ECOLOGY

CALORIES OUT, CALORIES IN

JONATHAN ROWE, ON THE COMMONS - It is the perverse genius of the
corporate economy to constantly find ways to sell us what we used to
have for free. In nothing is this more evident than in the realm of
bodily exertion. For decades centuries really this thing called "the
economy" has been stripping away the physical activity from daily life.
Eventually exertion itself became scarce, and something we had to buy.
At the same time, corporations were turning food into oral entertainment
and arterial junk, and pushing it at us constantly, thus making the
activity deficit all the more pressing.

Ergo the need to buy from "health clubs", the activity that once was
built into daily life. The farmer's plough became a Cybex machine, the
walk to the station a treadmill. Where once we produced we now consume;
and we internalize this process to such a degree that the ersatz version
becomes more legitimate than the original. I once belonged to a YMCA in
Manhattan where people would take an elevator to the 4th floor to use a
Stairmaster. The strange alchemy of market culture had made the
commoditized substitute more real somehow than just walking up the
stairs.

This process, multiplied thousands of times over, is what economists
fondly call "growth," much of it at least. In the conventional
reckonings it is the thing most devoutly to be sought. But it is beyond
screwy, not least where the strange calculus of physical exertion is
concerned. Probably I'm not the only one here who has sweated away on an
elliptical trainer (I admit it) and thought, "Why am I using electricity
to do this? Shouldn't I be producing something with this work instead?".
. .

in the Wall Street Journal reports on a gym in Hong Kong that has hooked
up its elliptical trainers to a car battery, and is using the resulting
energy to help run the gym. The thirteen machines can produce about 300
watts an hour, which is enough to run 5 sixty-watt bulbs. That's hardly
a peak surge. But it's something; and when you think about all the
Americans who toil away on such machines, the watts could add up. The
gym is part of an Asian chain called California Fitness (shouldn't we
Californians get a royalty or something for the expropriation of our
identity for corporate marketing?), which in turn is owned by the
24-Hour Fitness chain in the U.S. That company has close to 400 gyms in
the U.S. with some 3 million members. This could amount to something.

In this as in many other ways, people are rejecting the role of
"consumer" that economists assign to us, and are reclaiming their
capacity to produce to meet their own and others' needs. It turns out
the Hong Kong gym is part of a growing trend. The U.S. Army is financing
research on shoes that could generate energy when the heel strikes the
ground; these could enable soldiers to carry smaller batteries in their
packs. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania is developing a
backpack that would generate energy from the jiggling motion that comes
from walking. He's up to 15 watts so far.

http://onthecommons.org/node/1106

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||