[NYTr] Growth of Local Power One Bright Spot in 7 Bleak Years of Bush Regime

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP

The Guardian - Dec 31, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2232628,00.html#content


Growth of local power 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

by Rebecca Solnit
San Francisco

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.

[Rebecca Solnit is the author of "Hope in the Dark: The Untold History
of People Power."]