Many on the left are fed up with Obama. The left needs to stay vigilant and active and continue to push the political conversation in America, but I find that many of the left’s critiques of Obama miss the mark. I’d like to offer the following framework for assessing the Obama administration.

First, let’s hit my starting assumption: the left is more morally developed than the right. Exceptions abound and this actually says very little about the moral development of any one individual regardless of their political affiliations. But the overall policies and guiding visions of the left tend to be farther along and include a circle of compassion for more people than the right. This opening concept could and should be discussed, argued and debated a fair amount, but I’m guessing that since most of our readers are lefty’s that I don’t actually need to elaborate further for now. We’ll start with that as a given.

Shortly before the presidential election of 2008, I heard neoconservative analyst Bill Kristol tell Jon Stewart that Barak Obama was not going to represent some dramatic change in government. Rather, he predicted that Obama would be a moderate democratic president following his past voting record as a moderate democratic senator. And “moderate democrat” is the same phrase of damnation that some disappointed lefties toss out. Same old politics we’ve seen before. Old story, new face. Boredom and frustration both take hold.

But Kristol was wrong. And the frustrated lefties are as well. And I think they’d better realize it before they attack one of their most important allies.

When we bring in the idea that the spectrum from right to left tends to incorporate greater moral development, then we can see that the far left tends to show an even greater moral development than moderate lefties, who are further along than middle-of-the-road dems. This doesn’t mean their personal lives, intelligence, work ethic or any of those things are also better. It just means that their morality includes more people and takes more information into view and strives to come up with solutions should serve a greater and greater good. In this light, the left is understandably frustrated with most moderate democrats who are falling short on delivering a better world.

So most mod dems are just not as advanced along that moral road and they haven’t caught up to the insights of the far left. That does not describe Obama. How are we to understand his more “moderate” actions then? Having been to the far left, having “seen the light” and fully understood the moral vision there, Obama works closer to the center of American politics because that’s where America is! The far left has an important job pushing the envelope, but they can only really affect the mid-left, not the whole of America. Obama seems to be working on a longer-term vision. If he had simply walked in and pushed more extreme left actions faster than he did, the pushback would have been even worse than it has been and he would have lost all ability to enact any change.

I once told someone that the president who would really represent my views should never be elected because we live in a democracy and my views do not represent America. But Obama has managed to understand the concepts of the far left and also respect the important concerns of the right and then articulate how they can be wed. This is not a mere posturing of “reaching across the aisle”, but rather a way to bring the nation forward into a more progressive agenda more effectively. Obama’s success at this still remains to be seen, but understanding where he’s coming from changes how we should examine and criticize his work. We must still examine it and we must still criticize it (and to his credit, he even asked us to), but it changes what the conversation is about.

While many on the left are busy criticising Obama for things he’s always said he’d do (pursue the war in Afghanistan) or for including voices from the right (Rick Warren at the inauguration), let us look at his work (including these same controversial moves) from the perspective of someone who is aiming higher than a 4-year glory ride for the left that only digs a deeper divide in this country.

I pitched this idea to a friend shortly after the election. She said, “It sounds like a nice theory, but if someone votes or acts like a moderate dem, then how can we actually tell the difference?” I replied, “I think we’ll have to wait and see, but I suspect that a post-left moderate will manage to accomplish more of the left’s agenda than the left has accomplished on it’s own.” Then it hit me. With the results of the election, he’d already done just that.

– image by Jacob Corvidae (based on Fairey based on Garcia)

I was reading fivethirtyeight and saw this interesting graph showing how liberal and conservative the democrats and republicans were in each state legislature.  (Dems are blue and left is more liberal.)

It was interesting, but not at all surprising that where I live  in Missouri the Democrats are fairly right leaning but I was surprised to see that the Republicans were the 4th most conservative in the country.

Even more surprising is that the most conservative republicans are found in California! Talk about polarized – they have the most liberal Dems and the most conservative GOP. No wonder they can never pass a budget.

And whats up with Rhode Island where both parties are left of center and only a hairs breadth apart. There must be a story there.

Why can’t I rent a small apartment in Detroit? I mean a really small apartment. I know that space is cheap these days with the collapse of the housing market, but spaces are still too big and low-cost isn’t always low enough. While they’re not the right choice for everyone, tiny apartments could improve the community by bringing greater density and simultaneously give more people access to that increasingly thriving part of town. What do I mean by tiny? I mean tiny: say 150-250 square feet. Like I said: not for everyone.

Does this sound completely crazy? Check out these great stories and photos of 84 square foot to 400 square foot dwellings for a look at how it can work.

And note that while the 84 square foot home is in Olympia (mild weather), it’s a stand-alone home (therefore without the great heating benefits of an apartment building) and still only has $6 / month heating bills. Starting to sound a little better.

I know it sounds anethema to the elbow-room spirit of the Midwest, but frankly that’s not working so well for us anyway in the ever-expanding rustbelt. Besides, small spaces just pack in the beauty and intensity of life into a more concentrated form. Remember that trick from childhood where you spread food out on the plate so it looks like there’s less of it on your plate? That’s the same thing that happens with our population. We’re spread out and it feels like we’ve got less life on the plate than we actually do. Bring those folks closer in together and magic starts to happen. In San Fran, people are buying 250 square foot condos for almost $300,000. This isn’t news to any urban planner or most eco-geeks – dense living builds upon itself. But it doesn’t just create livelier neighborhoods: it’s also more affordable.

Affordable Housing still isn’t all that affordable for many people. Even in Detroit, where the affordable housing industry has been strong for decades and does great work, it’s still primarily serving the needs of people above the poverty line. And in Detroit, there’s a great many people below that line. So it can serve a low-income population that’s not well served while also serving singles, hipsters, young folks, etc. who seem to be one of the few populations growing in Detroit.

Imagine a very reasonable $1.33 per square foot rental cost. A 150 square foot apartment would only cost $200 per month. That’s half the cost (or less depending on who you ask) of the cheapest rent you can find anywhere near downtown now for even a studio. Of course with that small of a space, you really need to customize the space to fit your needs precisely. But with only 150 square feet to work with, that’s a very manageable task.

The truth is that I’d move in next week if I could get that — and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Many of us talk about the idea of Detroit as a laboratory for the 21st century. With all the empty building space downtown, I think this experiment is worth the try.

People wanting to know how to reduce their footprint would like to have data so they know what changes to make to do it. Unfortunately the data available for a lot of choice is still incredibly hard to find or inaccurate and vague.

I personally don’t do a lot of footprinting because  I don’t feel the need for exact numbers to trust that doing a few key things will reduce my footprint:

• Eating primarily vegan
• Driving fewer miles in efficient vehicles
• Having a smaller home (or sharing it)
• Using less electricity, gas, and heating oil
• Reducing long distance travel

Once you’ve done all that then you can start talking about the details: local and organic food, flying vs driving vs trains, etc.

For those interested in calculators here’s some links that might help you find the one thats best for you or that has that bit of information you were looking for. Let us know if you have a favorite or find ones that are really good.

Top Five Footprint Calculators – Just some bloggers opinion but there are some good links

The 15 best carbon Calculators – If 5 isn’t enough for you try 15.

Michael Bluejay’s Calculator – This guy didn’t like the other calculators so he wrote his own. Its very simple and well laid out. Its worth reading his opinions on the other calculators. Its also worth reading about him. I feel like I met him somewhere before.

Food carbon Calculator – For those wanting a detailed look at food. You can compare the CO2 of tropical vs local fruit, cooked vs raw veggies, etc. This may not work in every browser.

If you find one that can tell you the footprint of a strawbale home vs a cob home or the different impacts of sugar vs sorghum, then I’m definitely interested.

A friend recently sent me a link to an article about the ecofootprint of pets. The article claimed that the footprint of owning a dog was greater than driving an SUV!

I was skeptical of this attention grabbing notion, and looked a little closer. Some of their assumptions are a bit sketchy – they use a very low miles per year figure for the SUV, they use human food figures when there should probably be some discount for animal food often being byproducts, they use a very large dog in their comparison, they do not include any of the other impact factors of driving (vehicle production, roads, etc.).

Regardless, of which is worse, they both have an impact. I get tired of the way people use these kind of comparisons.

If people were coming from the perspective of  “Each of us can use our fair share of the earth’s resources, how do I want to use mine?” then I don’t really care if they choose to have a pet or an SUV. As long as they are staying within a sustainable impact they can choose how to spend their eco-footprint budget.

Unfortunately, the average American uses over 4 times their fair share of the earth’s resources. So, it ends up feeling like the issue is presented as “Since destroying the planet with an SUV is not that much different than the destruction of a pet, they must both be minor so I might as well do both.”

So all of this got me looking at footprinting and I found some interesting stuff:

Human Welfare and Ecological Footprint

On wikipedia’s eco-footprint page this graph shows how the US impact is off the charts while its Human Development Index is no better than many countries that cause less than half the impact.

Cuba certainly occupies an interesting spot on that graph – as the top country in terms of development that is using less than its fair earth share.

Greenhous Gas Emissions From Food

Or this graph that shows the average American’s greenhouse gas emssions from food vs driving.

This does not mean its OK to drive!!!!!

It means you need to change your diet and your driving, if you want to have a reasonable footprint.

A vegan diet can reduce your food footprint by 72%. Thats 5.8 tons of CO2 equivalent.

Driving half as much can reduce your carbon footprint from vehicles by 45%.  What!?! Why not 50%? Because 10% of the lifecycle impact of a vehicle is in the manufacturing.

So get a car with twice the mileage and drive half as much and you will still be emitting 32% of the GHG from driving you were before.

Now if you sell your car and bike, walk, and take public transit – now we are talking. (And don’t give me that bullshit about how biking has a bigger impact because of the food you eat unless you have some real numbers that include all the externalities – roads, pollution, health, people living closer to work, etc.)

Being crazy is defined as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. So, with so much research out there describing how peoples’ brains work in real life (look here and here) why are activists so attached to the same failed methods?

Once you understand that just putting info out there doesn’t significantly change behavior, will you do things differently? Or will this exhortation have the same effect as all the “Please turn off the lights!” stickers out there?

(Thanks to David Roberts at Grist for the idea.)

The Lagomorph Four.  I mean this title to be tongue in cheek. It would require a tremendous amount of hubris to imagine that four friends starting a blog together is of any grand significance. As I have been known to point out: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can overuse a once inspiring quote until it is tiresome to hear. Indeed, they already have.” So why the hell should we bother spilling our words into this expanding blogosphere ocean? Worse yet, why should we bother thinking that someone (you, Dear Reader) would actual arrive and read this?

Of course, the answer to that question is simply this: because you already have.

According to David Sifry, founder of Technorati, there were 120 thousand new blogs a day… in 2007. I shudder to imagine how many there are now. I am left with two primary reasons then, to justify this new addition to the blogosphere.

1) Conversations happen at a personal level. With the overabundance of information out on the internet, many things have already been said — but that doesn’t mean they’ve been said to me. I’m much more likely to hear about them through a friend, colleague or some network connection with a friend or colleague. And thus it’s still worthwhile for all of us to say things that we deem important. Of course, you never know which pieces of conversation will effect who and when. This approach might be summarized as invoking the notion of the butterflies wings that lead to a hurricane, but perhaps more accurate would be to refer to the notion that all hurricanes arise from a huge collection of many smaller wind currents aligning at once.

2) Something important happens when a group of people bring their attention to bear on one intention. In other words, overused quotes or not, Margaret Meade was right. The important distinction to make about her quote, I believe, is this: simply because a small group of swell citizens can change the world doesn’t mean they always will. Let’s use the popular chaos theory analogy again: even if one could theoretically trace all hurricanes back to a butterfly’s flapping wings, there are millions more flapping wings than there are hurricanes.

Still we’ve seen it time and again in the art world: a new movement arises from a collection of people pulled together with a similar focus. In music: The Five (with the great moniker The Mighty Handful) from Russia in the mid 1800s , or Les Six from Paris in the 20s (which seems like a great name for dyke jazz band that wanted to tip their hats to the original Les Six). In art: The surrealists in paris (again), the Canadian Seven. In writing: The transcendentalists in New England, The Beats in Greenwich Village. And so on. In some cases, they were driven by a place-based philosophy (e.g. the Mighty Hand specifically wanted to discover and define “Russian” music). But even those driven by more universal ideas (the Surrealists or the Beats) arose because of mutual influence and shared development of their thought.

Obviously, web-culture in the aughties doesn’t require a place-based movement to foster a shared conversation — but a dedication to that shared conversation is needed. We four are already deeply influenced by conversation with each other over the past decade. Now, we’re making it more public and carrying it forward. Ergo: the lagomorph four.  Tongue in cheek and all: let’s see what happens.

P.S. While this is the inaugural post for our launch of the site — there are older posts to read, as we geared up for the launch. Feel free to browse….