Dispatch from Toronto: No Transit, No Horizon by neil
Having been awakened by the tune of “a wildcat illegal job action” as played by the TTC’s maintenance workers, Toronto transit commuter’s were left in the lurch. Good day for a show of constituent force: today kicks Toronto Bike Week, a consciousness-raising initiative designed to communicate the profile and potential of bike use in the city.Coincidences converge on days when the things we take for granted grind down to failure: first real smog day in the city, temperatures soaring to 30, humidex above 34, more cars on the road (me included as I borrowed our friend’s vehicle to get Nat to work).
The kicker, though, came as I was driving home. As all the lines about emissions pollution and environmental degradation and political players grandstanding about the “broken city” and transit and the merits of bicycle travel continued to ball up in a nifty knot, I had the radio on. Of course, the energy-consumption story made its rounds and this cued my shameless resentment. I was greeted with the non-news of virtual demand and “requirement” outstripping power production and how days like today trumpet the combined need for more power, new energy policy, and new strategies for energy use. Inevitably, though, rather than reduced use, less consumption, alternate strategies, and green technologies, the music one tends to hear is the stuff of more “clean” reactors and “clean coal” plants to generate the adequate output. Chewing on this, I then saw the sagging, sorry symbol of Toronto’s “new” environmental legacy swing clearly into view: the only wind-power generator down by the CNE, sitting idle like an exhibit on display for reverential encounter. It looked like some lost and now-found object: fan blades dead, no revolutions, no action. I was struck by what is evidently a lame, tokenistic, and ineffectual gesture.
Then I looked across the lake towards Hamilton, where you can usually see the spewing steel-producing smoke stacks in the harbour, and realized that the thick smog had washed out any chance of seeing at a distance. Even the escarpment was gone from sight. Then I noticed that I couldn’t even determine where the water and sky began and ended. The horizon had disappeared and I fondly recalled the words of one writer I hold dear: Some day, the day the will come when the day doesn’t come.
May 29th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
intense and great post neil, though it makes me glad to not be in toronto today. i like how it ressonates with you words on cvp page 13- inspired, i guess by Emily Bernstein’s haiku about the politics of clothing art that won’t hold still on a wall, as opposed to the wind generator that’s just a sad and offensive peice of performance art. why is so much governance like this: a good idea become a deflated symbolic gesture? is it just because follow-through is hard?
May 30th, 2006 at 4:18 am
short answer. the problem is a combination of three things:
1.) badly allocated mental energy; individual resentment and facile diagnosis that ends with borrowed lines from obscure authors, that fails to enable or generate any kind of ceative, concerted, or sustainable alternative
2.) insufficient process of translation at the intersection of political will and cultural value; a lack of consistent effort and enactment simultaneous with a lack of desire and the recognition of stewardship and responsibility in the context of an always-existing ecology…the gesture was deflated before it was even commenced. it seems we get ever more anxious in proximity to actually acting and doing something (as opposed to the anxiety of environmental degradation, the ‘real’ threat), which is to say we’ve got no guts, or that the betrayal of our desires in the form of some happy solution as a sign of doing something is what we fear most (lacan). the “we” is a stretch. i know small interventions are being made but the consciousness here has to change. we are not entitled…
3.) capital: profit, overdevelopment, organizational structures (the opa), unions (check the latest powerworkers union advertisements, then see them cut to shreds in this week’s now magazine); lack of feasible “market-based solutions” and, additionally, the hegemony of neoliberal economic models of production and service that only accomodate applications and instruments that immediately pay for themselves, keeping other solutions off the market (but go bullfrog power); the prospects of economic collapse when dirty legs are pulled out of the flow; the reliance on technologies, green or otherwise, which may save us from one problem (i.e., killing ourselves) only to exacerbate another (“see, we can outstrip our own capacities if we have the proper technology”).
the problem is that the catastrophe’s already occurred…