The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations, and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund its budget with contributions by member-countries on a sliding scale with unindustrialized countries paying less.
This is what I mean by “getting the international level right.”
I think one thing that’s being missed here is that Mormons feel exactly this way about polygamy in many cases. If a man loves a woman, and another woman, and another woman, why are they not free to marry?
If it is about love…
I really do understand the practical problems with polygamy in a Mormon context may be mainly issues of power, culture and status - that these are not marriages between equals, perhaps. I’m not going to speak to that here, that is a complex matter in conventional one-on-one hetro-sexual marriages too for some people. I feel, however, that once you decide that love is the issue, it is impossible to argue that two people can love in a way that three cannot and be absolutely sure of the statement in all cases. Muslims, too, who may have multiple spouses in their home country but are not free to marry multiple times here, may well feel oppressed by the status quo.
Everybody acts as if the LDS has no understanding of the plight of gay people. How could they possibly take this stand against the rights of others to marry as they will. I think, though, they may understand all too well what it is like to have society’s version of marriage pushed on you and there may be more than a little of “well, if they can have their exception to the rules, why cannot we have ours?”
Suppose both groups get what they want, and we now have a definition of marriage which permits a group of any size (3 can love, but 4 cannot?) with any mix of genders. We have now expanded marriage in a way which could easily generate permutations which are more at home in science fiction, like line marriages.
I want you to understand that for people who’s parents, grand parents and great-grand parents married, one upon another, with presumed and never questioned perfect faithfulness, in a model passed down from time immemorial at least in this one culture, the idea of a group of sixty marrying over a period of a hundred years, and calling it marriage, and having the same status in society and in relationship to the government… this idea is a little daunting. In fact, it is like a cultural earthquake, shaking the assumptions about what is real and unreal, and about marriage as an act connoting a shared home, children and perhaps even white picket fences.
They fear it. They fear the change, the loss of a system which is known. They imagine their sons and daughters with funny same-gender ornaments on their wedding cakes, shattering patterns of life which have become mythic. This fear breeds anger, and resentment, and hatred.
Some people find rules comforting. They like to know that tomorrow and yesterday will be similar because they were OK yesterday, and if tomorrow and yesterday are similar, that probably means they will be OK tomorrow too. This is a reasonable neo-phobia which may well be adaptive at a species level.
Others, however, are wired to seed boundaries and edges, to push into tomorrow’s territory and claim it as their own.
Here is my proposed solution.
I believe America should establish four separate categories of marriage:
* one-on-one hetrosexual
* one-on-one same sex
* polygamy / polyandry (shared spouse)
* polyamorous (any combination of men/women)
Those who wish to privilege the older, common form of marriage may do so. Those who wish to lean into evolution’s edge may do so. Marriages are recognized as being typed, and there is space for special case legal forms to evolve to handle tricky cases which may take years to come up in case law to be examined, like disposal of property in partial dissolution of a polyamorous marriage.
The simple step of leaving the conventional form of marriage alone, but placing it alongside new forms which reflect the perfectly reasonable desires of those who love in other ways seems to resolve most of the sticking points in the current situation. The old can be left unchanged as long as enough room is made for the new beside it.
This struggle has been going on since the 1960s, and really through all time in one form or another. It’s not my struggle: I’ve tended towards a very conventional serial monogamy, but I fully support those who want more choices in their life, and equal support from their society in those novel choices.
In a lot of ways, the new year begins now. With a McCain / Palin presidency, the general atmosphere right now would be panic, horror, fleeing - a draft, total loss of faith in America and possibly in democracy (it would have taken massive fraud, for starters) and so on. Right now, the people feel they have spoken, and that somebody they believe in is in charge.
There’s two sets of problems we face, however. The first are the real, serious and non-partisan problems of America. The country is going broke because of the actions of generations, not just a few rich assholes with banks. The historical trend away from manufacturing, towards virtual wealth, towards mortgaging the future, the ecological situation, the need for sweeping updates in the basic institutions of the society… all that stuff is very real and presents massive challenges. We can all agree that much of the current crisis was caused by pointing the boat the wrong way in a storm, but the storm is real and ongoing.
The second set of problems are Bush-II-era damage. To the constitution. To faith in the goodness of America. To society itself. The absolute botches in financial deregulation and massive government spending on, frankly, all the wrong things. You know the story here as well as I do.
What America has is better leadership in an historic crisis. To say this crisis was created by the outgoing administration is a mistake: they mishandled the ongoing crisis, but they did not create the patterns of shifting economic activity which are making American-style borrow-and-spend economies untenable. They did not make the housing bubble. Invading Iraq may well have been madness, but 9/11 still happened, and the long and slow encounter between western secularism and Islam has been getting increasingly complicated and fraught for generations.
The President cannot make it all better. I’m going to repeat that.
The President cannot make it all better. And it’s not all the fault of the admittedly-incompetent outgoing regime.
There is no amount of government action or intervention which is going to fix all of this. There is no plan from the top down which will balance the books while simultaneously giving every American everything they (feel they) are entitled to. The dreamworld of a continually richer tomorrow, of maintaining the wealth disparity which was created in the 1950s when the US has the lion’s share of global manufacturing and was the only industrial power who’s territory was not ravaged by war… that time is gone now.
Obama cannot return us to 1998, before the chickens came home to roost. To expect him to do so is to set him up for failure.
What the new Democratic administration can do is controlled descent. They can, hopefully, get the plane on to the runway on the last dregs of fuel with one engine shot off, rather than the McCain/Palin team, which would likely have “landed” the plane into a sheer cliff face. But when stuff has been so far out of alignment, built on cooked books for generations, when expectations and reality have been divergent for untold decades… the Democratic party cannot make the American dream work again.
No one can.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the need to replace the American Dream with a Global Reality. Here’s what I mean by that.
1> No more screwing around burning planetary resources on futile wars while tens of millions of people lack food, toilets and other basic essentials. It’s obscene for the “civilized” nations of the developed world to keep up this farce. The cold war is over, get over it.
2> Environment. NOW! Or we’re going to face a scenario which makes the financial crisis look like the very least of our unpaid debts coming due. Nanosolar, Konarka and algal turf scrubbers are top rank national security type activities, not hippies. We need to wise up on this in a hurry.
3> International relations. Fifty years, maybe four or five Bad Presidents. Who’s on the list, that’s a matter of choice. But US democracy is too fragile, to unstable, and too prone to put whack jobs in the white house for us to globally consider the US as a Sole Superpower a reasonable or safe option. Fortunately the synchronicity of a need for hedging political bets globally coinciding with the US’s inability to maintain that Sole Superpower status has offered a simple and clear path to the future: multilateral alliances, including nations like China and Russia, to maintain the global equilibrium of the future. If the US continue s to go it alone, the next Cowboy President (Palin 2012) could well destroy the world, and we need to have everybody get oriented to that reality: a bad president in the US should not wreck the planet, and it’s in the US’s interests to enter into the agreements which would balance US power internationally now, because that’s also what relieves the enormous global security load the US is currently carrying.
It is a multi-lateral future. It cannot be otherwise.
Does this reflect flaws in democracy? No, not really. It’s an artifact of the precise implementation of US democracy - first past the post in an age of extremely split, factionalized and mutually-counterbalancing political interests. Plus the resurgence of an almost medieval theology.
But it does mean that building a multilateral global order as a hedge against President Palin or a similar debacle in 2012 or 2016 is a critical order of business for the current US administration. To re-tie the hands of future presidents, away from the Imperial Power Switch cannot be done only from within America. Regional security alliances, treaties, pushing of security to the edges, to networks of smaller players, even (god forbid) to the UN in some cases is a necessary hedge. We have seen the danger of the unitary executive, and it is not clear that anybody knows how to harden US democracy against it (ban signing statements? remake the supreme court with people with spines?)
The challenge is how to hedge against American political instability while at the same time preserving America’s leadership in setting the moral tone at an international level in individual human rights. We need that vision, of the Founding Fathers, and of some previous administrations as a light to the world. But it can no longer be accompanied by an unchallenged Big Stick at a military level without endangering both the US and the rest of the world. The temptation is simply too much to be left in one pair of hands, and we do not know how far the next swing to the right will be in the States.
This is, without a doubt, a hell of a thing to say, but I’ve said it: the US needs to build international alliances to counterbalance US power, to restrain the actions of future presidents who may abuse the unitary executive power established by Bush and supported by the Supreme Court and various other spineless US political entities that have been failing into provide an effective internal counterbalance.
Please, President Obama, fix Guantanamo Bay. Restore America’s honor. America’s national recovery from 9/11 is defined by closing the gaps in the Constitution - indeed, in the very rule of law itself - which the Bush administration opened in response to 9/11.
“Lock him up and throw away the key” should be a figure of speech, not a national policy.
I really want to stress that: this is work that should be government funded, the most natural channel being university research funding. But universities have narrow cultural mandates, do not tend to do this kind of full spectrum innovation, and otherwise just have not been tackling these problems in this kind of extremely involved, hands-on, live in your own gear kind of way. We can’t pool money through paying our taxes and get this sort of work done. We have to pool our money by sending it to Marcin.
The work they did in putting together and documenting a reasonable approach to making a hexayurt using conventional building materials has really been an enabling step for the Hexayurt project. I was going to take a crack at it in Iceland about three months ago, but the costs were prohibitive. So it was undone, until Marcin and the team got down and dirty and made one. Here’s a picture (and click it for a little of the story.)
They documented carefully. We have a gig and a half of files, mostly video showing the process of the build and structural details. Unfortunately I’m flat out right now and I don’t have the resources to turn this into a proper video - we all need video editing help because it takes a lot of time to get the good stuff online for people.
So, bottom line: I’m Vinay Gupta, and I endorse Marcin and the Open Source Ecology team as worthy recipients of your money for four big reasons:
* They work they are doing is great. It’s important, practical research in vital areas. It’s broad, it’s integrated, and the team doing the work is credible.
* You can see progress. If you watch the last 10 episodes of the Open Source Ecology Factor e Live updates, you’ll see that tangible goals are set in one episode, and three or four shows later, that built system is being casually used to work on the next task. That’s what Marcin promised, and that’s what Marcin and the team has delivered. Steady, real, documented progress.
* The work is not being funded by public sources or by conventional NGOs. If we want it done, we have to finance.
* It’s useful to me, personally, that Marcin and the crew continue to do this. The plywood hexayurt work was great, really enabling for us, and not something I could do from here. That research was done for everybody, including for the Hexayurt Project itself by the Open Source Ecology team. So… you like this, you want it to keep going, you send them money
Here’s the donation link: FUND MORE OPEN TRACTOR RESEARCH
Right now, in terms of funding ongoing practical research, Marcin’s team is where you send the dollars.
What I’m doing right now is work like this:
Our business model is to sell the service of doing this kind of training work to organizations that need it - NGOs, government, business - so the materials are fully open but if you want us to turn up and teach you these things, you pay for our time. That work is happening at The Open Toolbox. As we stabilize more free and open source appropriate technologies into systems that can be deployed at a town, city and county level, we’ll expand and upgrade the service offering. So if you want to support us, find us some clients. We can also handle on the ground implementations of things like conversion of tent cities to hexayurt cities, proactive planning for disaster response, risk assessment and many other services which are useful for larger organizations and government.
Long term management of funding issues is going to be key to funding engineering research. Here’s the conclusion of a short monograph I wrote on this a few years ago
So what we need is a new class of entities - not a charity, not a business, not a conventional educational institution. The closest models we have are free/open source software projects where many people throw in a little of their time or money to create something together.
In free/open source software, the risk is absorbed in two ways. Firstly, the licenses mean that your work is never absolutely wasted because, even in the event of project failure, the code remains available for other uses. The second risk absorber is that people invest spare cycles in free/open source projects most of the time, rather than working on it with the expectation that it will oe day take care of them.
The big issue is this: for the most part, nobody is dying waiting for their free/open source software to be completed, so spare cycles are enough to get the job done. Plus big companies have the ability to profit from some kinds of free/open source activites, so they are willing to pay and to absorb risk.
So What Do We Do?
We need activity directed at building engineering solutions for the developing world, from entities which are not among the current classes of social infrastructure we have (.gov, .mil, .edu, .org) because these bodies have had at least 20 or 30 years since the discovery of appropriate technology, and have done very little to actually roll out the solutions we all know are on the table, hidden somewhere in the laws of nature themselves.
These new entities provide risk management solutions to engineers who wish to dedicate their lives to working on free/open technology solutions to the pressing and urgent needs of the developing world.
I want your help defining what such an entity would look like, and then building one.
Right now, Open Source Ecology is the group closest to the model I proposed in this piece. Let’s fund them to make it a success, and then move forwards together to revolutionize how engineering, charity and aid are done.
I just love this post. This is exactly the kind of magic that I hoped that Global Swadeshi would produce. Now let’s build it!
I’ll note that the same logic applies to the dry coastlines of Africa too. And I bet there are ways, at scale, of cutting corners we can’t even imagine now.
OSNCamp is the gathering for all those interested in openness and knowledge sharing for a “just sustainability”. It is also the first gathering of the Open Sustainability Network.
What’s it about?
Thousands of organizations and millions of people are currently working to effectively tackle a set of profound global challenges through the creation, adoption and commercialization of sustainable approaches and clean technologies. Our efforts are fragmented. It is time to promote a culture of working together while maintaining our own special niches by leveraging shared and openly licensed solutions.
Join us for the first Open Sustainability Network unconference as we explore free content and knowledge sharing in sustainability, international development, appropriate technology and solutions to poverty.
The basics
Open Sustainability Network (more information) http://opensustainabilitynetwork.org/
October 18-19, 2008
8am-4pm (tentative)
Jack Adams hall
Cesar Chavez building
San Fransisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave
San Francisco, CA, 94132 USA
Come play
Join our thriving international community of scholars, makers, thinkers, and world-shakers - the event is open to all with a willingness to contribute and a desire to work throughout the weekend to make change happen. Registration is free and travel scholarships may be available to those with financial need (depending on sponsorship).
You know when I’ll say we’re taking environmentalism seriously as a people? When the government *BANS* incandescent lighting in general applications. Just flat out bans it, like they did with PCBs or lead-based paint or other hazardous substances.
