Today’s paper for my Topics in Sustainable Development class is a 2-page essay. Unlike previous postings, this paper is presented in a more traditional format. Our essays were written in response to the following:
Andrew Light: “The Moral Journey of Environmentalism: From Wilderness to Place”
Chusid: “Natural Allies: Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development”
Vincent B. Canizaro: “Regionalism, Place, Specificity, and Sustainable Design”
Donovan Rypkema: “Historic Preservation and Affordable Housing: The Missed Connection”
Click the following link to view the essay:
“Sustainability as Compassionate Action”
I agree with Light that the formidable experiences of the environmentalist are to be found in the realm of feeling or emotion. I would add that environmentalism is compassion for your surroundings, especially the people and culture.
Through Chris McAndless (See Into the Wild), I’ve found that at the height of connection with nature or solitude lies the realization that life is about creating spaces in which one being can connect with another. The beauty of separation is not being alone, but appreciating contact with others. And that is what the Alley Flat initiative is about. Creating spaces. Building; not bulldozing.
For me, oceanic and deep ecology as described are the great destroyer of labels in pursuit of true sustainability. So while activists can be effective by confining efforts to a targeted area, we must realize that it’s all one thing. There’s little point in having a clean city in which some kids receive substandard education. There’s less point to a good education without collective recognition of the right to access to existing medical care.
Furthermore, there is little use for the divide between academia, industry and social action. In the TSD class and my public interest law class last week, there were debates about when a lawyer or academic becomes a social activist. In university, it sometimes seems people would debate whether to stop a fight between two children, discussing the right to do so. There is a time for thought and a time for action. I believe some moral foundation is a prerequisite to adhesion of education and sustainability. I believe sustainability is more about action than thought because at its center lies compassion, which exists outside thought.
While we are busy in consensus-seeking committees on the right to act, the bulldozers are hard at work. Some in the TSD class have rejected shared equity as being wrong because it persuades “unsuspecting”, low-income people to give up ownership rights while enlarging the size of the shared-equity group. Capitalism has elevated desire for ownership above the fundamental need of a place to live. No feasible alternative for getting people into homes in the bottled-up Austin housing market is offered. A bond model was offered and I reject it because it doesn’t start from the bottom up. Shared-equity empowers the individual rather than placing them at the mercy of the benefits of the state.
Unlike Rypkema, I do not consider the potential for pre-fab as lying solely in its presentation of an alternative method for acquiring wealth through homeownership. The great potential within pre-fab and shared equity is re-Valuation of the American Dream from “owning my own home” to “living in an affordable, clean, safe place close to mass-transit or the places I frequent.” Pre-fab and shared-equity demand a fundamental shift in the role of housing. And while I’m with Rypkema that the time is now, I do not see federal tax credits as an option-it’s a top-down method both polluted and slow. Prefab and shared-equity are immediate, bottom-up solutions.
My husband told me that he once asked a German foreign exchange what the most noticeable thing about the U.S. was, and the student said “how new all the buildings are.” He went on to say that his house in Germany was more than 100 years old. In the U.S., we have strongly adhered to the frontier mentality that you clear things out and then erect something new; a mentality that was based even at the outset on what William Cronon calls a fiction-the idea that North America was a “wilderness” before 1492. We are always anxious to move up in the world. We’re at a point where we have to explore what else there is to do, like watching the trees grow in the suburbs we’ve already built.
Preservation is essential to sustainability, and Chusid’s point about both the builder’s ego and LEED standards not encouraging preservation or re-use brings us back to Sean Garretson’s point last week-that industry too strongly influences governmental decisions. We have put the cart before the horse with capitalism. I am no longer interested in a system that is broken, in LEED standards, etc. Sustainability is a peaceful revolution that must carried out from the bottom up, with solar panels and alley flats, pre-fab homes and water collection tanks, and with shared equity. There is a place for capitalism, but we don’t have to offer our neighborhoods in worshipful sacrifice to it.
Tags: andrew light, chusid, donovan rypkema, shared equity, vincent canizaro
