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A
"WE THE PEOPLE"
interview with
Paolo Soleri
and
Jerry Brown |
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The following transcript is of a two
day interview of Paolo Soleri broadcast on Jerry Brown's nationally
syndicated talkshow, "We the People." The program aired on
12/9/95 and 12/11/95. An open and closed parenthesis,(), indicates
a loss of information in the process of transcribing the interview.
DAY 1 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
DAY 2 : Part |
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 | |
DAY 1 :
PART 1 JB:
Welcome to another edition of "We the People". This hour we
have a very special guest from Arizona, Paolo Soleri, an author,
a visionary, an architect, a pioneer of new human spaces.
He's the author of Arcosanti,
an Urban Laboratory, the book Technology
and Cosmogenesis, the Arcology,
the City in the Image of Man, the Omega
Seed, and that's got a logical hypothesis. I first met
Paolo Soleri many, many years ago when he was visiting California,
and I went to Arcosanti, which is a...I'm going to let him
describe this incredible...Words take it away from me. Paolo,
welcome to the show! Please describe Arcosanti for me.
PS: Good afternoon, and thank you for the
great introduction.
JB: And I just want to say to those who do
not know Paolo Soleri, he was one of the students of Frank
Lloyd Wright. He came over here from Italy after World War
II, and he's been working...I guess more or less permanently
seventy miles from Scottsdale building his dream right in
several thousand acres at about an elevation of 3,000 feet
in the Arizona desert. Now, take it from there, Paolo.
PS: Well, we have been attempting the last
twenty years at least to develop something that may be persuasive
in the north to introduce society to an idea which is a very
old idea overseeing man congregating into what we call towns,
cities and metropolitan systems. So it is a very old story,
the fact that the city is the title of civilization. Civilization,
the term itself says that there's no separation between the
appearance of the cities and the development of civilizations
JB: So the cities are tied into civilization...
PS: Yes.
JB: And yet there is a destructive element
right along with it, because it certainly seems like the city,
at least in modern times in so many places, is very hostile
to civilization. If by that we mean something that's elegant
and creative and beautiful and pleasurable.
PS: Well, that's somehow the pathology of
the city, and every phenomena some pathologies, so we should
be careful to discriminate between what the notion of the
city can offer and what it's offering for us for millenniums,
and which we are now making the city into which is very much
what you are saying an environment which is not very conducive
to, what you might call, the good society. The fact remains
that if we eliminate all the cities from this continent, what
remains is not much. In fact, even though we Americans tend
to be very skeptical about the presence of the city, we must
recognize that the city is still the place where things are
happening in scale and in quality which is very real otherwise.
JB: That's interesting
that things where they are happening in scale and quality,
and yet cities receive such a low estimation, not only by
people in government, but by the policies and by the fact
that people are moving away from cities, and have been doing
so for almost thirty years.
PS: Yeah, I think that's a horrendous mistake,
and maybe to give a glimpse to what I'm saying, let me try
to come up with some kind of metaphor. We know that the population
of the globe is doubling from 5 billion a few years ago, we
are going to be 10 billions by the year 2050 or so. So that
means that whatever the stress is upon the planet that we
put upon the...or need now...will be double by the doubling
of the population. So that would mean that in reality that
we would be needing the equivalent of two planets by the year
2050. Then, we Americans have the American dream to implement.
Well, if we implement the American dream and we take that
other...the other module for the planet, then the American
dream would be a planetary dream, and that would be very much
in tune with the notion of democracy, of justice, or equality,
and so on. So if that was going to happen, then we must multiple
the two planets we need, because of the doubling of the population
by 20, that's what we Americans consume compared to the average
population. So, we would be in need of 40 planets by the year
2050, if the American dreams become the planetary dream.
JB: So what you're really saying is that
we as Americans are modeling a way of life that takes either
forty times...will by the time we get more people...forty
more planets...
PS: Yes...
JB: ...or we cut our standard of living by
forty.
PS: That's a sore point. Unless we moderate,
unless we re-invent the American dream in terms of the physiology
of it, then it's not going to be a dream, it's going to be
doomsday, and naturally, we wouldn't get to that point, because
many other things would happen, but one thing that would happen
was going to be an enormous increase in suffering, in separation,
in isolation, in segregation, in xenophobia, and the list
can go on and on. Because the planet, for the first time in
the history of this planet in the history of mankind, the
planet appears as the main, one of the main actors in the
play, because its limitations now are becoming evident and
we cannot ignore these very clear and very substantial fact
that we cannot demand from the planet whatever we please,
so what we need is to take the American dream and frugalize
it to be able to make it into something that instead of being
geared to the finality of materialese and edenese, and so
on, should become more oriented toward the inner life of individuals
and societies. You might need less of the physical in order
to produce more of the mental and the spiritual.
JB: Okay, so what we really have to recognize
and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps
the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.
PS: I think it happens
and seems to be really that, and...
JB: I think that's important just to pause
a moment with that, the way we are. The way I drive my car,
the way I live along with the other 255 million Americans,
we are setting a pattern that by the fact that we puffing
ourselves up as number one, we're validating a way in which
when generalized in accordance with our own principles of
democracy and equality will result in absolute devastation
of the planet because it violates the laws of biology.
PS: Yeah, yeah, and...
JB: Or putting it another way, we as Americans
require billions of people to live like slaves and serfs and
peons so that the planet can permit our particular way of
being.
PS: That's right, so that there's this privileged
class which we will say Americans and the Europeans and whoever
comes in, and this privileged class would have the right to
control and to limit the resources, and let's say, the fulfillment
of the majority of the population of the globe, because think
what's going to happen when China, India and Africa are going
to move into this cycle of hyperconsumption that we are championing.
Things are going to precipitate very rapidly, and the antagonists,
the notion of "my nation is the first," and all the xenophobia
that we are slowly developing is going to be catastrophic
and a...
JB: All it means is that for China and India,
maybe Africa too, to copy middle class or even low middle
class American ways of being...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...and the whole thing it's going to
be a war for the dwindling resources available to sustain
that blotted, as you call it, hyperconsumerism.
PS: Yeah, and you know even to project the
notion that we might go back to the tribal obscurities over
many thousands of years ago.
JB: The only difficulty
is now that many places, you know China but also India, have
nuclear weapons and even have transcontinental missiles.
PS: That's part of the gloom, I mean, part
of the tragedy that we might be setting the condition for.
JB: So here you have a situation where the
politics in America, and probably the discussion in a lot
of people's minds, is will the middle class be able to keep
what it has and get more, and will the lower middle class
be able to catch up in terms of hyperconsumerism, and while
that focus is absorbing people's attention, those ways and
models and images are transmitted to the rest of the world,
and as they get even a little bit closer to where we are...
PS: That's right.
JB: ...the whole
thing is going to turn into a vast what...war...I mean some
fanatic, not a fanatic, just some person showing up in India
might say, wait a minute, we don't want to live on 200 kilograms
of grain a year, we want to live on four times that amount
like you do, and have some nuclear missiles here, and you
either start sending us grain or else, and we think Shiva
will take care of the rest.
PS: Yeah, that's in a very short, concise
statement that's a possibility.
JB: And there's probably fifty others that
are equally as bad.
PS: Oh, yes. But now let me make a little
step further and I'm bringing in now the aspect of planning
in architecture and why. Because all the activities of mankind,
the bulkiest, the most expensive, the most demanding, and
the most necessary is sheltering. We have to shelter ourselves,
our families, our society, the institution that society needs.
So this sheltering is really an immense imposition, an immense
transformation of nature into shelter, and this is quite evident.
Now, the most consuming, the most wasteful, the most polluted,
the most segregative kind of shelter we can come up is the
suburban shelter. So we are presented with this problem, that
we like the notion of expanding into the suburban development.
The fact is that's the most pernicious way of going about
generating the future for our children because it is the most
consuming, etc., etc.
JB: Okay, so that's another important point...
PS: Yip.
JB: ...because it invalidates totally the
entire discussion in the United States and Europe about, oh,
will we get enough economic growth to expand suburban reality
for many more millions of people, and you have just asserted
that that is in itself is a perversion of what the human spirit
is capable of.
PS: Yeah, that sounds very, very harsh, but
I'm afraid we are to read it for what it is, which is that
really since the habitat is the most imposing, the greatest
of all activity in which we are involved with and necessarily
so, if the choice of habitat is the wrong choice, we are in
for catastrophe.
JB: All right, and are the suburbs wrong
because they're spread out? Are they wrong because it covers
over soil? Is it wrong because it kills other species? Is
it wrong because it creates a box that you have to fill up
with littler boxes that than you import over great distances?
PS: You're hitting on...
JB: Or is it wrong because by creating a
space for all these boxes, the boxes are made, the toys, the
gadgets and then you have to throw them somewhere and that
then fills up even more space.
PS: Absolutely. I mean, the larger is the
container, let's say the single family home is a good example,
and the more like I have financial power, the bigger has to
be the container, the more I have to purchase in order to
fill the container. So this process of building larger and
larger units, isolating them into what you call the suburban
sprawl, what we call the...and, and then trying to connect
each box, as you call it, to the resources and the utilities
and the retrieval systems like sewage and garbage and so on,
all those boxes are going to be the epitome, the real epitome
of consumption. So we set up a cycle where we say where happiness
is the consumption, therefore we have to consume more, which
means we have to produce more, which means we have to transform
more of the planet into what we feel is connected to our own
fulfillment. That's a declaration of materialism, if there
is one. Orienting ourselves to a materialistic kind of set
up that is going to kill us, and number one because of the
limitation of the planet, number two because that's an indication
that instead of transcending toward mental and excellence
we are moving toward the hedonism...
JB: Okay, stop right there Paolo, we'll be
back in thirty seconds. You're listening to "We the People."
I'm Jerry Brown, and we're speaking with Paolo Soleri.
Next
DAY 1 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
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DAY 2 : Part |
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2 | 3 |
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