Anecdotes of Research

Last week, The Public Square in Chicago, along with ITVS hosted a screening of King Corn, made by Aaron Woolfe, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis. They had invited me, along with the fabulous LaDonna Redmond, to make comments after the feature length video and then take questions on the issues raised.
(For what it’s worth, after the film there was barely half an hour left for comments and discussion. Do programmers think audiences simply cannot tolerate an event longer than 2 hours? What do you think?)

The Genre
The film is another example of a growing genre, the documentation of a self-initiated investigation that combines in varying proportions personal narrative and focused research, often anchored by a gesture or act that loosely qualifies as an experiment relevant to the motive question.

Viewers may recognize the strategy promoted largely (no pun intended) in the work of Michael Moore whose style is notoriously aggressive and often criticized for being emotionally manipulative. His 1989 pioneer example is “Roger and Me” in which he tries to get a meeting with CEO Roger Smith of General Motors to ask him why the world’s largest corporation is abandoning the people of Flint, Michigan. Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” (2004) is a precedent specifically regarding the question: what the hell are we eating and what is it doing to us?, taking the form of what turns out to be a health-endangering self-experiment. In books and articles, the food writer Michael Pollan (interviewed in King Corn) has used this structure beautifully, organizing his research with experiences initiated specifically for the purpose. So he has grown GMO potatoes in his vegetable garden, bought a calf as an investment and followed its life in the meat industry, traced the origins of variously typical American meals he has consumed, and procured a meal with the least commercial mediation possible (a contemporary hunter gatherer adventure). [See Playing God in the Garden, Power Steer, The Omnivore's Dilemma]

What is being generated here is reflexive knowledge. It is framed by a subjectivity, that of a specific learner, who responds to what she learns with reflection and new questions. It is not framed by the conventions of objectivity that traditionally certify truths.

Our guides are generally nonspecialists whose interests, methods, and priorities are more or less visible; we can evaluate them according to our own values, accept or reject their premises and findings accordingly.

Though they undoubtedly operate from their own bias, ideally they have no professional involvement in the material, thus nothing to protect in the substance of what they discover. The heart of the research is guaranteed not so much by authority but by experience that we more or less witness. Anyone could attempt to reproduce it, including us.

King Korn
The basic structure of King Corn is thus: when we realized how much of our diet consisted of corn, we decided to go out to Iowa and grow an acre of corn ourselves, to find out what goes into this crop and how it gets into so many of our foods…

The two filmmakers who actually appear in the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, met as undergrads at Yale. Regardless of what a Yale degree may actually indicate about the bearer’s intelligence, these guys are smart enough not to act like people approaching an Ivy League research paper. I imagine they knew quite a lot about the food and agriculture world before starting this practical investigation, but they seem to make a point of putting it aside once the videotape rolls. The outcome is a credible record of an ignorant everyman’s education in contemporary agriculture.

Cheney and Ellis had discovered in the course of their friendship that they each had great grandfathers who lived and farmed in the same county in Iowa, neatly providing a setting for their Green Acres research drama (in fact, the anchoring locale is a town called Green). This gives the story a backdrop of destiny, if you like that sort of thing, and/ or a returning-to-roots narrative.

On the odyssey of the pilgrim researcher, many experts are consulted. In the set up they visit a lab where they have their hair analyzed to get the data version of the typical American eater. Yup, the hair speaks counter-intuitive truth to reason: a diet of soda and hamburgers and snack foods delivers what they suspected: the main ingredient in their hair is corn. Look in the bioinformatic mirror and you read what you eat/are.

One of the strengths of the film is their respect for the Iowa farmers they encounter. They don’t assume anything about their informants’ lives, opinions or class affiliation. They refrain from interpreting and judging what they learn, but the knowledge they acquire complicates the decisions they have to make. And despite their restraint, those complications are ethical ones.

Their strategy is to participate in the existing system. They try to keep it simple; for instance, Cheney and Ellis plant the bioengineered corn seed that everyone around them is planting (Liberty Link tradename, Bayer CropSciences), and they eschew taking on transgenic agriculture as an issue. The corn they grow is inedible before processing in a factory or by an animal’s body, and an increasing share of it is destined for fuel. The prices for a bushel of corn the year they are growing it (2005) are not reflective of current prices. 2005 yielded the largest corn harvest in U.S. history and granaries were already full with mountains of surplus sitting under tarps outside. For years, overproduction has kept the prices of the big commodities (corn, soy and wheat) low, lower than the cost of producing it. Farmers supplying these commodity chains would not survive if not for massive government subsidies (our tax money). The surplus of corn is what has driven the switch to cheap corn syrup as a ubiquitous ingredient in processed foods, and corn as a major ingredient of livestock diets. Sodas and other drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup are leading culprits in the diabetes epidemic, and corn-fed beef is the source of hamburgers containing mostly fat, as well as environmentally disastrous confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These and other social/environmental problems are fairly well explored in King Corn.

Corn Currency
Since the film was made we’ve witnessed an unprecedented rise in the price fetched by grain commodities, particularly corn, wheat, soy, and increasingly rice. Now we are also witnessing skyrocketing food prices worldwide; consequent riots about the decreasing accessibility of food have broken out in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Haiti, Morocco and other parts of Africa. Elsewhere there are long queues for bread or grain and many nations are curbing the export of staple grains. Of course the deep dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels makes food vulnerable to rising oil prices. Other factors such as major droughts in Australia and China may implicate climate change. Another reason is that as affluence increases in developing nations like China and India, the demand for bread and for grain-fed meat is also rising. Worldwide, stocks of surplus grains are at an unprecedented low. And then there is the sudden demand for biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol. The reckless policy of U.S. government to subsidize this folly has thus far been unquestioned. Because farmers can get so much more for corn than they did in the past, they are planting even more corn, diminishing the acreage available for growing things that people actually eat.

Last week at the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council’s annual summit, I heard Jim Braun say a few interesting things about this rise in prices. Braun, a former farmer, and now a Springfield lobbyist with the Illinois Farmer-Consumer Coalition, took issue with currently popular attributions of rising food prices to farmers being paid more. According to him, the farmer’s average share of revenue from a box of corn flakes is $.05 cents. With wheat at $4.00 a bushel, farmers earn about $.01 from each loaf of bread. So farmers could get paid three times what they are getting now and the loaf would cost 3 cents more to the consumer. Reminds me of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of mostly immigrant tomato pickers in Immokalee County, Florida who spent years getting Yum Brands (parent of Taco Bell) to the table to discuss improvements to their condition. Getting an agreement for Yum to demand that tomato plantation owners pay workers one cent more per 32 pound bucket(!) was considered progress.

Where does the money go?

No regret to not inform

blogger’s delinquency: although posted in march 08, this was written in october 07

Last week I went with a couple of friends to the Renaissance Society in Chicago to see a new piece by Steve McQueen called Gravesend, a 17 minute video (transferred from 35 mm film, projected in a HUGE dark space) about coltan mining in the Congo.

The poster essay [see Renaissance Society website] written by Hamza Walker describes the film as “unapologetically abstract” and “resolutely purged of any information illustrating economic links….”

I feel unapologetically bothered about such an artistic strategy. I’ m sure many will find the piece beautiful. In the most arresting sequences we see or barely see in the dim light, miners (black), shoveling in a chiaroscuro pit. We see close-ups of their hands (black) picking little bits out of muddy clumps or out of walls or breaking larger clumps with a hammer, again to pick the bits from the chunks and wash them in a stream…. And then we see close-ups of industrial processes, preternaturally clean, featuring a robotic arm seizing and repositioning what look like coltan ingots to further, in mechanical rhythm, a process we don’t understand. Linking the shots of hands groping mud and the machinic purity, nothing more than a black and white animation of squiggly lines based on the currents or geographic track of the Congo River. After the precise robotic sorting of ingots, we will soon restart the loop back at the mine, after stopping for a ponderous sunset over an industrial harbor, ostensibly referring to the English town of Gravesend, from which the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, relates his tale. No additional contexts along the supply chain. Not an abstract peek at that terribly abstract thing, the markets trading coltan futures and other derivatives, nor, more concretely, the parts that go into cell phones and computers or the hands that assemble those goods, nor the price, feature and brand wars that keep cell phones “moving” in the market, nor the mountains of phones abandoned for new models. Outside of the camera’s tight frames on the bodies laboring in shadows and their eager hands, nothing about the decades of war and atrocity in the scramble to control the mineral resources of the Congo.

That job is left to the curator’s essay (Walker’s) which does provide some history and general details about the Democratic Republic of Congo and the economics of coltan. So, the division of labor referenced in McQueen’s film – both obliquely and obviously– is reiterated in the gallery: artist will do the resolutely purified positioning of parts and curator will do the heavy lifting of background explaining and connecting to lived histories in our world now. This is not the only place that conventional divisions of symbolic labor are observed.

I appreciate an artistic practice that declines the duty of informing. After all, information is everywhere and the urgent need seems to be how to get it to matter to people. If the information is there already, why should an artist spoil his art with it? Better to make something that motivates people to find out more, absorb such knowledge, come to their own conclusions regarding what to do about it.

But is this the only option? A friend that went to the show with me said that maybe the artist wanted to be sure not to slide into documentary forms. On that matter Walker’s essay says:

While its unembellished footage brings it into a discursive relationship with documentary and other forms of reportage, Gravesend above all else is a poem, and an epic one at that. Strikingly beautiful, and supremely ambitious, it is a highly formal meditation that speaks by looking.

Another division of labor. Why does the artist add his heft to the well guarded boundary between documentary and poem? That’s obvious enough; in most people’s minds documentary and reportage are jobs: toiling, grunting and sometimes even paid labor that must adhere to a form set by the social, a form that clearly sets out information and obviates or disguises bias by obeying conventions that certify objective or at least reliable information. The poem is the inspired offering of a special individual, moved by a refined sensibility to give form to elegant perceptions regardless of the object being perceived. The poem glimmers and radiates; the document hopes to shed light. It’s assumed that these polar pursuits–the documentary and the poem–loose status by sliding toward each other. The poetic documentary finds its credibility compromised. The poem with a job to inform is déclassé, forfeiting much of its prestige.

The only problem is that none of this is really true anymore. The degree to which such pure categories existed was the degree to which we wanted to believe in them. That was relatively easy during the swells of modernism in the last century, but now a rigid adherence to such divisions is more forced than ever. The conventions of documentary objectivity have never been entirely stable to begin with and for years now practitioners have been quite consciously reinventing the form along with our expectations of certifiable truth claims. Scores of media makers take on documentary subjects and methods while simultaneously interrogating the form itself, inflecting it in idiosyncratic ways. The issue for viewers is shifting from a position of accepting or not accepting a delivered truth to examining their own media literacy [and how what we perceive acquires meaning]. Given the endless proliferation of competing truth claims in our media environment, it becomes incumbent on viewers to develop their skills at evaluating both information and opinion and in the process to grapple with the ethics implied in their response.

One of the more perverse aspirations of some threads of high modernism was the constitution of pure visual experience. In certain frames this was the ultimate poetry for visual artists and apparently the criterion is still meaningful to some as this passage from Walker’s essay suggests:

Over and above any socio-economic and political machinations, Gravesend favors discreet outward appearances. For McQueen, the facts of the matter are visual and visual alone as Gravesend’s stunning production values attest. He insists that Gravesend “first and foremost is about looking,” even at the expense of knowing what we are observing. Textual footholds are dismissed; no maps, no dialogue, no villains, and no experts.

According to Walker’s statement, it seems the artist of this poetic product has taken on himself a “just the facts” protocol much more exclusive than those embraced by most artists dealing with complex contemporary issues and the feelings attached to them. It is rare that an artist desiring to further the discourse about a given issue and unafraid of being contaminated by a whiff of documentary, would take on a method that is visual and visual alone.

Why do some artists continue to restrict themselves to a set of parameters that is artistically exhausted and perhaps even morally complicit with the status quo? With or without stunning production values, insisting that the facts of any matter are visual alone is a position that studiously avoids the troubling questions about that matter. In this case the artist proves to us that he commands the resources to travel to presumably remote mines in the Congo, gain access to high tech manufacturing schemes, and insist on visual perfection. The subject matter of the film—an historic situation that is complex and tragic—elevates his work from mere poem to “epic” poem. The film depicts an implacable system containing human and nonhuman parts but ultimately not subject to human agency. The system is beyond our comprehension and within it no victims or villains muss the abstraction. The messenger of this cosmos is beyond good and evil and depicts his subject in the same mirror.

The complex concatenation of systems that describe the economic life of coltan is full of winners and losers, more and less numbing or fatal. Finally we the viewers, typically in the US or UK or EU, are lumped with the winners. Though the stakes for us are debatable, we gain from not thinking too precisely about practices that treat products depending on coltan mining like infinitely replaceable, always obsolete technology, i.e., garbage. Like the profiteers in the supply chain, whether they are war lords who manage labor with the end of a gun, or corporate executives who do business obtaining the mineral blindly through “opaque” brokers, we are not to be interrupted by moral considerations of the violence that makes our consumables not just available but affordable, finally dispensable.

But in the gallery, the high ground we are offered is to be beyond good and evil. In the art world, for artists, institutions and viewers, this buys prestige. When a definition of prestige is consistently more amenable to the interest of winners than losers we can only suspect its underpinnings.

There are many good reasons to eschew the haggard forms recognized as photographic “documentary.” Especially when we meet these images in the field of consumption instead of in the context of specific cases made by human rights organizations to stimulate action. That is a world in which visible evidence still can put people on the spot, and in many cases is required in the long slog for influence. But beyond the specialized propaganda wars of NGOs, corporations and governments, conventional documentary makes many of us feel powerless: either guilty and hopeless, or, if we are equipped with a sophisticated critique of the form, effectively off the hook.

Perhaps this aspect of documentary is part of what moves McQueen to maintain the high art fortress intended to protect his work from such a dreary fate. He has gone to great trouble to make a work about a deeply troubling subject, a world inextricably shadowing our daily life. Even though I am critical of the strategy, I don’t really want to judge his intentions.

I’m not looking for art whose methods and purpose can be collapsed to a function of conveying information. But neither am I interested in works that collapse their possibilities into the narrow spectra delineated by a false opposition between the documentary and the poetic. The kind of creativity that intrigues me rejects both of these well-trodden options in order to explore the huge and murky territory not defined by either.

a tale of (at least) two versions

Does your mom send you newspaper clippings? Has she transferred this impulse to the quicker clicker, namely email?

My mom regularly forwards various email messages that have been sent by friends or acquaintances of hers. I received this from her several months after it had made the rounds in the spheres of easy forwarding. To this one I was moved to write a response and hit “reply-all.” Here I post the original circular followed by my response.

The Forwarded Message
Subject: A TALE OF TWO HOUSES
Here’s some interesting information.
You can check this out on Snopes.com under “The Story of Two Houses”

House #1 A 20 room mansion ( not including 8 bathrooms ) heated by
natural gas. Add on a pool ( and a pool house) and a separate guest
house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more
energy than the average American household does in a year. The
average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400. In
natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the
national average for an American home. This house is not situated
in a Northern or Midwestern “snow belt” area. It’s in the South.

House #2 Designed by an architecture professor at a
leading national university. This house incorporates every
“green” feature current home construction can provide. The house is
4,000 square feet ( 4 bedrooms ) and is nestled on a high prairie in the
American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal
heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the
ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F. ) heats the house in the winter
and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or
natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a
conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected
and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from
showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then
into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land
surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area
enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.

~~~~~
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of
the “environmentalist” Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford,
Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States,

My Two Cents on Two Houses

This definitely deserves a response:

1. Commending Mom
2. What does it change?
3. A little more information

1.
First of all, I would like to commend my mom for sending out this news that disturbed her personally. I called her a couple of weeks ago sometime after she had first received this message and it was the first thing she wanted to talk about. It really upset her.

One of the many great things about Mom is that she is willing to reconsider her opinion on the basis of new information. To the best of my knowledge she voted with the Republican party most of her life. However, observing the decadence and opportunism of the Bush administration she seemed to reconsider many of her previously held opinions.
Meanwhile she had been taking in the news about climate change and I remember that when she went to see Gore’s movie and heard Gore speak in person, she was not afraid to say that she was very impressed with his commitment to a real issue, although she had never been a fan of his in the past. So of course she was upset to read something that discredits Gore by illustrating the hypocrisy of his lifestyle.
This news item is meant to upset people who admire Gore and to provide ammunition to those who would like to distract from his message.

2.
But even if we take it at face value, what does it change? Does it change the evidence being reported everyday from an overwhelming number of credible sources that global warming is a clear and present danger for all of us?

Maybe Gore was just lucky to choose the issue of the natural environment some time ago as part of his political “brand.” When he lost the battle to claim the election of 2000, maybe he had nothing better to do than to revive the issue he had published a book about before he served as Vice President. Gore’s luck was to have done years of work and come out with a film just at the moment that a larger public began to realize that the overwhelming majority of the scientific establishment just might be worth listening to. Even as the leader of the so-called free world, who with arguably the most powerful position on the planet, and had done everything in his power to scuttle any evidence that might trouble the public’s dependence on a life based on cheap fossil fuels, had exhausted his own credibility in every way.

And then we learn that Gore doesn’t practice what he preaches. And Bush, the leader of the free world who until very recently was the number one opponent of doing anything on the side of innovation or re-envisioning our relationship to energy, has created for himself a model energy-efficient home.

If I were a Bush supporter I would be very troubled by the fact that this man doesn’t privately practice what he preaches. Interesting that more Bush supporters aren’t troubled by this bit of hypocrisy.

As someone concerned about the consequences of short-sighted environmental practices, I am furious that the President doesn’t preach what he practices. Especially since, as President of the free world, his preaching often becomes the basis for policy changes at home and abroad.

On the other hand, you could say this is consistent with Bush’s doctrine of privatization of everything, or every man for himself. The notion of a “public good,” what is good for the population in the long-term scheme, doesn’t interfere with his policy of promoting whatever short-term folly seems to be advantageous for himself and his small circle.

3.
There are a few details left out of the story:

The Gores pay quite a bit extra for the kilowatt hours because they are enrolled in a Green Power Switch program which means that the power they are buying is generated through renewable resources like wind and solar.

The Gores have been in the process of converting their heating system to geothermal and installing solar panels on their house.

The Gore household referred to consists of four structures with 20 rooms total. One of those structures houses the Vice-President’s Secret Service detail. Another his own think tank. Tipper Gore also runs an office out of the house. Most homes do not have to deal with such things. Yet the local utility has stated that smaller residences in Nashville use as much power as the Gore household. In other words the Gore residence uses less power per capita than many other large Nashville residences. Although Bush has entertained publicly at his ranch in Crawford, this house is his private getaway, not his primary residence and work place.

Then there is the question of just how much they are actually using. The AP quotes a spokes women, Laurie Parker, for the Nashville Utility as saying that The Tennessee Center for Policy Research made no contact with them. AP also claimed to have reviewed the bills and came up with an energy use figure some 15% lower. Perhaps they factored in the surcharge charged for using over 1,000Kw per month. MSNBC countdown pointed out that the GORE family voluntarily pays $5,893 extra for green power.

The founder and president of the “nonpartisan” think tank that created this story, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is Jason Drew Johnson, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute which has received over $1.6 million from ExonMobil, and accordingly promotes the idea that global warming is not a real issue. For instance, last February, they were offering $10,000 to scientists and economists for articles that undermine a major climate change report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It’s interesting to see how many news organizations picked up on the report but failed to investigate further and ignored all or part of other relevant information:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200703010008
MSNBC’s Keith Olberman raised some of these points last February after the “two Houses” press release was issued, the day after Gore won the Academy Award:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/28/olbermann-on-gores-energy-use-setting-the-record-straight/

Almost all of our media is biased, lazy and/or blatantly corrupt. The burden is on us to consider where our news is coming from, the interests of who is generating it, and what is actually changed by a given story. Unfortunately we are so polarized that it seems most of us grab anything appearing to confirm our habitual positions.

So thanks for sending this along, Mom,

Case Study in Manhattan

I have started following the story of Colin Beavan, ‘no impact man,’ a writer living in Manhattan. Along with his wife (a writer for Business Week) and daughter, he is attempting to live for a year with no or minimal footprint in terms of energy consumption and waste production, although his project guidelines include the energy to blog daily and publish a book at the end of the year. http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/

What i find so interesting about his project, is what it contributes to an aspect of our current state in an affluent, industrialized nation– self-experimentation becomes necessary because no one can trust the authorities or so-called experts.

Beavan indicates this in this passage:

“One really important point I want to make is that the science is confusing about a lot of this stuff. There are studies and counter studies. It’s easier just to consume less product than to try to figure out what is okay and what is not.”

Our condition of reflexivity at this point is such that the amount of commentary or information on what we do is overwhelming not only us, but the “experts.” The dams around science’s fantasy of objectivity are being breached. Science is more and more obviously driven by subjective interests. Even though technocratic knowledge still legitimizes a major portion of the spectrum of authority, our ability to rely on technoscientific pronouncements is crumbling under the weight of information and the light of examination. We have more tools for producing ‘information’ and fewer for making judgments; we have more networks for informing– press, publicity, publishing– so we have more opportunities for examination. The public, weary of conflicting authorities, constantly exposed to means of reporting on and reflecting on the claims of authorities, has to devise other means of producing information, i.e., their own experience, and also has to move further to self reliance, i.e., trusting their own observation, good “sense” and decision. What we have is the glimmerings of new kinds of subjectivity or person: a more and more fully autonomous subject. Someone who does some kind of work or experiment to produce knowledge of their own, and then feels they have some basis for making their own decision. There is almost no other choice when other authorities have lost all credibility.

This is not to say that the individual produces knowledge all by herself. In the course of creating and interpreting her own experience she avails herself of the immeasurable wealth of knowledge produced by other humans, which includes that put into transmissible form (reports, studies, journalism, fiction, film, press, etc,), as well as the feedback from other people in her face-to-face sphere. But in the end she is creating of herself a person who can trust her own resources to put it altogether and accept the consequences of her own mistakes.

I love this part of what Beavan wrote in his March 20 post “I heareby sacrifice my teeth to the environment (kind of):”

“We’re moving and changing so fast that I may be making mistakes that we’ll have to correct later when some expert who knows a lot more than me tells me I’m an idiot, which of course I am because I’m just a schlub, like everyone else, trying to negotiate through spin and counter-spin to do the right thing.”

Of course he will make mistakes! He is on territory very inadequately explored or described; there is no other way to proceed there. Trial and error. It’s always a collective thing, as evidenced by all the comments sharing their own experiments of the same order. I haven’t brought myself to make the moves he has made, but reading his trial and error gives me more confidence. He are creating knowledge! Which includes mistakes so that other experimenters can have the luxury to say, ” I’m not gonna make THAT mistake because I already KNOW about that one!”

As Beavan indicates, the experts contradict each other every day, so there is less and less reason to believe they can judge better than we can. Especially since, with information technology as it is, we are increasingly privy to all the information they use.

On Gut Reading

People are really freaked out now about the breakdown of authority but people are showing each other ways to learn to rely on ourselves and each other. It’s a learning process so we have to learn to love learning. And we have to be able to be wrong. At one point Colin Beavan locates his source of decision-making in his “gut.” Even thought i have an aversion to that concept, recently aggravated by Mr. Bush, our president, who likewise accounts for his disastrous decision meter, i understand that what one is often saying with that phrase is that they are relying on their own experience over conflicting information. Unfortunately the case of Mr. Bush is that his own experience is narrow and twisted even while so much of our fate depends on it, so it becomes inexcusable. In this case Beavan produces a set of conditions in which we have what we need to assess the information he delivers, in other words, a respectable degree of transparency. We know he is getting a book out of this, but we also know that even he is not prepared for what he might learn by such an experiment. The conditions are such that we can examine his claims, query him when we see discrepancies and expect him to respond. Part of his motivation to respond truthfully is that getting a book deal is not just a promise of economic reward, but it is also a demand that the author live up to the terms of the experiment he is proposing; otherwise the book and Colin Beavan’s reputation as an author (an informant) is quickly discredited are more garbage to our midden of confusing unreliable sources.

Experimental Forms of Objectivity

The promise of the fantasy of objectivity is that we will gain a broader perspective than what we currently have. This is called understanding, which is not opposed to knowledge but accompanies it when a transparently motivated inquiry is undertaken. Under the conditions Beavan has constructed, he is substituting something different from the scientific brand of objectivity but which functions in the same way to broaden his perspective and to test his biases. His objectivity is in the rules that he set for himself to live according to what we currently understand as a no- or low-impact existence, and in his commitment to follow those rules. The objectivity of this experiment is equally dependent on the assemblage of people, most of them anonymous to him and surely of widely differing opinions, who have become invested in the experiment he is conducting in public. Even though he has his own interests in the project, we can take those into account, and can believe that he really is “a schlub like everybody else” IN THE AMBIT OF THE EXPERIMENT ITSELF. In other words, he really is starting this as another complacent, convenience-addicted consumer who just finally crossed the line so many of us feel everyday and may be able to tell us more about what is on the other side. This is information relevant to us, to the denizens of the everyday, who have to decide which toothpaste is best for us, if a company is capable of telling the truth about its own product, if one decision is more toxic than another, if we could stand to give up our cars…

Projects like this provide us with reality-based food for our IMAGINATION, which is actually at the source of all knowledge. The ability to think beyond one’s physically and historically limited self.