The water cooler buzz | Nov 7th at 7:08pm
Some of the best conversations happen over the break table. Juggling coffee, cookies, pamphlets, and bags, we gather to dissect what we just heard. I had a fast-paced conversation with a young landscape architect who has studied design after peak oil for four years. His concern about this conference is our seeming inability to get really honest about the hard truths. Elizabeth Kolbert opened the day outlining the stark realities about the rate of climate change, and several earlier posts on this site speak more to that. This designer felt that the subsequent sessions have not addressed those needs. He worries that we’re being too hopeful on some level. “Most people are talking about how to be a bit more sustainable,” he said, but we are not really contending with these harder truths. And if this group can’t have a come to Jesus moment, who can?
This is a challenging proposition. The human mind doesn’t like to wrap itself around dire predictions. We need some level of hope and a belief that we can remedy this individually and collectively. So how do we sound the alarm effectively? How do we learn to present the staggering truths to move toward the kind of real change that can offset these terrifying numbers?
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture and design for publications like The New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis. In addition to her own blog, Urban Palimpsest, Dickinson is a regular contributor to the Metropolis blog, P/O/V.
Fred Scharmen in Baltimore on Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 7:59pm
Not sure if a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment is really what people need. It seems like every generation thinks they’re faced with some dire choice between utopia or oblivion, when the truth turns out to be somewhere in between (of course). The current energy/sustainable/green generation is hardly immune (JH Kunstler, I’m looking in your direction).
Sure there are some things we don’t know, and some things will be worse than we think, but other things will turn out to be not so bad. Apocalyptic green scenarios sometimes bring out the worst in absolutist thinking and self righteousness (again, Kunstler).
James Glave on Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 8:15pm
Alas, staggering truths don’t sell. In periods of great upheaval such as these, people have enough bad news already, and hope—even piecemeal hope—commands a premium. It’s highly marketable stuff. At least in traditional advertiser-supported media, there’s no real way to get across the stakes, the prospect of turning off readers and accounts is simply too terrifying. I think social media and peer networks have a strong role to play here, they have potential to unleash runaway social change before we end up stuck with the other kind of not-so-good runaway change…
KLaus Philipsen on Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 10:41pm
Ever since menkind recorded thoughts there has been the fear of impending doom. Maybe the US is at the end of being an imperial power as were empires before us. There is always another day as Rome, the UK and China show, what we should avoid is fear. Creativity can wrestle opportunities from the unknown and even from the mistakes we made so far. Yes, we should not shy away from the hard truth that our current path is set to fail. Our presidential election showed that people see that.