What’s up on Earth Day in Busytown?
Richard Scarry’s Busytown lies at the heart of the sustainability challenge. We lose sight of that fact at our peril.
I’ve been reflecting a lot, lately, about Busytown, the cartoon city full of animals-standing-in-for-people that Richard Scarry created as the setting for books like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. I first read these books as a small child in the 1970s, and they fascinated me. Forty years later I had the chance to read them, again, with my son, Jay. I still remembered many of the characters and the stories. Except I also vividly recalled stories that didn’t seem to exist, like a banana heist and work at various places like the water purification plant, coal mine, power plant, and airport. After some on-and-off detective work, I discovered, from 1974–2015, the only edition of What Do People Do All Day?that Golden Books printed was abridged. Fortunately, Ebay came to the rescue, and I was able to buy a used copy of the unabridged 1968 edition. My brain wasn’t just making things up. There were all the stories I remembered.
Earth Day, it turned out, not to mention the environmental movement and civil rights movement, had taken their toll on Busytown. Busytown is where kids learn about what their parents do all day, when they go off to work, and where they learn about what they might want to do, too, themselves, when they grow up. Apparently, however, it was no longer fashionable after 1974 for people to work at the water treatment facility, the coal-fired power plant, or the coal mine (nor, either, for gorillas to be portrayed as banana thiefs; race and gender in Busytown are a complex, not always pretty story). These kinds of industrial labor were still things that people did all day. But apparently they were no longer forms of employment that the kinds of parents who read about Busytown with their kids wanted to celebrate or get kids excited about as future careers. In the theoretical lingo of science studies, they become invisible labor. I think it’s not an accident that 1974 was the year of the oil crisis and the year Dorothy Nelkin published her analysis of the controversy over the expansion of Boston’s Logan airport. It was a momentous time for environmental consciousness.
In a way, however, it’s a shame that all those pages got left out of childhood education for forty years. Indeed, I’ve never quite understood the logic. Those industries were then and still are at the heart of the environmental crisis. And it’s not just infrastructural labor that’s rendered unseen in our societies. Infrastructure itself is often made invisible. In Busytown, the electrical conduits are bolted onto the walls; today, in most houses, they’re located behind the drywall. The sewers are all buried under the streets. The power plants and coal mines are often hundreds of miles away, connected only by the electricity grid, which is also buried in my neighborhood and, more broadly, my part of metro Phoenix. Out of sight, out of mind.
How is it that we expect our kids to understand the environmental crisis that we confront as a global society in the 21st century if we don’t teach them from a very early age to see and understand the infrastructures that are the central drivers of the crisis? Isn’t it a better foundation for a war on coal — especially if we want it to be both effective and just — if coal is not just an empty signifier in a political slogan? If, instead, everybody learns as a small child what coal is, where it comes from, why we burn it to produce electricity, and the roles that a diverse array of workers play in making that happen? If we want a society that is well prepared to understand the challenges that we confront in protecting the Earth and maintaining the ecological foundations of our prosperity, wouldn’t we want all of our kids to learn about power plants, coal mines, hydroelectric dams, airports, and water purification plants?
I know what my good friend, Jon Foley (@globalecoguy), Executive Director of Project Drawdown and one of the world’s great environmental leaders, would say about Busytown on Earth Day. He’d say that the problem is that the stories about Busytown erase nature from our view. They forget the need for balance between people and planet. Busytown’s busy characters forget to remind us about — perhaps even deliberately leave out — the importance of the Earth in our lives and the place of Busytown in planetary ecology. Busytown’s protagonists pretend that what matters in modern societies is that human systems function well. That people are fed. That they have electricity for their lights and their air conditioners and gasoline for their cars. That the water they drink is clean. Underneath all of the success of all of those human systems, however, are the regulating and supporting services provided by natural ecosystems. And if natural ecosystems don’t function properly, then Busytown doesn’t function properly. The productivity of the soil decreases; the pollinators begin to die out. We run out of trees to cut down to make things. Giant rainstorms and hurricanes and storm surges flood out the roads, the downtown shops, and everybody’s houses. Heat waves make Busytown Phoenix uninhabitable.
Jon’s right, of course. All of that is absolutely true about Busytown. And yet …
And, yet, when we make that move, when we, as advocates for global sustainability, refocus our attention on the planet, I think we take our eye off the ball.
It’s Busytown that’s unsustainable.
Busytown is where little kids go with their parents to explore. And what they explore, as the titles of the books and the name of the town suggest, is what people do all day, in their busy lives, and the ways that they get around while they’re doing it.
Busytown is, I think, an archetype for modernity, an imaginary — and indeed the most accurate one that we have — of the kind of place that everyone lives in a modern society. It’s full of families of rabbits and bears and pigs and, of course, Lowly Worm, but it’s what all those families do that’s important for this story. Largely what they do is run all of the technological infrastructure in town. They run the power plant, powered by coal from the mine, transported by train and shoveled into the elevator to the boiler room. They run the mail, moving letters around the country, flying them on jet planes, driving them in trucks, sorting them by address, and delivering them to all the recipients. They run the food systems that grow and harvest wheat, mill it into flour, and bake it into bread. They run the lumber operations, cutting trees, sawing wood, pulping it, and making it into paper. They run the airport and the water purification plant. They run the cotton farms and the textile mills. They build the roads. They drive public transport and crew the ship. They build houses and fight fires. They run the healthcare system. In other words, in the main, the people of Busytown, and of modern societies more generally, are workers and managers in the great technological systems that make life in Busytown, and other modern societies, possible and give it the shape of modernity.
It’s all that stuff — all that human and engineered infrastructure — which has to change to make the planet sustainable: the ways that we configure our relationships to technology, every day, in the ordinary practices and routines of our everyday work and living, as we go about the business of making modern societies go.
Sustainability isn’t a lifestyle choice. Jon is right, to be sure, the things that we do as individuals matter, a lot. But by and large we can’t just change the layout of Phoenix as an urban metropolis to suit our needs as sustainability-minded individuals. The city was designed for the internal combustion engine and for the people-car hybrids who run around town in vast numbers, every day, even in the midst of a pandemic. To change its layout — to re-make Phoenix, or any other American city, as anything other than an automobile city — is a massive, multi-decadal undertaking. Both because the infrastructure is expensive and durable, with long lifetimes, and also because all of the things that we do all day, and all of the places that we go in our cars and our trucks, all of the routines that we’ve set up for ourselves, the schools for our kids, the stores we like to shop at: all of that will have to get reconfigured too, by everyone.
Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is humbling. In case you’ve forgotten, I encourage you to go pick up a copy and have a look. You will be regaled with thousands of stories of people on the move, each vehicle a tale in the telling. For sixty-nine pages, you will learn not only about the people on the go and the vehicles they travel with but also about the fashioning of the infrastructures that support them: the building of roads, the selling of cars, the movement of fuel, the laying of pipes, the pumping of gasoline, the operating of heavy equipment, the transport of food and sand and lumber and steel, the flying of planes, the vacations to the beach and to the camp, the plowing of snow, the policing of traffic, the transport of accident victims, the training of warfighters, the running of a modern industrial economy in all of its glorious motion.
All of that is up for re-design in the pursuit of a low-carbon future. All of it runs on carbon at the moment. Electrifying it is the future.
And that’s why, in the business of transforming Busytown, money will certainly help, and the government can write lots of rules, but neither money nor policy will do the job. The power plant workers are still going to have to do the work of figuring out how to run an electricity grid on solar and wind. The Department of Defense is going to have to figure out how to fight a war on electricity. And the rest of us are going to have to figure out how to orchestrate our lives when electricity is dirt cheap at noon and really, really expensive in the middle of the night. Almost no one alive remembers when it wasn’t the other way around: cheap at night, expensive during the day. It turns out, lots of things in our lives are optimized around that price differential. Bringing about this transformation means little things, like charging our future electric vehicles at work, in the middle of the day, when they’re in our bosses’ parking lots, instead of at night, in our garages. And it means big things, like perhaps rebalancing labor and capital in the economy or rejiggering the incentives that have driven us for a century toward a 24/7/365, always-on, globalized culture.
We’ve learned in the past two decades, especially from historians, just how thoroughly carbon has saturated every facet of modern politics, economies, and cultures. Exorcising that demon is going to be a beast of a challenge. We’re doing it, bit-by-bit, every day. And if I had to bet, I’d put money on a pre-2050 timeline for a post-carbon economy. In the process, we’ll figure out how to design photon cultures instead of petro-cultures.
But it’s not just the coal mine and the coal-fired power plant that are unsustainable. Every page of Busytown is unsustainable. And the people of Busytown aren’t environmentalists. Worse, if you berate them for that fact, they’re not going to listen to you. They’re ordinary people, going about the day-to-day business of their lives and their jobs, which you are proposing to turn, topsy-turvy, upside down. And their jobs are critical to the survival of Busytown, both because they keep the power on and because, in the near future, if they don’t figure out how to keep the power on using green electrons, climate change will do us all in. So cut them some slack, and then buckle down and get to work with them to figure it out. It’s on you to be helpful.
It’s Earth Day, so let’s all keep the planet in the back of our minds. But let’s not lose sight of Busytown, because it’s in the day-to-day business of Busytown where sustainability will be won or lost.
