i-eclectica.org

This year I didn’t look at anything relating to Burning Man - until I came across these and other photos at TechRepublic and LAist. What I’m not showing here are pictures of the burning effigies or the fireworks, which besides generators and recreational vehicles apparently created large amounts of pollution, leaving some attendees of the annual counterculture festival in the Nevada desert wondering how green the event actually was.

Several large art pieces at Burning Man 2007 attacked the oil industry head on. Mike Ross cut up pieces of two real oil tankers for his “Big Rig Jig,” curved them and hoisted them in the air in an “S” shape. People could crawl up inside the tankers.

Sean Orlando’s “Steampunk Tree House” evokes a vision of the future and the past. In a world with no trees there may be replicas, Orlando writes in an artist statement. His tree house is made of rusty machinery and gears and gives off steam in a nod to circa-1900s steam technology.

Bikes are a necessary form of transportation on the “playa,” the barren alkaline desert in northern Nevada on which Burning Man takes place. This year, an arch built out of bicycles was placed at the entrance to Center Cafe, where coffee can be purchased in recyclable cups. Along with espresso drinks and lemonade, ice is the only other item available for purchase at the event.

By David Griffiths
Sat, 14 Oct 06, 07:36:00

All co-operatives should undertake periods of review and examine the continuing relevance of their co-operative structure.

This is necessary and desirable and the critical question for the co-operatives is: Do the members support the co-operative as a co-operative and what is the evidence for this support? Are members attending general meetings of the co-operative? Are members nominating for the board of the co-operative?

External pressures are also impacting on housing co-operatives and the most significant of these is the policy and approach of Government and the public servants who interpret and administer legislation and regulation on behalf of the Government - a policy that is at best paternalistic and at worst antagonistic towards housing co-operatives.

This mix of paternalism and antagonism is possible because public policy debate in Australia does not recognise the co-operative as significant and serious policy options. If a public servant, therefore, expresses an opinion that co-operatives are not sufficiently commercial, then, this reflects and reinforces the status of public policy debate and decisions on co-operatives. It also reflects and reinforces the ignorance and/or antipathy of the public servant.

Co-operative peak bodies throughout Australia are resource-weak and have found it difficult to engage in and impact on public policy debate and, therefore, reduce the isolation of housing co-operatives.

Governments throughout Australia have increasingly preferred to facilitate the development of paternalistic housing - housing for people rather than by people. Paternalistic housing is typically provided by religious and welfare agencies who are imbued with a paternalistic history and tradition.

Co-operative housing is thriving elsewhere throughout the world. Established in 1946, the Norwegian Federation of Co-operative Housing Associations (NBBL), for instance, represents 90 housing co-operative associations - 700,000 individual members and 250,000 housing units. The NBBL is the fourth largest membership organisation in Norway.

The OBOS Group in Norway was established in 1929. It is the largest co-operative building association which manages 105,000 homes and 600 rental apartments. In 2004 it had 15 wholly-owned subsidiaries and employed 600 people.

Housing co-operatives in Norway serve a population of 4.5 million people. Housing co-operative homes hold a significant share of the housing market in cities. The national average is 15% and in Oslo it is 40%.

In Sweden the Riksbyggen co-operative is owned by building unions, housing associations and national co-operative organisations. With 2300 employees, it is involved in building, property management and residential services. There are 500,000 people living in dwellings managed by Riksbyggen. Riksbyggen has been responsible for about a tenth of housing built in Sweden.

In Germany the Gdw is the national federation of 3200 housing enterprises - including 2000 co-operatives. There are 6.5 millions dwellings for 15 million people managed by these enterprises - 17% of dwellings in Germany and 30% of all flats to let.

In Canada there are 2,100 housing co-operatives with 90,000 households and 250,000 people.

Co-operative housing may have had its time in Australia but not in Canada, Germany, Norway and Sweden!

Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada
http://www.chfc.coop

GdW
http://www.gdw.de

NBBL
http://www.boligsamvirket.no

OBOS Group
http://www.obos.no

Riksbyggen
http://www.riksbyggen.se

© Copyright by australia.coop

I am not surprised about the state of cooperative housing in Australia, but I don’t think we can simply blame policy makers and bureaucrats for this state of affairs - systems are far more complex than that. For example: in this case (like in many other social contexts in this country), the article supports my view of Australia being largely a very conservative country. I suspect this nation’s values to have at least two historical roots: one of obedience and dependency (the convict mentality) and another of a pioneer spirit (the free landowner mentality). Neither of them fostered an ongoing story of community focused existence and ‘us’ inspired values around the common good. Why should they lead to a history of creative collaboration and cooperation based on communities feeling responsible for its members? Life in Australia during and after the conquest was about survival of the fittest. I imagine people having lived in this country’s earlier days in a perceived ’school of hard knocks’ - with individuals fighting for their and their families’ survival in a natural environment seen as hostile, and/or feeling forced to focus on personal survival under an authority being experienced as all-pervading and oppressive.

Dovetail to that the development of capitalism (including its global character), with its so-called free market place in which each individual has to fight for himself or herself, and you have a country that by and large is highly individualistic when it comes to satisfying basic needs (such as a roof over one’s head and food on the table) or a mixture of needs and wants when it comes to personal status creation. Like most people, Australians are good of course in helping each other in times of great external emergencies and hardships (they seem to belief in the myth though that they are better at it than any other nation on this planet), but once the challenge is over, self-centredness rules again.

This focus on individual self-reliance to create wellbeing is historically reflected in the kinds of governments this country had. I can’t remember the exact figure but i think that for 80-90% of the time since the beginning of federation, Australia had conservative governments. Sure, this country might have had the first or one of the first pension systems in the world, but it never had a social-welfare state -unlike countries in Europe, which saw that policy model dominating their political system for almost four decades. No wonder then, certain European countries have a longstanding history of cooperative housing - Scandinavia and Germany were at the forefront of promoting a philosophy and practice focused on group welfare rather than just individual one.

I could rave on about all this more, but I hope I made my point: when judging phenomena, we need to look as much as possible at the system as a whole, which includes its history. I know that’s obvious, but then: why do we see policy makers as villains, ideologues and dogmatists rather than as agents of the system? If we don’t understand that government, bureaucrats, NGOs and most people in a particular society operate on the same historically shaped (and therefore deeply rooted) value system, it helps very little to observe that public servants “interpret and administer legislation and regulation on behalf of the Government - a policy that is at best paternalistic and at worst antagonistic towards housing co-operatives”. What’s new? Where’s the surprise? Of course, welfare agencies and religious organisations are paternalistic - the question is why! After all, it makes a big difference to one’s change strategies whether they deal with subsets of a society that don’t represent mainstream or whether you have to change a whole nation’s psyche that has deep roots in that society’s history. And drawing comparisons to other nations’ systemic expressions is of very little help in this context; all it proves is difference. You can’t make an apple tree become and pine tree.

So, all up, I have to say, I find the previous article a bit too simplistic and wingeing. I’d like to say to the author: give me a good analysis of the problems instead and propose ways forward!

This video by post-rock/experimental group ‘God is an astronaut’ shows how ignorant and at the same time arrogant the human species is … pretty sad really.