15th January 2021
Imagining the Green New Deal; The deep history of work
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I plan to write daily, five days a week, if I can manage it. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
Webinar today
I’m joining a webinar conversation later today to talk to John Sanei and Iraj Abedian to discuss their new book FutureNext. It’s at 16:00 GMT, and tickets are free, through Eventbrite.
#1: Imagining the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal sounds great in theory. Public and private investment creates new infrastructure and new jobs, and transitions our economies and societies away from the fossil fuel economy, and gives us an outside chance of avoiding the most damaging levels of climate change. What’s not to like?
But it’s hard to imagine what it feels like in practice. So it’s interesting to see a project by students at the University of Pennsylvania that sets out to imagine what the Green New Deal feels like from the ground up. They’ve ‘incast’ it, as the futures jargon goes, on a website called Designing The Green New Deal:
The resulting website… creates an immersive world we could have based on interviews with activists, experts, and everyday people.
The Midwest, for example, features a recipe collection, wind- and people-powered radio station, and a strikingly illustrated children’s book that together help viewers piece together the decades of work it took to build a Green New Deal. The stories these pieces tell bring to life the decades of work it takes to create a new world (I seriously cannot encourage you enough to dive into the website). Claudia Aliff, a grad student of city planning who worked on the Midwest group, said the children’s book in particular “taught me about storytelling and the power of everyday objects in changing people’s outlook on something that might be difficult to wrap one’s head around.”
It reminded me of the recent European project Notterdam, edited by my sometimes colleague Paul Graham Raven, written as a tourist guide to a European coastal city in 2045 after a successful carbon transition.
On the BBC podcast Thinking Allowed, Laurie Taylor talks to the anthropologist James Suzman about the history of work (28 minutes). We were, apparently, hunter-gatherers for 300,000 years, and have been agricultural societies for about 10,000. And the notion that idleness is a bad thing only turns up in the agricultural era (although this might also be because we started writing around the same time). Taylor also chats to Ella Harris on the recent history of pop-up spaces during the programme.
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