Signing off... for now

Dear friends,
This is the final instalment of the Cracks in the Pavement writings, almost a year to the day the first words hit the page. Thanks to the efforts of my good friend Justin Dunscombe, whose talents in the realms of both computers and beer making are considerable, there is now cracksinthepavement.net, a site hosting all of the book's writings in PDF format. You can also purchase additional hard copies of the book at www.lulu.com if you are an old fashioned reader like myself.

I will end these writings with a bit of a rambling meditation involving the very topic that gave the book its title: roads.

I was in Washington DC for a few days last week, a stopover en route to England where I am enrolled in a course on sustainability at Schumacher College (where I am also in the midst of applying to graduate school). On Thursday, I spent a good part of the morning at the wonderful National Museum of the American Indian. I was moved to tears by the relatively peaceful, egalitarian, and reverent way of life that predominated in the western hemisphere in pre-Columbian times. Granted, there were the Incan, Mayan, and Aztec empires, each with their own flavors of heirarchy and aggression, but this orientation seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. The accounts of early European explorers and conquistadors clearly paint a picture of strikingly generous, peaceful, and seemingly happy peoples. The subsequent and ongoing devastation of the native peoples of the Americas brought forth by the sword, by the microbe, and by the disruption and diminution of culture is one of humanity's great unhealed wounds.

From the Museum of the American Indian, I made my way to an exhibit of Xian terra cotta warriors at the National Geographic Museum. The dozen or so warriors, on loan from the Chinese Government, are part of a veritable underground army of an estimated 7000 near life-size clay figures that were constructed to guard the elaborate tomb of the first Qin Emperor around the 3rd Century BC. Tens of thousands of laborers and artisans worked on the tomb and its guardians over a period of thirty years.

Like the pyramids at Giza or the Great Wall of China, the Xian warriors are a staggeringly impressive feat. My reaction to these flawlessly preserved, millenia-old artifacts, however, was mixed with grief and unease. Here were monuments to the power, cruelty, and imbalance of empire. The Qin Emperor was the first to conquer and 'unify' what is roughly modern China, and the wealth and manpower that he funneled into his terra cotta army and his nearly four hundred palaces was siphoned from newly conquered lands. While the emperors excesses and draconian measures have long been condemned, he has also been lauded for instituting the legal and governmental structures upon which subsequent empires were based. He is also credited for developing a widespread network of efficient roads.

What troubles me about this bifurcated assessment of history - that the Qin Emperor was a tyrannical ruler but an able and admirable builder of an enduring infrastructure - is that it misses the point that the infrastructure enabled and spread the empire's violence and injustices. The roads and laws of the first emperor were, first and foremost, put in place to facilitate control over other people and hasten the consolidation of resources and power. An immediate and enduring consequence of the Qin roads was the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as the sovereignty and self-determination, of countless smaller and more peaceful groups of people - groups not unlike the American Indian cultures I had just been so deeply moved by.

The story of the Qin Emperor makes the tragic nature of empire particularly clear. In the end, both oppressor and oppressed are ravaged. Terrified of being assassinated, the emperor's vast wealth and power could not stave off a crippling paranoia. He slept each night in a different palace, and he distrusted and often executed his closest attendants and advisors. Who, then, benefits from the violence, the domination, the wars, the paranoia? If empire fails even to fulfill emperors, what is the point?

Of course I am oversimplifying a bit here. Without the vast concentrations of wealth and power made possible by an imperial orientation, the world would be without the printing press, modern science, Michaelangelo, world travel, and Handel's Messiah. Yet, I think it is important to keep in mind the enormous tradeoffs and sacrifices in terms of human rights and dignity, as well as cultural and biological diversity, that enabled these fruits of civilization.

The roads of the modern era are freetrade agreements and structural adjustment mandates, comunication technologies and corporate held media. They have enabled many worthwhile connections and innovations, and yet the most significant cumulative effect has been an unprecedented flow of wealth and power to multinational corporations that carry little accountability and few responsibilities to anyone other than shareholders. The power of multinationals and the international institutions that abet them is not news to the developing world where hardly a pause took place between political colonialism and corporate colonialism. Now the developed world is discovered just how markedly power has shifted, as local, state, and national governments of even the wealthiest nations are spiraling into debt and inpotence while corporate profits soar and the remaining firewalls against corporate influence in government crumble.

What nearly all of us want in life - peace, strong community, time with our families, meaningful and enjoyable work - are elusive in this new world order, even though on paper humanity posesses more wealth and more 'stuff' than at any time in history. The mindset of empire - accumulate. defend. repeat. - is nothing new here. What is new is the degree to which it has metastasized and gained popular acceptance. Aware of the dangers and power imbalance inherent in an economy based on imperial structure and ever-inreasing consumption, Gandhi wrote:

'God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.'

There are alternatives to stripping the world bare and brutalizing one another in the process, and it is possible to move away from an economy that is essentially imperial in nature. It is possible to shake our reliance on fossil fuels and to breathe life into local, vibrant, resilient, ecologically sustainable, and socially just economies. It is a possibility that is not without its demands - our energy, vision, passion, and courage, to name but a few. It need not be seen as a path of sacrifice, renunciation, and deprivation, for the rewards are immediate and nested within the effort itself.

The writings of the past year have all stemmed in one way or another from a dawning realization that we are living during an extraordinary era, one in which humankind has the potential to either plunge headlong into despair and degradation in competition over dwindling resources or to move decisively in the direction of a worldview and behavior that acknowledges and celebrates that we are 'merely' members of an awe-inspiring ecology, not lonely, alienated, and bumbling masters of the planet. As Wendell Berry writes, we are 'now required to confront consciously and capably, really for the first time in human history, a question that is almost overwhelming in its magnitude and urgency but also utterly fascinating, fully worthy of a lifetime's effort and study: can we change the ways we live and work so as to establish a preserving harmony between the made and the given worlds?'

Thank you all for your support over the past year and for joining me in my questions and musings. I am beyond fortunate to enjoy the diverse community that I have been blessed to inhabit. Take care and be well. Signing off for now -

Chad