The Growth of Local Power Is a Bright Spot in Seven Bleak Years of Bush
American cities, counties and states have offered a crucial counterweight to the White House on the issues that really matter
The centre cannot hold, and that’s the good news in the United States these days. Quietly, doggedly, cities, regions, counties and states have refused to march to the Bush administration’s drum when it comes to climate change, the environment and the war. Some of the recent changes are so sweeping that they will probably drag the nation along with them - notably efforts by Vermont, Massachusetts and California to set higher vehicle emissions standards and generally treat climate change as an environmental problem that can be addressed by regulation. The Bush administration has notoriously dragged its feet on doing anything about climate change, and it will now be dragged along by the states, themselves prodded forward by citizens.
It wasn’t supposed to work that way. States’ rights was a rallying cry for conservatives for much of the 20th century, first in allowing segregation and racial discrimination across the south and then in allowing environmental destruction around the west. Rightwingers have usually believed in a weak federal government - except when they run it; and that weakness, or rather the strength of the local, has been one of the bright spots during the seven bleak years of life under Bush.
The changes operate on all scales. Across the country, quite a lot of cities and towns have passed measures condemning the Iraq war or calling for the troops to be brought home. A handful of California counties have banned GM agriculture, and others have tried but been defeated by industry money - but may try again. North Dakota farmers created so powerful a pact against the use of Monsanto’s GM wheat that the corporation eventually gave up on commercialising the invention worldwide.
My own city, San Francisco, has made plans to issue identity cards to undocumented immigrants, attempted to legalise same-sex marriage a few years back, and as of November 20 2007 banned plastic grocery bags in supermarkets and pharmacies as a step towards banning them altogether. San Francisco, which is as much a peninsular republic unto itself as an irritation on the left edge of the superpower, has also gone for solar energy in a big way, kerbside compost pick-up as part of a successful programme to radically reduce landfill, and various other green programmes (though affluence itself is environmentally devastating, and we also have lots of big cars and air traffic). We are also trying out a universal healthcare plan.
Since a 2005 national mayors’ conference, more than 500 mayors from around the country have vowed to make their cities comply with or exceed the Kyoto accords, even while the federal government stalls. Any bleak picture you may have of the American hinterland as a vast sprawl of big-box stores, soulless suburbs and mindless consumption isn’t wrong, but is incomplete. Eating locally, starting community gardens in the inner city, supporting and spreading farmer’s markets, growing organically, promoting bicycle use, creating denser, more alternative, transport-friendly housing, increasing solar and wind technology, and building greener are all proliferating parts of the contemporary landscape too. Portions of New Orleans, for example, are being rebuilt to be energy efficient, use alternative energy and generally be green. Detroit is full of community gardens and experiments with local economies. As Los Angeles becomes a more and more Latino city, it develops more neighbourhoods of small businesses and lively pedestrian life.
From abroad, viewers mostly see this country as its federal government, the government that brought on a belligerent foreign policy while refusing to address the crises of climate change. It’s more than fair to say that the federal government could not behave this way without implicit consent from the majority of the governed. And from afar, it’s hard to see how tacit that consent is, or how much dissent is part of the landscape - it’s a big part, especially on climate change.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted about 160 years ago that Americans had a talent for congregating in groups and organisations, so there’s nothing new about the way that existing environmental groups and new grassroots organisations have taken up that issue. But it is exciting. Last year in Vermont the environmental writer Bill McKibben and a few college students started a walk across the state, something that grew into a thousand-person march to demand positive action on climate change. This push went for federal legislation to stipulate a reduction of 80% in climate-change gases by 2020, a far more radical standard than most have yet broached. A weaker federal bill is under consideration, and, pushed by his constituents, the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, continues to work towards far tougher regulations. However, the big changes may be made by an end run around the federales.
Since 2002, California has been battling the federal government for the right to set emissions standards for vehicles within the state. Since more than 10% of the nation’s population lives in California, any such regulation could change the face of the domestic auto industry, and so both car-makers and the White House have tried to defeat the measures. Happily, they have lost.
One step came when Massachusetts sued to get the Environmental Protection Agency to stop saying that it didn’t have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; the state won in the supreme court in the autumn of 2006. Another landmark came in November when a federal circuit court for the west struck down national vehicle mileage standards that increase efficiency by one mile per gallon, which California’s attorney general called “pathetic”. Soon afterwards, the attorney general joined 16 states in demanding that Congress prevent the Bush administration from blocking its 2002 motor vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions law. Change for the better largely comes from the bottom up, and in a decentralised country it doesn’t always have to reach the top to matter. These changes that are afoot across the US suggest that the federal government may become increasingly irrelevant on many issues.
The centre cannot hold, Yeats wrote; his next line is “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Anarchism in the contemporary sense of decentralised direct democracy is on the loose, and that’s the rest of the good news. Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it’s part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the US.
Activist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power; comment@guardian.co.uk
© 2007 The Guardian
And after ’seven lean cows’ comes starvation?
Yesterday I saw the videos of housing protesters being tasered and roughed up by New Orleans police as well as being thrown out of the city council meeting deciding their future. It struck me - there are no poor people on the New Orleans City Council. There are no poor people in any of the american legislative bodies in this so called “representative democracy”. There is no voice for the poor in our “representative democracy” unless they plead their case with the wealthier people who sit on the US councils of government.
No poor people on NOLA’s city council…that’s not the half of it. There are mostly white people on that council, for the first time in 30 years. Why? because people of color were shipped out of the city and prevented from returning…so now the white council has voted unanimously to tear down 4500 housing units where the (poor) people of color were living…the ones who could vote in a truly representative city council, the ones who don’t want their city to become white disneyland.
Make no mistake about it, New Orleans is a test run. There is still martial law there…first US city to be under martial law…but I daresay not the last.
This article comes accross as awfully pollyannish to me.
Sure there is growth of local power - local selfish business associations, local chambers of commerce, local (well-in the suburbs)slum lords, local corporate headquarters that threaten to move if not fed a diet of tax breaks, local billionaire sports team owners who blackmail local governments into building multi-hundred million dollar stadiums at public expense. etc.. etc.. ad nauseum.
In my city, a rabidly greedy group (three or four) local, rich, restaurant owners are holding a hundred-thousand daily users of public transit, and the will of our elected county board hostage, through the use of (no doubt local) corporate lawyers. All over a poured drink tax needed to stop the loss of public transit service, and improve county maintained roads and bridges.
And I remind everryone of the vibrant grassroots localism that was exhibited in places like Little Rock high School a few decades ago. They also opposed big bad government - like Atty. General Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Dept.
those at the top,are destructive criminals….the only hope for any future…is to work,from the bottom up.
I agree, seraphicmom. Our central government is busy handing over the public treasury and public lands to the already rich.
Our only hope of survival is to build local communities and local means of production.
Slouching towards Bethlehem
W.B Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Why does Solnit pervert the poem? Mere anarchy is not a good thing in Yeats. And the rough beast is rougher than she acknowledges. (She doesn’t even mention the second stanza. She just uses what she want in a rather shallow, perverse, and opportunistic way. Makes me suspicious of her thinking in general.)
Decentralize. Direct Democracy NOW! http://nationalinitiative.us/
Are people at the bottom everywhere desirous of the right kind of change?
The Morrocans, the Taliban and the Texas Evangilical populace?
When does the rule of the sane overcome the madness of the populace?
Can we find the happy fulcrum between mobocracy and dictatorship?
San Francisco, you seem so progressive. So when are you going to reject your economic enrichment by the nearby military-industrial complex?
California, you seem like a pioneer in regard to vehicle emissions standards. So why do you continue to build freeways knowing that it will only increase gasoline consumption?
SF is on the right track. The next thing they need to do is vote Pelosi OUT! She is the only road block in the way of impeachment. (Go here if your are interested in getting Nancy off the dime: http://www.petitiononline.com/everyman/petition.html)
Besides, the Governator is sueing the EPA for blocking CA’s emmision standards. There may be a lot of things wrong with CA, but I have to say that I like the fact that they are at least trying to fight the federal government.
You too can fight for States rights. Do you know where your State rep’s are? Get to know them. It’s a much smaller pond and they tend to listen more than your congress critters do. And get to know your neighbors while you’re at it. You’d be surprized what you can do together.
The only way to save the top is to rebuild the base. Elect new people at all levels of government. Everybody in government needs to be fired and new people voted in. The new people you vote in doesn’t have to be wealthy to be considered worthy either.
The CO2 emission regulation efforts in California have more to do with engine displacement and fuel consumption than global warming. They will not come right out and say it, because fuel economy standards are in federal government territory.
This is highly ironic, considering Governator Arnold owns 7 Hummers that get the worst mileage and spew more pollutants than just about any other SUV. Arnold was instrumental in getting GM to produce the vehicle for public use in the first place. Maybe he is trying to make ammends.
SJC_1 — Arnold is in his own way more (potentially) evil than Geo the inferior shrub_in_thief:
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
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