When I was in New York City a couple of weeks ago, Ray Harrell told me a story about a medicine wheel exercise he did at Lincoln Center with a group of students. Ray could tell it better than I, but the purpose of the exercise was to train the students in intense observation of the environment they were in
A few days ago, I was reading the epilogue to Small is Beautiful, where Schumacher writes about the need for "silent contemplation" to get in touch with the reality of our situation. My agreement with Schumacher's point presented me with the dilemma of coming up with an action to symbolize silent contemplation. Aren't "action" and "contemplation" a contradiction in terms? Sort of, but traditionally there have always been rituals to prepare the individual to "receive the spirit" so to speak. Mulling over these rituals, I eventually settled on the prayer wheel as a suitably iconic representation and after an amazingly brief google search discovered an artist who had used the image of the Buddhist prayer wheel as an energy generator to express the more fundamental need for a change in attitude to more mindful living -- exactly the point that Schumacher had been making. Taikkun Yang Li turned out to be living in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. Yesterday we met for coffee and mulled over plans for an October 10 event, part of the 350.org Global Work Party. Here is the URL for the 350.orgevent: http://www.350.org/node/17515 the facebook event page is at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146133062077368&index=1 Here's what you will find there: On October 10, 2010, event participants will erect and turn a "prayer wheel energy generator"to symbolize the need for silent contemplation and a new attitude for good. "He [or she] alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is... so called 'good intentions' and so-called 'meaning well' by no means suffice." (Josef Pieper, cited by E.F. Schumacher in the epilogue to Small is Beautiful.) At 350.org:... http://www.350.org/node/17515 In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Arthur Dahlberg wrote, "failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, our economic imperialism." Two years earlier, Kenneth Burke had summed up satirically what he called, "The Theory of the Economic Value of Waste": "The more we learn to use what we do not need, the greater our consumption, the greater our consumption, the greater our production; and the greater our production, the greater our prosperity. By this system, business need never face a saturation point. For though there is a limit to what a man can use, there is no limit whatever to what he can waste…We have simply to make sure that the increase in the number of labor-saving devices does not shorten the hours of labor." Burke confessed to being nonplussed twenty-six years later when no less an authority on capitalist thought than Business Week confirmed Burke's farce by proclaiming that mid-20th century prosperity was based on a perpetual cycle of "Borrow. Spend. Buy. Waste. Want." What is the alternative to the vicious cycle of borrowing, spending, buying, wasting and. wanting? Peter Victor counsels, “When managing without growth we would take most if not all of the gains in productivity as increased leisure to reduce the rate of unemployment and the burden on the environment.” It should be no surprise when Juliet Schor reminds us that, "Longer hours raise the ecological footprint, both because of more production, and because time-stressed households have higher-impact lifestyles. Getting to sustainability will require slowing down the pace of life, which means working less.” Getting to sustainability will thus require something much subtler than "alternative energy" or more efficient use of resources. As E.F. Schumacher warned nearly forty years ago in the epilogue to Small is Beautiful, it will require a "clear eyed objectivity" that can only be perfected by "an attitude of 'silent contemplation' of reality, during which the egocentric interests of man are at least temporarily silenced." "Silent contemplation" is hard to envision as a symbolic, public "practical action to cut carbon" but spinning a prayer wheel is an action the evokes silent contemplation. All the better if the prayer wheel has been modified to generate electricity! Vancouver artist, Taikkun Yang Li, has designed just such a prayer wheel. "The prayer wheel generator is built on a base of used bicycle parts and a discarded surplus fan motor…" The amount of electricity produced per spin of the prayer wheel would not be immense. But then that is not the point. Alternative energy alone isn't going to stop global warming, Li points out, the issue is not about technology, instead, it is "about our human attitude for good." -- Sandwichman
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