Book Review: The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner - Page 2

Each story highlights how a community has made a change. Change is easiest when it is local and big change is just a collection of small choices, Turner seems to be reminding us. Time and time again, we see high tech and low tech adjustments to the unreasonable demands we have been placing on the earth. Turner highlights different options — and by this I mean not just technology but also methodology — that reduce the impact of modern life on the planet.

Quickly, it becomes clear that the problem is not a lack of technology. We can build many of the tools we need. But, as any ad man would tell you, we need someone to tell us what those tools are; we rely on someone telling us what to buy. Traditionally, environmental groups have warned us of the dire consequences of our actions (a cliched tactic that I have already used in this very review). Yet this creates a marketing problem. We prefer to buy into the good, after all. You sell mouthwash by telling people that it will make them better kissers, not by warning them of social ostracism if they don't. Likewise, we hate to give things up, which is perhaps why the Blue Box recycling initiatives have been so succesful. It's also why Turner's approach — and the solutions he found — is so important: These technologies allow us to gain something, rather than depriving us of something. They offer continued comfort, rather than demanding we give up our treasured "lifestyles" entirely.

Ultimately, though, Turner recognizes that things will have to change. That much can be seen from Calgary. For instance, Alberta's behemoth efforts to turn "tar sands" into the kind of fuel that runs modern society, says Turner, "might be a symptom of a particularly advanced strain of mass insanity." It is the kind of madness that promises big yards, big cars, big houses. More of everything. A post-War kind of madness, inflated with each successive generation. Or, as Turner puts it: "The Good Life: Democratized, trademarked, mass-produced, shipped worldwide." Those are not the words of someone who believes the way it is is any kind of way to continue.

It all comes down to this: sustainability. Or, as Turner puts it:

Living deliberately: this, in the end, is the common ideological thread linking an ecovillage in rural Scotland and a resort development in Florida vacationland. And tying those places to Danish Renewable Energy Islands, New Mexican survivalist communities, solar-powered townhouses in southern Germany and hydro-powered villages in the hills of northwestern Thailand. To live deliberately: this is the life's blood of these communities, of any sustainable community.... If these communities seem more vital than a great many others, if they have lessons to teach about how the rest of us could bring such vitality to our own communities, they begin, all of them, with the simple art of living deliberately. It is, in a sense, the opposite of a fantastical, far-off Utopia: it starts with here and now, with whichever here and now you happen to find yourself in.

And so, in his year of living on the (sustainably-powered) brighter side, Turner discovered solutions on large and small scales, tailored to the needs of local people, geography and desire. It is good to know that it can be done, to know that hope, it turns out, has a pragmatic side. Still, there is in the end, as much frustration as there is hope: If it can be done, if places like Thailand and Denmark and Florida can do it, why aren't we? I picture Turner as an environmental evangelical, preaching not of sin and eternal fires, but of virtue and paradise.

Stop. Think of your life in 1992. How you found information, who you shared it with, how long it took to do so. Think of hunting for a pay phone, leaving word with the restaurant's hostess to let your friends know you were running late, hoping they got the message. Think of writing a letter, putting it in an envelope, mailing it and waiting for a reply. Think of the library, of card catalogues, of cranking your way through a dozen spools of microfilm looking for that quote, that bit of trivia, that slice of nostalgia. Think of all the stuff — obscure hobbies, half-formed thoughts, weird bits of pop-culture esoterica — that simply vanished, never to be heard from again. Think of all that went into transforming that world into this one.

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Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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