I've just spent most of the weekend at a building show. I spoke to many people in the environmentalist/sustainable building sector there. One of these people was an architect with whom I'm disagree on planning and resource issues, but we were able to have a rational discussion even if it came to nothing. Another person was a well-intentioned (I assume) American seeking marketing work who I found was immune to argument on many issues and driven by what I can only assume was personal preference, though admittedly I couldn't really be bothered pushing her.
The most worrying was a person who oplenly identified with Islam. He is some kind of sustainability activist and happily promoted so-called 'permaculture' as the future of human endeavour, saying that interfering with nature was always a disaster and that economic activity was inherently bad. You know the drill - resources are finite, price and value don't exist etc, etc.
I said that I didn't want to be an indentured sevant. He said that I already was. Obviously there is a grain of truth in his gross generalisation about the nature of freedom, but it is a tiny one buried under a mountain of nonsense. Where I live the pesantry isn't an ancient historical spectre, my grandmother was born a peasant, as were most people's grandparents here.
This character argued that all economic development comes at the cost of someone else - he claimed that living standards have declined in Africa in the last 150 years - and further that I, and he, were cynically profiting from the war in Iraq. He also said that the Enlightenment didn't happen, raising the spectre of France murdering 1,000,000 people in Algeria during the 1960s. Marxism is Judeo-Christian etc. I could go on, but I'm sure you all get the point. This is not the stuff of some extremist fringe, they were at building exhibition aimed at people building their own homes.
I am distressed by all of this, to say the least - including because it impacts very directly on my working life. About a month or so ago I had an, er, interesting discussion with an economist who advocated putting factories beside rivers to make use of water wheels for energy production. Not long afterwards the head of a company that manufactures domestic rainwater collection systems (otherwise known as large plastic buckets) advocated paying a consumption charge on mains water because there is supposely a shortage here. There isn't. This is a country that 'enjoys' rainfall between 150 and 225 days a year. Might she have had a vested interest in want people to use less mains water, I wonder?
So, revolution? Fat chance. Avoiding a back slide into the Dark Ages at the hands of these post-modern medievalists seems more important to me right now. Apologies for the diminished perspective, but there you have it.
Hello, by the way.
Jason.
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