PP showed us this amazing video tonight, about what economics is about and what it should be about:
It is very interesting and great, watch it!
It questions our current society's focus on money, natural resources, lack of sharing and giving... I want that Gift Economy that he is talking about. Maybe, just like Paying it forward, we should be Giving it forward more in our lives.
(Photo by Jennanana on Flickr, 'Rakes', Creative Commons license)
There seems to be a type of people that can't stand fall. They can't enjoy the gorgeous beauty of fallen leaves, transitions of seasons, and to let fall be fall. Instead, they bring out their noisy, polluting, gasoline-monster leaf blowers and destroy the whole feeling of fall.
'Leaves are evil. Leaves have to go away. Leaves are ugly, dirty, nasty, and germy piles of nature's rubbish'. That is what their actions seem to say. I think this is just another rendition of the common fear of nature.
Dear neighbors, park managers, and landscaping companies, leaves are meant to fall in the fall. That is what nature is. It is part of the natural circle. But I guess you think nature is bad. Everything has to be organized, controlled, squeaky clean, and then, in effect, artificial and unsustainable.
It is not normal to have a green lawn without a leaf on it in October. It is abnormal. It is not normal to run a leaf blower for 2.5 hours straight on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It is bad, both for the Earth and your health. If the leaves bother you, get the rakes out and get some exercise at the same, in the nice quiet sounds of nature, such as swishing vulture wings, woodpecker's hole-making drumming, and screeching blue jays. Spare me the leaf blower terror, please, please....
(It turns out I am not alone. Los Angeles have banned leaf blowers, and here is a link to some more information about leaf blower terror in the US.)
When I grew up I remember seeing the movie Shangri-La on TV one Sunday afternoon, and I loved it. A hidden valley, far away in the Himalayas, a paradise away from everything else, isolated and self-sufficient. Last night PP showed me an old movie by Lewis Mumford called 'The City", which shows another kind of utopia - a village where workers live in nice houses without industrialization's horrors and pollution. It is worth watching, and you can find it here, in the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films.
What struck me after seeing this movie is that there aren't any utopias anymore. We can't realistically dream about paradise islands where you can live away from the rest of the world. Everything is connected, affected, even if you want to be isolated. Every hidden valley, little town, or tropical island is affected by the global climate change, atmospheric pollution, radiation, and trash and toxins thrown into the sea, groundwater, or rivers. Over you satellites are watching you or give you connectivity to anywhere else in the world. All economies are linked, and what happens at Wall Street or in Asia's stock markets affect a country and village across the world.
So, the idea of Utopia has changed. Now we wish for small Utopian things, like affordable health care for all, toys without lead, and cleaner streets, while in the past you could dare to think big and dream away... I think this creates a kind of hopelessness and apathy in the new generations - it is much harder to change anything, the problems are big, global, and enormous. Even if you plan a small better village locally, you run into global and national problems and forces, since so much is controlled at a higher level, not locally anymore. Here in New Jersey, there used to be several local villages (like Roosevelt) built and based on Utopian ideas of fairness, sharing, and ethics. Now they are all just regular places like any other (with a few exceptions, like Free Acres).
Who even wishes for World Peace anymore? I do, but who really works for it? No big masses of people... I think the whole world view has changed since the hopeful 1960s, and gone downhill since then. The only way to change global things is for all of us to work together in all countries, and that seems pretty much impossible, sometimes even within just one country (US for example). Sad and depressing, unfortunately. Now the only real Utopias are new planets somewhere out there in the universe.
Maybe Utopia is just an impossibility, because humans are too selfish and competitive, and that all goes back to evolution and competition over scarce resources for survival? Still, I like the thought of better places for all...
Links for more information (to avoid the breaking up of your reading* I put these at the end)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Where does the stuff go?
Utopia
Prelinger Archives: Lewis Mumford: "The City"
Shangri-La
Free Acres, New Jersey : Roosevelt, NJ
* Researchers have showed that reading online text with a lot of links in it breaks up the thought process and you get distracted and don't learn and think so much. At each hyperlink in the text your brain thinks "should I click on this or not", and you loose your thought and memories of what you just read. So even if you don't click on the link, you are affected, without knowing it. So, links at the end on this post. (Link to more about this here and here.)
