Eric Garcetti at a Lyft party via Twitter.

I had planned an elaborate April Fools Day post for today involving the announcement of a new book entitled The Big Book of Anecdotes for Dentists. For, you know, those awkward times when the dentist has to do a monologue while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists.

Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their initial public offering on Friday. He tweeted, “L.A. is leading America’s transportation revolution, and @Lyft is a part of that promising future. Their spirit of corporate responsibility will guide the future of public-private partnerships that benefit residents first.” Keep in mind this tweet was sent out at the same time as Uber and Lyft drivers were on strike, asking for decent wages. He later tried to excuse his presence at this party saying that he was there to acknowledge an initiative of Lyft’s to donate $5 million towards transportation programs in Los Angeles.  Of course any sober economic analysis of Lyft’s impact on the city would, I’m certain, show that it costs us taxpayers way more than $5 million a year in terms of increased traffic and the cost of health care that the company doesn’t provide its “independent contractor” drivers.

Sadly, Eric Garcetti and many others in this city, instead of doing the unglamorous and often politically unpopular task of installing things like dedicated bus lanes and improvements to bike and pedestrian safety, are betting that somehow, someday technology will save us from the already unusable, congested streets of Los Angeles. This city made a bad bet back in the early 20th century on the automobile. Sadly, it’s making another bad bet now on a hoped for future of self driving cars which Lyft and Uber’s business models depend on. I had thought, ten years ago, that Los Angeles’ elected officials were beginning to imagine a future not dependent on cars but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I’m going to stick my neck out and make a few predictions. Self driving cars won’t work unless they have dedicated lanes. Those dedicated lanes will quickly fill to capacity and we’ll be right back where we started. The artificial intelligence self driving cars depend on is a just a deceptive term for a branch of predictive statistics which may prove useful but should not be compared to human intelligence. The hoped for future that Eric Garcetti is is betting on will never arrive. Meanwhile the changes we need to make right now won’t happen and the city will continue to be congested, dysfunctional and corrupt.

Proposed Institute of the Present headquarters at the Silver Lake Reservoir.

Which leads me in this rambling post to suggest the need for the formation of an Institute of the Present. What if, instead of hoping for self-flying pie in the sky we focused on the things we could do now to make our cities more equitable, livable and, in the process, mitigate the damage of climate change? That’s where the Institute of the Present comes in. Consider the Institute of the Present as the think tank version of flossing your teeth: unpopular and unglamorous but eminently practical, preventative and forward thinking by, paradoxically, being grounded in the present moment. Think trees, affordable housing, bus lanes, trains and a lot of bikes. Our slogan? Be present!

To double down on the irony this morning, as soon as I announce computer problems I discover it to be just a loose power cord and shazam we’re back with a blog post–back to discuss an appropriate technology journal from the pre-internet days.

One hopeful node in the otherwise sewage clogged tubes of the interwebs, is the work of librarians who have thoughtfully digitized old periodicals. I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon reading the delightful Rain: A Journal of Appropriate Technology, which was published between 1974 and 1996. Here’s the description on the Portland State Library website:

RAIN began in October 1974 as a publication of ECO-NET, an environmental education network funded by the Hill Foundation and an Environmental Education grant. Its office was based in the Environmental Education Center at Portland State University. With a focus on the Pacific Northwest, particularly Oregon, RAIN originally described itself as a “bulletin board” with an “emphasis on environmental/energy related and communications kinds of information” and interested in “the evolutionary possibilities of inter-disciplinary connections.” RAIN is notable for its early engagement and promotion of appropriate technologies supporting sustainability, sound ecological practices, and decentralized community action.

RAIN is kind of like the Whole Earth Catalog but with a special focus on applying appropriate technology here in the developed world. As one article put it, “You can’t sell compost toilets to others if you won’t use them yourself.”

For me, reading RAIN was melancholic. It’s hard not to think about how much better off we’d all be, from a climate change perspective, if we’d heeded the warnings and solutions offered back in the 1970s. Or for that matter, John Ruskin and William Morris’ concerns about the “dark satanic mills” of the 19th century. Hell, we even made a stab at this when we wrote our books around the time of the 2008 economic meltdown. But somehow the allure of shiny consumer objects sends us all back into destructive spasms of consumption and waste and publications like RAIN get forgotten.

Rain featured a lot of articles by E. F. Schumacher, as well as covering such topics as energy efficiency, permaculture and alternative schools. One topic I’d never thought much about, the destructive influence of tourism, seemed to be the special concern of co-editor Tom Bender. Here’s an especially eloquent passage by Bender from the May 1976 issue:

Drinking wine one recent evening with Florian Winter, an Austrian visiting us on a global survey of renewable energy developments for the U.N., we got into talking about the destruction of European cathedrals by tourism.

Each person came, he said, and took away a little of the cathedrals–in their camera, in their mind, or in the conversation–and now nothing remains.

In that absurdity there is truth.

All places live though the reverence with which we hold them–without which they crumble to pieces, unloved, unmaintained, abandoned and destroyed. That reverence is the glue that in reality binds the stones and the blood that in truth sustains the life of a place.

For the life of a place lies in its relation to the people that share it. And it is that reverence first which is taken away, tour group by tour group. Without this reverence, a place has nothing to give to those whose lives it must sustain, and they in turn lose their nourishment and fall into the same dereliction as their cathedral. It need not be so, for the visit of a pilgrim differs from that of a tourist. A pilgrim brings love and reverence, and the visit of a pilgrim leaves behind a gift of their reverence for others to share.

. . . And we lessen the soul of all places to which we go, and ourselves as well when we take without giving and come to them without reverence to life and to land, to people and to place, to ourselves and to the creation of which we are part. That is the destruction of which tourism is part and from which tourism arises, and it is there that we again can find the healing power for our land and our lives.

It’s well past time that we consider the wisdom in the pages of RAIN again.