--E. and I attended a great set of speakers Thursday night at the keynote of the Environmental Law Conference. Vandana Shiva spoke, confirming the fact that she is even more awesome in person than anyone has a right to be. As I told E. later, I just want to follow her around and do her laundry and fetch her non-Coca-Cola water products. And I don't even necessarily agree with her on a broad local v. global scale (kind of the same concern I had with James Scott's Seeing Like a State), but I really respect what she says and how she says it. One of her more provocative arguments was a list of some of the "solutions" to global warming that have been put out there by corporations and governments recently (as she said, "we've now won the paradigm war, we have to win the political war"): in particular, she has a real problem with carbon offset schemes like the ones Al Gore touts. She refers to them as "an outsourcing of the ecological footprint of consumption by the rich" through the seizing of peasant lands in India, among other things, in order to set up more of these carbon trading setups, and so on. They sound like pyramid schemes to me.
--Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also spoke, who could not look more like a Kennedy, and he was wholly different, but I definitely see why you would want him on your side. He speaks about environmentalism with the language of capitalism, efficiency, free market, and God. Not surprisingly, he gives the speech we heard at campuses all over the red states regularly. He also spoke with great passion about our irresponsible media and the 1988 abolition (yay Reagan!) of the 1928 Fairness in Broadcasting Act, which has pretty much allowed our radio and television news to abandon any sense of serving the public good. 80% of investigative reporters lost their jobs after 1988, most foreign news offices of U.S. stations closed down, and Rush Limbaugh opened up shop the same year (previously, the stations would have had to provide a balance of controversial views). He illustrated his argument that our society was now the best-entertained and least-informed in the world with a simple question about Britney's new haircut and Anna Nicole's death. The entire audience passed, or flunked, as the case may be.
--I finally got back to watching the 7-Up series (I finished 28-Up) after a long hiatus. It's so freaking good. I especially noted how most of the poor or working-class kids, by 28, have internalized this language about personal responsibility. Every single one of them described themselves as not getting more schooling because they are "lazy," and then talked about how they "chose" their crappy jobs, they chose it all! It was their choice! I think it has something to do with the fact that most of them now have kids at 28, and once you have kids do you really want to believe that they're going to be trapped by the same structure that funneled you into your low-income, rent-scraping life? The upper-class kids at 28 have gotten extremely good at covering the disdain they showed for the other classes at 7 and 14, and the only person who seemed to be engaging in a lot of self-reflection was the smart kid who ended up a homeless wanderer with mental illness issues. Seriously, that series is just so good. And I've already predicted who'll be divorced by the next one, the interviews were at Studs Terkel levels of letting people hang themselves.
--Finally, we had Erin's nephew staying with us all weekend, who is a leprechaun-sized little delight. He is one of those toddlers who loves snuggling, and smiles all the time, never cries, and says very astute things in his sweet little lisp. One such comment, moments after a visit with a depressed friend of ours. "John. Happy and sad." Kids are just smart.
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