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However, to Deb SF, I am not aware of all that much that was being talked about that would involve some sort of excessive sacrifice by poor people in Harrisonburg to satisfy fantasies of supposedly elite liberal greens (and I agree that some environmental fads have not been really all that viable or sustainable). I fully agree that the global warming issue is very hard (not the place to go on about it here) and that most of what was being discussed at the summit will have a miniscule effect on it.

But that is not the point, even if global warming was used as a rhetorical device at the conference, sort of a pep talk for cheerleading aspect. Presumably the sorts of things that were discussed and that might actually lead to action, such as improving the ability to use bicycles in Harrisonburg and cleaning up Black’s Run more, will be things that will be both environmentally sound locally and economically reasonable, thereby achieving improvements in the local quality of life, even if there is only trivial impact on global warming. Those items that are severely economically costly will probably not make it through to actual implementation.

Regarding such matters, the conference I was at was in the lovely city of Jonkoping, Sweden (pronounced “Yahn shopping,” no kidding). It is a beautiful city with lots of bike lanes and other environmentally sound practices in southern Sweden. A bit more than twice the size of Harrisonburg, it has a growing regional university and is trying to move towards information-based industries, with its current largest industry being in the gardening equipment business.

I had dinner with the mayor of Jonkoping, Anna Martinsson, the first woman mayor there since its founding in 1268. I suggested the possibility of Jonkoping and Harrisonburg becoming sister cities. She was open to the idea, and I am going to be advocating it to our mayor. I think that linking up with a progressive and well-run city in Sweden that has some similarities to ours might well help in providing a role model for moving towards a higher quality of local urban life here in Harrisonburg.

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I even know this was called the “Mayor’s Sustainability Summit”. If you google “sustainability” and “green”, you get more than 700,000 hits, many of them defining the green movement as enabling lifestyles of health and sustainability. Doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to link the two.

I thought the TNR piece was interesting, particularly in tracing the historical “bubbles” in the green movement, along the same lines as financial and real estate market bubbles, and the polling on the public’s interest in sustainability/green issues.

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Two questions:

1. More Seinfeld than Sierra Club?

2. This is your idea of dialogue?

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http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6cd5578a-85ab-4627-b793-680ea8d44c7f&p=3

say this:

“…pitch green lifestyles as thrifty ways to make ends meet in a difficult economy. And, no doubt, many Americans are seeking out some form of (in)voluntary simplicity in response to the financial crisis. But making virtue of necessity is not the same as making necessity of virtue. Whatever romanticized vision of a simpler life that might have existed a year or two ago has largely been replaced by a fearful vision of a life of poverty or, at least, greater insecurity. Today, the Times and other newspapers run stories about how Americans are coping with their economic, not ecological, anxieties.”

This:

“upper-middle-class liberals started questioning and resenting hyper-materialism, even while enjoying the status and comfort it offered.

Little surprise, then, that they would start buying a whole new class of products to demonstrate their ecological concern. Green consumption became what sociologists call “positional consumption”–consumption that distinguishes one as elite–and few things were more ecopositional than the Toyota Prius, whose advantage over other hybrid cars was its distinctive look. A 2007 survey that appeared in The New York Times found that more Prius owners (57 percent) said they bought the car because it “makes a statement about me” than because of its better gas mileage (36 percent), lower emissions (25 percent), or new technology (7 percent). Prius owners, the Times concluded, “want everyone to know they are driving a hybrid.” The status effects were so powerful that, by early 2009, Honda’s new Insight Hybrid had been reshaped to look like the triangular Prius.”

and this:

“It’s easy enough to point out the insignificance of planting a garden, buying fewer clothes, or using fluorescent bulbs. After all, we can’t escape the fact that we depend on an infrastructure–roads, buildings, sewage systems, power plants, electrical grids, etc.–that requires huge quantities of fossil fuels. But the ecological irrelevance of these practices was beside the point. What downscalers offered was not a better way to reduce emissions, but rather, a way to reduce guilt. In 2007, we asked environmentalists in focus groups about green consumption. None thought that consuming green would do much of anything to address a huge challenge like global warming. They did it anyway, they said, because it made them feel better.”

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Kai, will you come be my mayor too? Please?

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