In Naomi Klein’s essay, “Forget the Green Technology—the Hot Money is in Guns,” she reports that President Bush hopes that the ingenuity of market forces will determine how the United States finds a fix to our climate crisis. Bush’s public policy is a private response to the global emergency. They want investors to invest in sustainable “green” technologies as a way to meet the challenge of global climate change. Klein’s economic research into investment trends of the market show that less money is actually going into green technologies, while more money is going into “homeland” security technologies.
In fear of an invasion of displaced environmental refugees, technologies that offer protection from “war and weather” are hot investment items more so than investing in green technologies. She concludes that money is going into building fortresses rather than into building real solutions to our collective problems. Klein writes, “finding solutions for real problems is hard, but turning a profit from those problems is easy.” Thus, she says, we are loosing the war to find a solution to the global crisis because of the fortresses we are building as protection.
Klein’s essay is disturbing in that it points to a serious problem facing scientists and environments who want the political and economic direction of the United States to change. One of the reasons why I see environmentalists and scientists loosing the war against homeland security is because of the visionary metaphors being used to describe the future. Seeing the rich class gated up in their fortresses being protected by the police-state from the masses of refugees and immigrates who are seeking shelter from extreme weather conditions is architectural. Environmentalists and scientists don’t have such an architectural metaphor of protection and sustainability that allows us to visualize an alternative to the fortress.
Using green technologies as add-ons to 20th Century capitalist cities doesn’t solve any social problems. Green technologies alone without a vision of an architectural container are truly lame and hollow. It simply means that fortresses have already been established and continue to be built now with sustainable technologies. It isn’t inclusive because 20th Century capitalist cities were founded on us-and-them mentality of the have and have-nots.
Until we embrace an evolutionary architectural metaphor that houses everyone in an architecture founded on global justice and sustainability, the fortress will continue to rule with guns and high-tech border fences keeping the homeless-- too cold or too hot-- masses out in an inhospitable, toxic environment.
So, what is needed to advance us beyond the fortress? We need to image of global networks of grace within arcologies, or ecological cities designed with cradle-to-cradle, non-toxic technologies. We need to visualize the work-force building evolutionary ecocity designs that allow for everyone to be able to live rich lives within a sustainable lifestyle pattern. We need to step beyond the ghetto and the mansion, a win/loose dysfunctional model, to build a truly democratic architecture, win/win model that allows all creatures on the planet access to clean food, water and air. This is not a social revolution that changes the political players while leaving the development patterns in tact. It is a Lovolution, a non-violent move into a new blueprint for survival.
Doctress Neutopia is running for President in 2008.
Neutopia for President
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