Tag Archives: politics

language and authority: two links

29 Friday Jan 2010

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Two stories have crossed my desk lately along themes of language and social hierarchy, which is something I find both endlessly fascinating and endlessly frustrating.

As a child who resisted standardized spelling for many years (I knew what I was saying, what was the point of spelling a word the way someone else wanted it spelled?) and who was close friends with a couple of wizard spellers (the kind of girls who were perfectionists about spelling and grammar and didn’t hesitate to point out where I deviated from the norm) I’m acutely aware of the way “correct” language use can be wielded as a social and political weapon. Steerforth at Age of Uncertainty writes about this very dilemma from the perspective of his own English, working-class childhood in A Touch of Class,

The unpalatable truth is that I harbour a prejudice – one that has its origins in early childhood.

My parents were both working class, but aspired to move up the social ladder and focused their aspirations on me. As a young child I wasn’t allowed to play with the “rough boys” and whenever we walked past Teddington Social Club, my mother would point to the women inside playing Bingo and tell me how “common” they were.

. . .

It’s complicated, but I think that my parents’ obsession with making me speak “properly” left me with a deep-rooted prejudice about the local accent. During my teens I successfully rejected my parents views on race, gender and politics and came to regard myself as a liberal (with a small “l”).

Little did I realise that beneath my enlightened exterior, there lurked a bigot!

Likewise, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg of NPR’s Fresh Air muses about the recent kerfluffle over Harry Reid’s use of the word “Negro” in reference to Barack Obama, and his suggestion that Obama was more palatable to the American electorate because he sounded “white” (7:53).

In our culture speaking and writing in “standard” English opens certain doors (and closes others). Depending on what your goal is, at least knowing how to speak and write in these ways can be a powerful tool at your disposal. At the same time, it’s important to remember that “standard” is not exactly the same as “right”: we choose to give authority to certain modes of communication (and certain spellings of a word) through widespread agreement that these modes and spellings are the preferred form. They are not inherently right, and the people who deviate from those forms are not lesser persons because of their failure to conform.

English is notorious for its plasticity: the way it constantly evolves over time, shaping and reshaping the boundaries of language and authority. Steerforth points out in “A Touch of Class” that “In the past, there was no such thing as received pronunciation. We know this, because before spelling was standardised, people wrote phonetically. Then, in the Victorian age, accents began to be linked to social background and that’s where all the trouble began.” The story is more complicated than that, of course (as crazy as the Victorians are, they cannot be blamed for all the ills of the modern age!). As Simon Winchester points out in his absorbing history of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, the OED was in many ways the quintessential exercise in Victorian classification — and yet it also broke from previous dictionary endeavors by basing definitions and pronunciation on usage rather than on what its editors considered “proper.”

When I’m frustrated by speech patterns or grammar that confounds, I try to remember this history and remain humble . . . as long as the individual at the other end of the pen or conversation genuinely seems to be using speech to communicate rather than obfuscate. While acknowledging we find different language patterns disconcerting or frustrating seems totally legit to me, insisting our way is better and that children people speak or write the way that we happen to prefer is really just a way of asserting our authority. Why not enjoy our glorious nonconformity instead?

Blog for Choice: The Radical Act of Trusting Others

22 Friday Jan 2010

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Today is Blog for Choice Day 2010, coordinated by NARAL Pro-Choice America. I somehow missed the 2009 action day, but you can read my 2008 Blog for Choice post, The Radical Idea that I am a Person, in the blog archive.


So when I told Hanna that this year’s theme for Blog for Choice Day was “trust women,” her first response was “Are you fucking kidding me?! What a ridiculous statement! Jeeze — ask anyone who’s gone through a dyke break-up. Never trust women! Especially when they have the ability to make vital documents, irreplaceable vhs tapes, and cookbooks disappear!”

Which made me stop and think about what the theme implies. Because, to be honest, my own first response to the exhortation to “trust women” was not unlike Hanna’s: what do you mean “trust women”? Just . . . because? Because they’re women? Why should I? ‘Cause women are only human after all: some trustworthy, some profoundly not. Which, to me, is both [the most obvious and the most radical claim of feminism]: that women are only human. And human beings run the gamut from completely trustworthy to completely untrustworthy and every point between. Ergo women, as individuals, are only as worthy of trust as our individual past and present actions warrant.

So why, then, is it important for pro-choice activists to make the case for trusting women? And what, exactly, does it mean to “trust women” in the specific context of reproductive rights?

I would argue that it is precisely because women — particularly pregnant women — as a class are not really seen as fully human that the idea of trusting them with moral and medical decision-making continues to be such a radical notion. Setting aside for a minute the question of abortion per se, within the past week I have seen multiple stories about pregnant women’s right to bodily integrity and ability to consent to medical procedures challenged or violated with the support of the state. There was the story of Samantha Burton whose doctor got a court order to confine her in a hospital bed against her will when she disagreed with him about how best to proceed with her pregnancy care. A woman in Australia was visited by police when she resisted having her labor induced with the controversial drug pitocin. There have been a number of stories concerning the physical restraint of birthing women in prisons, who are often not able to labor in optimal positions because they’re shackled to their beds. As I’ve written previously, women shouldn’t have to give up their basic rights to bodily integrity and medical decision-making when they become pregnant, but the legal and cultural climate in the United States is such these days that many of us fear that’s precisely what will happen.

So when we chellenge folks to “trust women,” in part we’re demanding to merely be treated with the amount of trust that adult citizens in America have a right to expect: a legal and social framework that “trusts” individuals with decisions regarding their own personal physical well-being and medical decision-making. That trusts us to make informed decisions. Yet over and over again, anti-choice activists have made it clear that they don’t trust women. They fight to pass legislation that mandates physicians lie to us about our bodies, they harass us at clinics that provide health services and attempt to mislead us by dressing as clinic workers. If we trust women with the power to make decisions about their own well-being, these anti-choice activists seem to imply, the world will disintegrate before our very eyes.

Which brings me to the other implication of choosing to “trust women” with their reproductive agency. And I use the phrase “choosing to trust women” deliberately. Trusting other people with the agency to live their own lives is not necessarily something that comes easily to us: as human beings we often thrive on feeling in control of our environment (and by extension the people around us). Control can make us feel safe. But life simply doesn’t work like that: we could drive ourselves mad attempting to control the lives and decisions of others — and in the end, it would not make our lives richer or safer.

Choosing to “trust women,” then, is choosing to “trust others”: letting go of the burden of decisions that are not ours to make, and allowing those whose lives they directly affect (and who are best positioned to understand the ramifications of a given choice) to bear that responsibility. Because that’s what being human requires: rights and responsibilities.

Last sunday I shared a link to a beautiful essay from The Guardian by a vicar, David Bryant, who had recently counseled a woman trying to decide whether or not to seek an abortion. His essay is worth reading in full, but I would like to quote here the final two paragraphs,

One of the blessings of our humanity is that we have a conscience. To opt out of using such a priceless gift is irresponsible. Of course there are immense dangers here. We may make ill-guided decisions. Our thinking may be warped and skewed. On occasion we will follow a course of action so crass or unsociable that it brings us up before the magistrate. But if we allow the church, the nanny state, the media or popular opinion to become our conscience, we lose our moral integrity.

I had no easy answers for the woman. All I could offer was compassion in her grief and sympathy for the agony of choice that lay ahead. We fixed a meeting for the following day, but I never saw her again. True, I had been non-directive, but I could be none other. “I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. I believe he was right. That is why I could not decide the fate of the foetus for her.

What I appreciate so much about Bryant’s argument is that he refuses to retreat to the (legitimate, but limited) language of legal rights, instead challenging us to see that trusting women with the responsibility of making deeply challenging moral decisions is not only a legal imperative but a moral (dare I say “religious”?) one.

So when a pro-choice activist says to you “trust women,” pause for a moment and hear it for the truly radical challenge it is: a call to let go of the all-too-human impulse to control, and to allow some of the burden of responsibility to be lifted from your shoulders and taken on by someone else — someone whom you might not know enough to personally trust, but whom you must share this earth with, and who may well surprise you with her ability to make the decision that is, in the end, the most life-giving for us all.

After all: in the end, what other choice do we have?

*image credit: amor! by slickerdrip @ flickr.com.

bullying = "childish"?: some reflections

21 Thursday Jan 2010

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Last week, Hanna found this story from the UK-based Independent on bullying at Universities and sent it to me (on the premise that I’m always interested in the education beat; see yesterday’s rant about “liberal” academies) and, indeed, I was interested and started drafting a post about the problem of bullying and what folks who report on and attempt to combat bullying might learn from feminists who talk about “rape culture.”

That’s still a post I might write, since I think the analogy — while imperfect — helps to illuminate the way in which bullying is a systemic problem, one that continues because it’s actually supported by a culture that condones and rewards bullying behavior.

But in the meantime, I kept coming back to the original Independent article because I was bothered by the way the problem of bullying was framed.

We all know bullying occurs in children’s playgrounds, inside and outside of secondary schools and sometimes even in the adult workplace, but what about University?

This supposed sanctuary of like minded scholars has become just another place in which people compete with each other for respect and social order, and bullying has followed with it.

A psychologist specialising in bullying, harassment and inter-personal relationships, Dr. Pauline Rennie-Peyton, recognises the possibility of being bullied in all stages of life, and confirms University is no exception.

“If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” she says.

“The problem with Universities and Colleges is that if we’re not careful, students there also become children. Just because bullying in Universities is not talked about, it doesn’t mean it is not happening. I have students [come to me] and they have to deal with racism, sexual and even intellectual jealousy.”

I think they get it right emphasizing that bullying behavior happens in many social environments and at all stages of life. What bothers me is the equation of bullying with a return to childhood. “If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” Dr. Rennie-Peyton says. And bullying is the natural result? Something just didn’t sit right with me there, and it kept getting in the way of the whole “rape culture” argument I was trying to make.

Luckily, a few days after the post had stalled, Idzie @ I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write came to my rescue with a well-timed blog post on being “childish.”

When people use that word, when they say “childish”, what they mean is that anything a child comes up with, any thought, opinion, emotion, is absolutely worthless and discard-able. To be a child is to have nothing of worth to show for yourself. It’s an expression of ageism at it’s very worst!

So when someone tells me that I’m being childish, they’re not only insulting children everywhere, they’re also telling me that my opinions are worthless. That they’re short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to.

So here’s what I want to say (for now) about bullying, about bullying being framed as a child-like behavior, and about the idea that “becoming children” being a bad thing.

We choose, as a culture, to de-value being child-like, and to denigrate those who we believe are being “childish” (that is “short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to”). It’s certainly true that children can exhibit all of these behaviors — just like any human being. All of us are, at times, short-sighted and uninformed. We all walk into situations where we feel out of our element. Yet these human qualities become strongly associated — through language like “childish” — with childhood. And because they are qualities our culture looks down upon (and experiences that make us feel uncomfortable: most people don’t like to feel out of their element) children themselves become targets of suspicion, ill-temper, and blame simply for being young.

(The flip-side of the bundle of negative connotations associated with “childish” is, of course, that infants and children are also the venerated objects of adoration by our culture: the near-universal signifier of all things cute and precious, when in fact they are simply human. It’s the childhood version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: children are either angelic objects to be cherished and protected or unruly demons to be feared and controlled — neither approach considers children as human beings worthy of our individual respect as fellow-persons).

Bullying isn’t something that naturally occurs in childhood — it happens because young people learn that they can get what they want by manipulating power relationships. And that shrewd manipulation of power relations wins them respect and authority — not just among their peers but among adults as well. Bullying is successful because our culture as a whole — not just some segregated “childish” culture — rewards bullying. We reward people who abuse their authority, and anyone who professes shock that bullying exists in grown-up spaces like university or work environments has really been deluding themselves.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think bullying is simply “human nature” and that speaking up or acting to prevent is will be ineffectual. After all, human beings do horrible things to each other that it is clearly in our “nature” to do (that is, we’re capable of doing them), but which it is also in our “nature” to resist and condemn. People of all ages are capable of small-minded, vicious, and even evil acts; we are also all capable of empathy, compassion, love, and healing. Let’s quit dividing the full range of human capacity up into artificial categories by age, just as we’ve started resisting the divisions of “masculine” and “feminine” attributes that pigeonhole multi-dimensional people into cramped boxes of gender-based expectations.

The limits of the "liberal" academy?

20 Wednesday Jan 2010

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It’s that time of year when all things academical start to grate on my nerves. So when lisa @ Sociological Images put up a post earlier today about a recent study by researchers Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse that seems to confirm the “professors skew liberal” stereotype, I grumbled my way over to check it out.

As studies go, it’s making the relatively modest claim that about 43% of professors self-identify as “liberal,” only 9% as “conservative,” while the remaining are dumped in the “moderate” pot. As Lisa writes:

The study measured a number of reasons why college professors may be more liberal. Among others, they argued that already liberal people may be drawn to academia because they perceive that academics are liberal. That is, just as women are drawn to teaching and men to construction work because these jobs are gendered, academia is a politically-typed job that draws people who identify as liberal already.

They also speculate that the relative low pay, given the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings, may lead professors to lean towards democratic principles of economic redistribution.

What caught my eye here was the emphasis on “democratic principles of economic redistribution.” While I’m not arguing this isn’t a laudable democratic concern, I notice that what is left out of the definition is any interest in deeper challenges to cultures of hierarchical authority (that is: a broader interest in small-d “democracy”). In fact, the argument seems to be that academics are pissed that “the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings” result in professional academics who — far from being invested in anti-hierarchical, democratic politics, are instead simply pissed off that their “high status” profession isn’t rewarded financially.

Not that there isn’t a reason to be pissed off about a system that requires a relatively high initial financial investment (re: student loans) when compared to future income. I just think that to equate that economic frustration with a more general “liberal” outlook on life points toward a very narrow definition of what liberal politics is about. In fact, it suggests that people who are upset about the so-called “liberal” academy should be far less threatened by academics than they profess to be: according to this study, anyway, even those 43% of faculty who self-identify as liberal may be less interested in questioning the hierarchical structure of society than they are about gaining access to it’s upper economic echelons. In other words, they just want a bigger piece of the pie.

What this study tells me, actually, rather than confirming the “liberal” stereotype, is that if I want radical questioning of hierarchical power relations — particularly as they relate to knowledge, education, and worth — I’m probably going to have to look somewhere other than academe. (Or at least not expect to be welcomed with open arms when I keep asking “what legitimizes your authority?”) Folks who are invested in the high social status their chosen profession brings them aren’t going to be too excited about questioning whether that status has any deeper meaning or legitimacy.

You can read more about the study at Inside Higher Ed and find a PDF of Gross and Fosse’s working paper, which I look forward to reading when I have the chance, at Neil Gross’s web page.

quick hit: dahlia does it again

18 Monday Jan 2010

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Dahlia Lithwick on the Supreme Court’s decision to ban broadcast of the circuit court trial of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the legal challenge to Proposition 8 which overturned California’s earlier law legalizing same-sex marriage.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger promises to be a sprawling exploration of every aspect of the fight over gay marriage. But beneath all of the social-science testimony and constitutional nitpicking lies a deep institutional anxiety about whether California’s voters or unelected federal judges should be the arbiters of what marriage means. Opponents of liberal jurisprudence, and their pushy push to legalize gay marriage, have long argued against allowing unelected, sherry-sipping judges to substitute their values for those of the American people. As an argument, this has legs. It’s populist. It’s catchy. But it’s hard to take it seriously when the same people making it also come out strongly against letting the people watch trials.

. . .

The absurdity of the court’s meaningless distinction between broadcasting high-profile vs. low-profile cases is highlighted by the Supreme Court’s own broadcasting policy: The court only provides same-day audio-casting of its own oral arguments that are of major public importance, or, as the court puts it, if there is a “heightened public interest” in the case. So, to be perfectly clear: The court only provides same-day broadcast in its most contentious, hot-button cases, but when the 9th Circuit attempts to do the same, the justices run away shrieking.

. . .

Putting aside the merits of the gay-marriage trial itself, in this new decision the Supreme Court has revealed something profound about its view of the American people. One cannot argue that the majority of California citizens wanted to ban gay marriage and should be respected while also claiming that supporters of such an initiative are a fragile, oppressed minority who must testify in dark sunglasses in dark rooms. Opponents of gay marriage can’t have it both ways. If they want to say that unelected federal judges cannot subvert the will of John Q. Voter, then they cannot also insist that John Q. Voter be banned from witnessing federal judges at work.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. day treat yourself to a mini civics lesson and go read the whole thing over at Slate.

holland, hope, and homosexuality: some reflections

30 Wednesday Dec 2009

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Just before Christmas my friend Rachel sent me a recent column by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black about his experience filming in Holland, Michigan (my hometown) and being invited to speak at Hope College (my alma mater). As I wrote here in October, Black was extended and invitation to speak at the college and then the invitation was withdrawn by the administration. Later arrangements were made for Black to speak at an off-campus venue.

Black’s column, reflecting on his experience in Holland and at Hope is clearly written in a well-meaning spirit of reconciliation in a situation where hurt feelings abounded. It is also written from the personal perspective of an outsider who visited Holland for a short period of time to do a specific project and became tangled up in one chapter of the ongoing saga that is West Michigan’s religious, social and political conservatism. More specifically, he walked into a situation colored indelibly by Hope College’s struggle to decide where it stands in relation to the Reformed Church in America, a denomination currently divided (as most mainline Christian denominations are) in regards to their official stance and everyday practice concerning sexual orientation.

Unfortunately, I think Black, with the myopia of a visitor — misses the mark when it comes to understanding the particular context for — and history of — his own slice of experience in West Michigan and with Hope College. He characterizes Holland (a metropolitan area of roughly 95,000) as a “small Midwestern town” and describes his encounters with the local populace as if his presence was somehow a catalyst for the city and college to wrestle with issues of sexual orientation that they had heretofore complacently ignored. “I don’t think the town was homophobic,” he writes, “I think they had simply never discussed gay rights openly before, and here I was, an interloper, threatening to thrust this hot-button issue into their community.”

Well . . . yes and no. Clearly, I have my moments of profound antagonism toward the conservatism of place and people that characterizes the West Michigan region. There are reasons I felt it necessary to become a self-identified feminist, reasons that I decided to move elsewhere for graduate school, and reasons I will think long and hard before supporting my alma mater financially or otherwise. There have been times when I experienced the majority culture of West Michigan like a physical weight on my chest, an asthma attack waiting to happen.

Yet on the other hand, I think it’s important — and I speak here as a feminist, as someone who’s bisexual and in a same-sex relationship, and as a Midwesterner — to resist the easy dichotomy of “Midwest” versus “coast,” and “small town” versus “urban” that become stand-ins for talking about political and social conservatism and liberalism. West Michigan was where I became the person I am today partly in spite of yet just as much because of the people around me: West Michigan’s politics and majority culture are conservative, but that conservatism does not thrive in a vacuum free of liberal, leftist pushback. West Michigan conservatism is perennially contested by those who disagree with the premises of a conservative Church and Republican party politics. (Consider, for example, that my senior project in the Women’s Studies program at Hope was a multi-year group research project on a predominantly lesbian, feminist organization and community that thrived in West Michigan during the 1970s and early 1980s.) I would argue that Black served less as a catalyst for new awakening and more as the latest spark to reignite the antagonism between these two indigenous forces: dominant culture and counter-culture.

Those outsider-sparks can serve as personal awakenings, sure: it was a similar series of events in 1998 that were my own adult initiation into the world of feminist and LGBT politics — but I think the important thing to remember is that even if the immediate impetus for such community reflection comes from outside, myriad resources with which to challenge the conservative status quo are rooted deep in local, Midwestern soil.

I grew up a crazy-ass liberal in what (as Black points out) is the most Republican-leaning county in Michigan — yet I found a tenacious network of like-minded folks within that community who have helped me to grow, often to thrive, and always to explore a world beyond the boundaries of fear-driven, narrow-minded conservatism. And many of those people hail from (and continue to live in more or less uneasy relationship with) the very groups of folks that Black imagines to be so well-meaning yet clueless about queer politics. Among the folks who helped me grow into the woman I am today are Holland natives, Hope College faculty and staff, and deeply religious folks whose Christianity informs their political liberalism.

And those folks deserve to reside in the “small Midwestern town” of our collective imagination just as much as (if not more than) those who resort to fear and exclusion.

Quick Hit: Religious Diversity and SCOTUS

11 Friday Dec 2009

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I’ve written before about my undying love for legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick; today I bring you her latest column at Slate, which challenges us to consider the religious diversity of the United States Supreme Court.

Popular opinion once held that even one Catholic was too many on the court. Today there are six. But would anyone even notice if Obama appointed a seventh to replace Stevens? Once upon a time, there was an outright religious litmus test for Supreme Court appointees. Today religion is almost irrelevant in appointing new justices.

. . .

We generally don’t talk much about religion and the Supreme Court. We talk about the need for race and gender diversity on the court in brave, sweeping pronouncements: The court needs more women, we say, or more Asians, or more gay and disabled people. Because all those things will impact the law. But when it comes to talking about religious diversity, it happens in whispers, if at all. Because it might impact the law.

I think it’s an interesting example of how our conversations about identity are shifting from more material, embodied factors (sex, race, sexual orientation, physical abilities, class) to understanding people in terms of chosen affiliations, and how those affiliations shape our sense of group identity and our understanding of “diversity” in action.

That’s all I have for the end of this busy week, but hope you all head on over to Slate to read the whole thing.

"Who ARE these people?"

11 Wednesday Nov 2009

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Yesterday, LISNews linked to a post by self-described “conservative librarian” Bert Chapman, who blogs at townhall.com, in which Mr. Chapman made the “economic case against homosexuality.” For those of you who might entertain fleeting hopes that he was taking the New York Times route, and tabulating the cost of homophobic discrimination against gay couples in our society, I am sad to report that this is not the case. No. Instead, Mr. Chapman tries to argue that “our nation cannot afford the extremely high financial costs of this [homosexual] lifestyle.”

I realize that open-mindedness and empathy for one’s fellow human beings are not legally-enforcible prerequisites for the library science profession — but, damn there are days when I sure as hell wish they were.

The people I am glad to call fellow-professionals, however, are the folks who took the time to post comments on the LISNews item. You are all made of awesome (as Hanna would say) and remind me why I think librarians are some of the coolest people around. A sampling of comments thus far:

“oh, yes, the shopping. I had to give up the lifestyle when I couldn’t afford the clothing.”

“‘Lifestyle’ – really? Really? I can’t believe people still use that word in this context.”

“There are a number of lifestyles I object to. The idiot lifestyle, the bigot lifestyle, the uneducated lifestyle, the fearmongering lifestyle, the use-of-the-word-“lifestyle” lifestyle, the describing someone’s existence as a lifestyle, the vile hate disguised as a scholarly opinion lifestyle, the cowardly bully lifestyle and the sub-literate Townhall columnist lifestyle.”

And my personal favorite: “Who ARE these pathetic bigots and how in Hell did they land in my profession? Get OUT…”

"eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month"

11 Wednesday Nov 2009

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Today, November 11th, is Armistice Day, the day 91 years ago when the First World War officially came to an end. As an undergraduate when I spent an academic year at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, I was struck by the omnipresence of the World Wars on the landscape and architecture in Britain. Public memorials proliferated: in churches, schools, high streets, shops, public parks, town squares, train stations . . . name a space and somewhere there will be some sort of memorial plaque or monument or dedication to the fallen. Perhaps it was because of my status as a foreigner (one sees more as a visitor than as a resident in any space), but I did come away with the feeling that Britons co-exist with their collective memories of war and loss in a way that Americans, so often, do not. We remember war, sure, but we are uncomfortable facing the reality of violence, preferring instead to depict war as a triumphant enterprise.


One of my favorite memorials from Aberdeen is this mosaic, funded by a woman who lost three sons during the Second World War, all pilots in the RAF. It is located on the King’s College campus in Old Aberdeen, and I used to walk passed it frequently on my way to and from classes, the library, and errands on High Street.

I don’t really have any Big Thoughts for today other than to encourage all of us to take a few minutes in the midst of whatever our regularly-scheduled plans are to reflect on how often humanity is, indeed, inhumane. And how we live with that reality every day — whether we choose to collectively memorialize it or not.

blogging climate change

15 Thursday Oct 2009

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Hanna and Diana alerted me yesterday that today is Blog Action Day 2009, and this year’s theme is climate change. So I’ve had about twenty-four hours to think about what I wanted to say in my contribution (oh help!).

Riding to work on the T (Boston subway) this morning, I decided the theme of this post would be transportation, specifically the need for transportation infrastructure that supports access for all of us to forms of transporation that are efficient, environmentally-friendly, and affordable.

Since I was old enough to understand about global warming and other environental issues, they have always been something I have felt largely terrified and helpless about. I feel helpless because ecological disasters seem so huge, so, well, global and beyond the capacity of individual actions to effect necessary change. In the American economy, at least, it seems like environmentally friendly, “green,” options have increasingly moved away from city-wide recycling programs or buying recycled paper products to activities that require a substantial discretionary budget: top-of-the-line hybrid cars (my family has never been able to afford a new vehicle), locally-grown fruits and vegetables (eating a balanced diet on our budget means buying cheap), alternative-energy electricity and heat (we take what our apartment building provides) and carbon offset credits (I’m just grateful I can afford to visit my parents once a year). We desperately need large-scale structural changes at the national and international level that provide all of us — urban or rural, poor or middle-class — with green transportation options that support our working and family lives. “Local” is wonderful, unless the folks you care about are spread across the country or across the globe. Walking to work is great if you can afford to live in the neighborhood where your job is located; public mass transit is also a great alternative to driving if you live in an area where the mass transit is reliable, frequent, and fast. Combatting global warming will only be effective if every single human being on the planet is able to live their lives in an environmentally sustainable way, and convincing individual people that environmentally sustainable lives are possible means making sure that “green” options are accessible to all.

I never could bring myself to watch Al Gore’s now-iconic An Inconvenient Truth, but a couple of years ago I watched a close cousin, the 2006 documentary Who Killed The Electric Car?. I’m going to close this post with a trailer from the film, which I thought provided a brilliant analysis of the tangled interests and complicated social factors that so often frustrate our attempts at environmentally-friendly innovation. The movie points fingers but stops short of demonizing one single interest group (eg. oil companies, car companies, politicians, the American public). It also manages to tell a story of failure (the electric cars in the film were, indeed, “killed”) while still offering the possibility of hope for future change.

Let us all, collectively, live up to our best possible selves as we move forward into an uncertain future.