{ The 10th and final installment of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology

The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.

A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.

{ Installment 9 in Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series. }

Dominant versus subsidiary motors

People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person’s native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man’s natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.

{ Installment 8 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Degrees of self-powered mobility

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel-probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions-finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

The video says it all.

From Boston.com: “Let me just also say, there’s a conversation we’re going to have to have …that I’ve been trying to have since the first few weeks I’ve been in this job, and it has to do with communication,” the governor said. “I can’t compete if I don’t know something’s at risk.”

“Massachusetts has been kind to Fidelity. I know that’s a two-way street, but if we’re going to build on what we have here, then they need to tell me what they need and I need to be able at least to have an opportunity to respond,” he said.

The governor added: “I feel disappointed and frustrated.”

Governor Patrick,

You are not dating Fidelity, and this is not a question of communication. This is about government officials lying prostrate on the floor before all-powerful corporations. This is about giving away our tax dollars to unscrupulous, very profitable, greedy bastards, when we ABSOLUTELY cannot afford it.

When you ran for re-election, you failed to make an issue about these indefensible giveaways, even while your Green-Rainbow opponent raised the issue. You praised yourself for weak claw-back provisions in future tax giveaways, rather than challenging the idea of giving away tax dollars to corporations trying to hold us hostage to their agendas.