Sunday, January 29, 2017

Trump's wall and the imaginary lines we draw




I am reminded of my days in South Texas when the federal government decided enough was enough and erected a floating border of sorts around Florida to stop rising seaborne drug trafficking. As a result much of that drug trafficking merely shifted westward, some of it to the Texas coast.

The French imagined that the Maginot Line, built to halt a German invasion, did not have to extend to the English Channel. When the Second World War broke out, the Germans felt no obligation to march directly into French machine guns and artillery along the fortified line. Instead, they invaded Belgium and then turned south toward France. Who could have guessed it? (Actually, a lot of people did.)

Humans are making a mockery of the current border barrier daily by simply walking or driving through regular border crossings. It's hard to see how that will change with a wall. The wall will have to allow for current bridges and land crossings. And, it will have to allow rivers on the American side to flow into the Rio Grande or out of and into Mexico where it touches the Colorado River basin.

As for the current barrier, people can just climb over it or through it where there are holes made by wire cutters.

Yes, yes, I know. This new wall will be concrete, and it will be 55 feet tall. My source for the material and height specifications is Donald Trump. I'm sure in Trumpian language the wall will be fabulous and the best wall ever built by the smartest engineers. It will be "beautiful," he says.

We have no actual plans or specifications for such a wall from the Trump administration yet. But, a fanciful attempt by a Mexican architectural firm imagined a pink wall (so it would be beautiful) stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The architects estimated it would take 16 years to complete in part because the mountainous terrain along some of the border will be difficult to access and build on. Perhaps adding to the difficulty for this design will be the shopping malls and detention centers built right into the wall.

Still, unless the wall is attended to by guards all along its length, people will just find ways over it or possibly under it. Ladders are pretty handy. Of course, wire cutters may also be needed. Where there is water, boats are a good choice and can be navigated up the tributaries of the Rio Grande well beyond the wall. Those crossing the border have a lot of experience with all of these.

It's hard to imagine that at one time the United States had a formal agreement with Mexico called the Bracero Program to import Mexican laborers to overcome a labor shortage, primarily for seasonal agricultural work during World War II. The program lasted until 1965 when new immigration legislation ended it. The need for Mexican seasonal labor, however, didn't end which is why much of the movement of 500,000 Mexican workers in and out of the United States each year continued as that movement went from being legally sanctioned and administered to being illegal.

Given all the goods and people crossing the Mexican border every day, the hoopla over the proposed wall must actually be about something other than keeping goods and people on the Mexican side out. It's more about the lines we construct in our minds between us and others.

Denizens of the U.S. coastal regions are used to the cacophony of voices and subcultures that populate their daily lives. There is no convenient line that can be drawn to separate cultures from one another in those places. In so-called flyover country, where Trump was hugely popular, recent immigrants are more sparse. It is easier to draw a line between "us" and "them." By this I do not mean that people living in the Plains states or the Midwest are not charitable. One can find plenty of stories about kindness to newcomers from foreign lands.

But the newcomers do not simply melt into a polyglot culture in those places. They are aliens and remain so for a very long time after arrival.

The wall--whether it is ever built or not--signifies a desire to reduce the number of newcomers and to preserve a way of life that is threatened economically and culturally by the globalism embraced by the country's bi-coastal elites. Stop the invasion of newcomers and you will stop the forces bearing down on a threatened way of life in flyover country; so goes the visceral logic.

It's doubtful that such a wall can do either. But a promise to build one signifies sympathy for a certain fearful and nostalgic outlook and an opposition to a globalism that has devastated the economies of small towns and rural communities--by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas and by favoring the consolidation of agricultural in a way that is driving more and more people off the land.

Sometimes when we put up barriers to others, it can actually be to draw them nearer in steps. Lovers love the chase. Businesspeople stake out negotiating positions, but do so only as part of a game to come to an agreement. Lines are drawn to be crossed. That's how new friends and new opportunities enter our lives.

Sometimes we put up barriers to protect ourselves from others who might harm us physically or who might merely reject us or shame us publicly for sport. Sometimes, we put up barriers to those who are culturally alien, too, not because we necessarily dislike them, but oftentimes because we are not certain of the stability of our own cultural lives.

The maelstrom of change which is now sweeping over American culture (and much of the world) can overwhelm those without secure anchorage. We are beyond the relative stability that prevailed prior to the 2008 financial crisis and into an in-between period of rapidly changing technological, social, economic and environmental forces, all of which demand new arrangements.

The globalism that promised to put to rest old divisions has instead reawakened them. A retreat behind a wall won't reconcile those divisions. But neither will a rapid advance toward a socially untenable and ecologically disastrous globalism based on a neoliberal economic ideology that has led to financial stagnation and decline among so many low- and middle-income families.

Economics thought that it could replace politics. Politics has come back to reassert itself and challenge what could not be publicly challenged before. The repressed always returns, often in ways which surprise and distress us.

We now have no choice. We are obliged to cross lines into uncharted territory to discover a new politics and a new economics. There will be many barriers and detours, and it won't be an easy journey.


Sunday, January 22, 2017

Which species are we sure we can survive without?




















Sunday, January 15, 2017

Neoliberals know the price of everything and the value of nothing






















Sunday, January 08, 2017



















Sunday, January 01, 2017






In other words, we'll get to a renewable energy economy eventually as fossil fuels become ever more expensive to take out of the ground. But the default endpoint is not one that results from a planned transition which would try to save the best of industrial civilization while jettisoning the worst.

Rather, the default endpoint is merely the wreckage of an industrial civilization that didn't prepare properly. Such a society would be forced to make due with the energy budget available from renewables like all past civilizations. That's a lot less than we in industrialized countries use, and, more important, far less than we could have if we make sensible and serious plans and implement them starting now.

Heinberg and Fridley don't dwell on this conclusion, but it is at the heart of their message. Most of the book is spent explaining why the transition to renewable energy is possible and how it can take place.

This is a largely hopeful message which explains that there is a lot for each of us to do as citizens in influencing and pushing for the right policies and as community members in preparing ourselves, our families and our neighbors for a lower energy future. The authors make very clear that the amount of renewable energy we can hope to generate in the coming decades simply cannot be expected to match what we are getting today from fossil fuels. That means we have to change many aspects of our society and our daily lives.

Fortunately, as they explain, we know how to reduce our energy footprint dramatically if we have the will and the perseverance. The steps for doing this will sound familiar to many: weatherizing and insulating existing buildings; building new ones for very high energy efficiency; focusing on public transportation, bicycling and walking as modes of daily transport; creating a food system that uses far less energy (which means primarily organic) and builds rather than depletes the soil (which can become a place to store large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere); moving toward local and regional manufacturing (relocalization as it is commonly called) to reduce the need for freight transportation; moving away from the consumer economy which prioritizes consumption and planned obsolescence toward what the authors call the "conserver economy" which prioritizes durability, repair and recycling; and scheduling our electricity use to accommodate the daily cycles that renewables are likely to exhibit.

These are tall orders and lack much of the flash offered by the techno-optimists who assure us that renewable energy will make the future look like the present, only better--and, all we have to do is sit back and watch it happen.

Our Renewable Future is without a doubt the most sensible book I've read on the prospects and promise of renewable energy, and I wholeheartedly endorse its conclusions. A future of 100 percent renewable energy is possible. But only if we act now and persist.

That means there is a lot of work ahead for all of us. The rewards, however, are a stable climate and durable communities that offer many (but not all) of the advantages of our current fossil-fueled civilization. And this future is one that can be ushered in by a transition far more humane and far less traumatic than the one our business-as-usual trajectory could hope to offer.
