Ed. note: this is a stunning development. I dare say it represents the beginning of a changing tide from timidity regarding the Green Party to explicit investment of hope in its development. Korten’s courage here is noteworthy, moving from theoretical ideas of a sustainable and just economy to the practical work of designing its political roadmap and beginning road construction.

2010 Pacific Northwest Regional Green Gathering

David Korten, November 13, 2010

Read the original article.

I was delighted to be invited to address this gathering of Pacific Northwest Regional Green Party leaders. I had not realized at the time that would be an exclusive gathering of the party elders. We do have the benefit of bringing a depth of experience and connections to the significant work at hand.

I’ll be laying out my take on what is at stake at this point in America’s history and how I believe we need to rethink and reposition the Green Party to function as the political arm of a much larger social movement devoted to advancing the universal human values that frame the Green Party’s agenda. It requires, among other things, coming up with a much more concise statement of what we are about-our elevator speech.

{ Installment 3 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Speed-stunned imagination

Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.