Archive for July 8th, 2009

A Problem of Scale

Sharon July 8th, 2009

It isn’t just artists who sometimes have trouble with perspective – all of us do.  Consider our tendency, for example, when speaking of history to pick and choose the historical periods we consider relevant. Thus, for example, proponents of the traditional family emphasize the 1950s and ignore the 1940s, although there’s certainly a case to be made that American history has enough wartimes, which inevitably upend gender roles, that the periods of stability in between were not normative.  Or consider narratives of, say, European goodness and American awfulness, which are moderately credible if history begins in 1980, say and not at all credible if it begins in 1930.  Or whatever.  All of us generally prefer the long view to the short one, the small historical model in the short term to the big sweep of history and all its variations.

Bigness is one of those things that is remarkably hard to estimate – I can show my children a picture of a New York City Building, a Redwood Tree, an elephant and a child to give a sense of the size of a Redwood – but until you have craned your neck and looked up and up and up and up some more at a tree that goes on forever, perspective remains a flat thing, rather like the medieval painting from exemplum, rather than from life – thus we make the images in our heads of things, and thus we are astonished by the vitality of reality.

This problem of flattened mental visions of vast things confronts us everywhere, most notably as we attempt to navigate our collective ecological crisis.  The sheer vastness of the scale of our problems is one most of us have no ability to come to grips with – indeed, are never asked to come to grips with.  We are shown our problems in flat terms, ones that many of us do not fully understand – that is, it is hard to imagine the hugeness of a Diplodocus over an elephant, particularly if one has never actually seen an elephant up close, never been close enough to one to see how enormous it really is – and then to imagine 50 of them…one’s mind tends to look and say “ok, that’s big, and the other thing is really big.” 

Consider the problem of soil – I’ve heard some people say it isn’t a problem at all, after all, soil can be built. And this is absolutely true.  One simple way to do so would be to buy some straw or old hay and place 6 bales together, making a bed.  Fill this bed with woodchips, some more straw, some grass clippings, some brush and leaves, animal or composted humanure, a few shovelfulls of dirt from a forest floor, water it, perhaps pee on it, and go about  your business.  In a few months, the fungi and bacteria will have feasted upon the organic matter, and produced a lesser amount of glorious growing medium, which carefully nurtured and sustained will bring forth food in perpetuity.

It is even possible to imagine a concerted national effort to do this – national “build a garden bed day” in which almost all Americans not needed elsewhere did this.  There would be stiff competition for brush and straw, of course, but it is possible to imagine that at the end of the season, 100 million new 4×10 garden beds would be constructed.  Done in fall, that’s 400, 000,000 new square feet of growing space, more than 300,000 new acres of land available for growing.

Of course, 300,000 acres is no more than a drop in the bucket, in terms of total national acreage needed (don’t get me wrong, it would still be a good idea!).  And therein lies the problem of course – there simply isn’t enough straw or forest soil, grass clippings or manure to fully restore our topsoil for a really, really long time. There aren’t enough animal manures either – which is why we’re going to have to come to terms with the question of humanure, and probably right quick now.

Or consider the solar panel – it seems like such a good idea to simply power everyone’s house with solar, whether individual panels or vast plantations in the desert.  We keep being told we use only a tiny percentage of the solar energy that pours forth upon the earth.  Ignoring the fact that it is actually kind of horrifying to imagine human beings using all the energy the sun pours forth ;-) , there’s the fact that those vast plantations of solar panels must be built in the Gobi and California deserts, where people do not live.  They cover vast areas, and aren’t near much – in order to build them, one must first build housing and shelter for the people who build them, and run water there.  Then one must truck in concrete, with its enormous ecological footprint, and again, run water for the process of installation.  Meanwhile, at a distant factory one must manufacture not thousands but millions of solar cells, from trace minerals that must be mined.

The ecological cost of all of this is high – I’ve pointed out repeatedly that in fact, we may actually cross our climate threshold by building out resources to prevent further climate change, an irony I don’t find at all appealing.  All the energy must be fronted – that is, all of the renewables require a front investment in fossil fuels, that are burned and will never come back.  Moreover, they require an upfront investment in money – which means people rich enough to tie up their money for a long time awaiting returns. 

And because solar panels are far less energy dense, with a lower EROEI than most fossil fuels, in order to replace 1 barrel of oil, we have to build 5 solar cells – that is, we aren’t replacing the billions of barrels of oil 1-for-1, but 5-for-1 which drives up the scale even further. Most of us are no longer actually holding an image in our head of what that means in miles of panel, tons of concrete, tonnes of carbon dioxide, mining equipment or anything else.  We’re back at looking at how big the dinosaur was – big vs. really big.  And because we know we’ve already done some really big things – the moon launch, the nuclear program, we don’t even bother calculating how big – if we could do one big thing, we must, by logic, be able to do another.

We have in our own way as much problem with perspective as artists do – there’s as much to say, although I won’t say it today, about our problem with perceiving small things, except to quote Gaston Bachelard, from _The Poetics of Space_ in saying “Distance, too, creatues miniatures at all points on the horizon, and the dreamer, faced with these spectacles of distant nature, picks out these miniatures as so many nexts of solitude in which he dreams of living” – and observe that it isn’t just that we decline to see the vastness of our problems, we are attracted to them, miniaturized by distance and unfamiliarity. Thus the electric car looks adorable, endearing, a place to keep the dream of private transport alive, as long as we do not look to close at the realities of our dreams.

Perspective is not easy, and it isn’t a problem that is fully soluble – the long view leaves things out as much as the short one, and vice versa.  No view is perfect – looking up at the Redwood, the Cathedral, the elephant, one is prone to overestimate, to factor in the direct experience of shock and overstate things.  And yet, knowledge by authority, analogy and example were insufficient – there’s a reason that Renaissance art, with its emphasis on focused perspective based on observation is a stunning leap over the best of medieval art – not because the Renaissance painter was the first to see, but because the Renaissance painter insisted that if you could not get all the perspective needed, you could at least insist on grounding authority in experience and reality.

Most of us need to get up close and personal with things like numbers and other evidence of scale – and those of us who write about this stuff need to work harder at illustrating the problems of scale – because we face an audience that does not understand them – they think they are looking at two large creatures, one big, one bigger – they do not realize that the difference between technological and real solutions are the difference between absent dinosaurs of surpassing hugeness and ordinary, just really big elephants.

 Sharon

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't: Identity, Women, Domestic Life

Sharon July 8th, 2009

I was struck this morning by the implicit assumptions in a Washington Post article about Michelle Obama’s visit to Russia.  The headline reads “In Mother Russia, She’s 1st Lady of Gardening.”  And even in that terse bit of writing are a whole bunch of implicit assumptions – after all, why invoke “Mother” Russia, except to emphasize the backwardness of Russian women, who, we learn, are interested not in Obama’s education, her speeches or her Narciso Rodriguez dress (whatever that is).  Instead, they are interested in how she grows food and runs her domestic life.

The article is rather patronizing to Russian women.  Yes, they admit that Russian women also have degrees and education, but:

“Women here have long stood equal to men on a variety of fronts — one of the lasting aspects of the Soviet era — but they are also expected to tend the hearth, raise the children and maintain the family. Obama, a lawyer and former hospital executive, has described her White House role as mom in chief. That title, as well as her very public sowing and planting, speaks volumes in a culture where men and women relate in very traditional ways and women struggle to balance independence with homemaking.”

Oh gosh, I wonder what that would be like – a society where women struggle to balance independence with homemaking, and where women have to do the vast majority of the work in tending the hearth, raising the children and maintaining the family?  I can’t imagine such a shocking situation happening anywhere.  Next you’ll tell me that a major national newspaper in Russia has so little respect for women that an article about Obama’s reputation contains half a paragraph about what she’s wearing, and less than a single sentence about what she has said.  Oh, wait, that’s the Washington Post.

Yes, there are real cultural differences between the US and Russia, but is hard to see them clearly because our own prejudices are showing so clearly.  Consider this quotation by a Russian teacher,

“The dacha is something important in our life and something present in our life all the time,” says Alla Lapidus, 52, a teacher at a music school. Obama is appealing not only because she has a career but also because “she can work with her hands,” Lapidus says.”

Try to imagine an American – almost any American, saying that about their first lady – that she’s appealing because she is not afraid of manual labor.  There are parts of American culture where that is a term of praise still, but it stretches the imagination to conceive of someone applying it to Michelle Obama – simply because we are told that the primary grounds on which to admire a woman who takes on the fraught and uncertain job of first lady is her education and policy talent.

But, of course,  she hasn’t been elected to anything, and for the duration of her husband’s presidency is expected to devote herself to parenting, redecorating the White House, doing Oprah and posing for publicity shots far more than policy work.   We don’t actually like it much when highly educated and competent women who happen to be married to presidents actually intervene in public affairs – witness Hillary Clinton during her husband’s tenure.  The role is still very narrow, but we are expected not to admire her for her domestic skills or willingness to work, but for her willingness to look attractive (the Washington Post article contrasts the lack of interest in Russia in her clothing with Europe’s fascination, and manages to slip in that she “wore flats” at the tomb of the unknown soldier, perhaps the least useful information on earth that could be appended to any fact).  We are supposed to see in her fashion sense and her Oprah interviews the keen legal intellect, and admire her for it. 

This represents a fundamental intellectual problem – one’s intellect does not reside in one’s choice of shoes.  Of course we know Michelle Obama is brilliant and talented.  We also know that for the next 3-7 years, she’s going to be set up as first domestic in the land, whether she’s enthusiastic about the job or not.  Redbook is going to show her Christmas tree, people are going to judge her on her parenting and her clothing, she’s going to have to make sure to tell everyone her favorite recipes, and odds are, if she actually steps in in any major policy role, she’ll be criticized for it.  And to the woman’s enormous credit (because I find it very hard to imagine that any bright woman enters this deal with the devil with anything other than deep ambivalence), she’s done a pretty good job with it – she’s still smart and funny, but she’s also expanding the role of first domestic to include gardening.  She’s blunt that her children still have to do chores, and that she doesn’t think that a little thing like your husband being president gets you out of weeding the garden.  She’s in a difficult spot, and she’s doing it very well.

And of course, it is just a smaller version of the reality of women in general.  We all know that it isn’t just Russian women who live in a country where it is hard to balance independence with domestic life, where women have to work with their hands – or want to.  It isn’t just in Russia where women are torn between tending the hearth and family and going out to work and make money in the formal economy.  The game of being first lady is damned if you do, damned if you don’t – and the practice you get for that job is to be a woman – or occasionally (and increasingly frequently) a man – who does domestic work.

The reality is that all of us are in the situation the the paper implies is exclusively the territory of Russian women, who have not sufficiently evolved – and if there’s less attention on us, well, we most of us don’t have a working staff to handle the cleaning and cooking, either.  There are several ways one can navigate the problem of domestic life – I’m sure I’m overstating the difficulties in some cases, but I think there’s some truth in these broad categories established with in our nuclear family structure:

1. Both the adults in the household work full time by choice or necessity.  They make enough money to outsource any domestic work that needs doing, except what actually can’t be skipped or sold.  The/one of the woman/women if any probably does much of that, although there are exceptions.  There is sometimes money, and never any time.  Most of the work doesn’t get done to anyone’s satisfaction, and many people feel bad about it.  Children, if any, spend a lot of time with paid caregivers and unless they are very good (and usually, the parents very affluent) or family, everyone feels guilty, but usually mostly the female parent.  Domestic skills needed in a changing future are frantically gathered as best can be, and again, guilt reigns.

 2. One member of the adult household works, the other one stays home and does the domestic work,  and that person is female.  The domestic work gets done, but there is often an economic cost, and often a time cost – in many families the breadwinner works long hours to compensate for the loss of a full time earner, with predictable cost to his time with his children.  The domestic worker often finds herself isolated and struggling with a large burden, particularly if she is trying to gain skills and self-sufficiency and has children.  People ask her “What is it you do?” and then wander off when she struggles to explain, or say loftily and condescendingly, ”Oh, I couldn’t do what you do…I work.” 

 3. The gender roles are reversed and the father or male partner is the primary domestic figure.  He gets all the disadvantages of being at home, plus the reality that if there is a female partner, she probably micromanages a lot more than a comparable male spouse would ;-) , and the fact that almost no one thinks he should be doing this work.  This is particularly unpleasant for people who did not choose this situation, but had it thrust upon them due to unemployment.  If there are children, he gets the dubious delight of being the only guy at the playground, and thus gets more than his share of discussions of mastitis, the side effects of pregnancy and other joys.  Otherwise, the situation is the same, except that every single woman in the world is impressed if he can just dress his children in the morning and keep them out of the road, except, of course, his spouse or partner ;-) ).  The woman is assumed to be an unnatural parent and probably secretly to have a penis or a complex, because she makes more money than her partner and doesn’t love her children enough to stay home with them ;-) . 

4. The parents/partners divide the domestic and employed work, and probably argue about it a fair bit.  Either one works days and the other nights, and they are never together and always exhausted, or both work from home and constantly struggle with privacy, space and whose turn it is to take the kid to the potty, or something.  Both of them do without sleep and free time, while also attempting to build a sustainable future until they go completely mad.  

5. There is only one adult in the household and he or she gets all the fun.  He or she is held morally responsible for not being there for the kids, not doing enough domestic work, not making enough money and not providing another parent.  He or she knows that they are also not doing enough to prepare for incoming zombies, but figures that he/she is already a zombie from lack of sleep and stress, so perhaps they’ll be able to pass.

I’m going to guess that these variations on this are available to women in Russia as well, with one important difference – many of the Russians I know live in extended families with their parents or in-laws.  I have no doubt that this comes with many disadvantages – a neighbor of mine, for example, who married not a Russian, but Ukrainian woman, found it very difficult now that they were living in the US to clearly explain why the parents could not hang pictures of Joseph Stalin in their living room. On the other hand, the grandparents helped cook, gardened, cleaned and helped tend their grandchildren.   The reality of a household with three, four or more adults is very different than one with one or two people and enough labor for 10.

I realize it isn’t just women who get screwed here – men at least have a place where they can win, but of course, are terribly vulnerable to losing that place.  But I think it is fascinating to see how turbulent and troubled our relationship to domestic life and its work are, and how deeply gendered that turbulence is. The article unintentionally turns a microscope not on Russian attitudes, but on American ones.  Consider the opening paragraph:

 ”On her second international trip as first lady, the welcoming cover stories and street chatter here have focused on her White House kitchen garden rather than her clothes, her Ivy League pedigree or her interest in promoting public service. The current cover of Ogonyok, for example, a weekly magazine focusing on politics and culture, carries a candid photograph of the first lady dressed in a burgundy windbreaker with her hair pulled back, working in the garden with students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District. The cover line reads: “The Queen of the Fields: Michelle Obama and her husband can overturn our understanding of America.” It’s accompanied by an extensive story about gardening culture in the United States. Tomatoes, apparently, now serve as tools for diplomacy.”

The article assumes that “public service” doesn’t include helping develop schoolyard gardens, and that there’s something weird and trivial about tomatoes having anything to do with the understanding of the US that Russia has.  Her public service couldn’t include something as domestic as the garden, because when she touches dirt, we don’t see her education – we’ve been trained to see dirt touching as the territory of near-illiterates, so of course we can’t see her law degree and “spunky independence” when she’s got a hoe in her hand. 

And of course, engagement with her food could never be vital, exciting, and truly a diplomatic tool – that’s just proof that Russians again, are backwards, they worry about stupid little things like food.  Of course it couldn’t be important to the world for them to see us as like them, as caring about food security and doing the hard work involved in creating it – better we remain in everyone’s view rich, fashion conscious and talking about self-esteem, rather than dinner.

And of course, even though in its function, the role of first lady still carries heavy domestic assumptions, it is implied there’s something wrong about Michelle Obama embracing and expanding those to any extent.  And definitely, there’s something weird about people responding to her because she does those things, and does them well.  We are told in the article that people are more interested in how she raises her children than in her speeches – well, first of all, that’s almost certainly true of Americans as well, otherwise “Inside the White House” wouldn’t be in so many magazines.  Americans want to know what the front-face of American motherhood and domestic life actually does – that’s why all the photo spreads. 

Some interest is obviously gossipy trivialities or celebrity worship, but some of it isn’t.  Some of it is genuinely reasonable – after all, fair or no, being first lady means taking on a public domestic role – people cared that Eleanor Roosevelt stopped serving coffee in the White House during rationing and that they ate what everyone else ate, people cared that the Clintons seemed to be mostly good parents, if not always good people.  And they don’t care just for bad reasons – they care because they know that domestic life didn’t disappear just because we stopped talking about it, or implying that it took intelligence, skill and strength to manage. 

The truth is that someone does have to parent Sasha and Malia Obama, and it won’t be their Dad, for the most part – he’s got a big job.  The truth is that someone has to be the face of domestic life in America – because that life is real, and it is increasingly flooding into our reality.  As fewer people can afford even fast food and bad daycare, as more people are unemployed, as more and more people need to tend their own needs and expand their self-sufficiency, domestic life is reminding us that despite our lack of respect or even interest, it is a primary human activity, one we cannot negate simply by declining to value it or the people who do the work.

Those Russian women being interviewed have educations too.  They have jobs or even careers too.  They also have gardens and kitchens and children – and the very fact that they aren’t interested in Obama’s legal career or her speeches on self-esteem suggests something – in a society where domestic life literally saved lives – where the gardens kept people fed during the SU’s collapse, domestic life is more interesting than jobs. Jobs go away sometimes. Education is great, but you can think about poetry while you cook or dig. 

It is us who haven’t come to terms with reality – tomatoes can change the world.  It does matter how you parent children, and doing so is not trivial work.  Pretending that domestic labor doesn’t exist doesn’t make you happy or your life easier.  And that maybe, just maybe, there are better choices for both women and men than damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

 Sharon