Modern
culture is an advocate of speed. From urban planning and transport
systems, to the food industry and beyond, ‘fast living’ cuts deep and
affects almost every aspect of life.
In
terms of distances, things today are more spread out yet are more
interconnected than in the past. This interconnectedness has had the
effect of shrinking even the largest of distances and is ably assisted
by digital communications technology and rapid transit systems. Airports
and metro transport links are being extended or built, huge concrete
flyovers cut through neighbourhoods and separate communities from one
another and employment is being centralised in out of town business
parks or city centre office blocks. Speed of communications and
transport narrows the distances.
Encouraging
further urban sprawl is of course highly profitable for the real
estate, construction, automobile and various other industries (1). It is
not that we need this type of urban planning and development, but
powerful economic interests and their influence in/over governments
dictate it’s the type we get.
Speed
and high-energy living have become an essential fact of life. In the
process, our communities have become disjointed and dispersed. We have
sacrificed intimacy, friendship and neighbourliness for a more
impersonal way of accelerated living. And the process continues as rural
communities are uprooted and hundreds of millions are forced into
cities of ever-increasing sizes to indulge in the fast life.
In
the virtual world, friends possibly half the world away are made and
‘defriended’ at the click of an icon. Likes and dislikes are but passing
fads. Meaningful social activism has been trivialised and reduced to
the almost meaningless clicking of an online petition. It’s more
convenient and quicker than taking to the street. After the near
destruction of working class movements in many countries, this is what
‘protest’ has too often become.
In
the ‘real’ world, where ‘clicking’ just doesn’t cut it, how to
physically move from A to B as quickly as possible dominates the modern
mindset – how to get to work, the airport, to your kids’ schools, the
hospital or the shopping mall, which are increasingly further away from
home. Many now appear to spend half their lives in transit in order to
do what was once achievable by foot or by bicycle.
It’s
all become a case of how to eat fast, live fast, consume fast, text
message fast, Facebook fast and purchase fast. Speed is of the essence.
And it seems that the faster we live, the greater our appetites have
become. The mantra seems to be faster, quicker, better, more. In a
quick-paced, use-and-throw world, speed is addictive.
But
there is a heavy price to pay. We are using up the world’s resources at
an ever greater pace: the materials to make the cell phone or flat
screen TVs; the water to irrigate the massive amounts of grain and land
required to feed the animals that end up on the dinner plate as the
world increasingly turns towards diets that are more meat based; the oil
that fuels the transport to get from here to there, to ship the food
over huge distances, to fuel the type of petrochemical agriculture we
have come to rely on, or the minerals which form a constituent part of
the endless stream of consumer products on the shelves. Greed and the
grab for resources not only fuels conflict, structural violence imposed
on nations via Wall Street backed economic policies and death and war,
but high energy, accelerated living takes a heavy toll on the
environment and, if we are honest, on ourselves, in terms of our health
and our relationships.
If the
type of high energy living outlined above continues, we are heading for a
crunching slowdown much sooner than we think. It will be catastrophic
as current conflicts intensify and new ones emerge over diminishing
resources, whether water, oil, minerals, fertile land or food.
The term ‘slow living’ was
popularized when Carlo Petrini protested against the opening of
a McDonald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna inRome in 1986. This
reaction against fast food sparked the creation of the Slow
Food movement. Over time, this developed into other areas, such
as Cittaslow (Slow Cities), Slow Living, Slow Travel, and Slow Design.
What was Carlo Petrini
actually originally arguing against? Fast food is food that is grown
quickly, eaten quickly and prepared quickly. It is convenience food of
dubious nutritional quality that fits in with the belief that the ‘good
life’ equates with fast living. It is food that tends to rely on
petrochemical pesticides, fertilizers and transport across huge
distances.
Food that is chemically processed and which relies on hormones,
steroids and other similar inputs in order to ‘speed things up’ in terms
of crop or animal growth and delivery to plates that may be half a
world away from where it is produced by agricultural workers who
themselves are undernourished or malnourished (2). It is nature speeded
up, but also nature that has been contaminated and distorted and pressed
into the service of big oil and agribusiness interests.
On the other hand, slow
food tends to imply food that is grown or produced locally and with
minimal bio-chemical inputs. It tends to rest on the sourcing of local
foods and centuries’ old traditions and ideally sold by neighbourhood
farms and stores, not by giant monopolistic retailers that are integral
to the fast food industry. Slow food also implies more nourishing and
healthy food and agriculture that places less strain on water resources
and soil to produce better yields (3) and which does not pollute either
body or environment as a result of chemical residues (4) or uproot
communities or destroy biodiversity (5).
Slow food is associated
with lower energy inputs. It is less reliant on oil-based
factory-processed fertilizers/pesticides and oil-based transportation
across lengthy distances, not least because it is organically produced
and locally sourced. In their ultimate forms, slow food and living slow
can arguably best be achieved via decentralization and through
communities that are more self-sustaining in terms of food
production/consumption as well as in terms of other activities,
including localized energy production via renewables or industrial
outputs such as garment making or eco-friendly house building. In this
respect, slow living extends to remaking the communities and relearning
the crafts and artisan skills we have often lost or had stolen from us.
Ultimately, urban planning and the ‘local’ are key to living slow. No
need for the automobile if work, school or healthcare facilities are
close by. Less need for ugly flyovers or six lane highways that rip up
communities in their path. Getting from A to B would not require a race
against the clock on the highway that cuts through a series of
localities that are never to be visited, never to be regarded as
anything but an inconvenience to be passed through en route to big-mac
nirvana, multiplex overload or shopping mall hedonism.
Instead, how about a leisurely, even enjoyable walk or cycle ride
through an environment free from traffic pollution or noise, where the
pedestrian is not regarded as an obstacle to be honked at with horn,
where the cyclist is not a damned inconvenience to be driven off the
road or where ‘neighbourhood’ has been stripped of its intimacy, of its
local ‘mom and pop’ stores, of its local theatres?
Having jettisoned the slow
life for a life of fast living, we are now encouraged to seek out the
slow life, not least for example through tourism. The trouble is that
with more and more people seeking out the slow life for two weeks of
respite, destination slow suddenly became a complete mess. Instead of
genteel locals, pristine forests and refreshing air, what you experience
is sprawling hotel complexes, endless buses and taxis clogging up the
place along with thousands of other tourists.
And the locals – they
abandoned the slow life once mass tourism arrived and jumped on the
bandwagon of fastness to rent out their rooms at inflated prices, to
open restaurants serving fast food that caters to fast tourism. The slow
mindset suddenly became abandoned in the quest to make a fast buck from
the tourists, and before you knew it, six lane highways arrived, water
was gobbled up by tourist complexes and urban sprawl sprawled even
further across the once pristine hillsides or beaches.
But that’s what fast living
or, to be precise, the system that creates it does. It corrupts and
destroys most things that get in its way. It recasts everything in its
own image. Even ‘slowness’ has become a bogus, debased commodity sold to
the fast living, fast consuming masses.
What can we do on a
practical level that does not result in the debasement of the slow life?
Is living slow nothing more than the dreamers mandate for taking us all
back a century or two?
For some advocates of slow
living, it is about trying to live better in a fast world, perhaps
making space to enjoy ‘quality time’. For others, however, it comprises a
wide ranging cultural and economic revolution that challenges many of
the notions that underpin current consumption patterns and
‘globalization’.
Loosely defined, slow
living is nothing new. From Buddha to the social philosopher Ivan Illich
in the 1960s and 70s, the philosophy has always been around in
different guises and has been accorded many labels. Whether it is
anti-globalization, environmentalism, post-modernism, the organic
movement, ‘green’ energy, localization or decentralization, these
concepts and the movements that sprang up around them have embraced some
notion of slowness in one form or another.
In India, the Navdanya
organization is wholeheartedly against the destruction of biodiversity
and traditional farming practices and communities and presents a radical
critique of consumerism, petro-chemical farming and Western
agribusiness (6). The views of Vandana Shiva, Navdanya’s founder, are
well documented. Shiva advocates a radical shift of course from the one
the world (and India) is currently on. Navdanya has even opened a Slow
Food Café in Delhi.
On a general level, again
taken loosely, slow living might involve improving the quality of life
by merely slowing down the pace of living. In urban planning, for
example, it may mean pedestrianising urban spaces and restricting
motorized traffic, especially car use. In many European cities cycling
is encouraged by offering the public the free use of bicycles. Visit any
Dutch city to see that cycling is a predominant mode of transport,
which certainly makes a positive contribution to the easy going
ambiance.
In the UK, in part as a
response to traffic congestion and the negative impacts of motorized
transport on communities, a movement emerged in the early nineties to
‘reclaim the streets’, to hand them back to local residents who felt a
need to claim ownership of their communities and public spaces, which
had essentially been hijacked by commuters or large corporations.
Living slow may entail
slowing down in order to develop some kind of spiritual connection with
one’s inner self. It might also involve opting for more environmentally
friendly products while shopping, living in more eco-sensitive housing,
developing small cottage industries or just generally leading a
‘greener’ lifestyle as a consumer.
But it’s no good adopting a
piecemeal, watered-down approach. The root of the problem needs to be
addressed. The slow life, whether slow food or slow urban environments,
is impossible if we fail to realize that decisions
about urban planning, economic activity, investment, products and
services, etc, are made through the capture of governments, regulatory
agencies and courts by corporations adamant on expanding and
perpetuating their dominance (8,9).
In
order to achieve any semblance of genuine, lasting change towards a
better, slower world, we must eradicate the material conditions that
produce and perpetuate class-based exploitation and divisions on an
increasingly global level. These conditions stem from patterns of
capital ownership and the consequent flow of wealth from bottom to top
that occurs by various means of ‘accumulation by dispossession’
(corruption, tax evasion/avoidance, bail outs, ‘austerity’, ‘free
trade’ agreements, corporate taxpayer subsidies, capital market
liberalization, etc).
What
we need is proper democracy achieved through, for example, common
ownership of banks and key industries and a commitment to ‘green’
policies and renewable energy. This entails challenging the oligarchs
and their corporations that have colonized almost every aspect of modern
living, from healthcare, urban planning, food and agriculture to
education and development, in order to effect change that is beneficial
to their interests and thereby enslaving us all in the process.
Take action and be informed:
Notes
Posts
burglaries
and thefts were rising in your neighborhood, what would you do? If bullies
and thugs took over your town, what would you do? If a man confronted
you on the street and demanded your money, what would you do? In most
cases you would act swiftly to get out of the way, save your child, take
action to stop the neighborhood crime, confront the bully and resist the
robber from stealing your money ..... or would you?
