Surviving Progress Page #6

but an attempt to increase the bottom

line for certain very large corporations.

If we're gonna feed the

upcoming nine billion people

we can't afford to use our prime crop land for trying

to produce billions of gallons of fuel that we use.

What we're doing is writing the

genetic code, changing this species

allows us to use desert land mhm..

we just need sunlight and CO2

for using this new

engineered algea for example.

Synthetic biology in a way, you know, it's frightening

but I'm very sympathetic to this on many ways

that it will be nice to get a

more water efficient plants

but still it would still need water

Greg Venter cannot create a plant

which needs no water and no nitrogen

or it totaly fixes on nitrogen

by sucking it from the air

which is....., it cannot go that far.

This does not fundamentally

change the game.

What fundamentally changes the game

and what people don't want to hear

and I'm telling this all the time and people say: "don't

talk to us like that because it's just a no-starter"

but for me this is the only

starter:
We have to use less.

LIMITS:

The poor people need more. There is no

noubt, there is no discussion there.

If you are average villiger somewhere in Rajastan

or Panjab or Nigeria u need more. Period.

There's a basic human decency that commends

you to say:
These people need more

more clean water, more basic food,

more education for their children

the discussion goes like before it begins

but as far as us is concerned we certainly

could and should use much, much, much less.

People have been conditioned that

things have to always go better

and immediately if you say: "limit something",

people think this is not getting better

but it would be.

It is even a no-starter when you say: You should

eat less, you should eat less meat, right?

Even that is a no-starter. You

should use less electricity, right?

You should build smaller cars. I saw the

vice-president of GM talking about new GM

and one of the journalists asks him: "but your cars are

still so heavy", and he says: "yes, we are working on it"

what is there to work on it?!? There

are so many things that we could do.

Not to surrender our stand of living,

not to live in gutter, right?

But we don't need one-and-a-half ton

car to go from red light to red light.

People are not willing to go back on these things.

Most of them simply aren't

because they've totally hijacked

by this material culture.

Let's not underestimate the persuasion,

the power of this material culture.

It's immense, it's just immense.

When I've seen so many people

being genuinly unhappy

that they cannot afford a 50 000 sq foot,

sorry, 50 000 dollar bathroom remodelling

I mean, there is something wrong

with that values set, right?

'Cause bathroom is a place where you just spend,

like, 10 minutes to take shower, brush your teeth

so it doesn't have to be very... but, you know, how

much money people are.... because I can't... yhm...

because we are thinking about redoing our bathroom, right, so..

in my mind... it's very interesting

for me it's a char because it has to be done, but for

many people it's a life-affirming thing, you know.

People are renting storage spaces, right?

that they will never access, right?

to store the junk which they cannot

store in their 5000 sq. foot homes

so do we need that? It's amazing!

eh.... it's, it's, it's.....

This is very difficult to put the geany in the bottle,

so everything is defined in this material thinking

I could make a lot more coherent but it's difficult because

if you make it more coherent you make it prescriptive

and prescriptions never work, really.

Because I don't have the solution

I can't say "we should follow this and then it

will click and we will live happily everafter"

so I'm making it deliberatly uncoherent. I could

be very doctrinate, I could be, but you see,

I lived for 26 years in communist society I'm

inoculated against any doctriner grand solution,

you know, "this is the path, this is the must,

this is the paradigm which we have to follow"

I'm just totally set agains it, so I'm

making deliberatly, kind of, you know,

messy, uncoordinated, because that's how life is.

We don't know what path will emerge.

As long as we are living on this sea of

afluents and opportunities and material riches.

It's just very difficult to make this individual,

voluntary resolutes that are saying "enough", "back"

I was walking around pointing my

finger at everybody, you know,

you people, you know, blaming

the culture for its consumption

finaly one day I came home and air-conditioners

were on even though there was no one at home

and I was like:
Wait, I've been going around blaming

everybody else but the fact of the matter is

that my lifestyle requires a huge amount of

resources too, so how can I blame other people

and I realized that before I go around and try to change

other people maybe I should look at myself and change myself

keep my side of the street clean.

So I came up with this idea that I would live as environmentaly

as possible for a year and see how that affected us.

COLIN BEAVAN.

- ENGINEER / AUTHOR & DIRECTOR OF NO IMPACT PROJEC So we did this No Impact

experiment, we did it.

We live in New York, in the

middle of the New York City

which made it unussual because most people can think of

environmental living as some kind of back to tha land thing

but of course, back to the land, is not the

right idea when it comes to saving our habitat

if all of us in New York were to go back to

the land we would very much destroy the land.

We're not biologicaly consumptive this

is not got to do with human nature.

Human nature is to do what everybody

else does, that's human nature

that we want... and it's wonderful, it's like: I

want to be with you, I want to be the same as you,

I want to love you and I want

you to love me, thats not bad.

So that's... that's also part of the problem.

I want to be the same as you and you consume

so I'm not going to be

the first not to consume.

But it also tells us that if we can move

from non-consumption to consumption,

we can also go from consumtion

back to non-consumption.

We need to begin by saying: We're

at the end of the failed experiment

and it is time to say good bye to it.

An economic experiment, it's a technological experiment

that's been going on for couple of hundred years

and it's not worked, it's brought

us to this point of crisis.

Then we can start sainly and inteligently say how can

we live within the real limits that our planet gives us

and create a safe operating

space for humanity.

Admitedly we've used are brains in ways that are

detrimental to the environment and the society

but brains are begining to get together

around the planet to find solutions to some

of the harm that we've inflicted.

You know, we humans are a problem solving species. We

always do pretty well with our back's to the wall.

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