Clarion Content

Regular Clarion Content feature contributor Cliff Phillips returns with another insightful piece about pace, society, and environmental change. Once again he examines our shared modern world and ways. His astute observations take what had heretofore been subterranean and casually ignored, and ask us to acknowledge and confront it in our cultural selves. We would say, "Amen, brother, shout it from the mountaintops!" but it would probably be drowned out by the din.


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What is the difference between a broom and a vacuum? Between a scythe and a mower? Between a horse and a car? Between a rake and a leaf blower? The newer tools save labor, of course, but it’s also important to recognize that the older tools belong to a quieter time.

Stop to picture doing things the old way and you will notice a critical break industrial man has made with our past. The bad old days of manual chores seem impossibly difficult to us now, but it has been easy to forget that they were blissfully quiet compared to the sonic environment we endure today. And the ongoing technological proliferation of gadgetry, machines and toys comes at the direct cost of escalating noise levels.

While studies document the damage of noise pollution to hearing, cognitive function, mental health and cardiovascular health (and not just for humans), there is no measure of the collective social damage caused by the stress, anxiety, and even pathological behavior unleashed by the escalating racket. And the roar is steadily increasing, even periodically doubling in many environments (like near growing airports), with no indication of how it might level off. The din is not merely diminishing our quality of life. Worse, civilization is sick with noise.

Noise pollution is defined as any environmental noise which is annoying, distracting or physically harmful. “Annoying” and “distracting” may seem to stretch the definition, until you try to listen to one of two or more competing sounds. It’s not just difficult, it can be irritating, and those unwanted sounds are a problem. Consider an office worker, standing beside a running copy machine in a busy office, straining to make out what their boss is saying to them from across the room. They may well feel a surge of annoyance, not all of it caused by their boss.

At 60-80 decibels, the competing sounds of conversation and office machines are beneath the 90-95 decibel range at which prolonged exposure can result in hearing loss. The typical modern environment is pretty cluttered with 60-80 decibel sound, whether from humans or from their electronic surrogates. But the brain can’t easily distinguish between multiple sound sources, making the quantity of noise just as problematic as its volume. The office worker can’t distinguish her boss’ words from the meaningless sounds, and events quickly outpace her senses. The tiny primal thrill of hypertension (“annoyance”) she feels is harmless in itself, but a busy day in the office can become thrilling in a bad way. When we talk about having “stress” and “distractions,” we are often referring to noise.

Our standard for what we deem unreasonable noise is bound up in notions of what a reasonable person would tolerate in their sonic environment. But when we try to imagine this “reasonable person” in our noisy contemporary world, it is often the exceptionally tolerant person we picture. Given how prolific noise sources are, we need to seek a standard of quiet rather than a standard of noise tolerance. There truly is a level at which noise is not only too loud, but too much, and just not healthy for individuals or society.

But can we remember the quiet well enough to make the judgment? What would the “reasonable person” of 1900 or 1800 have thought was unreasonable noise? How would they respond to an environment where streams of jet planes rip through the city skies, highways scream past crowded neighborhoods, televisions broadcast from every room in the household, cell phones sing spontaneously from every pocket, and swarms of leaf blowers and lawnmowers drone perpetually through the warm seasons of suburbia? The astonishing fact is that almost every basic task of life has been automated and has a corresponding mechanical or electronic noise. We live with a ruckus unanticipated in the hush of 1900. Unimaginable in the stillness of 1800.

No doubt, our ancestors would be rattled to encounter the sonic environment of 2011. The crescendo would alarm them, but so would the sheer fact that we endure it. No doubt they would wonder, because we seem unaware of the riot in the air. It might seem to them that in all the sustained commotion, human consciousness itself had been blasted into an altered state: that interacting with our environment no longer sharpened or heightened our senses but actually deadened them; that instead of listening we filtered out, instead of paying attention we ignored, instead of experiencing we disengaged; that the restorative beauty of silence, now nearly extinct, caused many only loneliness, anxiety and fear.

Maybe they would be sorry for us. Maybe angry at us. They would think us lonely, for sure, but also sense-addicted and over-stimulated. Was something gained? Would our ancestors see a world of “connectivity” and because of it leisure and freedom? Or would they see a bleak echo chamber where the human spirit is shouted down and gradually forgotten, silenced by the rampant, petty violence of exponential noise?

Labels: Cliff Phillips, ecology, technology

Columnist Cliff Phillips returns with a brilliant piece about place and change, chronicling our shared modern sense of dislocation with his own poignant New Jersey narrative. There is much to chew on here and cultural advice is hard to take. But who is this other? Aren't they all us? When the tale is from the gut and viscerally we respond to it, perhaps there is hope. The potential for change lies within us. As it says in the Talmud, the power of your dreams is your belief that they will come true.




"I'm not from here"

I live in rural New England, but I’m not from here. I moved to western Massachusetts twenty years ago, and around here, I am the Other, a from-away, and I always will be. It’s an important distinction for natives to make, and I respect it.

No, I’m a native of New Jersey, or at least that’s where I was born and raised. I’ve heard all the jokes and most of them are true. People often ask “Jersey? Which exit?” but they never ask how it got that way. The truth is, nobody knows. Like any tragedy, no one can quite explain how it happened, or why. It’s been so long since I left, people are usually surprised to learn I grew up there. I’m almost surprised myself. I suppose I could go back and try to reacquaint myself, but all those places are gone. Literally, gone. Can you imagine that?

I was born in Morristown, New Jersey, a place first settled by the Dutch in the early 1600’s. It’s a real colonial town, with Revolutionary War sites, and snow in winter, which was long. It was a lot like New England in a lot of respects.

When I was small, there was still new interstate highway construction in the old Northeast, and in northern New Jersey, that meant Route 287 was gradually extending its reach northward toward New York State in an arc around the New York Metropolitan Area. At the time it stopped just north of Morristown, stalled by fervent opposition. I didn’t know it was new and I didn’t know it represented a dramatic kind of change. Maybe I assumed the highway had always been there, on a wide flat plain which happened to have been a perfectly graded, open meadow. I was a kid and I took the world as it was.

I grew up in a 1950’s subdivision carved from a wooded hillside. Mountainside Drive. I didn’t know it was new and I didn’t know our split-level was replicated all over the hillside in nearly identical neighborhoods. A kid doesn’t know the relative ages of things, let alone comprehend the scale or significance of them. Of course, the interstate and my neighborhood were a forested valley and ridge just a short time before I was born.

We were lucky to live at the end of a dead end street where our yard fronted a wide empty circle. It was a place for the neighborhood kids to congregate. It served as a paved playground and gave onto a trail which led through woods to another dead end in a neighboring subdivision. The woods seemed a vast frontier and an enduring mystery to my unchallenged mind. I have been told the roads are now connected and the woods are gone, but I won’t be going back to see that. I’m from New Jersey and I’ve seen enough of that.

From age nine, until I left the state at age eighteen, I lived in Kinnelon, a smaller, more remote town further north. A bedroom community, it was a sad, lonely, beautiful place set among wooded lakes. Dry open ridges of scrappy weather-beaten oaks and wild blueberry fell off steeply into enormous assemblages of glacial boulders, often as big as a house, among the quiet shelter of hemlock forest and the brighter but impassable thickets of mountain laurel.

In the mid-nineties, I returned to the area for the wedding of two friends from this second half of childhood. Approaching from near Morristown, I followed the wedding invitation’s directions northward to be confronted by apparent unreality where the conquering Route 287, now encircling a dominion which extended to the New York State Thruway, had obliterated miles of familiar landscape and ran screaming along the formerly quiet Ramapo Mountains.

The outlying towns were choked by pavement and frantic with pointless commerce. The approaches were a crush of seething resentment as each isolated driver, alone in their car, tried to assert their position against the Other on the already crowded superhighway. Chunks of mountain were gone, blasted away into bits of rock which were baled up in massive chain link cubes and stacked grotesquely like toy blocks. I was less than fifteen minutes from my old home. I recognized nothing. Everything was altered. I know I can’t describe the uncomprehending shock and disbelief I felt, the haunted disorientation, the sweeping sense of exile which has remained ever since.

In New Jersey, a shocking verbal assault can pass for a civil greeting, and the mild disparagement would burn New England ears. Waving is rare but the finger is frequent. In a swathe between New York City and Philadelphia, the people live in a fully developed and totally privatized environment. For many, the only accessible open space is the highway and the parking lot. Both are thronged. Many towns are completely “built out,” and the last forested ridgelines which stood between urban or suburban corridors have fallen to development. Some municipalities have hired sharpshooters to kill off deer trapped in residential settings where hunting is no longer possible. There is ample shrubbery for the deer to browse, but aside from the snipers, there are no predators. There is no habitat.

The places the people grew up are also gone. The places their parents frequented are forgotten, demolished, entombed beneath asphalt. Continuity has been banished, and history has been erased. It’s as if the people’s collective memory has been wiped clean. Social isolation is the rule, but is perversely aggravated by going out in public. Many people migrate from this toxic social and physical environment. The lucky ones, given enough time, find another chance to integrate into a community and belong to a place and a landscape again, though they be forever from-aways in their new homes. Who can blame them?

It’s difficult to see one’s place, which is a birthright, changed from the outside. It’s an injustice. Yet it is worse to see it disfigured beyond recognition. Many New Englanders resent the hypocrisy of the from-away, who would bring change from the outside even while proclaiming “your beautiful New England must be kept intact.” They mistake it for arrogance, but I have a word of advice for any native of rural New England or any other undeveloped island of our great paved country.

Please try to have some compassion and a receptive ear for the most despised of your local transplants, who have trickled into your quiet towns from America’s many ruined and impervious landscapes, like refugees fleeing man-made disaster. Wonder where they came from, with their hatchet accents and impulsive social customs, their tackiness and bad habits. Picture their forsaken homes for yourself: the invasive sameness, the fuming traffic, the blanketing fog of amnesia where corporate culture steps in to set the tone, to name the policy, and to garland the thoroughfares with stoplights, logos and trash. Once beautiful places, all of them, but indistinguishable now.

It can happen anywhere. It can happen everywhere.

Can you imagine that?

Labels: Cliff Phillips, ecology, Economy, Guest columns, Practical Advice, thought

The Clarion Content is proud to introduce our newest guest columnist, Cliff Phillips. We are very grateful to those that sent him in our direction. His piece touches on a timely theme, one that has been percolating in American culture, personal responsibility. The Clarion Content recently read and circulated a commentary in Esquire around the Bush II-Obama transfer of power that ruminated on America's cultural complicity in our predicament. Here Mr. Phillips offers a methodology of improvement, a thought on how to act rather than complain. Be the example you wish to see in the world. This piece was originally penned prior to Obama's election, but based on the President's call to action in his inauguration speech, "greatness is never given, it is earned," it is even more relevant now.



Conservation is an Energy Source
Cliff Phillips

Every crisis conceals an opportunity. Every problem contains its own solution. We can see the answer through an effort of imagination or, failing that, hindsight. Our ever-escalating consumption of energy and resources has brought us to a volatile point in our history. Does the looming crisis of scarcity and pollution offer an opportunity we don’t see? Can our imagination illuminate the situation, or will hindsight teach us -too late- what could have been done to salvage our future?

The fact is, we have ample energy and answers are within reach. We can continue the blind, destructive search for new energy, or we can recognize that our energy problems mask enormous opportunities, beginning with a wealth of readily available conservation energy.

Our energy policy has to be an inclusive, public decision if it is to be sustainable. Experts have useful contributions to make, but they sorely lack the imagination (or breadth of experience) to deal comprehensively with this all-encompassing issue. The last energy expert to chart our long-term policy was Dick Cheney. The public was kept out of the process and the decisions were made in secret by a skilled but unimaginative few. Rolling blackouts immediately followed, as “market mechanisms” were put to work, threatening power grid supply and economic stability.

Since that time, the United States has embarked on an ongoing occupation of an oil-rich country, dragged its feet on implementing new energy technologies and efficiencies, and proposed only belatedly the further development of dwindling carbon energy fuels, coupled with dangerous and ludicrously expensive nuclear energy. These initiatives, especially the nuclear one, are to be funded by giant open-ended taxpayer subsidies resembling advance bailouts. They also impose incalculable additional costs on the public in terms of public health, pollution, and military expenditure, to name just a few. They guarantee a future of tight supplies and escalating prices, along with global political instability and environmental collapse. The single greatest stakeholder in this energy policy is the American public (who after all pays for it), and it is poorly served by this expertly engineered, but very unimaginative way forward.

What would the American public envision as its own “energy future,“ if it were not imposed from some secret industry committee in the Vice President’s office? A resolution of the worst failures of our energy policy would:

*Add 25-35 percent to available electric power

*be faster, easier and cheaper to develop than our existing resources

*generate an immediate boost to the national energy supply, to jobs, and to the economy , making American business more competitive and efficient while saving it billions of dollars each year

*quickly reduce our carbon and other emissions below 1990 levels, enabling the United States to participate in good faith and with leadership in international treaties intended to control carbon releases and limit climate change

*give the country sufficient time to develop renewable energy technologies which are non-polluting, safe and affordable

*and ease global political instability which already threatens security everywhere...

Of course this scenario is in many ways opposite to what we know from experience. Yet every item on the list is achievable through a responsible use of energy and resources.

Conservation is an energy source. It is real. Its potential is equal to the sum total of our society’s waste and inefficiency, which is on a scale not seen in human history. Our energy problem is a crisis of consumption and not a crisis of supply, and the sources of waste are far easier to identify and ‘tap’ than new sources of energy.

The American people have the moral obligation and the practical necessity to eliminate waste and inefficiency everywhere we can. When we do this, we will increase our autonomy as individuals and as a nation. We will eliminate many of our dependencies, which have stifled our initiative and smothered our democratic institutions. As must be the case if we are to transform a major crisis, we will have devised a solution from the problem itself.

Consider that a third or more of our household energy consumption can currently be chalked up to waste and inefficiency. Generating and distributing electricity for the grid wastes an even larger proportion before we get to turn the lights on at home. Likewise, we waste a large percentage of our transportation fuels as well as raw and finished materials in manufacturing, packaging, construction, etc (stuff is energy). As many have pointed out, our economy is predicated on the waste of energy and resources. Yet there is reason to be glad for the depth and breadth of our prodigal waste. There is more energy currently available through conservation and efficiency than from any single energy source. It does not require decades to develop at enormous taxpayer expense. And conservation sources save money while new energy sources cost money.

Every kilowatt/hour of conserved energy represents a savings to consumers and an increase in money circulating in the economy. Every kilowatt/hour saved is a reduction in pollution. Every kilowatt/hour of conservation and efficiency is a gift of time to our children, who face a future horror it we don’t begin to treat conservation as an energy source now.

The time is over when a President of the United States can claim that energy is a major national security issue yet fail to have a national energy conservation program. The time is over when we as individuals can bemoan a future of scarcity and pollution caused by some inadequate, abstract policy. It is caused by us, and we can do something about it.

The sad legacy of waste and pollution we have built into our economy in the past sixty years can be turned to our advantage now. The crisis conceals an opportunity. The problem contains the solution.

Conservation is an energy source.

This piece originally ran in the The Greenfield Recorder.

Labels: 2008's President, Cliff Phillips, ecology, Economy, energy policy, Guest columns, Politics, thought