12th March 2021 | Transitions | Beats
Reducing consumption; The last of the Beats
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Vaclav Smil labours under the weight of being described routinely as “Bill Gates favourite thinker”, or somesuch, which is probably unfortunate for him. I can see why Gates is a fan: Smil comes to our environmental and related crises with the eye of an energy and environmental scientist.
He has a new book out, called Grand Transitions, which looks at human history through the lenses of population, food, energy and the economy, and Noema did an expansive interview with him about it. A few highlights here.
Population is declining, almost everywhere, but the problem isn’t population, itis consumption:
From a hundred or so years ago up to the 1970s, we were worried there would be too many of us. People were warning about zillions of humans overrunning the planet’s resources. But in the end, it’s not about the number of people; it’s about their level of consumption. People don’t realize just how large the differences in consumption are. [The Japanese] consume less than 150 gigajoules per capita, while Americans are at over 250. China is about 95, India 25, sub-Saharan Africa 10. If even a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa reached American levels of consumption, the planet would be stripped.
Digitisation won’t save us because its effects on consumption are marginal:
The fundamental thing really is that civilization rests on stuff like steel, cement, plastics, copper and ammonia for fertilizers. There is no digitalization in that. You’ve got to dig up iron ore, smelt it and then turn it into steel. You’ve got to dig up lots of coal and use copious amounts of energy to turn it into coke. You can digitize the control process, but not the material force… The average American car weighs close to two tons. You need two tons of steel and plastic and glass to make that car.
Climate change is only one part of the crisis we face:
Suppose we had no climate change whatsoever? Suppose carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases had no effect on the climate. We would still have massive deforestation in many countries around the world. We would still have a massive loss of biodiversity. We would still have the problem of hundreds of millions of tons of plastic in the ocean. We would still have classical air pollution. We would still have marine ecosystems acidifying because of fertilizers flowing in.
There’s no single way to solve these problems, but lots of ways that all need addressing at the same time:
In complex systems, there is never any one thing that is decisive…. Suppose we stop selling all SUVs. Suppose people stop flying like crazy… What if people stopped buying massive houses, eliminated food waste and stopped importing blueberries from Peru by highly energy-intensive aircraft?
None of these would do the trick in isolation… What we have are lots of small keys to get rid of 3% a year here, 6% there and so on. To assemble such an array of responses requires much more attention, much more consistency and much longer periods of devotion to the problem.
#2: The last of the Beats
(Portrait of Larence Ferlighetti by Christopher Michel / CC BY 2.0)
Somewhere along the line I missed the news that Lawrence Ferlinghetti had died in February at the age of 101. He was a hugely significant figure in America’s radical literary history in the second half of the 20th century, as one of the Beat poets (with Ginsberg and others), as a co-founder of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and as a publisher who faced obscenity charges (as a result of publishing Ginsberg’s Howl) and won the case.
I first came across his work in my teens, I think in a Penguin Modern Poets volume that also included Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. As a poet, although he was forever associated with the Beats, he insisted that he wasn’t part of a movement. Instead, says a piece in Open Culture, he claimed his work was ‘insurgent art’—the title of a late poem:
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
The City Lights bookshop was, and is, a San Francisco institution, co-founded by Ferlinghetti in the 1950s. Robert Scheer, who had worked there, described it in an entertaining if sprawling interview he did with Ferlinghetti to mark his 100th birthday (also available as a podcast (32’00)):
Here you have a bookstore; you’ve deliberately stocked it with the world’s literature–not all the literature, but all the literature you feel is honest and worthwhile and commands attention, crosses political lines, crosses stylistic lines, crosses religious lines. And then people forget what a bookstore does that Amazon can’t do… You go over to that bookshelf, you’re looking for the book that somebody told you about, but you see all these other books. And there’s a table there and a chair, a couple of chairs. You don’t have to buy the book. No one ever got kicked out of City Lights for occupying a chair and not buying a book. No one ever did.
But Ferlinghetti was also a pioneer of a whole new culture, as the writer Alysia Abbott recalls in a short memoir-cum-obituary at Literary Hub:
It was Ferlinghetti who pioneered poetry and jazz experiments. A Coney Island of the Mind, published by New Directions in 1958, included a series of poems to be read aloud accompanied by jazz performance. The title of the collection, taken from Henry Miller’s “Into the Night Life,” represented what Ferlinghetti called “a kind of circus of the soul.”
The voice in these poems is that of the “everyman,” and reflected Ferlinghetti’s populist consciousness. His poem “Autobiography” begins:
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike’s Place every day
watching the champs
of the Dante Billiard Parlor
and the French pinball addicts.
I am leading a quiet life
on lower Broadway.
I am an American (Coney, 60)The result made Ferlinghetti one of one of the most widely read poets in America.
Below, Ferlinghetti reads “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes…”, from A Coney Island of the Mind.
Update: I wrote about the political environment in Russia a few weeks ago. At Tortoise Media the journalist John Kampfner has a terrific profile both of Alexander Navalny and the way his campaign uses 21st century media to discomfit Putin.
j2t#050
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