Tokyo Babylon

I wish I could take credit for a lot of the things written here, but I can’t. Almost every view I hold is the result of asking a question and then doing some research. The funny thing about a lot of it is how as soon as I turned to look I stubbed my toe on the answer and had to hop around for a while swearing under my breath.

When I was thinking about the analogy of growth as a hamster wheel spinning us around in an eternity of unthinking drudgery I came across Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish in a bookshop in Australia. The book basically threw itself off the shelf as I walked past. A very thoughtful book it asks questions like what does the left do now in the midst of affluence? It questions Blair’s Third Way. It asks questions about societies goals and objectives.

When I was thinking about realigning our methods of production I came across Natural Capitalism, The Natural Advantage of Nations and The Toyota Production System, all of which are about doing things better and harnessing the vitality of business to get it done. Lately I’ve added The Natural Step from Sweden. I also read The End of Poverty but was less impressed. The ideals are creditworthy, but their basis in economics rather than in methods which are tailor made for poor countries left me doubting whether it was sustainable.

Books on Society at large included the Death of Responsibility and the Unconscious Civilization, both of which made me think and hone my own ideas. Both are questioning books and the questions they ask are the questions we all need to think on, even if our answers are different.

That being said the thing that interests me most is bouncing ideas around. Brainstorming is apparently improved if everyone has a piece of paper, writes their idea on it and then pushes it into the middle of the table. Like a baton exchange in a relay race, someone picks up on your idea and maybe takes it in an unexpected direction, to the benefit of all.

We are all of us seeking answers to the important questions of destiny, function and purpose, something which I like to call our own personal legacy. It is very difficult to find these things while walking alone. So, please if there’s anything you like, don’t like, needs whittled, then please add a comment. I will respond.

I’ve spent a lot of time following what people around the world are doing to rehabilitate soils, conquer the desert, build on destruction. You put some of this stuff together and you’ve got a place you’d want to live. One of the most interesting things I came across was called terra preta or black earth. Now black earth is found in lots of places so you’re probably thinking I’ve bought a dirt concession and will try to sell you a half inch of top soil or something. That’s certainly an idea but cheating people is not sustainable.

When the Spanish and Portuguese were swarming all over Central and South America looking for El Dorado there was an expedition that went up the Amazon. That particular Conquistador came back with tales of a kingdom in the middle ofthe Amazon Jungle.

Until recently everyone scoffed at the notion. Look they said Amazon soils are very thin, that’s why chopping down the trees is a bad idea because the trees are the only thing that keeps the fertility from getting washed away. No way could there ever have been a kingdom there, the soil could never support it.

Then people started talking about finding deep, incredibly fertile black soil in the midst of the Amazon. The secret to it’s formation was charred wood, which meant that wonder upon wonder, these soils were man made.

Charred wood, not burned wood, is stable in soils. It doesn’t degrade quickly, but what it does do is become a fungus matrix. It also becomes a water filter. So water flows down into the soil, hits the char layer and flows through, but in doing so it leaves all the nitrogen, potassium and other essential nutrients trapped in that matrix. The fungi secretes all sorts of enzymes and juices which unlock all the nutrients from the matrix and make it available to plants. Now apparently the problem with this is not that after a while the soil loses fertility and has to be abandoned, it’s that the soil is so incredibly rich that weeds are growing faster than they can be ripped out. Something about this had already been known. Farmers could never figure why sugar cane fields just kept getting more fertile. It makes no sense that the cane should be taking stuff out of the soil but that the field just increased in fertility. Now, they know the answer, it’s because it’s burned, they’re getting the same matrix under the ground because the roots don’t fully burn- they char.

Another thing about this is that terra preta acts like yeast in bread. Amazonians mine this stuff, and they know that if you leave a thin layer at the bottom of the hole you can come back in ten years and the hole has been filled in, like bread rising out of a baking tin. Ponder that and recall that most places in the world are losing topsoil at rates hundreds of times higher than the rate of replacement.

It used to be if you cut down plants and burned them, people would say that you are causing global warming, but if the char is placed in the ground and vegetation grows lie crazy, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is that still the case?

Jared Diamond who writes about civilization in books such as guns, germs and steel and collapse writes that Australia with its old worn out soil is supporting an unsustainably large population. However if people can make rich soils that alters the whole equation. Deserts can be conquered, badlands made good, salt pans can bloom.

It’s good news for a change. The solutions to all our problems are out there. It just needs responsibility and dedication. Never again should you say it’s bad but there’s nothing I can do about it. Most of this stuff is about learning not about money. Everything starts with thought.

Right now how I see the world is like one big garbage conveyor. Your crapper is a flush and forget garbage conveyor and toxic waste dump. Your car is a gaseous garbage producers and conveyor. Your home is a massive garbage production unit and conveyor. Almost everything we do is mishandled, mismanaged, overpackaged and overprocessed. They’re all also black holes of energy consumption, energy that is used to power your personal conveyor and turn our entire planet into a toxic waste dump.

Whoa I hear you say, aren’t you going a bit far, you might say. Before doing so perhaps you should take a look around you, listen to what people are saying and think about what all this is doing to you. It’s not just an environmental thing, it’s a power thing, it’s politics and society. We are what we do, and we are also what we don’t do. We’ve all settled for second best and utter abrogation of any responsibility for the world around us. That’s fine for some people, the ones who think this is their world, but let’s face it - they only think that way because the rest of us let them.

The world has faced this kind of ‘this is mine’ threat before. Hitler called it liebensraum or ‘growing space’; the Japanese called it the co-prosperity sphere; the British, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians and hordes of others called it Empire. The Americans called it ‘our backyard’. But these are relatively small groups of people, and we can take it back.

The world as we know it is all about control, about making people dependent on supplies of this or that. When you don’t need to worry about supplies of this or that, like in the rich western world, then there’s also the fear of …isms. Doesn’t really matter what the ..ism is so long as they make you afraid of it, enough to keep your head down and don’t think about the big picture of the small world around you.

That’s where we are right now. It’s dark when you compare it to what is possible. I am a critical optimist. I shout at things and ask why are we settling for this, when there is so much more we are capable of. People don’t want to hear about the dark future, even when it’s looming large in front of them. However there is an alternative, though it spreads power around so thinly that it’s definitely a threat to the people on the Forbes list and the people who pay not to be on the Forbes list.

The government will tell to you about acceptable levels, but tell me if you walk in shit is there an acceptable level of crap you would want on your shoes? Now think about the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat. That stuff is going into you, but yet it’s alright to allow it, because it’s invisible and odourless. It’s insidious but we should be of an age now where we know what this stuff is doing to us, or are we?

A lot of this crap is about supplying this stuff to you and making money from it. You are not free to get what you want. You are free to choose from what companies want to give you. So much of it has been monopolized, cartelised and controlled by small groups of people to the detriment of all of us.

Now, imagine if you will a world where people’s homes made their own power. Your power company would locate to where the big industry was and supply just them. You wouldn’t be at the mercy of energy markets, OPEC and middle eastern security concerns. Saudi Arabia would have to become a nation where schoolgirls were not chased back into burning buildings by religious morality police for the crime of not wearing a veil. Making power from renewable sources is not the big obstacle everyone says it is. It’s basically a supply and demand problem. If the supply isn’t doing it, then you have to look at demand reduction. We can make buildings that heat themselves in the coldest winter with nothing but a roof of soil, a heat sink (fifty feet down it’s not cold except if you live on permafrost). We can make buildings that cool themselves with nothing but the intelligent use of materials, shade and high school physics. Termites have been doing it in the baking heat of African summer for millions of years, so why can’t we.

Now, imagine if you will a world where flush and forget was not the be all and end all of sanitation. I am sure every one of you has turned on the TV and seen ads from the UN and other agencies telling us to conserve water. Could it be because we are dropping shit into all the clean water we can find. Every international agency will tell you that there’s not enough water in the world to give everyone a flush and forget toilet, and they’re right. Give it 30 years and water polluters will be being tried in the Hague next to mass murderers. Another word for shit was nightsoil, which is a clue to where all this shit should go. Well first it shouldn’t be flushed, it should be dropped into the one thing that absorbs crap well and that’s green plant matter. Nature designed a system to take care of crap, it’s made up of workers who work for free and produce without asking for anything in exchange, because everything they want is everything we don’t want. Bacteria, fungus, earthworms. It’s called a compost heap and contrary to popular belief it’s high tech because it’s got billions of years of natural R&D behind it. Some might say dumb animals but no engineer on earth can make ceramics at normal pressure and temperature and shellfish do it all the time.

We don’t need power for our homes. We save it for the car and live close to where we work. I mean if your problem with the big city is that it’s noisy, dirty and cramped, don’t make it worse by moving out and having to commute. You’re wasting your time. Instead make an investment of the time you would spend commuting to make your community better. Don’t run away only to run in and out every day. Stay where you are and make the city better.

We don’t need water for our toilets. We use it for drinking, showering and cooking. Anything that’s got stuff in it, whether it’s flakes of skin, urine or left over gravy gets diluted down by rainwater and goes straight into the vegetable garden. There should be some kind of law stating that if you put up a building you shouldn’t displace the plants. The Babylonians did this thousands of years ago, so who are we kidding. How many times have you heard the term ‘garden city’? Now, have you ever seen one?

So now we’re making our own power, processing our own crap (or getting a city farmer to do it on our roof), we’re using a 10th of the water we did before and best of all we’re not paying someone else to do it. The power goes where the money goes. Keep it in your community and it means better markets and better democracy. Doing all this stuff doesn’t take a long time. It takes less time than you would commuting to the office and back, fighting your way through the supermarket and working all those hours to pay for your electricity, water and food bills. Doing so would give the  freedom you need to chase your dreams instead of chasing your next pay packet. None of this is merely about the environment, it’s about becoming a better , freer, happier person in a better, freer, happier world.

You can only be that person and live in that world when you start taking responsibility for the things you do. Stand up and be counted as the man, the woman, you are. Your economic, spiritual and emotional destiny is yours for the taking. When we take that back, the world will recover.

It comes as a shock when you find out that someone you thought of as a humorless and overly concerned with his image at University has become someone with something of a reputation. Now Andrew O’Hagan, the apparently acclaimed Scots novelist, and I studied English together at Strathclyde University, and by studied I mean he did well and I didn’t.

I guess I was one of those people who takes their time to find out what he wants to make of his life, which is part of the reasoning behind this blog. Andrew on the other hand always seemed to know what he was doing and where he was going. Sour grapes it certainly is to a certain extent, since I’ve been little more than a global dilettante, but then again..

What I remember of Andrew was that he was one of those people who are perplexed by wit and resent it to a certain extent. Sure he was smart, but when it came to the parry and ripostes of banter he was a paraplegic. I remember even then he was talking about his interest in people who disappear off the face of the earth, It was apparently the subject of his first novel. I should get around to reading that. I need to find out if my dislike of this man, which was visceral when I encountered him but who I otherwise ignored, is someone that I judged too harshly. I was a lot more judgmental in those days and the feelings that I dredge up on seeing his name once more are the feelings of a younger and altogether sharper and more judgmental person than I am today. That could lead on to a long piece about the nature of experience but I’ll leave the idea of what the experiences framed by the different people we were then actually are to another day.

I also remember in the pub he seem perplexed that I could talk to the mature female students and make them laugh. They never seemed to have much time for him as I recall. His brow darkened still further I think when he watched me with them. For my part I tended to notice that his shoe leather and bag were exactly the same color. His bag was one of those writer’s bags, you know the ones with the bronze clasps that professors carry, and his shoes were those light brown hush puppy type things. I wonder even now whether he tries that hard to present himself in the clothes of the learned and the intelligentsia. I thought it shallow at the time. I see his photo on a webpage though and I suspect that little has changed. There are the author photos were they come across as easy going and approachable. There are the author photos were they come across as the kind of person who puts his hand on his chin moments before shutter clicks seemingly asking themselves if they will look intelligent enough. Sadly Andrew falls into the latter category, which leads me to suspect that time has not worked its magic on his personality to the extent where I would actually like him now.

But then again you never know.

I doubt he’s thought about me in the intervening years as much as I’ve thought about him, which is maybe fleetingly once a year. For me Andrew O’ Hagan pretty much encapsulated everything I didn’t like about University. I found him self-centered, image conscious, humorless and with no room for doubt in his opinions. On the other hand it seems to have worked well for him. Maybe I should just wish him well and get back to figuring out what I really want to do with my life? Perhaps he was on the right side of things and I was not. Who can know such things? But I will still wonder…