An Open Letter to the City Repair Project, from your not-so-friendly, collapse-wary, hard-up Urban Scout.
Dear The City Repair Project,
You don’t really know me, but I know you. I have to say, it took me a while to get up the nerve to write this letter. But after sitting for several months now and seeing your ugly cob structures sit empty of people, and watching my savings go faster than a cup of Stumptown Coffee, I finally feel filled up with an insane jealous rage as to why the fuck you get so much funding for your bullshit cob projects and I can’t seem to scrape up a single penny.
Our introduction came in the summer of 2006 when a local foundation hired me to produce a video short about your annual Village Building Convergence (VBC):
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0df5FyrZ2M" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0df5FyrZ2M
While shooting and editing the video I became wary of your organization. I rarely if ever see someone using the cob structures you build around my town. You claim they strengthen a neighborhood, but if no one uses them after they build them, than all you do involves moving sand and clay and grasses from the wilderness and dumping it in the city. You call this practice “natural building.” You call this “sustainable development.” After hearing these terms and seeing the wasteful, destructive process of building pointless cob structures, it really shocked me that so many people who consider themselves environmental activists have no clue what sustainability truly means.
After seeing just how many people believe in the lie of “repairing the city” it became clear to me that something had to change. I needed to find a way to smack down these false hopes. I needed someone who could do it in a few hours, someone who would attract a lot of people, someone who would relentlessly bash the sustainability movement in a light-hearted yet fierce way. I needed Derrick Jensen.
I decided I would bring Derrick Jensen to Portland to shoot an interview called The Secret of Sustainability, where I interview him specifically on the real meaning of sustainability, and have him outline very simply for all you cob-for-brains hippies, how and why civilization will never, ever have a sustainable foundation. I decided to make his visit two-fold, and hold an evening talk where I knew all the angry greenies would have their little civilized hearts broken. I needed a venue to host such a talk, and who would have guessed it but I even asked you, the City Repair Project, to “partner” with my organization, Mythmedia, to let us use your meeting space. This way I could kill two birds with one stone; get a venue and also have Derrick Jensen’s talk advertised to all of your dedicated The City Repair Project patrons. Easy money.
During our meeting, I invited another, cooler environmental organization to partner for the event. I came up with the idea that our three organizations should meet regularly, and even work together to create a “200 year plan beyond civilization, for Portland.” The Derrick Jensen event partnership would work as our first step on the path together. You even decided to make that the theme of the next VBC. Though we toyed with the title a bit and I believe our third party associate fine-tuned it with, “7 Generations Beyond Civilization; the 200 year story for Portland.”
But as fate would have it, the fucking Fire Marshall (I’ve had it up to HERE with that fucking Fire Marshall) would not get back to you about the capacity of your building. “The Fire Marshall said we could have a lot, but we don’t have a contract yet…” Well shit… And then what happened? The Fire Marshall said you could only have 2 events a month. And what? What? Oh you already have two events before the Derrick one, so… Sorry? Do you mean to say you want to turn down a Derrick Jensen talk so that you can hold your fucking Burning Man Retrospective?!? …I shit you not people.
Ah, the breaking of the fellowship. I didn’t know that just because we couldn’t use your venue, that our 200 year plan for Portland would not happen. I even tried to get one of your people to table at the actual talk, but no one ever got back to me. I had less than 30 days until the event and needed to send out press releases and put up posters, but now I had no venue. Luckily Disjecta bailed me out (thank you soooo much!) and we had an awesome event there! We packed the house with people, Derrick talked late into the night. Everyone had a grand ol’ time.
But where did you go, the City Repair Project? I did see some of you at the talk, but not the droves I had heard about. I didn’t hear from you for a while. In fact, I heard that you ended up changing the theme of the VBC, but only slightly to; “7 Generations Beyond; A 200 Year Story of Portland.” What the fuck happened to the Civilization part? Oh, right; City repair project. Apparently not only did you NOT go to the Derrick Jensen talk, you also somehow missed the interview I did with him. Please, watch it right now.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8199834239551312732" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8199834239551312732&q=
derrick+jensen&total=37&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
Okay, now do you get it? You cannot “repair” a city. You can no more repair a city than you can repair slavery. Cities require importation of resources. They require stealing from the country; they require war. They form themselves through unsustainable food growing practices. I know you know this. You have to know this. We all know that the foundation of people/place relationships come from how you get your food, not the material you use to rest your ass. I mean, do you really think we need more cob structures or any more structures made of anything? How about instead we stop building altogether and start taking all this unnecessary shit down. Do you know how many homes in Portland hold only a single person? A lot. You want to build community? How about getting more people to live together and stop taking up so much space! Why don’t you get with the program and change your name to the City Dismantle Project… or better yet, the Forest/Habitat Repair Project.
Of course, if you ever had the balls to change your name and do something other than a 10-day hippie mud fest that doesn’t even come close to shaming the original Woodstock, you’d probably lose all the big, fat foundation funding and end up like me; begging for pennies on the street corner. Though I do believe that if a Forest Repair Project had the number of people your organization draws, money would mean nothing, as we would soon turn this shit hole Port-Town back into an awesome community sustaining old growth forest as it once held…
Instead you continue to sell your false hopes of the impossible “city repair” to willing buyers, rather than do the real ground work (though I do commend you for your Village Planting Convergence and your depave.org project). In the face of global and local catastrophe, I urge you and all of your funders to reconsider the true meaning of sustainability and see that a real “investment” in the future looks like building diverse habitat, not building more city. Now when the shit hits the fan, you can’t say that I didn’t warn you!
In Humor,
Urban Scout
p.s. If I ever, for any reason, have to enter one of your events on other business as I did this last year, I swear to god if I have to hug someone to get in the fucking door, I will punch them in the face instead.
Powerful write-up Scout!
Always good to view time and time again how Derrick Jensen imparts with you the true meaning of ‘Sustainability’.
Cheers for you!
Christine
While I’m a big fan of Derrick’s, I gotta disagree with his definition of a city. He’s just chosen an arbitrary boundary to the system in order to make it appear maximally unsustainable. You can do the same thing with any system. For instance, if you draw the boundaries around my physical body then I am an unsustainable entity, as I require the importation of resources in order to survive. Or picture a mid-sized family living on enough land sustainably cultivated that they are living off only the flora and fauna present on that land and the flora and fauna continue to flourish. If you draw the boundaries of the system around just the house, the house appears to be unsustainable since it requires the importation of goods from the surrounding land in order to survive.
In the case of cities, one just needs to draw the boundaries differently and some more options present themselves. What if the boundaries were drawn around Portland and enough of the surrounding countryside that the whole system could be self-supporting? Now, let’s look at why that surrounding countryside *isn’t* being used to sustain the citizens of Portland. And it turns out that the problem isn’t the city at all, it’s a much bigger issue having mostly to do with international trade, government subsidy systems, and suburbs. (And as a side note, if more people would move into the city instead of taking up valuable farmland with their suburban culdesacs, there would be a lot more room to create a sustainable city. So rather than taking down the cities, why don’t we move more people into them?)
I’m just saying is all.
The more people you move into the city, the more resources they will need from outside of it.
I agree with you, DeAnna, that you can draw a boundary anywhere in order to determine the sustainability of what lies within the boundary. But I think Jensen’s definition still holds true that if the thing inside the boundary sucks from its surroundings (even if they fall within the boundary) without giving back, then it’s a city, and it’s unsustainable.
Certainly, a group of people could gather together and live in an area that they draw resources from and give back to at the same time–even give back more than they take. I call that a village, not a city.
Scout, please give an extra punch to the doorway huggers from me.
There’s no greater sign of a psuedo-community than people forcing themselves on you in fake-friendship in an attempt to stop those nagging doubts that something isn’t quite right with what they’re doing.
I was thinking some more about defining systems, and am thinking that even the Earth itself is unsustainable using Derrick’s definition…the planet requires rather a lot of input from the sun, and various influences from the moon, and probably lots of other stuff that I don’t know enough about to talk about. I’m not sure that the Earth “gives back” anything that keeps the sun going. But I could be wrong, I’m not an astronomer.
I don’t mean moving more people into cities from otherwise sustainable villages. I mean consolidating sprawling cities so that the land currently used for lawns could be used to support the folks living in the cities.
Forced hugs are sick and wrong. It’s on the same continuum as forced sex.
I don’t know about his definition, but I do agree with him that cities cannot have sustainability. Not because they require the importation of resources, but because what makes a city even possible involves agriculture, which really just means; constant deforestation.
Cities (or Civilization) occur when people practice agriculture. Agriculture refers to a method of planting food that requires catastrophe to the land; floods, fire, tilling, etc. It requires this because the kind of food grown involves mostly grass and other plants that grow during the first phase of succession, which means you must deforest a region in order to plant.
Because an Acre of grass can produce more calories than an acre of forest, you can artificially inflate a human population above what the diverse forest would have sustained.
This system fails quite easily as a drought or disease can destroy an agricultural peoples only food source. In response, agricultural peoples build food storage units and grow more food than they need. When any population has more food than it needs, its population will expand to meet the food. This creates a positive feedback loop of people planting more food than they need for their ever-growing population. At some level of population density villages turn to towns, towns turn to cities and you now have a civilization. The people merely act as products of deforestation and grass growing. Even if people did permaculture, we would still never come close to matching the food production needed to sustain the great numbers of people. And even if we did, what of the continuous growth happening elsewhere? Where would those people move too? (the products of agriculture I mean)
Though Derricks definition of city may not sit well with you, it doesn’t change the conclusion that cities cannot sustain themselves because the land cannot support the density of people living there, and the culture in which cities become possible can never work sustainably. I can guess you already know all this but I just wanted to write it down for readers that don’t understand how & why cities can never work.
Forced hugs… sick and wrong? Did I ever tell you that I think the world of you?
Can an acre of grass produce more calories than an acre of forest? Can you tell me more about this, or refer me to some stats? I’m curious about this. I just looked at the back of a bag of pine nuts, which says that a tablespoon of the little guys has just over 100 calories in it. I wonder how many calories there are from pine nuts alone in an acre of the Pine Barrens. Not to mention all the other edible things there.
Yes, I agree with Derrick’s broader point (and yours) that cities aren’t sustainable. And I think we all know when something is a city and when it isn’t (it’s a lot like pornography that way, only less fun). It just annoys me when sloppy logic is used to support ideas that I would like to believe in. Derrick’s definition of a city is sloppy.
‘The one who attacks for reasons other than defense of that which they love has proven they are too ignorant to find the right words to ameoliorate the crisis.’ - Chinese Proverb [paraphrased]
But you’re just threatening, so I guess it’s okay! (:
BTW, how would you say “forced hugs are sick and wrong” without using the ‘to be’ verb? Forced hugs have sickness and wrongness? Sickness and wrongness coincide with forced hugs?
Ive always been inspired by earth friendly cob houses or earthship form of home. Indeed, I have designed my own earthship floorplan in hopes that one day my dreams will come true. TO hear that theres no one living in these cob houses they built disapoints me as well. Whats the point in building if they cannot live in it? And to prove that their life will lead a productive one in spite of the city living…