There is a reason why we need to make conservation a legislative matter and why free market solutions don’t work to lower waste and overuse. That reason has to do with  how conservation and consumption work. The two are quantitatively different, even though qualitatively they are similar. Conservation and consumption behave in inverse ways. Not to mention all the incentives of our economic system directed toward more consumption.

Here is my description of this issue, and I think it makes sense. The range of consumption per capita is quite large in this country. I would say that range may be as large as a factor of 50, and not in the fractions as it might seem. Lets take my new neighborhood for example. My family consists of 2.25 people and we use about 5 units of water which is about what a single person uses, we drive a Prius, and a small pickup and don’t put many miles or our vehicles. We compost and recycle most of our household waste.  Nearly every electronics product we have is energy star rated, and we don’t use anything other than our computers (mostly laptops) for any length of time on most days… OK you get the picture, we are near bottom of energy/resource usage.

Our neighbors are on the other extreme for the same demographics of course (this means we are only looking at middle class home owners, not the very rich, or the poor.) They are 3.75 people I would say (parents, adult child and teenager.) They have 3 vehicles, two of which are SUV’s, a house more than double the size of ours, a garbage can more than double ours, AC unit  (which runs in the winter sometimes!), massive entertainment system in their garage that gets used heavily every day, etc.

So if you start to add things up, you start to see that they use double and triple what we do instead of the 3.75/2.25 ratio that you might expect. What I am saying, is that family culture and individual lifestyle, because of the consumerist freedom we share, can allow people of similar means to have wildly different impact on our greater society and environment through resource usage.

If we need people to use less in order to save ourselves, common sense and market incentives won’t get people to change. We must be faced by unwavering certainty of an outcome, whether it be fines and jail time for breaking the law, or  an unwavering core value that is backed by drastic consequence (i.e belief in the wrath of God, or understanding of climate science, or a vindictive relative, etc.). Humans have to be forced to change, like any other animal on the planet.

“Life on the edge;” “the cutting edge;” we’ve all heard of the “edge,” and it seems like an attractive place, but the change that this edge-ness represents isn’t just the novelty our bored heads crave. There is a lot at stake when you travel to the edge and back, or work on the bleeding edge. Get too close, and we cut our selves, or … fly off the cliff.

As individuals we seem to seek barriers to break, and triumphs to win. We want to struggle with the unknown, or the seemingly unknown, to conquer some primordial fear. Somehow our quests prove to ourselves that we are more than our impulses and instincts, but alas that drive to face down fear is just that, isn’t it? An impulse.

I’ve always found it odd that the things people fear are the simply overcome things in life; spiders, snakes, heights, enclosures, to name a few. With even a somewhat evolved mind, none of those things pose any threat to our individual safety or or collective well being, yet the phobias mingle on  in generation after generation of people.

Our instincts control us in so many ways, and we are always in a battle with our own minds to feel evolved and carry on reasoned thinking. At any moment we can fall victim to ourselves and become someone else, and maybe someone less, for a moment or for a hundred moments. When it happens, its hard to know what we’ll do next. That scares us.  Maybe we race through a changing street light, or yell at a waitress, or often much worse. We all have that in us, and those moments pepper our lives from the moment we enter the world to the moment we leave it.

We are a hoard of individuals with multiple personalities, and we are all on the edge. No one knows when one of us will be cut or will fall off the other side, so it keeps us on that edge. There’s excitement in it, like a game of Russian roulette, but our collective minds grow weary of the stress. Life on the edge robs us of any sense of solid ground.

The games we play mascaraed as an evolved existence when we live out there… on the edge.

Where do we go when we’ve only learned to walk in a straight line, often pushed to do so by the mob around us, and in our path lies a mortal challenge?

If you’ve been on this planet and listening to it,  or feeling the weather change year to year, or simply watching the news, you probably know that humanity is struggling to grow up. We seem to be trying to figure out to how to come up with some long term life plans. This struggle is something that I have thought about since I was old enough to understand how destructive we humans can be. It is a struggle I have internalized and have tried to sort out in my own life. I have long sought to figure out how to live free of the shortcomings of modern self abusive,  resource intensive, and un-sustainable life style.

My art has started to directly address my thoughts and ideas about where we are failing, but I think the theme has been subtly embedded in my work since I started painting and drawing in my childhood. In fact I would say that social and environment responsibility has been the core motivator of all my art work and writing through out my life.

This isn’t a new realization or admission my any means, but as the world spirals faster and faster towards an environmental and social meltdown, I have become more urgent in my working toward solution. I am struggling more with finding sustainability and change toward a healthy and responsible life.

My birthday last week both impressed on me that time wears on with us humans still having far to go to grow up, and that huge strides can be made in the course of life if honorable and responsible living become the core of all life decisions, and values. For my birthday I received a great book that  seems to hit this nail on the head.

The book Natural Living: The 21st Century Guide to a Self-Sufficient Lifestyle is a trove of knowledge about everything from gardening to keeping animals, cooking, canning, knitting and everything in between. The book mostly just touches on the key points of all these topics, but its enough to keep someone like me going in my quest. It will definitely augment my ongoing projects as they become bigger and better.

In all this I have learned that living a sustainable life is like any other skill or endeavor. It requires practice, learning from others, a support network,  failures and perseverance. Lying deep in all these struggles, too, lie issues of freedom. To change, we need freedom over what we do and how we consume, yet we live in a time and place where we give up those freedoms too easily in the face of comfort and excess, and maybe disillusion.

Since I have moved into a mortgaged house, where I have more space and ability to make changes, I have realized that like so many science fiction tales stress, we live within ever changing and ever encompassing systems of control. What I can do in “my” house is actually very limited on many fronts as you may know or guess, but it does offer another step in my explorations and struggles.

Breaking free of some of those controls is a challenge, but the systems do begin to unravel as you work back toward a simple life with the seasons and soil as your guides. It is a paradox isn’t it, though. To regain a freer life we must submit more to the aspects of our lives that we actually have no control over.

This post represents a new start for this chronicle. It is also a long time coming that I reflect on the economic turmoil we are experiencing. If you read artedetimo v.1, you know that I have lamented the problems that have founded the economic mess for a while, but since all the stuff has hit the fan, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It has been one thing to see the gathering storm, but it is another to see where we’re going to come out.

One thing for sure is that the old captains; the economists, investors, bankers and businessmen, that had no vision and have no vision of where we could be going, need to be removed from power. A strong point I have tried to articulate in the past has been that in the last 20 to 30 years we have increasingly traded long term value for short term gain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all times, but when that gain is used to let s drive around big cars, buy house we can’t afford, and push for high dividends to pad our retirement funds, it has lead to where we are. This mess has been a long time coming.

Its odd now when I flip through the news shows I hear a lot of talk about all sorts of 20-30 year trends; maybe a little too late in my head. Its nice to hear now, but problem was that we should have been picking up on these trends 5-10 years ago when anyone who was looking could see them coming. That’s not how things work is it.

The country needs vision. Obama is trying to provide that vision, but he’s butting up against a whole class of people who won’t be able to let go of the way things are. It’s only when our financial society is pushed aside that we will see a new way forward. I can’t blame anyone though; you live much of the last 2 or 3 decades like you are running the show, you start to think that’s how things are. Society in the US since WWII has been more of a creative man’s cave, despite the man in the gray suit and the middle manager society’s logistical dominance. The problem solvers and innovators have always been the source of our greatness no matter how many layers of corruption, or bureaucracy or finacialism covered them up.

Go back to Lee IA coca. Was he a suit? The auto industry has been in this situation before, but last time there was a visionary left in teh industry to pull it out… I don’t see one today do you?

Steve Jobs? Apple despite its tiny share of the computing world has been the point of the spear head since its foundation. You ask the business world about them and they laugh, but if you think of computer history, its criss-crossed by the style-is-equal-to-practicality visions of Apple. Is this going down that pc v. Apple road? I don’t think so. My point is only that the PC’s type is good for business makers, the Apple type is good for making businesses.

I think this idea of imagining what society, culture and our relationship to nature COULD be, is at the core of why I write this blog. So many of the public figures out there leading our institutions have so little imagination its frightening. I’m not sure if it has been beaten out of them by life or what, but it is something that plagues us in all parts of life. We, both our leaders an us, get caught up in the limitations of the way things are, and can’t see past the trees.

Alas, this post is only a teaser, or a re-starting point. It is where I put my writing on a path that is line with what my work and passions are about.

I hope to weave this thread of the social forest here. I will be presenting my art work along the way, which follows that theme. I’ll post the work of others who use their imagination to get us somewhere beyond the dead end we live in. Above all, I hope to spark the imagination in all its forms within my readers; you.

Welcome to the new version of the Arte de Timo Chronicle. The chronicle is running on new software, and has a new design as you can see. Going forward I think I am going to stay a LITTLE more focused on providing ideas worth reading on a more selective range of topics. I won’t go away in the shift, but I think I want to show a bit more maturity in how I present my ideas, and rant less. The old content is still on the forum, but I am making it private.

I have been thinking of pulling out some of the old posts and putting them in here for some context and historical background on where I am coming from. What do you think (you can post comments right here now)?

I look forward to moving into the future with my new web chronicle, and hope I can generate some good ideas for you to ponder and back feed me on.