Energy and Equity: Ivan Illich Uses Transportation as an Example

 Energy and Equity by Ivan Illich

NY:  Harper and Row, 1974

06-080327-4

(page10-11)  The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs.  It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command.   For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which power corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits.  Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall call it counterfoil research.  It has three steps,  First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative.  Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found.  Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.

(19)  The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles:  less than five miles per hour.  In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.  What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

(26)  He (the habitual passenger) takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion.  He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportatioin and communication systems.  He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue.  As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client.  He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media.  He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it.  It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure and autonomy.

(32)  Tell me how fast you go and I’ll tell you who you are.

(38-39)  By now, people work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work.  The time a society spends on transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public conveyance.  Japan now [1974] leads the United States in both areas.  Life-time gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation and space from distortion.

NB:  Ivan Illich watches “Traffic” with Jacques Tati

(45)  The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use value (the innate capacity for transit).  Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law:  Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.  Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the non-therapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.

NB:  Elinor Ostrom

(54) Their [planners'] belief in the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use.

(60)  Man on a bicycle can go three of four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process.  He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calaries.  The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion.  Equipped with this tool, man out strips the efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well.

(75-76)   There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity:  one is the road of liberation from affluence;  the other is the road of liberation from dependence.  Both roads have the same destination:  the social restructuring of space that offers to each person the constantly renewed experience that the centre of the world is where he stands, walks and lives.

NB:  JG Ballard and Ivan Illich