Re: [pf]footnote: deadlines, order, degrees of chaos

Last night, at 18:00 15/11/2000 -0800, I (David Mac) wrote:
**  Sorry; got to go, ...

· I didn't finish; Molly had a long list of things people in suburbs fill
their lives with, much of the day-to-day stuff to do with parents'
involvement in their children's lives (e.g. ferrying them around by car).
This list probably got other readers nodding their heads in agreement. If
so, that illustrates why, although she was certainly describing lives with
considerable chaos in them, it's of limited degree. Rush-rush people like
that could reasonably expect next week and next month to be similar in
general, though different in detail. 
  I have to admit that, with enough hours per day and per week in which to
relax and "unwind", that degree of chaos probably should stimulate creative
responses to /some/ of the irritating situations in these people's lives.
But time for contemplation is needed for this to happen, IMO, and I suspect
Molly was right with her reference to the TV-saturated culture: there may
be only the odd few quiet minutes with a cup of coffee, for musing.

· Although I talked about suburban living, this was partly because there'd
been a thread on this during the previous day or two. Now I think about it,
I was using the suburbs as an icon for the change in the American
experience since 100-and-more years earlier when there was a lot more
creativity and ferment, IMO.
  I don't have the knowledge to make a proper case for this, and of course
I could be wrong - comments please?

· But I was at least in part saying that the next 15 years can be seen as
an opportunity to create a better future, even though _and_perhaps_because_
there will have to be major shakeups in everyone's lives. Most visibly
because of the necessity, by the end of that time, to massively re-organise
transport to halve energy and materials use. And then another half in the
10 years after that. 
  See this figure from WWF's Living Planet Report:
http://panda.org/livingplanet/lpr00/graphics/sp_figure_12.jpg
  It shows the North American ecological footprint being totally excessive,
way larger (~12 acres per person) than Western Europe's 6 and the rest of
the world's 2-3. The planet cannot support that degree of excessively
consumptive living, even if N.Americans keep that kind of life to
themselves, using stand-over tactics (and worse) on the rest of the world
to grab what they "need" from people, places and living things elsewhere.
/I/ would like to see what material-standard-of-living the USA (for
example) could support if it relied on its own huge resources; that would
be fair - with the results of your resource extraction right in front of
your eyes ("in your own back yard"), there should be enough feedback to
eventually get it right.
· "Free Trade" and "Globalization" are spin-words for what I've described.

· The whole report starts at:
http://panda.org/livingplanet/lpr00/
  while the page with the above very revealing graph is at the link:
Ecological Footprint, giving you:
http://panda.org/livingplanet/lpr00/ecofoot.cfm

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
*************************************************

___________________________________________________________
T O P I C A  http://www.topica.com/t/17
Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics