locus communis

I started to carry chalk around with me. I ride my bike a lot, so, I’d ride my bike over to people’s houses and leave them messages in chalk on their sidewalk. I set up a couple of systems with people where, when they got home, they would put something in the window, like a stuffed dog, or put a pumpkin up on the ledge that meant ‘Hey, I’m here. Come talk.’ I started having fun trying to dream up different ways to get people’s attention.

A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth. It’s extremely hard to focus on this, because environmentalism goes in and out of political fashion depending on the economy, war, and so forth. But from the perspective of our great-grandchildren, the only thing that’s going to seem important is whether we burned all the fossil fuel on the planet and sent global temperatures up by at least 4 degrees Celsius in the next century, or whether we took collective action, shifted our energy sources, and held the global temperature rise to 2 degrees or less.

…it is worth listening to the historian Richard Longworth and his tell-it-like-it-is explanation of why the system that has served the United States well in its first two centuries might be inadequate for the third: “Globalization really does lead to an urban-rural split. In too many states, the present is anchored to rural areas and small towns that control state governments and state legislatures. More and more, these rural area and their people are being left behind, cut out of the global conversation, far from the global action, embittered by loss and resentful of the global elite in cities and college towns. To the degree that state governments are controlled by global losers, they’ll be crippled in meeting globalization’s challenge.” Without question, this judgment is harsh and flies in the face of the current trend in Washington to avoid critical issues by hiding in the bunkers of states rights and “American exceptionalism.” Longworth is correct to suggest the need for a new and competitive game plan: “The job of state government in this new world is to get out of the way of this new regional future, while providing some sort of safety net for those left behind. The job of the new dominant cities is to join in new and powerful alliances, to mount a twenty-first century power base, to leverage their strengths.” (28) Much of the rest of the world has adopted this game plan while we are on the sidelines arguing amongst ourselves.

Modern architects recognize 300 masterpieces but ignore the other 30 million buildings that have ruined the world.