What I am learning is that pigs are very good at eating just about anything as I take on my new Post-Arcosanti stint as a helper on a western Mass pig farm.
The versatility of pigs centers on the fact that they can turn the wastes from many food processing facilities into profit. Developing a process of food production that involves minimal feed or fertilizer costs, is a key factor for profitability and success in a competitive and often challenging business.
This begs the question: how many devices do we really need? The folks in the corporate world when they get all excited in their eHome prototypes, they become increasingly out of touch with the economic realities that most of us face. The bubble hits home when the line for the company’s expectation of consumers buying products without any rational sense of them providing something meaningful for people in terms of say increased productivity, hits the reality of their being only so much money people can spend on these things.
A crash is when the two lines intersect. There is not limitless money just as there is not limitless resources. And that needs to be considered as well – this idea of a moral and ethic obligation for us as consumers to think about the ecological and social implications of these vast industries that produce these products of our modern world. Also in the consumer frenzy we tend to overlook the reality that there might be better things we could be doing for ourselves as well as humanity than considering what has become little more than business gossip about what these corporate titans are doing?
When we consider the huge impact of making the computers on the planet, Apple and other companies are some of the worst ecological offenders of our time. Especially when you consider Apple’s anti-recycle and anti-repair attitude when it comes to getting the max life out of its products.
For me the reality of Apple’s selfishness and arrogance is most obvious when it comes to their obtuseness in regards to this idea of making more ecologically and socially responsible computers – despite its huge cash pile. I think this is the kind of innovation that really matters for the future of humanity.
The open source guys are different. These see the world different than the dominant cultures of the computer world today: Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Google. Linux designers continue to design low power systems that do pretty much everything most of us ever need on computers that are 4-7 years old or more. Also there is amazing work to get to low power desktop capabilities on ARM systems that cost 50 dollars.
We are rapidly moving towards the realm of absurdity when it comes to many consumer sectors and the options their offer which are so much more than most of us consumers need for our everyday lives. For example the Retina screen is close to the limits of what our eyes can see, in terms of display quality and definition. So as our ecofootprint grows, the reality is that we can really do just fine with older and more compact technologies, using a fraction of the computing and technology power we now have at our disposal in our phones, computers, cars and even washing machines.
iWatch is the latest and most obvious sign that despite all of our state of the art technologies we still feel like it is not enough. Maybe its not enough because we are not focusing on what is important in life?
I encourage people to just stop a moment and consider this idea of much is enough. Maybe we are reaching this point of pretty much having all that we need in these technologies. Possibly now the real innovation should be focused on making them last longer so that they don’t have to be replaced so often. In this process, we can reduce our ecofootprint and focus on more pressing issues like extreme world poverty and global climate change.
I changed the name of this blog from Life@Arcosanti to Life After Arcosanti to reflect my changing status. I am no longer a resident of Arcosanti and I currently have no plans to go back on a permanent basis (but who knows what the future will bring these days?).
The goal of the blog is to continue to look at the Arcosanti Experience as a unique effort to explore and consider alternative living environments. I am also interested in how a movement could emerge to reconsider Paolo Soleri’s ideas – a reformulation process if you will – in which we might enable a more dynamic and intellectually rigorous process for looking at Arcosanti and the future of Arcosanti. Possibly a ArcoWiki could be set up and folks interested in this idea that led to the formation of Arcosanti could get involved in sharing their intellectual visions and ideas of what Arcology and Arcosanti represent for both themselves and humanity.
And what about the 7000 or so people who have come to Arcosanti for various periods of time and participating in the living and building of Arcosanti over the last 43 years of its existence? How do they figure in this process of trying to build the world’s first prototype Arcology?
We’ll also look at the psycho-social implications of Arcosanti Life and consider the various interesting social and psychological dynamics of the project and relate them to larger social theories as well as Arcology.
Finally what is the importance of this idea of serving as a model in the progressive movement? Should all progressive experiments like Arcosanti be accountable to not only participants, donors, residents, etc., but also the larger movement itself in terms of an obligation to be what we say – to be the change we want to see in the world? Should the notion of stakeholder ownership be taken seriously in non-profit management and how does that challenge prevailing management theories and practices including those currently in practice at Arcosanti and the Cosanti Foundation today?
Also in relation to considering this idea of Arcosanti as a model; an experimental laboratory – how do Arcosanti and Sustainability connect? Does Arcosanti’s inability or reluctance to develop a serious set of sustainability and appropriate technologies taint its image as a model for future cities and sustainable living?
The above questions and issues will continue to be discussed here as I consider the impact of the project on my life and my life beyond Arcosanti.
I would love your inputs.
So please let me know your thoughts.
Best to you…
Jeff Buderer
buderman@gmail.com
928 202 0515
Last Saturday, Cosanti Foundation president Jeff Stein presented at an event organized by a group based in SF called TEDxMission. The name of this particular event was called TEDxMission 2.0 The City. It featured discussions with leaders in the sustainability field. There was a specific focus on innovative ideas and technologies relating to urban design (and particularly in terms of the Bay Area): “to share the powerful narratives of urban innovators and organizers, stewards and artists, builders and tastemakers.”
Besides Stein, the other speakers I recognized were (my thought is that these people could be a potential network resource for making Arcosanti more sustainable):
I have to begun to make the investments and commitments in my life to begin to really live a sustainable lifestyle. This is important to me so that I can focus less on purely intellectual and idealistic pursuits (thoughts for the sake of thoughts) and more on hands-on activities that prepare me for the coming changes within humanity. For me to actively participate in these changes, it is important that I reorient my life towards the values put forward by one of the world’s great modern spiritual leaders Mahatma Gandhi – becoming the change that I want to see in this world.
While I am here in Long Island, I am taking some time to think about communications in relation to laying the architecture for building a sustainable Arcosanti. I know it sounds ambitious, but I feel like we need to begin to talk about this. Especially as we consider the reality of a new president of Cosanti Foundation – Jeffrey Stein – is talking about the need for a five year strategy plan.
About two Januaries ago, students from the Kansas City Art Institute came for a special two week workshop organized by a influential and notable alum of the project Russell Ferguson. Ferguson is director of the “School of the Foundation Year” at KCAI which helps students decide what their passion and specific focus is an artist.
There was a prophetic writing by Dr Norman Myers that I got from a relative when I was studying alternative ideas in College: The Gaian Atlas of Future Worlds.
One of the key elements of it was that we are learning from nature and the capstone to that was that nature at the highest level was bound together as Gaia: the planetary consciousness of the earth. Conscious in that it was the sum of all the energy of the species and inanimate matter that made up the planet.
One of the interesting things here at Arcosanti is the continued interest in what it represents. Even though it is not clear to some what all the hoopla is about. My own view is that if we live in the past too much we run the risk of being nostalgic. For an organization that claims to be very concerned with the future of humanity that can be problematic.
Also the idea is why do people stay here? Is it for the views? The social mix of people who come here from all over the world? To build an Arcology as a solution to the problems facing humanity? To document and promote Paolo Soleri’s past glories? Is it for the architecture? Is it because many who stay here fear that they can’t (or possibly a more charitable views is that they don’t want to) survive out there in the real world?
We are a diverse mix of people and so there are many reasons why we are here.
Yet I think the challenge is not to be overcome by the pain of expectation and of what should be.
It has to do with the fact that it is sometimes not clear why Arcosanti is so special to people because we live it everyday and many times struggle with the idea of living amongst a group of people for such a long time without really acknowledging its a community.
Consider that for many years the prevailing “memetic jinjo” coming out of the mouths of Cosanti Foundation operatives was that “Arcosanti is not a community its a construction site.” It was jarring to me every time I heard that I had this vicerial reaction to that kind of thinking. For me it was a denial of the idea that to live well for any period of time among a group of people it cannot be anything other than a community and be graciously acknowledged as such.
Now we seem to have evolved past the need to remind people that the people living and devoting their lives to Arcosanti are not really a community of people. However, there is still lacking a real understanding of the unique conditions here and how to facilitate something meaningful at Arcosanti that improves the quality of life here.
I often say to people that the reason architecture inspires is not so much about the architect itself but about the shared memory of an experience in viewing inspirational architecture. Pierre Teilard de Chardin was a major early influence on Soleri. Chardin expressed some metaphysical views that were very similar to Carl Jung in relation to the idea that we do have an imprint on our world by developing rings of shared conscious experiences. It is through these experiences that we have intuitions and make what are called telepathic links with one another.
The challenge is of course that we do not really acknowledge this power flow through our lives. The idea is that there are cross-cutting influences in our lives and the power of the consumer culture and its ideological drivers are still great even here at Arcosanti.
Despite this or more precisely because of countervailing influences the Arcosanti metaphysical or metaphysics is denied. The idea of magic in our lives is denied and so the routine takes over to the point where it becomes stifling and even dismal. To acknowledge this reality is problematic because in society we are supposed to say everything is fine or at least OK (which of course is short for okey dokey).
So the problem with keeping an open mind in relation to community development is the premise that you can still have a real community while denying the idea of the role of spirit in creating and sustaining community. I mean something similar to what Jung and Chardin were talking about…That we though our spiritual essence are somehow sharing something important with each other as well as the planet and the universe on a more holistic and unconscious level. To deny this is to deny the very elemental elements of life and at a fundamental level to pretend a very basic life building block is not only unimportant but nonsensical.
So for me those who deny the spiritual essence of all things and our interrelationship with them is denying the very life force that sustains us. It is that we deny this life force that we become depressed, we are cut off from the link to the universe and to our fellow kindred spirits.
The result of the above is hardly surprising. When we are not holistic beings acknowledging on some level the completeness of what we are and what we are a part of in terms of the larger whole, productivity and effectiveness in our lives becomes distant like a mythological vision or dream. We can only wish for it, like we as children wish for Santa Claus to give us presents.
The reality is that without the spirit of community in our lives we descent into a darker world which is driven by shame, denial and pretending. We lie to ourselves and we lie to each other because we often don’t want to face the shame of what we are, what we have become. So we turn to drugs and addictive patterns of behavior to keep us complacent in the dismal and uninspiring realities of our where we are in the moments that we seek to get away from. But each moment is as dismal as the next and so much of our time is spent getting away from the memory of the now and the past and focusing on some unrealistic future vision.
Paolo: Going on to do “other things”?
Its been a few months but I’m still musing over the big change here at Arcosanti.
In the Cosanti Foundation Soleri retirement Press Release at Arcosanti’s official website blog (Daily Progress aka Today@Arcosanti) announcing the change in leadership, Soleri supposedly explains that its time for him to “do other things.” What other things are we talking about here? Most recently Paolo Soleri has been focusing his energy on this idea of building a Lean Linear City.
It seems that he might just have a couple of moves up his sleeve. Really though the only other thing he could be talking about is his having more of a focus on Lean Linear City.
I have mixed feelings about the change in that I don’t want him to just fade away but then again it might be a good thing for the project for him to become less involved and let some new blood in to get the project really moving again. However I don’t think there is much worry about his “retirement” as he seems to be pretty much involved as he was in the past but without the title of President.
References/Notes:
Life After Arcosanti 