I'm not sure I know what to call it yet, but I've been slowing fleshing out in my mind a sort of semi-realistic optimistic future. I think the first words I used to describe it may have been a "pastoral daydream" which I still think would be a great moniker for a chillwave outfit. More recently I've been trying to sandwich together phrases like "Eco-Tech" or "Eco-Pop" (another idea for music, maybe a genre?), or more vaguely using images of tree houses, wild flowers and domestic gardens and electric bikes and solar powered laptops. I often will try and pry some distasteful element from the over saturated modern life out to wash off and reexamine as a puzzle piece for this "best case scenario" future I would hope for. It's about 1 part science fiction, 1 part idealism, and 1 part some beacon of principles I hope to move toward or define more clearly. Usually I'm thinking about this as just a helpful exercise in finding the basic problems of living in an overpopulated, detached world and trying to replace them with a more natural, sustainable, and hopeful alternative. I'm not sure how useful it is, but I"d like to start taking it more seriously, start doing little bits of research here and there and see if I can't hammer out a sort of "plan" or at least a few rules for the future than can address real tangible issues in a productive, long-term sort of way.
I think the core of this dream idea is an image of either a small town, or an urban "village" which can address the needs of a densely populated, healthy, and scientifically literate and diverse group of people. I image houses built in a modular fashion, emphasising personal ownership and improvement as much as they do more loosely deliniated property lines. Houses and apartments need not be driven by the need for personal property and individual use as much as they are now. Not not at all of course, but if you shift the emphasis away from this suddenly a great deal of identical space serving only a few sometimes can be freed up to serve anyone who needs it all the time. Yards, for instance, if you clumped all the houses on a city block together into one complex and consolidated all the aggregate yard space you'd have more space, for more people, more often.
Other personal amenities are trickier. Mind you this is only really applicable for, and I'm really only keeping in mind, the American situation and sensibility, or at least that of the west. Living space being shared, and communal space is treated much more differently in different parts of the world. Here in the USA, privacy and having your own space and items is highly valued and these sociological barriers would not be simple to overcome. I believe though that two factors could make the kind of idealogical shift needed to accomplish these ideas, the primary factor being necessity. The other factor is more ephemeral, but just as valuable, and I think that it is the simple fact that American society sacrifices a great deal of human connection and positivity by promoting and allowing for a "me first" approach to living, and while this is inherently appealing and has good reasons to be, the subtle and "slow acting" benefit of reintegrating into a more pro-social method of living will be encouraging. Most people growing up in this way won't know they might be better off living this way until they try or they can experience it, so I would hope it has a snowballing effect in a positive way outside of the growing necessity to reevaluate how we use space and consume resources. Such changes can’t be made by simply reallocating space and resources, but for the sake of an ideal vision I’ll continue to describe what a goal might look like.
Almost every daily need is the same for the average person. It’s the basics of life, plus the convenience of modernity. I wouldn’t suggest any sort of large scale reconfiguring to an “out-in-the-woods” commune for society today, which really does just need the basics of human life, but instead I think it’s important to try and preserve the convenience and progress we have achieve this far as much as possible. Because of this, there are some things that can be argued aren’t real “daily needs” that I think are important to include anyway. This Pastoral Daydream is a day dream yes, but I’m also hoping to find realistic solutions to problems, and revoking your right to wi-fi, year round strawberries, and an overflowing goblet of internet videos in one fell swoop, while maybe good over all, is not realistic by todays standards. That being said, there are a few basic elements of living which are universal and need a serious influx of scalability and sustainability. Maybe the biggest of these on a global scale is food. Food is naturally the most universal and pervasive aspect of human life in the most basic of ways, and the infrastructure that supports it is arguable the primary arteries of the human world. For the sake of consumer culture, convenience, and sometimes just sheer marvel, the way most Americans eat is as galling as it is fascinating. I won’t walk backwards trying to stack up all the inventions since the industrial revolution which has allowed everything from the low-milk detecting fridge to gushers and cheese-its, but I do have to point out another seemingly insurmountable issue with the changing of social norms that will arise when addressing food. Mostly it’s just the collective habitual diet we find ourselves eating and promoting with our dollar. It’s unhealthy in myriad ways, it’s a diabolical system of unsustainability which is contributing hugely to the climate crisis, and it is physically and spiritually the farthest from the natural realities of eating than we have ever been. So, so many of these problems start and end with food. Understanding just how far reaching and consequential this idea is will be the task of a generation (among many) and changing the social zeitgeist around eating is both very difficult and very important. It is possible though, and if and when we are able to change the American attitude toward food you can start the regrowth of a happy and healthy way of eating.
There has been a growing uptick in community gardens recently; they’re growing popularity is a fantastic sign of hope if not an upwelling of interest in subverting the agro-industrial complex, and that is just as well for now. Returning to this proverbial urban city block or small village unit, it’s easy to imagine how consolidation of even just yard space could yield most of the land necessary to have a very vibrant and productive local garden. Hierarchies and organization regarding who can partake, who helps, and who living on that block can abstain from gardening are easy enough to imagine. It might not be much food, not enough to sustain the entire block certainly unless you took up hydroponics or put all the living quarters underground, but a garden on every block does 3 important things for food and community. First, it reduced the strain on the systems supplying the grocery stores with produce which adds up to a tremendous weight in transportation, farming costs, pesticides, hours of labor and resources being poured into the pockets of middlemen and ending up unused or sent at great cost to places which don’t need it. Until we can teleport, it’s absurd to think that most people in the world can eat food grown more than 100 miles away at any time of year, humans should eat food grown near them, preferably by them. Second, by making food production more frequent and more community driven, you’re helping to create a less stratified, more equal, and more close knit community. Most Americans will go years living on the same street and will only meet some of their neighbors, and will actually gather with them occasionally, maybe the annual block party, maybe if you’re part of an HOA more often. The idea that community, mostly in urban places, are built in non-localized networks tied together by the workplace, common interests, class, or other hierarchical systems suggests a more tribal, and again, individualized approach to life than is necessary or good. This is a can of worms to crack open and I don’t mean to suggest that everything with the way community is current facilitated and developed is wrong, in fact there are probably far more ways this happens than I could ever be aware of both within and outside of city environments. Instead I just mean to suggest that a common human interest such as gardening, or food production being localized to a geographic area like a city block will promote a greater sense of community than passing dead-eyed strangers in the produce isle ever could.
The third issue which a “block garden” would seek to assuage is the detachment from nature and reality that is becoming increasingly normalized today. We don’t need neurological studies to tell us that human brains like to be outside, we like to see trees and plants and for the most part it feels good to touch soil and get dirty and smell things. The average 9-5er spending almost 2 hours in an air-conditioned car on the commute sees only traffic and billboards, then spends another 8 hours breathing sterile HVAC air and straining their eyes under dense fluorescent lights and OLED screens to return home and spend most of their leisure time with the windows closed and indoors again unless it’s nice outside. I don’t mean to critique the work week yet (but I will), my point is that modern life keeps us quite removed from things most would argue are “natural”. It’s as simple as fresh air, if you lived in an apartment as park of a city block community and you had to spend even just 1 hour per week volunteering some time outdoors gardening, you’ve already started to chip meaningfully away at the otherwise monotonous and isolated lifestyle which is so normal now. Better yet, if that hour happened to coincide with one or two neighbors, providing you’re not too burnt out or anti-social to engage with them, you now have an extra hour of face-to-face communication with people in your community, building relationships, equalizing biases and strengthening the fabric of society. Moreover, that small amount of time you’ve devoted to those tomatoes, weeding that raised bed, or planting cucumbers has brought you back to the reality of food and nature. In a few weeks you’ll be able to eat some of those vegetables and plants that you watched and helped grow, and if you haven’t had a homegrown salad, the satisfaction that brings is universal. Rather than washing a plastic wrapped cabbage that rolled from a dirty truck to cook with, you can pick one fresh and carry it one hundred feet to your plate.
There are of course, other ways that local gardening can be improved on and improve urban and rural life, and ways that this probably wouldn’t work. The point of the pastoral daydream is to reduce problems to adaptable principles, to be used as suggestion and fodder for real small solutions. Here the principals are nothing new really, eat local. Grow local if you can, and grown within your community. Find ways to reallocate space and reduce redundant space. As global populations have and will continue to spike until about maybe 2050, fears about the earths capacity of arable land have also risen. The truth is the earth is rich enough to feed a capacity of even more than 12 billion human beings, just as it’s possible to feed all nearly 8 billion of us today. It’s not a lack of land or nutrients but an incongruent distribution of them. Thousands of acres of good, arable land are being used to produce billions of calories of nutritious food which is then being fed to animals which have a lower caloric yield, and a less healthy balance of nutritional output. We then take that reduced product and sell it at competitive prices all over the US to grocery stores, marking it up along the way, to provide calories of arguable value to those who can afford this cheap product, but who couldn’t afford to eat the healthier, more sustainable calories locked up in time, effort, “organic branding” and places. To forget even the inequity, carbon footprint, and capitalist agenda such a system is a travesty to the hundred of millions of starving people on earth. This is also leaving out the negative impacts of monoculture, Monsanto and pesticides, over farming, and myriad other issues. The simple fact that the capacity for useful food is being willingly reduced and distributed by greed and desire rather than necessity is appalling and unsustainable. Redirecting this system to a more local, community driven method subverts the issue as well as improves upon it, and has little to no downside all while remaining functionally within our reach.
At the risk of veering far into anecdotes as I often do, I want to approach another element in the “eco-tech” future of my dreams. Broadly speaking, it’s the issue of infrastructure and transportation. To most people, it seems like a wildly boring topic that is only brought up at city counsel meetings until you get stuck at a bad light, or in a long ling of traffic behind some road work, but infrastructure has tremendous bearing on the minutia of daily life which is often overlooked or taken for granted.
There are a few topics which are most important to me and which I think are among the most pressing, or at least ones that have the greatest potential impact for the lowest investment. First: bury our power lines. They are a hazard, an eyesore, an economic liability, and represent an embarrassing lack of advancement and investment in the most important resource in the modern age. I’ve heard before than most of the US electrical power grid is still based on 1950’s era technology, and while I can’t attest to the validity or usefulness of that statement I can imagine more than a few massive blindspots in terms of preventative measures being taken to protect this resource.
While you’re at it, why not use the workforce replacing the electrical system to integrate high speed internet to rural parts, batteries to store energy prevent outages, and easy integration with sustainable energy like solar, wind etc if not installing the things themselves. Delocalize power plants and divest from monopolizing utility providers, give personal autonomy to places and people rather than let a vital resource become an after-thought dispensed from a single regulatory tap. Eventually technology I would hope will advance to the point that cars, phones (or whatever their futuristic iteration is), computers and the like will all be wirelessly charged by universal but locally controlled system of both power and data connectivity which are available to everyone through a more reasonable distribution of tax dollars.
Beyond power and connectivity, one of the greatest perils, difficulties, sources of debt, and challenge and adverse impact on human life in cities and everywhere is the eternally pervasive car culture. Cars, cars, cars. Everything is built for cars, cities have been reinvented for them, businesses built for them span every conceivable genre of service. Distance and time itself is defined by the car. Wars waged over fuel and economic weather predicted by changes in gas price. Landmark life events are defined by cars, from the 16th birthday, “rent-a-car” age, learners permits, to ownership becoming a defining part of your coming of age. Far too often, cars are the cause of death. Tens of thousands die annually in the US alone, and countless more are injured in a debilitating ways. Campaigns against drunk driving are a natural part of the high school experience as they are ubiquitous billboards and comments, finding their way into jokes and euphemisms and all sorts of vernacular.
The AGGREGATE AMOUNT OF TIME WASTED IN TRAFFIC ANNUALLY IN THE US EXCEEDS 7 BILLION HOURS. There is enough parking space in the US to fill the state of Delaware! Police spend most of their time managing traffic and writing traffic violations. Parking tickets fund city expansion projects. The prohibitive expense of car ownership can prevent people from working, getting out of debt, sometimes it can even needlessly send them to jail for unpaid tickets, etc. There is almost no redeeming qualities about cars in 2020 as far as I can see, and personally I cannot wait to see them abolished. Don’t get me wrong, there are some cases where cars are frankly, necessary. Long distance cross country travel, it’s a must. Shipping, connecting the continent, all of this is irrefutably important to the modern age. Even in rural places right now and likely for the next century at least, personal car ownership is a must. In light of these I can see 2 potential goals for the reduction in car culture than currently has society by the balls ( or should I say by the truck nuts)
First and easiest is, if you can, go car free. In many cities today owning a car is way less convenient than simply using public transit. You’d be crazy to own a car in New York, right? But in LA, well even with the deterrent of traffic driving is still a primary mode of transportation, as it is all over America today. It’s hard to imagine a more luxurious and personalized experience than driving your own car somewhere so it’s not hard to see why so many people continue to drive cars, but there are even downsides to this experience too. Mostly, the fact that you have to drive! I believe the most important upcoming revolution in driving is already here, and it’s one that will assuage almost all of the current issues that make driving not only an awful experience for all involved, but such a drag on infrastructure and the environment. The solution is self driving cars, but real bonafide ones lacking a driver seat and the traditional ergonomics and form factor, self driving cars that give you the personalization of the automobile of yesterday with the integration and group think of tomorrow.
There are several reasons self driving cars will revolutionize the future of transportation and car culture forever. The first is the implication that these vehicles are inherently safer, and I’m hesitant at the moment to hand them that with the current technology. However both in the spirit of optimism and the assurance of progress, I’m guessing that the adages of human error being a think of the past will come to apply here too. Autonomous cars won’t drive drunk, they won’t drive overtired and too long on the high way late at night, they won’t miss the green light or sideswipe a bicycle when turning right. They won’t zoom through crosswalks or park incorrectly, or accrue traffic violations. You can imagine the hundreds of despairing traffic cops and starving city parking lot owners, but honestly these are all wild improvements that are much needed. While they won’t be without error or mistake, any meaningful systemic reduction in car related fatalities and injuries is a huge boon to the wellbeing of society. We could live in a future where 10 car pileups are a gruesome figment of the past, and why shouldn’t we? It’s a disgrace that one of the most common examples of bodily risk tossed out to justify doing something dangerous is “Well you get in the car everyday, and you’re more likely to die that way than by ___”. Spurious statistics aside, we can and should be doing better.
When you start to ask what these new cars might look like, the more you realize they might not actually look like cars very much at all. After all, why are cars shaped they way they are? Since the beginning they’ve been modeled on the idea that one person will be facing forward, directing the 4 wheeled vehicle using a steering wheel, and since we’ve added aerodynamic shapes, lights and windshield wipers, defrosters and mirrors all to facilitate the drivers ability to safely operate the car. As soon as you remove the necessity of the driver, suddenly the car becomes unrecognizable, a blank canvas on which you can redesign its form for the better. Naturally such a big shift won’t happen all at once, it goes without saying that Tesla’s autopilot feature is built into a car made very much for the driver first and still will for sometime. The only real way to make a car which never needs to be manually driven is to have it built into a robust network to do the work of signaling, traffic directing, and hazard avoidance, and this is not something which can be easily done. I imaging this departure would take place in more urbanized areas first, if at all in rural parts of the country. I can’t quite imagine a grizzled farmer twiddling his thumbs in the cockpit of an autonomous Ford F15000 as it trundles 25 miles down the road anytime soon.
Such a driverless car owned by a family in the suburbs might look like a train car, or some futuristic pod. Four or more seats which face inward, wrapped in glass, or even a wrap around screen to simulate a more open space. It could have a table, a video game set. It could look like another room of your house. In one discrete corner there would be a panel with a keyboard where you input your destination, and the vehicles onboard navigation systems would optimize your route. You can sit back and play uno with your family or friends on your way out to the beach, or to the store, or out of the city to the nearby state park. With this Jetsons-esque image in your mind, it might be easy to forget that such a car would only be afforded such freedom if the responsibility of the driver was outsourced not just to the car itself, but to the surrounding infrastructure. It would require that the car could “see” as modern self driving cars do, all the elements on the road and react to them in real time, perhaps reading stop signs and anticipating the moves of other vehicles. But this vision is actually itself inserting more needless steps, why teach two cars to see and avoid each other as a human driver would if they are both driving themselves? Why put up traffic signs and use stop lights to direct two computerized entities? It’s redundant and the solution winds up being considerably more elegant.
These self driving cars would instead rely on a new sort of road system, one free of meddling drivers and if planners have any sense, free of all other vehicles. Not because these cars wouldn’t be able to pay nice, but because cars which drive themselves can be crammed into wildly smaller, and otherwise more dangerous or unpleasant places than driven cars would be. It a perfect image, they would work almost like a subway system, puttering along a perfect distance from each other on a narrow tunnel highway under the city. Each car could be connected to the aforementioned data system, the city wi-fi if you will, which would allow them to both connect to navigation information, but also to talk to other cars nearby. Each vehicle could network and optimize an intersection based on accurate trajectories which would not just prevent the need to stopping at lights or traffic at all, but allow optimizing the speed at which they each must travel to avoid colliding on two opposing turns at an intersection without sacrificing a single wasted moment. Like a colony of ants on steroids, you could have a swarm of vehicles all exchanging information at breakneck speeds to calculate the single best route for every passenger without ever stopping or getting lost. Traffic would be gone, no time would be lost in aggregate whatsoever, accidents are over, and if you start moving these things underground, suddenly you have the supremacy and individuality of the car with the space saving mass transit of a subway system.
This infrastructure could be taken a step further, by integrating vehicle power and the road system in one. Solar roadways and wireless charging would give these cars an infinite range. If you’re thinking this just sounds like a worse and more costly alternative to public transit that preserves the worst of the individualists lifestyle without compromise, I would have to concede some of these points. This solution is impractical in any near future rendering of a city or even a suburb, and having a hybrid drivable car which can be driven “off road” so to speak would be paramount for many years still. However, the idea that the roadway itself can slowly be built for these cars, especially outside of the city, across miles of highway or even in less populated areas, is still a valid one even as a transitionary idea. After a while these vehicles might actually be the best way to take a road trip, and maybe a farmer would be content to check on his animals from the screen within his self driving car as it sped down the solar highway to the feed and supply store in the nearest town, unfettered by tight corners, tractors or cows on the road, and the risk of a human mistake.
Comments
Post a Comment