Anarchocyclist

I’m currently reading “Energy and Equity” by Ivan Illich. In it, he’s discussing the idea that people who use more than a certain amount of per capita energy tend to be enslaved by the social relations that result from all the of infrastructure and centralized political power that delivers the ability to consume that energy. Here’s a quote:

The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence, is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

It’s really interesting to me to hear this sort of critique, because it’s based on the social effects of massive overconsumption of energy rather than just decreasing supply of energy or the pollution that consumption causes. Lately, all the energy articles i’ve been reading are about pollution or about the crisis of peak oil, but they tend not to deal with these complex social effects that come out of a high-energy society.

I like that Illich also brings to light the contradiction that societies that put more monetary value on time actually spend more time going from place to place. Our North American society spends huge amounts of time (individually and collectively) financing and building cars and roads, and then sitting in traffic for hours every day. Illich contends that if you add up all this expenditure on traffic and divide by the miles travelled, the high-energy society is actually travelling slower on average than the low-energy society:

The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

ok, i gotta finish reading this, and then find more of it :)

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 06:07 am and is filed under Cycling, Front Page, Politics, energy descent, stuff to read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.