[Iowa-dx] FW: [globalnetnews-summary] The growth of local power is a bright spot in seven bleak years of Bush

[Hart, Holly J]

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2232678,00.html
The growth of local power is 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

Rebecca Solnit in San Francisco
Friday December 28, 2007
The Guardian

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.

=B7 Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: The Untold
History of People Power comment@guardian.co.uk