World Change Cafe

Chomsky: Is the U.S. Gearing Up for the Destruction of Iran?

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:49:19 +0000

By Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s Official Site

Posted on July 15, 2010, Printed on July 18, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/147572/

The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that “the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability” in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of US global concerns. The term “stability” here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under US control.

In June 2010 Congress strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding US offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is “to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran.” British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the US will stay the course after the replacement of General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior military staff along with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. The meeting focused “on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran,” according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that “I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective.” Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.

The increasing threats of military action against Iran are of course in violation of the UN Charter, and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.

Some analysts who seem to be taken seriously describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that “The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East,” no less. If Iran’s nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will “move toward” the new Iranian “superpower.” To rephrase in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the US. In the US army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a US attack that targets not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure — meaning, the civilian society. “This kind of military action is akin to sanctions – causing ‘pain’ in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means.”

Such inflammatory pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided by military and intelligence reports to Congress in April 2010 [Lieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess, Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, Statement before the Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, 14 April 2010; Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010; John J. Kruzel, American Forces Press Service, “Report to Congress Outlines Iranian Threats,” April 2010.

The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the military and intelligence assessments. Rather, they are concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.

The reports make it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is “relatively low compared to the rest of the region,” and of course minuscule as compared to the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly “defensive, … designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.” Iran has only “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders.” With regard to the nuclear option, “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Though the Iranian threat is not military aggression, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II. As one influential figure advised, expressing a common understanding, control of these resources yields “substantial control of the world” (A. A. Berle).

But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. Iran’s “current five-year plan seeks to expand bilateral, regional, and international relations, strengthen Iran’s ties with friendly states, and enhance its defense and deterrent capabilities. Commensurate with that plan, Iran is seeking to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity.” In short, Iran is seeking to “destabilize” the region, in the technical sense of the term used by General Petraeus. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is “stabilization.” Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is “destabilization,” hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor of the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term “stability” in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile it was necessary to “destabilize” the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also carrying out and supporting terrorism, the reports continue. Its Revolutionary Guards “are behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the past three decades,” including attacks on US military facilities in the region and “many of the insurgent attacks on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq since 2003.” Furthermore Iran backs Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine — if elections matter. The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon’s latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships, emphasized by Obama with his strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

The terrorist acts attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah pale in comparison to US-Israeli terrorism in the same region, but they are worth a look nevertheless.

On May 25 Lebanon celebrated its national holiday Liberation Day, commemorating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22 years, as a result of Hezbollah resistance — described by Israeli authorities as “Iranian aggression” against Israel in Israeli-occupied Lebanon (Ephraim Sneh). That too is normal imperial usage. Thus President John F. Kennedy condemned the “the assault from the inside” in South Vietnam, “which is manipulated from the North.” This criminal assault by the South Vietnamese resistance against Kennedy’s bombers, chemical warfare, programs to drive peasants to virtual concentration camps, and other such benign measures was denounced as “internal aggression” by Kennedy’s UN Ambassador, liberal hero Adlai Stevenson. North Vietnamese support for their countrymen in the US-occupied South is aggression, intolerable interference with Washington’s righteous mission. Kennedy advisors Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson, considered doves, also praised Washington’s intervention to reverse “aggression” in South Vietnam — by the indigenous resistance, as they knew, at least if they read US intelligence reports. In 1955 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had defined several types of “aggression,” including “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or subversion.” For example, an internal uprising against a US-imposed police state, or elections that come out the wrong way. The usage is also common in scholarship and political commentary, and makes sense on the prevailing assumption that We Own the World.

Hamas resists Israel’s military occupation and its illegal and violent actions in the occupied territories. It is accused of refusing to recognize Israel (political parties do not recognize states). In contrast, the US and Israel not only do not recognize Palestine, but have been acting relentlessly and decisively for decades to ensure that it can never come into existence in any meaningful form. The governing party in Israel, in its 1999 campaign platform, bars the existence of any Palestinian state — a step towards accommodation beyond the official positions of the US and Israel a decade earlier, which held that there cannot be “an additional Palestinian state” between Israel and Jordan, the latter a “Palestinian state” by US-Israeli fiat whatever its benighted inhabitants and government might believe.

Hamas is charged with rocketing Israeli settlements on the border, criminal acts no doubt, though a fraction of Israel’s violence in Gaza, let alone elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, in this connection, that the US and Israel know exactly how to terminate the terror that they deplore with such passion. Israel officially concedes that there were no Hamas rockets as long as Israel partially observed a truce with Hamas in 2008. Israel rejected Hamas’s offer to renew the truce, preferring to launch the murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008, with full US backing, an exploit of murderous aggression without the slightest credible pretext on either legal or moral grounds.

The model for democracy in the Muslim world, despite serious flaws, is Turkey, which has relatively free elections, and has also been subject to harsh criticism in the US. The most extreme case was when the government followed the position of 95% of the population and refused to join in the invasion of Iraq, eliciting harsh condemnation from Washington for its failure to comprehend how a democratic government should behave: under our concept of democracy, the voice of the Master determines policy, not the near-unanimous voice of the population.

The Obama administration was once again incensed when Turkey joined with Brazil in arranging a deal with Iran to restrict its enrichment of uranium. Obama had praised the initiative in a letter to Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, apparently on the assumption that it would fail and provide a propaganda weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the US was furious, and quickly undermined it by ramming through a Security Council resolution with new sanctions against Iran that were so meaningless that China cheerfully joined at once — recognizing that at most the sanctions would impede Western interests in competing with China for Iran’s resources. Once again, Washington acted forthrightly to ensure that others would not interfere with US control of the region.

Not surprisingly, Turkey (along with Brazil) voted against the US sanctions motion in the Security Council. The other regional member, Lebanon, abstained. These actions aroused further consternation in Washington. Philip Gordon, the Obama administration’s top diplomat on European affairs, warned Turkey that its actions are not understood in the US and that it must “demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West,” AP reported, “a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally.”

The political class understands as well. Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that the critical question now is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?” — following orders like good democrats. A New York Times headline captured the general mood: “Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader’s Legacy.” In brief, do what we say, or else.

There is no indication that other countries in the region favor US sanctions any more than Turkey does. On Iran’s opposite border, for example, Pakistan and Iran, meeting in Turkey, recently signed an agreement for a new pipeline. Even more worrisome for the US is that the pipeline might extend to India. The 2008 US treaty with India supporting its nuclear programs — and indirectly its nuclear weapons programs — was intended to stop India from joining the pipeline, according to Moeed Yusuf, a South Asia adviser to the United States Institute of Peace, expressing a common interpretation. India and Pakistan are two of the three nuclear powers that have refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the third being Israel. All have developed nuclear weapons with US support, and still do.

No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons; or anyone. One obvious way to mitigate or eliminate this threat is to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East. The issue arose (again) at the NPT conference at United Nations headquarters in early May 2010. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, proposed that the conference back a plan calling for the start of negotiations in 2011 on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.

Washington still formally agrees, but insists that Israel be exempted — and has given no hint of allowing such provisions to apply to itself. The time is not yet ripe for creating the zone, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated at the NPT conference, while Washington insisted that no proposal can be accepted that calls for Israel’s nuclear program to be placed under the auspices of the IAEA or that calls on signers of the NPT, specifically Washington, to release information about “Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” Obama’s technique of evasion is to adopt Israel’s position that any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the US can delay indefinitely, as it has been doing for 35 years, with rare and temporary exceptions.

At the same time, Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, asked foreign ministers of its 151 member states to share views on how to implement a resolution demanding that Israel “accede to” the NPT and throw its nuclear facilities open to IAEA oversight, AP reported.

It is rarely noted that the US and UK have a special responsibility to work to establish a Middle East NWFZ. In attempting to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of the Iraq in 2003, they appealed to Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), which called on Iraq to terminate its development of weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK claimed that they had not done so. We need not tarry on the excuse, but that Resolution commits its signers to move to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East.

Parenthetically, we may add that US insistence on maintaining nuclear facilities in Diego Garcia undermines the NWFZ established by the African Union, just as Washington continues to block a Pacific NWFZ by excluding its Pacific dependencies.

Obama’s rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation has received much praise, even a Nobel peace prize. One practical step in this direction is establishment of NWFZs. Another is to withdraw support for the nuclear programs of the three non-signers of the NPT. As often, rhetoric and actions are hardly aligned, in fact are in direct contradiction in this case, facts that pass with as little attention as most of what has just been briefly reviewed.

Instead of taking practical steps towards reducing the truly dire threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the US is taking major steps towards reinforcing US control of the vital Middle East oil-producing regions, by violence if other means do not suffice. That is understandable and even reasonable, under prevailing imperial doctrine, however grim the consequences, yet another illustration of “the savage injustice of the Europeans” that Adam Smith deplored in 1776, with the command center since shifted to their imperial settlement across the seas.

Read more of Noam Chomsky’s work at Chomsky.info.

Our Plunder Of Nature Will End Up Killing Capitalism And Our Obscene Lifestyles

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:47:56 +0000

By Joe Bageant

13 July, 2010
JoeBageant.com

To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have.

As an Anglo European white guy from a very long line of white guys, I want to thank all the brown, black, yellow and red people for a marvelous three-century joy ride. During the past 300 years of the industrial age, as Europeans, and later as Americans, we have managed to consume infinitely more than we ever produced, thanks to colonialism, crooked deals with despotic potentates and good old gunboats and grapeshot. Yes, we have lived, and still live, extravagant lifestyles far above the rest of you. And so, my sincere thanks to all of you folks around the world working in sweatshops, or living on two bucks a day, even though you sit on vast oil deposits. And to those outside my window here in Mexico this morning, the two guys pruning the retired gringo’s hedges with what look like pocket knives, I say, keep up the good work. It’s the world’s cheap labor guys like you — the black, brown and yellow folks who take it up the shorts — who make capitalism look like it actually works. So keep on humping. Remember: We’ve got predator drones.

After twelve generations of lavish living at the expense of the rest of the world, it is understandable that citizens of the so-called developed countries have come to consider it quite normal. In fact, Americans expect it to become plusher in the future, increasingly chocked with techno gadgetry, whiz bang processed foodstuffs, automobiles, entertainments, inordinately large living spaces — forever.

We’ve had plenty of encouragement, especially in recent times. Before our hyper monetized economy metastasized, things such as housing values went through the sky, and the cost of basics, food etc. went through the basement floor, compared to the rest of the world. The game got so cheap and fast that relative fundamental value went right out the window and hasn’t been seen since. For example, it would be very difficult to make Americans understand that a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs have more inherent value than an iPhone. Yet, at ground zero of human species economics, where the only currency is the calorie, that is still true.

Such is the triumph of the money economy that nothing can be valued by any other measure, despite that nobody knows what money is worth at all these days. This is due in part to the international finance jerk-off, in which the world’s governments print truckloads of worthless money, so they can loan it out. The idea here is that incoming repayment in some other, more valuable, currency will cover their own bad paper. In turn, the debtor nations print their own bogus money to repay the loans. So you have institutions loaning money they do not have to institutions unable to repay the loans. All this is based on the bullshit theory that tangible wealth is being created by the world’s financial institutions, through interest on the debt. Money making money.

As my friend, physicist and political activist George Salzman writes,

“Everyone in these ‘professional’ institutions dealing in money lives a fundamentally dishonest life. Never mind ‘regulating’ interest rates,” he says. “We must do away with interest, with the very idea of ‘money making money’. We must recognize that what is termed ‘Western Civilization’ is in fact an anti-civilization, a global social structure of death and destruction. However, the charade of ever-increasing debt can be kept up only as long as the public remains ignorant. Once ecological limits have been reached the capitalist political game is up.”

You can see why I love this guy.

Boomers and Doomers and XXL bloomers

Capitalism wouldn’t be around today, at least not in its current pathogenic form, if it had not caught a couple of lucky breaks. The first of course, was the expansion of bloodsucking colonialism to give it transfusions of unearned wealth, enabling “investors” to profit by artificial means (death, oppression and slavery). But the biggest break was being driven to stratospheric heights by inordinate quantities of available hydrocarbon energy. Inordinate, but never the less finite. Consequently, the 100-year-long oil suckdown that put industrial countries in the tall cotton, now threatens to take back from subsequent beneficiary generation everything it gave. The Hummers, the golf courses, the big box stores, cruising at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic — everything.

You’d never know that, to look around at Americans or Canadians, who have not the slightest qualms about living in that 3,500 square foot vinyl sided fuck box, if they can manage to make the mortgage nut, or unashamedly buying a quadruple X large Raiders Jersey because, hey, a guy’s gotta eat, right? Why don’t I deserve a nice ride, a swimming pool and a flat screen? I worked for it (sure you did buddy, your $12,000 Visa/MasterCard tab is proof of that).

The doomers and the peak oilers gag, and they call it American denial. Personally, I think it is somewhat unfair to say that most Americans and Canadians are in denial. They simply don’t have a fucking clue about what is really happening to them and their world. Everything they have been taught about working, money and “quality of life” constitutes the planet’s greatest problem — overshoot. Understanding this trashes our most basic assumptions, and requires a complete reversal in contemporary thought and practice about how we live in the world. When was the last time you saw any individual, much less an entire nation, do that?

Compounding our ignorance and naiveté are the officials and experts, politicians, media elites, and especially economists, who interpret the world for us and govern the course of things. The go-to guys. They don’t know either. But they’ve got the lingo down.

Somehow or other, it all has to do with the economy, which none of us understands, despite round the clock media jabbering on the subject. Somehow it has to do with this great big spring on Wall Street called “the market” that’s gotta be kept wound up, and interest rates at something called The Fed, which have got to be kept smunched down. The industry of crystal gazing and hairball rubbing surrounding these entities is called economics.

In heaven, there are no jobs

The following may be old news to some who studied economics in college. However, I did not. And, for me at least, this gets at the heart of our dilemma (if dilemma is the right word for economic, environmental and species collapse). Here goes:

The human economy is made up of three parts: nature, work and money. But since nobody would pay people like Allen Greenspan or Milton Friedman millions of dollars if they talked just like the rest of us, economists and academics refer to these three parts as the primary, secondary and tertiary economies.

Of these, nature — the world’s ecosystems and natural capital — is by far the most important. It comprises about three quarters of the total value of economic activity (Richard Costanza et al. 1997). To western world economists, nature — when it is even give nature a thought — is considered to be limitless.

The second part, work, is the labor required to produce goods and services from natural resources. Work creates real value through efficient use of both human and natural resource energy. A potato is just a potato until people sweating over belt lines and giant fryers turn it into Tater Tots.

The third economy, the tertiary economy, is the production and exchange of money. This includes anything that can be exchanged for money, whether it is gold, or mortgages bundled as securities, or derivatives. In short, any paperwork device that can be rigged up in such a fashion that money will stick to it. Feel free to take a wild-assed guess which of the three economies causes the most grief in this world.

To an economist, work — the stuff that eats up at least a third of our earthly lives, is merely a “factor” called labor. Work is considered an unfortunate cost in creating added value. Added value, along with nature’s resources, is the basis for all real world profits. Without labor, the money economy could not gin up on-paper wealth in its virtual economy. Somewhere, somebody’s gotta do some real-world work, before bankers and investment brokers can go into their offices and pretend to work at “creating and managing wealth.”

Paying the workers in society to produce real wealth costs money. Capitalists hate any sort of cost. It represents money that has somehow escaped their coffers. So when any behemoth corporation hands out thousands of pink slips on a Friday, Wall Street cheers and “the market” goes up. No ordinary mortal has ever seen “the market.” But traders on the floor of 11 Wall Street, people who’ve deemed themselves more than mortal by virtue of their $110 Vanitas silk undershorts, assure us the market does exist. No tours of the New York Stock exchange are permitted, so we have to take their word for it.

In any case, in the money economy, eliminating costs, even if those costs happen to be feeding human beings, citizens of the empire, is sublime. That is why economists in the tertiary economy can declare a “jobless recovery” with a straight face. By their lights, the perfect recovery would necessarily be 100% jobless. Human costs of generating profit would be entirely eliminated.

Say what you will about the tertiary “money economy,” but one thing is certain. It’s virulent. Right now finance makes up 42% of GDP, and is rising. Traditionally that figure has been around 9%. Fifty eight percent of the economy is “services.” When it comes to the service economy, most people think of fried chicken buckets and “customer service,” call centers harassing debtors or selling credit cards. However, much of the so-called service economy consists of “services” sub-corporations and entities owned and operated by monopolies in communications, electronic access and energy. They are designed for the sole purpose of robbing the people incrementally. Borrow a microscope and read the back side your cable and electric bill. Billing you is a “service” for which you pay. So is the guy who cuts off your lights if you don’t.

And manufacturing? Ten percent. Mostly big ticket items such as salad shooters, as near as I can tell.

What nature?

Still though, the foundation of the world, including our entire economic structure, is nature. This is clear to anyone who has ever, planted a garden, hiked in the woods, gone fishing or been gnawed on by chiggers. In vis est exordium quod terminus.

Yet, not one in a thousand economists takes nature into account. Nature has no place in contemporary economics, or the economic policy of today’s industrial nations. Again, like the general American public, these economists are not in denial. They simply don’t know it’s there. Historically, nature has never been considered even momentarily because economists, like the public, never figured they would run out of it. With the Gulf oil “spill” at full throttle, the terrible destruction of nature is becoming obvious. But no economist who values his or her career wants to start figuring the cost of ecocide into pricing analysis. For god sake man, it’s a cost!

With industrial society chewing the ass out of Mama Nature for three centuries, something had to give, and it has. Capitalists, however, remain unimpressed by global warming, or melting polar ice caps, or Southwestern desert armadillos showing up in Canada, or hurricanes getting bigger and more numerous every year. They are impressed by the potential dough in the so-called green economy. In fact, last night I watched an economist on CNN say that if the government had let the free market take care of the BP gulf catastrophe, it would not be the clusterfuck it is now. Now THAT might qualify as denial. In the mean time, anthropogenic ecocide and resource depletion, coupled with the pressures of six billion mouths and asses across the globe, have started to produce — surprise surprise, Sheriff Taylor! — very real effects on world economies. (How could they not?) So far though, in the simplistic see-spot-run American mind, it’s all about dead pelicans and oiled up hotel beaches.

Monkey with the paper

When the U.S., and then the world’s money economy started to crumble, the first thing capitalist economists could think of to do was to monkey with the paper. That’s all they knew how to do. It was unthinkable that the tertiary virtual economy, that great backroom fraud of debt manipulation and fiat money, might have finally reached the limits of the material earth to support. That the money economy’s gaming of workers and Mother Nature might itself might be the problem never occurred to the world’s economic movers and shakers. It still hasn’t. (Except for Chavez, Morales, Castro and Lula). Jobs disappeared, homes went to foreclosure, and personal debt was at staggering all time highs. America’s working folks were taking it square in the face. Not that economists or financial kingpins cared much one way or the other. In the capitalist financial world, everything is an opportunity. Cancer? Build cancer hospital chains. Pollution? Sell pollution credits. The country gone bankrupt?

“Nothing to do,” cried the mad hatters of finance, “but print more money, and give gobs of cash to the banks! Yes, yes, yes! Borrow astronomical amounts of the stuff and bribe every fat cat financial corporation up and down The Street!” All of which came down to creating more debt for the common people to work off. They seem willing enough to do it too — if only they had jobs.

Along with the EU, Japan and the rest of the industrial world, the US continues to flood the market with cheap credit. That would be hunky dory, if was actually wealth for anybody but a banker. The real problems are debt and fraud, and tripling the debt in order to cover up the fraud. And pretending there no natural costs of our actions, that we do not have to rob the natural world to crank up the money world through debt.

No matter what economists tell us abut getting the credit industry moving again, papering over debt with more debt will not pollinate our food crops when the last honeybee is dead. I suggest that we put the economists out there in the fields, hand-pollinating crops like they do in China. They seem to know all about the subject, and have placed a monetary value of $12 billion on the pollination accomplished by bees in the US. Can you imagine the fucking arrogance? All bees do is make our fruit and vegetable supply possible. Anyway, if we cannot use the economists for pollinators (odds are they are too damned whacked to do that job), we could also stuff them down the blowhole of the Deepwater Horizon spill. For the first time in history, economists would be visibly useful.

Speaking of China: Since there is no way to pick up the turd of American capitalism by the clean end, much less polish it, American economists have pointed east, and set up a yow-yow about China as “the emerging giant.” The “next global industrial superpower.” Many Chinese are willing to ride their bicycles 10 miles to work through poisonous yellow-green air, and others in the “emerging middle class” are willing to wade into debt up to their nipples; this is offered as evidence of the viability of industrial capitalism. All it proves is that governments and economists never learn. In the quest of getting something for nothing, China follows the previous fools right into the smog and off the cliff.

Sumthin’ fer nuthin’

The main feature of capitalism is the seductive assertion that you can get something for nothing in this world. That you can manufacture wealth through money manipulation, and that it is OK to steal and hold captive the people’s medium of exchange, then charge them out the ass for access. That you can do so with a clear conscience. Which you can, if you are the kind of sleazy prick who has inherited or stolen enough wealth to get into the game.

Even so, to keep a rigged game going, you must keep the suckers believing they can, and eventually will, benefit from the game. Also, that it is the only game in town. Legitimizing public theft means indoctrinating the public with all sorts of market mystique and hocus-pocus. They must be convinced there is is such a thing as an “investment” for the average schmuck drawing a paycheck (and there is, sort of, between the crashes and the bubbles). It requires a unified economic rationale for government and industry policies, and it is the economist’s job to pump out this rationale. Historically, they have seldom hesitated to get down on their knees and do so.

It ain’t robbery, it’s a business cycle

Capitalism is about one thing: aggregating the surplus productive value of the public for private interests. As we have said, it is about creating state sanctioned “investments” for the workers who produce the real wealth. Things like home “ownership” and mortgages, or stock investments and funds to absorb their retirement savings. That crushing 30-year mortgage with two refis is an investment. So is that 401K melting like a snow cone the beach.

As the people’s wealth accumulates, it is steadily siphoned off by government and elite private forces. From time to time, it is openly plundered for their benefit by way of various bubbles, depressions or recessions and other forms of theft passed off as unavoidable acts of nature/god. These periodic raids and draw downs of the people’s wealth are attributed to “business cycles.” Past periodic raids and thefts are heralded as being proof of the rationale. “See folks, it comes and goes, so it’s a cycle!” Economic raids and busts become “market adjustments.” Public blackmail and plundering through bailouts become a “necessary rescue packages.” Giveaways to corporations under the guise of public works and creating employment become “stimulus.” The chief responsibility of economists is to name things in accordance with government and corporate interests. The function of the public is to acquire debt and maintain “consumer confidence.” When the public staggers to its feet again and manages to carry more debt, buy more poker chips on credit to play again, it’s called a recovery. They are back in the game.

Dealer, hit me with two more cards,. I feel lucky.

Does it hurt yet?

To anyone who is paying attention, things look doomed. Fortunately for American capitalism, nobody is paying attention. They never have. Even given the unemployment numbers, foreclosures and bankruptcies, most Americans are still not feeling enough pain yet to demand change. Not that they will. Demand change, I mean. We haven’t the slightest idea of any other options, outside those provided by the corporate managed state. So in a chorus well-schooled by the media the public demands “reform,” of the present system, the systemic pathogenic system based on exploitation of the many by the few, the one presently eating our society from the inside out. How do you reform that?

We are clueless, and the state sees to it that we stay that way. Take the price of gas, about which Americans are obsessive. In one way or another, petroleum is the subject of much news coverage, nearly as much as pissing matches between egomaniacs in Hollywood or o Capitol Hill. So one might think that by now Americans would have a realistic grasp of the petroleum business and things like oil and gasoline prices.

Hah, think again! This is America, this is Strawberry Fields, where nothing is real and the skies are not cloudy all day. We’re stewed in a consumer hallucination called the American Dream and riding a digital virtual money economy nobody can even prove exists.

Is there an economy out there or not?

If we decide to believe the money economy still exists, and that debt is indeed wealth, then we damned sure know where to go looking for the wealth. Globally, forty percent of it is in the paws of the wealthiest one percent. Nearly all of that one percent are connected to the largest and richest corporations. Just before the economy blew out, these elites held slightly less than $80 trillion. After the blowout/bailout, their combined investment wealth was estimated at a little over $83 trillion. To give some idea, this is four years of the gross output of all the human beings on earth. It is only logical that these elites say the only way to revive the economy, which to them consists entirely of the money economy, is to continue to borrow money from them.

However, the unasked question still hangs in the air: Does the money economy even exist anymore? Is it still there? (was it ever?) Or are we all blindly going through the motions because:

A: we do not understand that, for all practical historical purposes, it’s over;

B: we do not know how to do anything else so we keep dancing with the corpse of the hyper-capitalist economy;

C: the right calamity has not come down the pike to knock us loose from the spell of the dance,

or D: we’re so friggin brain dead, commodities engorged and internally colonized by capitalist industrialism that nobody cares, and therefore it no longer matters.

This is multiple choice, and it counts ten points toward survival, come the collapse.

If there is no economy left, what the hell are we all participating in? A mirage? The zombie ball? The short answer is: Because the economy is a belief system, you are participating in whatever you believe you are. Personally, I believe we are participating in a modern extension of the feudal system, with bankers as the new feudal barons and credit demographics as their turf. But then, I drink and take drugs. Whatever it is, the money economy is the only game in town until the collapse, after which chickens and firewood may become the national currency. The Masai use cattle don’t they?

At the same time, even dumb people are starting to feel an undefined fear in their bones. When I was back in the States last month, an old high school chum, a sluggard who seldom has forward thought beyond the next beer and Lotto scratch ticket, confides in me:

“Joey, I can’t shake the feeling that something big and awful is going to happen. And by awful I mean awful.”

“Happen to what?”

“Money, work, our country. Shit, I dunno.”

“Probably all three,” I opined. “Plus the environment.”

“Cheerful fuck, ain’t ya?”

“That’s what they pay me for, Bubba.”

Some in the herd are starting to feel a big chill in the air, the first winds of the approaching storm. Yes, something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, dooooo yew, Mistah Jones?

However, the most adept economists and other court sorcerers are going along as if nothing too unusual is happening — calling it a recession, or more recently a double-dip recession (don’t you love these turd-balls, making it sound as harmless as an ice cream cone — gimme a double dip please!) or even a depression. But no matter what it is, they smugly assure us, there is nothing happening that the world has never seen before. Including the insider scams that ignited the catastrophe. It’s just a matter of size. Extent.

OK, it’s a matter of scale. Like the Gulf oil spill. We’ve seen spills before, just not this big. But over the next couple of years as the poison crud circulates the world’s oceans, the Deep Horizon spill will prove to be a global game changer, whether economists and court wizards acknowledge it or don’t. Anything of global scale, whether it is in finance, energy, foreign aid, world health or war contracting, is accompanied by unimaginable complexity. That makes it perfect cover for criminal activity. Particularly finance, where you are always close to the money.

Jim Kunstler, never at a loss to describe a ludicrous situation, sums up the paper economy’s engineering of our collapse nicely:

“Wall Street — in particular the biggest ‘banks’ — packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet … the people fabricating things like synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) had no idea what the fuck they were doing — besides deliberately creating documents that nobody would ever understand, that would never be unraveled by teams of law clerks … and were guaranteed to place in jeopardy every operation of the world economy above the barter level.”

Phew!

So, for $5,000 and an all expense paid trip to Rio: What does a good capitalist do after having stolen all there is to steal from the living, then stolen the nation’s future wealth from the unborn through debt both public and private?

Tick tock, tick tock. The wheel spins.

Blaaaaaamp!

“Your answer please.”

“A good capitalist would ‘invest’ his haul in some other racket, some other scam in the money economy.”

“Vanna, a pie in the kisser for this guy, please.”

The problem with the answer is that economy is now toxed out. Radioactive. Crawling with paper vermin and all manner of vermin, especially toxic derivatives — about $1.4 quadrillion worth (even as we are still trying to get used to hearing the term trillions), according to the Bank of National Settlements. That is 1,000 trillion, or $190,000 for every human being on the planet. There is not now, and never will be, enough wealth to cover that puppy — because there is not enough natural world under the puppy to create it. Not the way capitalism creates wealth.

Defenders of capitalism who say it can and must be saved must also admit that there is not enough money left to work with, to invest. There is only debt. Oh, yeah, we forgot; debt is wealth to a banker. Well then, all we gotta do is collect $190,000 per head from people in Sudan and Haiti and the rest of the planet.

Naw, that’s too hard. Elite capital’s best bet is a good old fashioned money raid on the serfs; create another bubble that will buy enough time before it pops to make the already rich a few billion richer. To that end, the G-8 is blowing one last bounder out there in the hyperspace where the economy is alleged to be surviving. Naturally, they are doing it in order to “save the world economy.” The tough part is figuring out what to base the next bubble on.

May I suggest Soylent Green?

Under God, with fees and compound interest for all

From the outset, capitalism was always about the theft of the people’s sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft — the final looting of the source of their sustenance — nature. Now that capitalism has eaten its own seed corn, the show is just about over, with the nastiest scenes yet to play out around water, carbon energy (or anything that expends energy), soil and oxygen. For the near future however, it will continue to play out around money.

As the economy slowly implodes, money will become more volatile stuff than it already is. The value and availability of money is sure to fluctuate wildly. Most people don’t have the luxury of escaping the money economy, so they will be held hostage and milked hard again by the same people who just drained them in the bailouts. As usual, the government will be right there to see that everybody plays by the rules. Those who have always benefited by capitalism’s rules will benefit more. That cadre of “money professionals” which holds captive the nation’s money supply, and runs things according to the rules of money, can never lose money. It writes the rules. And rewrites them when it suits the money elite’s interests. Capitalism, the Christian god, democracy, the Constitution.

It’s all one ball of wax, one set of rules in the American national psyche. Thus, the money masters behind the curtain will write The New Rules, the new tablets of supreme law, and call them Reform. There will be rejoicing that “the will of the people” has once again moved upon the land, and that the democracy’s scripture has once again been delivered by the unseen hand of God.
Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

Nature’s Bottom Line

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:35:18 +0000

By Wayne Ellwood

13 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Ecological collapse is all around. But faith in economic growth as the only path to prosperity shows no sign of fading. Wayne Ellwood examines the folly of endless growth on a finite planet.

Charles Darwin was a consummate scientist – meticulous and rigorous. He spent nearly 20 years sifting his research, honing his analysis and polishing his prose before publishing his groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species, in November 1859.1

Darwin’s slim volume was what we would call a ‘game changer’; a revolutionary work that fundamentally altered the way human beings see themselves and the natural world. Today most of us are familiar with his theory of ‘natural selection’ – the foundation of modern evolutionary biology. But 150 years ago, Darwin was sailing into choppy waters. The Church of England set rigid boundaries and his thesis was clearly offside – a challenge to the orthodox view that humans were a separate, unique part of God’s creation and that all life was divinely concocted and unchangeable.

The establishment mocked him. There was intense public debate. But Darwin was unflinching. Today his core idea that all animals and plants evolve and adapt through natural selection is the bedrock of modern life sciences. He opened the door to a new world – a door which religious fundamentalists and ‘intelligent design’ proponents are still trying to close.

Darwin’s long battle has disturbing echoes today. We, too, are trapped in the same sort of false illusion that stymied critical thought before his radical breakthrough. Except the myth that envelops us is more dangerous and even more deeply rooted.

Our great sustaining myth is economic growth: faith that the economy can grow forever, that there are no limits to the wealth we can create from the natural resources of the Earth. Growth, measured by an increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is what drives government policy worldwide. The equation has been drummed into us for so long that it’s received wisdom. Growth equals prosperity and jobs. Growth equals progress (see ‘History of an idea’, below).

Yet this is a fairly recent turn of events. Using GDP as a tool to measure growth has only been around since the late 1940s when the UN System of National Accounts was developed. For most of human history economic growth was a mere blip. Only the last eight generations of humans have experienced consistent growth (out of an estimated 125,000 generations in total). As the father of green economics, Herman Daly, writes: ‘Historically, steady state is the normal condition; growth is an abberation.’2 By ‘steady state’ Daly means an economy with a constant population and ‘the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption’.

The latest global economic slump underlines our reliance on growth. What happens when the economy stumbles? Financial markets crash, property values plummet, bankruptcies pile up, unemployment soars and social pathologies multiply. Thus the resurgence of Keynesian economics. Prime the pump with billions in government funds. Pray that tax breaks and fiscal stimulus boost investment, production and jobs.

Yet the world already produces way too much stuff, a lot of it unnecessary and much of it useless. We go on churning out mountains of consumer goods because it’s good for growth. As long as the economy keeps growing, things will be OK. Growth keeps people employed, investment profitable and the endless cycle of production and consumption spinning. Increases in productivity and the restless search for profits drive the process. Endless accumulation and expansion is the core of capitalism.

Consider this: the world economy grew more than seven-fold from 1950 to 2000. It’s projected to do the same again by 2050. At current rates of growth (before the recent global meltdown) the economy was doubling every 15 years, a breathtaking number when you consider that it took all of human history to hit the $6 trillion world economy of 1950.3

As the US writers Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster note: ‘No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron: when growth ceases the system is in a state of crisis.’ The upshot is that the natural environment, on which human life and the human economy depend, is sidelined – ‘not as a place with inherent boundaries within which human beings must live together with earth’s other species, but as a realm to be exploited in a process of growing economic expansion.’4

The uncomfortable truth is that the physical resources of the biosphere are finite. We’re not approaching the ecological limits to growth; we’re well past them. And in the process we’re fouling the globe with our wastes and threatening the natural systems on which humanity and all other species depend. The statistics of ecological decline could fill a library. We’re chewing through massive quantities of renewable and non-renewable resources at a breakneck speed.

In 2005 the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a collaborative work of more than 10,000 scientists, found 60 per cent of ‘ecosystem services’ – things like climate regulation, the water cycle, pollination, global fisheries, natural waste treatment – were being degraded or used unsustainably. ‘Human activity is putting such a heavy strain on the natural functions of the Earth,’ the report warned, ‘that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain human endeavour can no longer be taken for granted.’

The now familiar ‘Ecological Footprint’ model supports this conclusion. It’s a way of asking how much we’re extracting from the planet to live the way we do. Conventional economics tends to see the environment as a subset of the economy. The footprint approach does the reverse, comparing humanity’s ecological impact – resources consumed and waste produced – with the amount of productive land and water available to supply key ecosystem services. It deals in averages so the rich/poor divide is blurred. But the message is clear. It takes about 1.8 hectares to sustain the average person on Earth. Those of us in the rich world are way above the average: Canadians use about eight hectares. Americans use ten, more than five times the average. In 1961, human beings used about half the Earth’s biocapacity; by 2006 we were using 44 per cent more than is available.5 Mathis Wackernagel, one of the founders of the footprint analysis, says we will need the equivalent of two Earths by the late 2030s to keep up with our demands. Ecologists call this phenomenon ‘overshoot’. It’s a temporary state that becomes more untenable as stocks of renewable and non-renewable resources are depleted. Wackernagel again: ‘Since the 1980s we’ve been drawing down the biosphere’s principal rather than living off its annual interest. To support our consumption, we have been liquidating resource stocks and allowing carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere.’5

Oil is the main culprit. The burning of fossil fuels, especially petroleum, powers the global economy. Oil is an extraordinary feat of concentrated energy: three large teaspoons of crude contain about the same amount of energy as eight hours of human manual labour. The geologist Colin J Campbell hit the nail on the head: ‘It’s as if each one of us had a team of slaves working for us for next to nothing.’6

Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach; our modern, globalized economy marches on oil. But it’s a Faustian bargain. The costs now exceed the benefits. Take the climate system, a key ‘natural service’ threatened by human-made greenhouse gas emissions, mostly CO2, the main by-product from the combustion of fossil fuels. The more oil and coal we burn, the more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere and the more we tip the balance.

Leading climate scientists say a target of 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 may avoid dangerous climate change. We’re currently at 390 ppm and projected to hit 650 ppm by the end of this century. This translates into an average increase in global temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius. If this projection plays out we’re in big trouble. Large parts of Africa, China, India and Latin America would become desert or near-desert. Heard the term ‘environmental refugees’? Keep it in mind, because you’re going to be hearing it a lot more.

Even on its own terms growth isn’t working. We avoid talking about the skewed distribution of the planet’s wealth and income, dreaming instead that we can grow our way out of the problem. So the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population consumes the lion’s share of resources, while the poorest 80 per cent get by on the crumbs. And the ratios are getting worse. Growth is an excuse for continued inequality. But more importantly, countless studies show that beyond a certain point higher levels of material consumption don’t lead to increased wellbeing or happiness. Per capita GDP has tripled in the US since 1950 but the percentage of people who say they are happy has declined since the 1970s. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level, argue that poor nations with lower inequality have higher levels of wellbeing than richer but more unequal nations.7 We place growth above equality and pay the price in what’s been called the ‘hidden injuries of class’. Shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives addicted to a mindless consumerism which is depleting the planet’s resources.

Free market cheerleaders believe that technology and human ingenuity will solve the problem. The economy can be ‘de-coupled’ from material inputs. Improved technology will allow us to produce more wealth with less energy, materials and waste. This is whistling in the dark. Between 1970 and 2000, rich countries saw impressive gains in energy efficiency of up to 40 per cent. But average improvements of two per cent a year were eclipsed by growth rates of three per cent or more. Increased technical efficiency is swamped by increased consumption. A recent report by the New Economics Foundation found that to stabilize carbon emissions at 350 ppm by 2050 the carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of production) of the global economy would need to fall by 95 per cent.8 Ramping up GDP without improving technological efficiency leads to more environmental damage. Yet improving efficiency triggers more growth, which leads to the same result.

We’ve been captured by a myth far more alluring than the one that Charles Darwin confronted 150 years ago: the dream of perpetual economic growth. In the North we have been living beyond our ecological means for decades, consuming too much and producing more waste than the environment can absorb, while inequality grows.

The global population is expected to jump by 3 billion in the next 40 years – more than the entire population in 1950. Most of that increase will be in the South, where poverty is entrenched and living standards desperate. How will those next three billion live? Justice demands that we in the rich countries ratchet back our growth and clear some space for those who need it. The fate of the Earth may depend on it.

Are we up for it?

The economy is a human construct. It’s not an act of god. We made it, we can change it. The rest of this issue examines the growth dilemma and highlights the alternatives.

History of an idea

Growth is a modern idea – a product of the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment that challenged traditional views of religion and humankind’s place in the cosmos. Thinkers like Locke in England, Hume in Scotland, Voltaire in France and Paine in the US mapped out this new intellectual terrain.

This rupture with tradition changed age-old cyclical thinking to sequential thinking, unleashed democratic political movements and ushered in the rule of law.

The idea of progress became paramount: the notion that history has a direction, which is the gradual improvement of the human condition.

The rise of science and the empirical method merged with improved technologies (the steam engine, gunpowder, the printing press) stimulating early capitalism. Economic growth became synonymous with social progress.

European colonialism spread the idea around the world. But soon the concept of improvement was eclipsed by a narrow fixation on numbers. The gross measure of economic output (GDP) became the benchmark for economic success, detached from broad notions of the public good. Growth without concern for its social or ecological consequences became the overarching goal of government policy.

Notes

1) Darwin’s original title was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

2) Beyond growth: the economics of sustainable development, Herman Daly, Beacon Press, 1996, p215.

3) ‘Global warming and modern capitalism’, Gustav Speth, The Nation, 6 Oct 2008.

4) ‘What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism’, Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, March 2010, p8.

5) The Ecological Wealth of Nations’, Global Footprint Network, www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/EcologicalWealthof_Nations.pdf

6) The upside of down, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Souvenir Press, London, 2007.

7) The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Allen Lane, London, 2009.

Growth isn’t possible: why rich nations need a new economic direction, NEF, London, 2010.

Police Brutality In America

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:21:14 +0000

By Stephen Lendman

13 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Across America, daily incidents occur, one of many the cold-blooded January 1, 2009 murder of Oscar Grant – unarmed, offering no resistance, thrust face-down on the ground, shot in the back, and killed, videotaped on at least four cameras for irrefutable proof. USA Today said five bystanders taped it.

His killer: Oakland, CA transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, tried for the killing, the jury told to consider four possible verdicts – innocent, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter, jurors deciding the latter.

The Legal Dictionary defines it as “The act of unlawfully killing another human being unintentionally,” the absence of intent distinguishing it from voluntary manslaughter. Many states don’t define it or do it vaguely. Wallin & Klarich Violent Crime Attorneys say in California it carries a two – four year sentence. However, since a gun was used, Judge Robert Perry can add three to 10 additional years.

Because minority victims seldom get justice, especially against police, Mehserle may serve minimal time, then be paroled quietly when the current furor subsides.

After the verdict, it erupted on Oakland streets, hundreds turning out to protest, Bay Area indymedia.org saying:

“The actions of the Police in Oakland tonight (including dozens of arrests) show their disrespect for justice in General. Their heavy handed violence towards protestors just reinforces their total disconnect with the people of Oakland.” It’s as true everywhere across America, police acting like Gestapo, usually unaccountably.

Grant’s family will appeal the verdict and is suing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) for $25 million, his mother Wanda Johnson saying “My son was murdered (and) the law has not held the officer accountable.” It rarely does for Black, Latino, or other minorities, no matter the injustice, civil rights lawyer John Burris, representing Grant’s family in the civil suit, saying:

“The system is rarely fair when a police officer shoots an African-American male.” Police brutality against them and other minorites is systemic, including beatings, torture, and cold-blooded murder, usually with impunity, justice nearly always denied.

While far from certain, the Obama administration may charge Mehserle with civil rights or hate crime violations, DOJ spokesman Alejandro Miyar saying:

“The Justice Department has been closely monitoring the state’s investigation and prosecution. The Civil Rights Division, the US Attorney’s Office, and the FBI have an open investigation into the fatal shooting and, at the conclusion of the state prosecution, will conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances to determine whether the evidence warrants federal prosecution.”

Systemic Police Brutality

An earlier Jones Report.com text and video account headlined, “Epidemic of Police Brutality Sweeps America,” showing footage of police repeatedly tasering a student with 50,000 volts of electricity for questioning the 2004 election results at a campus meeting.

Freedom from Sexual Self-Denial: Why Not Have Sex With People Who Aren’t Your Partner?

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:30:39 +0000

By Gabrielle Robin, AlterNet

When my boyfriend, Jason, confessed to having sex with another woman, I cried. I cried almost nonstop for a full weekend, actually, in spite of the fact that I was the one who encouraged him to do it.

For the first two years of our relationship, I constantly teased Jason with dares that he fool around with any girl who hit on him. I maintained that I didn’t feel comfortable demanding monogamy, and that if he wanted to have sex with someone else, all I asked was that he be honest with me about it.

But Jason repeatedly said he was naturally monogamous. He didn’t like one-night stands—he was picky and prone to germophobia—and he didn’t want to have an ongoing sexual relationship with anyone else while we were together. He was a serial monogamist; he’d never had a “friend with benefits.” If he was having sex with someone, it was because they were dating.

Yet after years of being together, we hit a sexual wall. We’d tried meeting other couples and had two threesomes, but our efforts only yielded frustration and disappointment. I missed my days of effortlessly falling into bed with a new man and letting our chemistry lead the way. And I missed having dirty details to share with Jason about my past exploits (which he always enjoyed hearing). Together we decided that I would seek out another man, and though Jason would not necessarily look for another partner, he had license to seize the opportunity should it arise. That opportunity arose during a trip to New York, when a waitress gave him her phone number.

Although open relationships are not as shocking a concept today as they were 50 years ago, they’re still regarded with overwhelming skepticism and even disdain. The usual assumption is that polyamorous people are selfish, immature, incapable of commitment, and their primary relationship is therefore doomed to failure. When a letter writer asked Psychology Today columnist Hara Estroff Marano whether an open marriage might work for the writer and his/her partner—explaining that each had affairs in the past but still “remain committed to each other”— Marano (who is not actually a psychologist), replied “no.” She went on to accuse the letter writer of being in search of “Peter Pan escape(s),” closing with the snide line that staying in a monogamous marriage “takes guts; it’s much easier to look outside for excitement than to find the source within.”

But what’s so gutsy about living a life full of self-denial and insecurity, where the person you love most is also the person you most need to limit?

Janet W. Hardy, co-author of The Ethical Slut, is quick to point out that being “open” is not necessarily the path of least resistance, and that moving away from monogamy takes courage: “The difference between polyamorous people and monogamous people isn’t that poly people never feel jealous — we do. The real difference is what we do with our feelings of jealousy. […] By blaming the [unhappy] feelings on their partners, [most monogamous people] are able to make problems someone else’s fault. That way, they don’t have to feel responsible for figuring out what’s causing the feelings, or for finding a solution.” Those who have elected to allow their partner extra-relationship sex don’t “have that luxury. You don’t get to distract yourself from your feelings of loss, sorrow, insecurity or whatever by diverting them into anger toward him [or her.]”

This is part of why an open relationship can be such a challenge. In an article that came out earlier this year about one couple’s history of their open marriage, wife Cate specifically said “it seemed worth it to me to push my psychological limits, to just work through it. I wanted to get to a better self […] There were a million — not a million, but many — painful challenges. Enormous, terrifying. But if you have relationships that have real emotional depth to them, which is what we aspire to, then it is never safe. You’re terrified about losing the person. It’s high risk.”

Is that the thought process of someone who’s cowardly, careless or motivated only by hedonism?

I found out about such powerful psychological effects firsthand. My logical side was appalled by my crying—I was going to have other partners, too!—but my ego was screaming for comfort. My own experiences in the past had proven to me that I could have orgasms with men I wasn’t interested in dating; I could have good sexual chemistry with men who were not conventionally attractive; and I could even have a positive sexual encounter with someone without craving a repeat. I knew Jason had practiced safer sex and I knew that he loved me. There was no threat to my safety and no betrayal of trust. So why was I suffering so much? Probably because Jason’s news forced me to confront the way I perceived myself (impervious, rational, independent) versus the reality of how I actually am (insecure, emotional).

Janet Hardy puts this suffering in a positive light, by calling it “a gift, although it doesn’t feel like one. It means that you get to make yourself stronger by figuring out what it was that triggered your jealousy, and working to solve it.” And that’s what I started to do. As I searched for a word to describe my internal experience, only one came up: humiliated. This was not a sensation I’d dealt with much. It was hardly a word in my vocabulary. But Jason’s affair had unleashed a slew of overwhelming insecurities—that I’m not sexy enough or pretty enough or satisfying enough—that left me vulnerable and exposed.

Therapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, recognizes the volatility of such personal fears by encouraging the couples she sees to “find out where sexual exclusiveness begins or ends. When do you feel that boundaries have been stretched too thin and therefore the relationship is being threatened?” In my situation, it was less that I felt my relationship with Jason was threatened and more that I felt my own confidence, or rather my relationship with myself, was threatened. What I doubted was not his love of me but my own desirability and my worthiness to be loved. Personal issues that powerful wouldn’t disappear simply by requiring complete monogamy.

Furthermore, as Perel sees it, the distinction between monogamy and non-monogamy is erroneous. For her, “sexual exclusivity” and “fidelity” are more useful terms. “Fidelity is a relational constancy,” she explains. “A foundational respect, a pact, that may or may not include [sexual] exclusivity. Gay people have forever negotiated a monogamous relationship with a primary emotional commitment to one partner, with a deep sense of loyalty and devotion, that wasn’t necessarily sexually exclusive.”

Recent studies back her up. Although some estimates as to how many adults maintain open relationships are shockingly low (WebMD features two guesses that range from 4-9 percent to “less than 1 percent”) a study conducted by San Francisco State University found that 50 percent of gay couples were having sex outside the relationship with their partners’ consent. This circumstance seemed to have no effect on the couples’ happiness within their relationships when compared to the satisfaction of non-open gay couples.

Sadly, therapists as open-minded as Perel are hard to come by. David J. Ley, clinical psychologist and author of the amusingly titled Insatiable Wives, recently called out other therapists for being judgmental and hypocritical in their routine dismissal of alternative relationships. According to Ley, most counselors don’t receive enough instruction in human sexuality, and they fall back on cultural and personal biases in the absence of training. Just weeks ago in the Chicago Tribune, much-loved Dr. Ruth answered a female advice seeker who said she trusted her husband deeply and wanted to bring a third party into their relationship with: “Don’t put [your marriage] at risk by having sex outside the marriage, in any form.”

Jenny Block, author of Open: Love, Sex, and Life In An Open Marriage, doesn’t understand why an open relationship would seem more risky than a closed one when 50 percent of marriages already end in divorce. “Relationships are hard no matter what the set-up. Sometimes I think open ones have a better shot because they are (or at least the good ones are) steeped in honesty.” She is also a strong believer that no one should define themselves by their relationships. “Relationships don’t complete me. They complement me and I hope my partners feel they can say the same. Relationships should be about flexibility, not rigidity. They should be about love, not ownership.”

The dominant school of thought among journalists, therapists and the general public is that romantic relationships require a renunciation of desire in order to succeed, or at least a severe restriction of desire. “Self-sacrifice” comes up often, but rarely the question of why you want someone you’re in love with to make such sacrifices, or the possibility of long-term resentment and unhappiness if you yourself sacrifice too much. Desire, even when unconsummated, makes many of us feel vibrant and alive, more awake to the world around us.

Along with this assumption regarding self-control or self-discipline is the strange refusal to admit that most romantic relationships are not life-long or even decade-long; that marriages fall apart and true loves grow distant; that people staying in a marriage is not synonymous with being happy. As Sandra Tsing Loh so controversially pointed out, there comes a point where someone may choose not to “work on” falling back in love—but some of those people separate and others stay together. The assumption when an open couple breaks up is that their poly lifestyle destroyed an otherwise tenable relationship. I find myself wondering if open couples are not simply more honest about what they want and need, and unwilling to stay in a relationship that isn’t functioning. Of course, amid all this speculation is the proverbial elephant in the room whenever polyamory is discussed: the fact that so many “monogamous” individuals have extra-relationship sex anyway.

When it comes to open relationships, Esther Perel is pragmatic: “It’s not for everybody. But neither is closed. Neither is the traditional model.” She adds that, contrary to being irresponsible and greedy, “people who try out [an open] model are often people who are very respectful of the other person’s sexual exploration. Or there are couples that are hoping that by creating a different kind of boundary they have a higher chance to survive and to preserve themselves. It’s [a decision] made for the purpose of the couple lasting.”

Jason and I are still together. We’re still learning about our boundaries, each other, and ourselves. We’re not actively pursuing other partners, but we also haven’t ruled out the possibility that we may in the future. I hope and suspect that if our relationship comes to an end, it will be the result of sincere self-reflection and honest assessment, not a blowup over sexual attraction to another person or a perceived sexual betrayal. Jason’s affair in New York taught me that our relationship is durable, that I can be strong even while hurt, and that if two people are honest with one another, most situations become less scary. As Jenny Block says, “Ultimately, it’s not about the sex. It’s about honesty, trust, love and respect. If you have those, you have no cause for concern.”

Gabrielle Robin is a pseudonym.

How to Solve Our Economic and Environmental Crises

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:05:36 +0000

By Heeten Kalan, AlterNet

The global economy is still hemorrhaging from the global economic crisis, and we can’t turn on the television or look at the Internet without being reminded of the ecological crises that are unfolding all around us (including, of course, the growing disaster in the Gulf). Yet the answer to both sets of problems — ecologically and economically — are one and the same.

We can’t talk about sustainable environments without talking about sustainable economies. And we can’t have any type of economic model that doesn’t take our fundamental ecology into consideration. We’re actually talking about two sides to the same coin.

Our changing climate continues to make profound impacts on how people live, work and play. Everything from our food systems, water sources, oceans and deserts is negatively influenced by our obsession with mining, transporting and burning carbon-based fossil fuels. Using energy security and independence as a mantra, the United States government and fossil fuel industries are aiming to pump billions of dollars into oil exploration and mining the last bit of accessible coal.

While our national attention may be focused on oil, our coal addiction is similarly threatening our environmental, economic and human health. Proponents of coal argue that it’s plentiful, cheap and readily available, and with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), coal’s climate impacts can be mitigated.

In reality though, coal is anything but cheap when health and environmental costs are taken into consideration. Coal is responsible for over 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions and yet the aim is to mine and burn more of it. The so-called magic bullet of CCS is very costly to implement and according to an MIT study titled “The Future of Coal” the first commercial CCS plant won’t be on stream until 2030 at the earliest. It may prove to be too little, too late — and even if the technology is ever viable, burning coal more cleanly will never solve the problem of the impacts of coal extraction.

In most parts of coal country (Appalachia, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado) local communities have not seen the direct benefits of coal. In fact most of these communities suffer from serious health impacts, limited supply of drinking water, restricted access to natural resources, poor education and health systems that are sorely lacking. It is no coincidence that some of the poorest counties in the U.S. are found in the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky. Coal has shown little economic promise and its economic, health and ecological legacy are devastating.

The impact of coal on health may be the best way to open the dialogue about the costs of coal. Coal combustion emissions damage the respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems and contribute to four of the top five leading causes of death in the U.S. A 2008 West Virginia University study published in the American Journal of Public Health has found that as coal production increases in an area, so does the “incidence of chronic illness in nearby communities.” The main findings from the study show that people in coal mining communities have a 70 percent increased risk for developing kidney disease; a 64 percent increased risk for developing chronic lung diseases such as emphysema; and are 30 percent more likely to report high blood pressure.

The data and evidence on coal’s impact on our health is mounting daily, and yet we fail to focus on coal as a health risk. Given the evidence, the time has come to turn coal into a pariah.

The true cost of coal, including the environmental and the health costs, will affect large swaths of the population. With emerging data in the last year and a half showing the consequences of coal on people’s health, the environmental justice movement needs to partner with the medical establishment to publicize the facts. We need to make coal the next tobacco..

We should start by waging a serious campaign that would involve doctors, nurses, public health officials and patients speaking out about the connection between consumers of coal energy and their immediate health concerns. By connecting the human element to the issue we can expand the climate discussion beyond the environmental community. From there we can have campaigns to divest from coal and shareholder actions, exposing the fiduciary risks of investing in coal. Perhaps even a national ad campaign akin to the anti-tobacco ads — using health as a vector to raise the public consciousness about climate and energy.

After all, climate change is not solely an environmental problem — it is a human/planetary problem. If we are going to rely on a small base of environmentalists to carry us through this crisis, we are in trouble. Our spokespeople on this issue have to come from a wide spectrum of citizens and leaders. The mainstream movement has lost sight of the justice element of the work and is less interested in building a broad, national movement to pressure and push for change. The problem is that the debate around climate is very wonky and policy-oriented, which leaves most communities out of the conversation. We have to build bigger and broader constituencies to make a difference. Without such a base, our future depends on Washington insiders and mainstream environmental groups. Compromise and backroom deals will prevail and we will make no significant progress in reversing climate change.

Of course, we have to go beyond a health campaign; without providing alternatives to and a transition from coal, an anti-coal campaign is weak. How coal is replaced as a base-load energy source requires political will and significant investments. Jobs that are dependent on the mining, transporting and burning of coal need to be replaced and workers retrained. This places us squarely in the green jobs/economy discussions. The new energy economy has a lot of potential for providing good, clean and green jobs — but that will not happen on its own and it will require strong voices to demand it and demonstrate how it can be done.

Rethinking a green economic model requires bringing together labor, community organizations, environmentalists, progressive economists, government leaders and policy makers, along with the private sector to have a conversation about sustainability, the economy and ecology.

Can old manufacturing centers be revamped to produce parts for wind turbines? Can resources go into developing new solar technologies with local production? This is where we should be focusing our expertise. Exploring and expanding on alternative energy sources and green manufacturing provides jobs and even expands the economy, while sustaining our environment — this should be a risk worth taking.

Heeten Kalan is senior program officer for the Environmental Health and Justice fund at the New World Foundation.

10 Easy Steps for Becoming a Radical Homemaker

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:45:08 +0000

By Shannon Hayes, YES! Magazine

When I first released Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, I was advised to make a list of “easy steps for becoming a radical homemaker” as part of my publicity outreach materials. My shoulders slumped at the very thought: Three years of research about the social, economic, and ecological significance of homemaking, and I had to reduce it to 10 easy tips? I didn’t see a to-do list as a viable route to a dramatic shift in thinking, beliefs, and behaviors. But since the objective of such a list was smoother discussion and communication of Radical Homemaking ideas with the public, I did it.

I came up with the simplest things I could imagine—like committing to hanging laundry out to dry, dedicating a portion of the lawn to a vegetable garden, making an effort to get to know neighbors to enable greater cooperation and reduce resource consumption. I would perfunctorily refer back to them when radio dialogues flagged, when interviews seemed to be getting off track, or to distract myself when an occasional wave of personal sarcasm (I do have them on occasion) threatened to jeopardize an otherwise polite discourse about the book. After about 40 media interviews, I was pretty good at rattling them off, and I began to see their power and significance beyond helping me to be polite.

Every time a person sticks a clothespin on a pair of undies, he or she is saying, “I want a better world. And I’m willing to do what it takes.”

Take hanging out the laundry as an example. At the outset, it is deceptively simple: It saves money and resources, and it’s easy. As I spoke about line-drying laundry more, however, the suggestion took on more meaning. Of course everyone would like to hang out the laundry. But many people don’t do it. They’re too busy. Thus, the commitment to hanging out the laundry represents a commitment to slowing down—it means starting to align one’s daily household activity with the rhythms of nature. In my mind, hanging out the laundry moved from being a simple chore to being an act of meditation and reflection on a deeper, more profound commitment that a person wanted to make. Thus, draping shirts and socks on a clothesline wasn’t just about getting a chore done; it represented the new, sane world so many of us are working to create. Every time a person sticks a clothespin on a pair of undies, he or she is saying, “I want a better world. And I’m willing to do what it takes.” Laundry may be a simple first step, but it ultimately leads to something bigger.

Laundry became the central theme of a talk I gave recently in an affluent community, where golf course-quality lawns are ready at a moment’s notice as the backdrop for the season’s latest fad: large screen outdoor television sets. I was speaking at a community eco-festival, where volunteers were teaching residents about the importance of composting, solar panels, buying locally, and changing light bulbs. In my session, I talked about the power of living by one’s values, the misery of excessive consumption, the importance of social change, the deep fulfillment and happiness that results from living with less and having more.

To help me drive my point home, my husband Bob armed me with a seemingly endless collection of images of fellow radical homemaker’s lives: pictures of happy kids showing off their homemade toys, families gathering for feasts, piles of tomatoes on a kitchen counter following an early fall harvest, a sink full of grapes ready for juicing, friends in their backyard gardens, smiling bike riders. At the end of my talk, I was presented with a single question from a man wearing an expensive watch: “Americans fall on a spectrum with money,” he explained, holding his hands about a foot apart from each other. “Most of the people you’re talking about fall on this end,” he said, waving one hand. “And what you’re talking about may work for them. But what about those of us on this end?” With that, he waved his other hand. “What are we supposed to do to be able to live like that?”

There were a number of snarky remarks on the end of my tongue. But this man’s eyes were earnest. Perhaps he saw something in those slides that his affluence could not buy. Nevertheless, my sarcasm propensity meter was no longer registering on the dial. It was time to switch to the safety zone and draw from my 10 easy tips: “Grow some vegetables in your backyard. Try learning how to can,” I chirped at him. Once I re-gained my bearings, I talked about changing the world by moving toward what we love, not running away from what we fear. I talked about the power of small changes to result in a deep personal shift. I suggested he hang out the laundry.

There were no further questions. People politely thanked me for my time and left the room. One other man, who sat in the back corner, lingered. A longtime activist, he expressed his despair at the lifestyles of his neighbors. The social pressure to have a perfect lawn is huge, he explained. For years, he’d been doing programs to encourage residents to allow parts of their lawn to go wild for habitat—an even simpler step than gardening. The majority of his efforts were unsuccessful. There was too much shame. “It’s so much easier for you,” he lamented. “You can hang out the laundry.” I gave him a quizzical look. He went on to explain local zoning codes. By law, people in his community weren’t allowed to hang clothes outside. It was trashy. It would diminish property values.

But what about home values? I felt deeply sad for his neighbors. They’d devoted their life energy in pursuit of the material affluence required to live in this particular community. At the same time, the number of people in attendance at this eco-festival suggested they truly wanted to play a role in healing the planet. Ironically, the very laws of their community—both social and written—compelled them to turn their backs on their personal values. Henry David Thoreau’s observations about the imprisonment of wealth were spot on: “The opportunities for living are diminished in proportion as what are called the ‘means’ are increased,” he wrote. That day, I saw people who cared about the Earth, who wanted a better world. But their power to act according to these concerns was limited to their purchases alone—to buying solar panels, buy local campaigns, buying new light bulbs. They could try to buy some of their beliefs. But they couldn’t live them.

I suppose that is the deepest wealth in the radical homemaking lifestyle. By needing less, we are free to live our beliefs. To us, this seems ordinary. To someone else, a values-driven lifestyle might seem an extraordinary act of bravery.

We need that bravery. Now. Worrying about our planet while adhering to local zoning codes or social norms forbidding ecologically sensible behavior is a recipe for disaster. Such laws require citizens to commit an ecological injustice by using a disproportionate share of our Earth’s resources. They scream out for civil disobedience. As Thoreau reminds us, “break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” Go on and live dangerously. Hang out the wash.

For those who might be curious:

10 Easy Steps for Becoming a Radical Homemaker

Commit to hanging your laundry out to dry.
Dedicate a portion of your lawn to a vegetable garden.
Get to know your neighbors. Cooperate to save money and resources.
Go to your local farmers’ market each week before you head to the
grocery store.
Do some spring cleaning to identify everything in your home that you absolutely don’t need. Donate to help others save money and resources.
Make a commitment to start carrying your own reusable bags and use them on all your shopping trips.
Choose one local food item to learn how to preserve for yourself for the winter.
Get your family to spend more evenings at home, preferably with the TV off.
Cook for your family.
Focus on enjoying what you have and who are with. Stop fixating on what you think you may need, or how things could be better “if only.”

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill. She is the host of grassfedcooking.com and radicalhomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

Humans vs. the environment – A thought experiment

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:47:00 +0000

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Protecting the environment isn’t a “liberal” idea; it’s everybody’s business. Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, the environment provides life support for us all, and if we fail to recognize that, we are truly doomed as a civilization.

To help explain this, I’ve put together a simple thought experiment. It begins with three undeniable truths about humans and the environment:

Truth #1 – The Earth’s resources are limited.

This should be self-evidence, but some people still don’t get it. The Earth’s resources — oil, forests, water, energy, and so on — are finite. They do not exist in infinite quantities. If they did, they would obviously be larger than the Earth itself (and would, in fact, fill the universe). But they don’t fill the universe. They are contained within the boundaries of planet Earth, and therefore they are limited.

Of course, many of Earth’s resources can be either regenerated or recycled, but that only happens over time — usually a long time. In the case of oil, it’s hundreds of thousands of years. For fossil water it’s much the same. The rate at which modern human civilization is using up these resources is orders of magnitude faster than the rate at which they can be naturally regenerated. This holds true for oil, water, topsoil, forests and more.

Truth #2 – Each person living in modern civilization consumes some amount of the Earth’s limited resources.

This should also be self-evident: People consume resources. When you drive your car, you’re obviously consuming limited natural resources. When you buy a car, you’re consuming many other natural resources (all the elements that went into making a car), too. This is true even when you buy a solar panel.

Every time you turn on a light switch, or open a package of food, or swallow a piece of food, you are consuming some amount of the Earth’s limited resources.

The sum of your consumption is called your “ecological footprint,” and your ecological footprint is much larger than the immediate space you might call your home. The things you consume in your home require the resources of a much larger area far outside your home.

A human child born in America today, for example, will consume 45,000 pounds of metal in their lifetime (through the products they purchase). That’s 45,000 pounds of metal that must be mined, processed, transported and manufactured into consumable products, and metal mining is a very dirty business, by the way, even if that metal goes into making clean energy devices such as wind turbines.

Truth #3 – Humans are altering the environment

You can’t argue with this (although some people ridiculously try). Human activity is altering our environment in a huge way, from the massive deforestation of the planet to the release of gases into the atmosphere. We’ve poisoned the rivers, destroyed natural habitat, polluted the oceans (Gulf of Mexico, anyone?) and altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere. These are undeniable scientific truths. No sane person can reasonably argue that human beings have not radically altered the environment of our planet over the last 200 years.

If you visited North America 200 years ago, for example, you wouldn’t even have recognized it as the same continent dominated by human beings today. A few hundred years ago, North America was teeming with life, with huge old-growth forests, pristine rivers and abundant plains. Today it is relatively dead, having been over-developed, over-paved and over-population to a point so extreme that our ancestors would largely consider it “dead”.

Truth #4 – Humans really like to have babies

This is also self-evidence: People like to procreate. Every family, it seems, wants children, and those children want their own children, too. In general, human beings want to procreate without limitation. This, of course, leads to an explosion in population growth. We’ve seen this explosion over the last two hundred years as the Earth’s population has grown from less than one billion people in 1800 to nearly seven billion today.

Human beings do not consider their impact on the global population when they procreate. The decision to have children is made privately, selfishly, without regard to the impact on the planet. One more child seems like no big deal from the point of view of a couple that wishes for another son or daughter, but multiplied by billions, these decisions to procreate en masse lead to overpopulation, which leads to over-consumption of the planet’s limited resources.

The Easter Island effect

Now let’s work our little thought experiment. Given the four simple truths described above, it is only a matter of time before the continued procreation of human beings collides with the reality of limited resources, causing a crisis of unsustainability.

At some point, in other words, the continued expansion of human beings will destroy so much of the natural environment (and use so many natural resources) that there will not be enough resources available to support the continuation of the existing population.

I call this the “Easter Island effect,” in reference to the way in which the natives of Easter Island chopped down all their trees to build ever-larger monuments to themselves, and in doing so they destroyed their entire ecosystem and soon perished. The entire human civilization is now pulling an Easter Island on a global scale.

Our two choices

Given that the unlimited expansion of the human population must inevitably use up key resources required to sustain human life, it stands to reason that there are only two choices for how we human beings can choose to deal with the situation:

Choice #1 – We can acknowledge the ecological impact of human beings on our planet and make conscious choices to live within the bounds of sustainable balance with our planet (i.e. keeping our population size relatively stable by limiting runaway population growth, reducing our ecological footprint, respecting the natural environment that supports life on our planet, etc.).

Choice #2 – We can continue our mindless population expansion and resource exploitation while ignoring any long-term consequences. This is the definition of stupidity, and yet it is precisely the path that modern human civilization is now choosing. It also seems to be the chosen path of “anti-environmentalists” — people who resist the idea that we need to protect the environment at all.

Sadly, human civilization has decided to go with choice #2. I believe the future of modern civilization is now set. Population expansion and resource depletion will soon collide with the limitations of our planet and result in a cataclysmic collapse of our civilization. We human beings are pulling off the Easter Island scenario, but with more than just trees: We’re doing it with oil, water, soil and habitat. We are destroying the only planet that can keep us alive, and there now appears to be no stopping this self-destructive tendency of the human species.

I have personally seen no evidence that the current human species is capable of long-term, sustainable balance with any ecosystem. It lacks the intelligent foresight necessary to anticipate such outcomes and make adjustments well in advance of them coming true. Some people among us even argue against environmental protection, not realizing they are essentially arguing for their own self-destruction.

Other who are more thoughtful argue only against the fear of a world government enforcing environmental regulations at the expense of losing personal freedoms. This is a legitimate concern, and I happen to agree with these concerns. “Protecting the environment” can all too easily become a slippery mantra for world domination over individual freedom. The best way to avoid losing freedom while saving our environment is through education of the public that urges people to make better decisions without turning them into criminals if they fail to make those decisions.

Can humanity save itself?

Saving human civilization from its own ignorance is no easy task. It will require intelligent, forward-thinking business leaders who see the long-term picture and who genuinely care about the future. Yet sadly, there is no such thing. Business leaders are, by definition, focused on the next fiscal quarter, not the next century. They will ALWAYS mortgage our collective future to increase their immediate profits.

There is almost no such thing as a successful business person who is simultaneously an effective steward of our planet’s natural resources. The simple act of generating more business — in any business — always results in more consumption because our entire economic system is based on consumption. It’s even true about internet businesses, by the way. Every bit and byte you consume over the internet has an indirect environmental cost due to the electricity consumption of the CPUs delivering that content to you as well as, more importantly, the enormous cooling demand in data centers that spend fortunes just cooling all the computers running there.

The fact that our economic activity is fundamentally based on consumption rather than conservation demonstrates why humanity is doomed to destroy itself. After seeing the failure of so many environmental summits, I’m convinced of it. I don’t see any possible way that human beings will suddenly gain the intelligence and foresight necessary to live in balance with our natural world. Not without a crisis to teach everybody a few lessons, anyway. But even the Gulf Coast disaster isn’t fundamentally changing the way business leaders think about consumption. They think it’s just an “oil problem” not a global problem with the business models that drive our world into a self-destructive cycle of mindless consumption.

What may be coming in the next few years

When the population continues to expand and most of the world’s resources are wiped out, the human population will plunge into a time of great darkness. The loss of life will be immense — perhaps as much as a 90% reduction in the planetary population. Ecosystems will fail, crops will fail and civilization itself will be brought to its knees. It won’t take much to crash the current global system. Once the power grid is down for as little as 5 days, there’s almost no bringing civilization back — at least not modern civilization as we know it.

Once the population is drastically reduced, the natural environment will have a chance to recover. Plants and animals will re-populate areas once lost to high-density human populations. And once the abundance returns, humans will again have the abundance necessary to re-populate, too. Hopefully future generations of human beings will learn from our present mistakes and not pursue the same path we did — the path of endless consumption of the planet’s resources to the point of destruction.

On a long time scale, you will likely see human population rising, then crashing, then rising again from the ashes of a collapsed civilization. This is the ebb and flow of the future of life on Earth. You might even call it a “natural” cycle of human population expansion, then collapse, followed by expansion and yet more collapse. It’s very similar to the way a virus invades a human body and multiplies until it kills the very host that once gave it life. In terms of big-picture behavior, humans are much like a virus on our planet.

This cycle of destruction and rebirth could be balanced out, though, by a sufficiently intelligent species gifted with sufficient foresight to see what’s coming and make early adjustments to avoid the population collapse. Our current human species, sadly, is not sufficiently intelligent to do so.

The corporate greed machine

I hadn’t really accepted this outcome as reality until just recently. I’ve always maintained a more optimistic attitude, thinking that we could find innovative ways to reverse climate change, reduce consumption, educate people and invent new technologies to clean up the planetary messes we’ve made. But I can now see that we’re up against corporate monsters that are relentlessly pushing for our collective destruction.

They’re destroying our seeds and genes (for profit, no less), our soils, rivers, oceans and lands. They’re corrupting our minds with pro-business propaganda and our bodies with their chemicals poisons. And they absolutely will not stop until every last exploitable resource on the planet has been used up and sold to a consumer. When our world is dominated by Monsanto, DuPont, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, weapons manufacturers, junk food giants and chemical companies, there’s not much hope for meaningful change that could set humanity on a new course of conservation and protection of life.

Sadly, there is no stopping the great corporate greed machine. It will keep rolling forward, aiming for more growth, more consumption and more exploitation until the very last drop of oil is squeezed out of the tar sands and every last tree is slashed to make room for cattle ranching.

A profit-based economic model cannot coexist with environmental protection because the two concepts are opposites. Big Business depends on endless growth, expansion, exploitation and consumption. But the environment can only be protected by consuming less. And that’s not even in the vocabulary of today’s business executives. The idea of consuming less is the antithesis of corporate profit and expansion.

Have you ever seen a Coca-Cola ad that urged you to “drink less Coke”?

That’s why as long as corporations rule our world (and make no mistake, they already do), there is no saving the environment. Ergo, there is no saving ourselves from a complete civilization blowout that will eventually see the near-destruction of our natural world… with the collapse of the human population to soon follow.

The thought experiment – SimEarth

Imagine you’re playing a software game called SimEarth. (Such a game actually exists, I believe, but I’m not referring to any real game. This is a fictional exercise.)

In this SimEarth game, you get 1 point for every year that one human being is alive on planet Earth. The simulation runs for 1000 years and begins in the year we know as 1500 A.D.

In the game, just as in the real world, the survival of human beings depends on the people having access to food, water, shelter, safety and other essentials. When the game begins, you have a blank slate SimEarth planet with enormous untapped resources of fossil oil, fossil water, old-growth forests, abundant ocean life and incredible biodiversity on land and sea. The human population is relatively small, perhaps only a few million people.

As the game progresses and the years tick by, you start earning more and more points by allowing the human population to multiply. At one point, you turn on the invention of the combustion engine coupled with the discovery of oil, and then things really begin to accelerate: Food production suddenly multiplies, making food resources incredibly cheap and abundant, leading to a population explosion.

As the points keep racking up, you watch as your SimEarth world becomes increasingly taken over by humans. The old growth forests are cut down and replaced with farm lands and cattle ranches. The once-abundant populations of wild animals are replaced by concrete highways and housing developments. Fossil water supplies drop sharply and oil drilling rigs pump out a heavy portion of the planet’s remaining oil resources.

Your points are really accelerating now as you watch the human population blow past four billion people, then five, and then six. At that point, on-screen statistics begin to flash red, warning you that world’s oil, water, food, soil and ocean health are all reaching critical levels of deficiency. Although you’re earning big points from all the human activity, the environmental cost of supporting all those people is now threatening the ecological stability of the planetary ecosystem.

It is at this point you realize that, to beat the high score, you need to keep your human population alive at some level for the next 500 years, and yet the planet’s resources are running out, reaching depletion in just 50 years or less. What should you do?

You decide to just watch and see what happens. With your eyes fixated on the screen, the years tick past. Twenty-five years further into the simulation, the oil runs out, thrusting your simulated societies into an energy crisis. Without cheap, plentiful oil, food production grinds to a halt. Mass starvation takes hold in just one year, leading to disease and the unleashing of a global pandemic. Over the next five years, the human population suffers a massive, catastrophic die-off, plummeting to less than a billion people. Your once-awesome score now looks pitiful: Human civilization crashed and you’ll never win the simulation now. Game over.

This is the outcome facing modern human civilization… and it’s no game. The possibility is very real. Unless something drastic is done to find a balance between human consumption (which is directly tied to population) and the natural environment that supports us all, our population is going to crash, too. It is a simple matter of biology.

The population problem no one dares speak of

There’s no way around this sobering thought: Population is the problem. There are too many people consuming too much stuff. It cannot be sustained — especially not at the very high rates of consumption our western world has grown used to.

To solve this dilemma, you can either reduce the population over time (through one-child policies, for example) or reduce consumption (through a variety of means), but you’ve got to do something. In no way do I support the idea of a one-child policy, by the way. I don’t support government intervention in our private lives, and I don’t support governments mandating personal limits on our carbon consumption. But then again, if something radical doesn’t change, it’s fairly obvious that the human population is simply going to keep expanding until key resources are all dried up. And that, of course, will result in a devastating crash of the human population.

So there you have it: The price for our expansionistic, high-consumption lifestyles today is eventually going to be the blowout of human civilization in the future, followed by a sharp population crash. The only thing that can really stop it is forced government population control, a global pandemic, or some other widespread disaster that kills off a huge percentage of the world population. None of these seem particularly desirable.

Or, perhaps, the world could be saved with a sudden burst of global education that teaches people to think about the long-term consequences of their own actions, but I’m not betting on that happening anytime soon. Even really smart people in first-world nations still burn up oil and use up resources as if there were no consequences.

Education alone cannot save human civilization from destroying itself. Smart people are not necessarily ecologically-aware people. In fact, you could argue that the most highly-educated people on the planet are precisely those who are consuming the greatest natural resources. (Poor, uneducated populations don’t consume much for the simple reason that they cannot afford to.)

There’s no way around it: We are on a track headed straight for our own destruction. A planet-wide collapse is coming sometime this century.

If you think I’m wrong, I’d like to hear from you. I hope I’m wrong, and I’m looking for a reasoned argument that can offer a solution to our population problem — preferably without resorting to government-run population control initiatives or forced one-child policies.

Seriously: How can the human species now save itself from its own destruction? Even free energy technologies aren’t the answer, as they don’t solve the problems of running out of fossil water, topsoil, natural habitat or rare earth metals used in industrial processes. Free energy will only cause the human population to explode even more rapidly, worsening the current problem of over-population.

I challenge every person reading this to do the math. Run the numbers yourself. Look at the limited resources on our planet and compare them with the per-capita consumption facts associated with modern-day consumers. Then consider what happens when the population keeps expanding… and add to that the desire for poorer nations to “achieve” the consumption rates of first-world nations like the USA.

If you do the math, you’ll quickly see it doesn’t add up. The projects all come to a screeching halt in the next hundred years (if not sooner). The population growth rates still under way lead to a literal dead end, given current rates of consumption.

This may not be a popular topic to write about. Most people prefer to pretend this problem doesn’t exist (much like the U.S. national debt). But it is, in reality, the single largest problem facing the future of human civilization: How do we find a way to live in balance with our natural environment while sustaining a steady population… without turning our world into a population control police state?

I personally cannot think of any acceptable solution to this problem that does not involve some sort of massive population control measure… and that solution is, itself, unthinkable.

Climate Change And Social Justice: Towards An Ecosocialist Perspective

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:33:14 +0000

By Asit Das

26 June, 2010
Reflections Of A Rebel Blog

After the Kyoto protocol and the IPCC report, climate change has emerged as a serious issue facing mankind. Climate change and the issues of social justice should be seen in the context of the urgency of the global ecological crisis.

Some writers think that the origins of today’s global ecological crises are to be found in the unusual response in Europe’s ruling states, to the great crisis in the 14th century 1290 -1450. There are indeed striking parallels between the world system today, and the situation prevailing in a broadly feudal Europe. At the dawn of the 14th century, the agriculture regime, once capable of remarkable productivity, experienced stagnation. A large population shifted to cities; western trading networks connected far-flung economic centers. Resource extraction like copper and silver, faced new technical challenges, fettering profitability. After some six centuries of sustained expansion, by the 14th century it had become clear that feudal Europe had reached the limits of its development, for reasons related to its environment, its configuration of social power, and the relations between them.

What followed was either immediately or eventually the rise of capitalism. Regardless of one’s specific interpretation, it is clear that the centuries after 1450 marked an era of fundamental environmental transformation. It was to be commodity-centered and exclusive, it was also an unstable and uneven, dynamic combination of seigniorial capitalist and peasant economics.

This ecological regime of early capitalism was beset with contradiction. In the middle of the 18th century, England shifted from its position as a leading grain exporter to major grain importer. Yield in England’s agriculture stagnated. Inside the country, landlords compensated by agitating for enclosures, which accelerated beyond anything known in previous centuries. Outside the country, Ireland’s subordination was intensified with an eye on agricultural exports. This was the era of crisis for capitalism’s first ecological regime. For all the talk of early capitalism as mercantile, it was also extraordinarily productivist and dynamic, in ways that went far beyond buying cheap and selling dear. Early capitalism had created a vast agro-ecological system of unprecedented geographical breadth, stretching from the eastern Baltic to Portugal, from southern Norway to Brazil and the Caribbean. It had delivered an expansion of the agro-extractive surplus for centuries. It had been, in other words, an expression of capitalist advancement following Adam Smith and occasionally, combining market, class and ecological transformations in a new crystallization of ecological power and process.

By the middle of the 18th century, however, this world ecological regime had become a victim of its own success. Agricultural yields, not just in England but also across Europe, extended even into the Andes and Spain. It was a contributor to the world crisis. It was a world ecological crisis, i.e., not a crisis of the earth in an idealist sense, but a crisis of early modern capitalism’s organization of the world nature of capitalism and not just a world economy, but also a world ecology. For even many on the left have long regarded capitalism as something that acts upon nature treating it as a commodity. This world ecological crisis can be characterized as capitalism’s first developmental environmental crisis, quite distinct from the epochal ecological crisis that characterized the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It was a crisis resolved through two major successive waves of global conquest – the creation of North America, and increasingly India as a vast supplier of food and resources; and then, by the later 19th century, the great colonial invasion and occupation of Southeast Asia, Africa and China.

The Industrial Revolution retains its hold on the popular imagination as the historical and geographical locus of today’s environmental crisis. It was a view that co-existed with the profound faith in technological progress. It can be viewed that the industrial revolution as the resolution of an earlier moment of modern ecological crisis and a more expansive, more intensive reconstruction of global nature. The industrial revolution offered not merely a technical fix to the developmental crisis that marked capitalism’s ecological regimes, but within this revolution, was inscribed a vast geographical fix, which at that time was as limiting as it had once been liberating. Such a perspective of world ecological crisis offers a more historical name and a more hopeful way of looking for a pro-people approach for thinking and acting about the problems of ecological crisis in the modern world. While the technological marvels of the past two centuries are routinely celebrated, it had become clear in the 1860s that all advances in resource efficiency promised more aggregate resource consumption. This is how the modern world market functions, towards profligacy and not conservation. The technological marvels have rested on geographical expansion neither more nor less than they did in the formative centuries of capitalist development. The pressure to enclose vast new areas of the planet and to penetrate even deeper into the niches of social and ecological life has continued unabated. Now we are witnessing the imperial process of new enclosures, with a partnership with the ruling elites, and the corporate sector of the Third World countries. All this has been reinforced in the same manner by a radical plunge into the depths of the earth to extract oil, coal, water and different types of strategic resources. It is an ecological regime that has reached, or will soon reach, its limits. Whatever the geological veracity of the peak oil argument, it is clear that the American led ecological regime that promised, and for half a century delivered cheap oil, is now done for – this is a bigger issue than present limits of oil reserves.

It is from this standpoint that an accounting of earlier crises may help us to discern the contours of the present global ecological crisis. At the outset, it seems capitalism’s preference for externalizing its crisis through colonial expansions, plunder and conquest of new territories for resources and markets, has reached its definite and destructive geographical limits. As long as fresh land existed beyond the reach of capital, the system’s socio-ecological contradictions could be managed. With the possibilities for external colonization foreclosed by the 20th century, capital has been compelled to pursue strategies of internal colonization, among which we might include the explosive growth of genetically modified plants and animals since 1970. Drilling even deeper and to even more distant locales for oil, water and minerals; converting human bodies, especially those of women, people of color, workers and farmers into toxic waste dumps for a wide range of carcinogenic and other lethal substantives.

There has been lots of critical analysis of different dimensions of contemporary environmental degradation, of government policies, and the role of multinational international agreements. What is needed is sufficient care given to the task of situating these factors systemically and historically.

There is a certain urgency to the present ecological crisis. Now it has been proved that the world economy has been driven to the limits, and in some cases beyond a whole range of ecological thresholds. The global ecological crisis is not impending, it is already here. To understand the structural logic of this crisis, we have to have a historical perspective on globalization and distinguishing the new from the old, in the present juncture and trying to situate the contemporary dynamics of the world historically. Our response to the fate of human civilization depends on how we deal with this age of ecological catastrophes. By locating today’s ecological transformations within the long run and large-scale patterns of recurrence and evolution in the modern world, we may unravel the distinctiveness of the impending ecological catastrophe. This means that we have to situate ecological relations internal to the political economy of capitalism and not merely placing concepts of ecological transformation and governance, alongside those of political categories of political economy from the standpoint of the historically existing dialectic of nature and society. Once ecological relations of production are put into the mix, one of the chief things that come into view is the production of socio-ecological regimes, both regional and on world scale. These initially liberate the accumulation of capital, only to generate self-limiting contradictions that culminate in renewed ecological bottlenecks to continued accumulation each time the cycle starts anew; historically, this has been more expansive and intensifies relations between capital labour and external nature. The task before us is to identify the different forms and kinds of the unfolding ecological crises.

The Writing on the Wall, Ecology: The Moment of Truth

Explaining the magnitude of the crisis and the urgency to deal with it, John Bellamy Foster in his note “Ecology: The Moment of Truth” says: “It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century.” Nearly fifteen years ago he observed (John Bellamy Foster, “This Vulnerable Planet”, 1994): “We have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.

1. Today, with a quarter-century still remaining in this projected time line, it appears to have been too optimistic. Available evidence now strongly suggests that under a regime of business as usual we could be facing an irrerevocable “tipping point” with respect to climate change, within a mere decade.

2. Other crises such as species extinction (percentage of bird, mammal and fish species “vulnerable or in immediate danger of extinction” are “now measured in double digits”).

3. The rapid depletion of the oceans’ bounty; desertification; deforestation; air pollution; water shortages/pollution; soil degradation; the imminent peaking of world oil production (creating new geopolitical tensions); and a chronic world food crisis – all point to the fact that the planet as we know it and its ecosystems are stretched to the breaking point. The moment of truth for the earth and human civilization has arrived.”

To be sure, it is unlikely that the effects of ecological degradation in our time, though enormous, will prove apocalyptic for human civilization within a single generation, even under conditions of capitalist business as usual. Normal human life spans, there is no doubt that considerable time is still left before the full effect of the current human degrading the planet comes into play. Yet, the period remaining in which we can avert future environmental catastrophe, before it is essentially out of our hands, is much shorter. Indeed, the growing sense of urgency of environmentalists has to do with the prospect of various tipping points being reached as critical ecological thresholds are crossed, leading to the possibility of a drastic contraction of life on earth. (See “Ecology: The Moment of Truth” by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Monthly Review, July-August 2008).

Capitalist and Socialist Response to the Present Ecological Crisis

Under capitalist conditions, the environment is more and more transformed into a contested object of human greed. The exploitation of natural resources, and their degradation by a growing variety of pollutants, results in man made scarcity, leading to conflicts over access to them. Access to nature is uneven and unequal, and the societal relation of man to nature therefore is conflict-prone. The ecological footprints of people in different countries and regions of the world are of very different sizes, reflecting severe inequalities of incomes and wealth. Ecological injustices, therefore, can only usefully be discussed if social class contradictions and production of inequality in the courses of capital accumulation are taken into account. The environment includes the energy system, climate, biodiversity, soils, water, wood, deserts, ice sheets, etc., the different spheres of planet earth and their historical evolution. The complexity of nature and the positive and negative feedback mechanisms between the different dimensions of the environment in space and time are only partly known. Therefore, an environmental policy has to be made in the shadow of a high degree of uncertainty. This is why one of the basic principles of environmental policy is that of precaution. The effects of human activities, particularly economic activities on natural processes and the feedback mechanisms within the totality of the social political and economic systems, constitute the so-called societal relation of man to nature. Only a holistic attempt to integrate environmental aspects into discourses of political economy, political science, sociology culture studies, etc., can make possible a coherent understanding of environmental problems and yield adequate political response to the challenges of the ongoing ecological crisis.

Green Capitalism and Capitalist Response to the Ecological Crisis

Mainstream environmentalists seek to solve the ecological problems almost exclusively through three mechanical strategies: (1) technological solutions, (2) extending the market to all aspects of nature, and (3) creating what are intended as mere islands of preservation in a world of almost universal exploitation and destruction of nature habitats. In contrast, a minority of critical human ecologists have come to understand the need to change our fundamental social relations.

The Capitalist Response to Global Ecological Crisis

The ecological crisis is a complex mix of dangerous trends. Capitalist ideology characteristically views only the components of this crisis, thereby obscuring its systemic nature. The build up of greenhouse gases and the consequent spectres of climatic tipping points have been widely, if reluctantly, acknowledged within the US ruling class, although for the most part without any matching sense of urgency. Little attention is paid to this in official mainstream campaign discourses. Different dimensions of the crisis are viewed either as a local problem, or more alarmingly, as opportunities for future profit. One can see these in the spread of toxins, the depletion of vital goods – notably fresh water, and biodiversity; the increasingly intrusive and reckless manipulation of basic natural processes as in genetic engineering, cloud seeding, changing the course of rivers, etc.

An adequate response to the crisis will ultimately involve addressing all these dimensions. We are still only in the earliest stages of necessary awareness. This means that we must first convincingly address the arguments of those who would downplay the depth of the transformation that long-term species-survival will require. One part of this task responding to those who deny human agency in climate crisis is a matter of pitting straightforward scientific reasoning against assertions made principally by representatives of corporate capital. Another challenge comes to social ecology from those who put forward the view that the only feasible green agenda is a capitalist one.

Green Capitalism

Among the many possible illustrations of “Green Capitalism”, a small news item in the financial section of the March 7, 2008 issue of the New York Times, provides a useful lead. Captioned “Gore gets rich”, it reports that former US Vice-President Al Gore, fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his cautionary filmed lecture about global warming, invested 35 million dollars with Capricorn Investment Group, a firm that puts clients’ assets into hedge funds and invests in makers of environmentally friendly products. The article also notes that Gore has flourished from his business ties with Apple and Google, and that he was recently made a partner at Keiner Perkins Caufield, the top tier Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm. A visit to the Capricorn Group’s website leads to stories about the various projects in which its funds have been invested, one of which is Mendel Biotechnology, which is working with BP and Monsanto supported by a 125 million dollar grant from the US Department of Energy, to find a way to propagate Miscanthus – a potentially more efficient fuel-producing plant than corn, for quick planting and maximum yield.

This is quintessential capitalism; its only green attribute is the notion of crop-derived fuel as offering a clean and green form of energy. The following core aspects of the ecological crisis, however, remain unaddressed – if not aggravated, in this scenario:

1. Although biofuels may produce less greenhouse gas than petroleum, their aggregate impact in terms of air and water pollution, soil degradation and food prices may be more severe.

2. No recognition is given to the need to reduce the total amount of energy consumption of paved surfaces.

3. Large-scale use of cropland as a fuel source impinges on food crops without reducing pressure on the world water supply.

4. Agri-business practices, whatever the product, have their negative impact on biodiversity.

5. Monsanto is implicated in the coercive imposition of genetically modified organisms (GMO).

6. Silicon Valley is at the cutting edge of capitalist hyper-development that has accelerated innovation and obsolescence, a generation of vast quantities of toxic trash.

7. The US Government continues to provide subsidies to corporations rather than supporting efforts directly to address long-term human needs.

The more familiar image of green capitalism is the one of small grassroot enterprises offering local services, solar housing, organic food markets, etc. It is true and promising that as ecological awareness spreads, the space for such activities will grow. We should also acknowledge that the related exploration of alternative living arrangements might contribute in a positive way to the longer-term conversion that is required. More generally, it is certainly the case that any effective conservation measures, including steps towards renewable energy that can be taken in the short run, should be welcome, no matter who takes those steps. However, it is important not to see in such steps any repudiation by capital of its ecologically and socially devastating core commitments to expansion, accumulation and profit.

To remind ourselves of this core commitment is not to claim that capital ignores the environmental crisis, it is simply to account for the particular way it responds to it. This includes direct corporate initiatives and measures taken by capitalist governments. At least in the US, however, the former thrust predominates. The accepted self-designation of these approaches, ‘corporate environmentalism’ defined as environmentally friendly actions, not required by the law and thereby signifying explicitly that the corporations themselves are setting the agenda. The most tangible expression of corporate environmentalism is a substantial across-the-board jump through the 1980s in the numbers of management personnel assigned to deal with environmental issues.

On the basis of both theory and performance, and viewing the corporate sector as a whole, we can say that this new emphasis has made itself felt in two ways. On the one hand, corporations have been alert to opportunities for making environmentally positive adjustments, where these coincide with the standard business criteria of efficiency and cost reduction. On the other hand, more importantly, corporations have acted directly on the political stage, with an exceptionally free hand in the US. Both by lobbying and direct penetration of policy making bodies, they have moulded regulatory practices, censored scientific reports and shaped a defiant official posture in the global arena exemplified by US withdrawal from the Kyoto accords. In addition, they have undertaken vast public relation campaigns (Green Washing) to portray their practices as environmentally progressive. From outside, as well as within the US, they have attempted with considerable success to define in their own interest, the internationally accepted parameters of sustainable development – initially through the continuing activity of the World Trade Organization, as well as corporate partnerships with United Nations Development Agencies.

None of these efforts embodies the slightest change in basic capitalist practice. On the contrary, they reflect a determination to shore up such a practice at all costs. The reality of green capitalism is that capital pays attention to green issues; this is not at all the same as having green priorities. Insofar as capital makes green oriented adjustments beyond those that are either profit-friendly or advisable for PR purposes or protection against liability, it is because those adjustments have been imposed, or as in the case of wind turbines in Germany, stimulated and subsidized by public authority. Such authority, even though exerted within the overall capitalist framework, reflects primarily the political strength of non or anti-capitalist forces like environmentalist organizations, trade unions, community groups, grassroot coalitions, etc., although these may be supported in part by certain sectors of capital, such as alternative energy and insurance industries.

As this whole current of opinion becomes stronger, advocates of green capitalism pick up on the popular call for renewable energy, but accompany it with a vision of undiminished proliferation of industrial products. In so doing, they overlook the complexity of the environmental crisis which has not only to do with the burning of fossil fuels, but also with assaults on the earth’s resource base as a whole, including for example, the paving over the green space, the raw material and energy costs of producing solar collectors and wind turbines, the encroachment on natural habitats not only by buildings and pavements, but also by dams, wind turbines, etc; the toxins associated with high-tech commodities and the increasingly critical problems of waste disposal; in short, the routine spin-offs from capital’s unqualified prioritization of economic growth.

Proponents of green capitalism respond to this by saying that economic growth, far from being the problem, is what holds the solutions. Environmentalism in this view is a purely negative response to ecological crisis giving rise to unpopular practices like regulation and prohibition. Hence, the singular “green capitalist” caricature of environmentalists. All of them direct our attention to stopping the bad, not creating the good. The “good” from this perspective, is a scenario of jobs, material abundance, and energy independence, understood however, within a characteristically capitalist competitive framework. While the need to cut greenhouse gases is recognized, the challenge is posed in narrowly technological terms. Attempts to resist consumerism are belittled, on the assumption that innovations, along with massive public investment, will solve any problem of scarcity; the vision is emphatically centered on the visited states, with China invoked to signify that the growth is unstoppable. The very existence of an environmental nexus is called into question, on the grounds that the category “environment” can only be conceived either as excluding humans or as being synonymous with everything – at either of which extreme it is seen to make sense. The biological understanding of the environment as a matrix with inter-penetrating parts is not entertained. Ultimately, green capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

One pole is referring to a complexly evolving equilibrium encompassing the growth of one of its particular components. Ironically, the core capitalist response to ecological crisis is a further deepening of the logic of commodification. Capitalist practice has come to pose not just as a material threat to ecological recovery, but also as an ideological threat to socialist theory and by extension to the prospects for developing a long-term popular movement with an inspiring alternative vision.

Socialist Response to Global Ecological Crisis: Towards Ecosocialism

Human beings depend on functioning ecosystems to sustain themselves, and their actions affect those same ecosystems. As a result, there is a necessary “metabolic” interaction between humans and the earth, which influences both the natural and social history. Increasingly the state of nature is being defined by the operations of the capitalist system, as anthropogenic forces are altering the global environment on a scale that is unprecedented. The global climate is rapidly changing due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. No area of the world’s ocean is unaffected by human influence, as the accumulation of carbon, fertilizer runoff, and over-fishing undermine biodiversity and the natural services that it provides. The millennium ecosystem assessment documents show that over two-thirds of the world’s ecosystems are over-exploited and polluted. Environmental problems are increasingly interrelated. Experts have been warning that we are dangerously close to pushing the planet past its tipping point, setting off cascading environmental problems that will radically alter the conditions of nature.

Although the ecological crisis has captured public attention, the dominant economic forces are attempting to seize the moment by assuring us that capital, technology and the market can be employed so as to ward off any threats without a major transformation of society. For example, numerous technological solutions are proposed to remedy global climate change, including agro-fuels, nuclear energy, and new coal plants that will capture and sequester carbon underground. The ecological crisis is thus presented as a technical problem that can be fixed within the current system, through better ingenuity, technological innovation and the magic of the market. In this view, the economy will be increasingly dematerialized, reducing demands placed on nature. The market will ensure that new avenues of capital accumulation are created in the very process of dealing with environmental challenges.

Yet this line of thought ignores the root causes of the ecological crisis. The social metabolic order of capitalism is inherently anti-ecological, since it systematically subordinates nature in its pursuit of endless accumulation and production on ever-larger scales. Technical fixes to socio-ecological problems typically have unintended consequences and fail to address the root of the problems – the political economic order. Rather than acknowledging metabolic rifts, natural limits, and ecological contradictions, capital seeks to play a shell game with the environmental problems. It generates, moving them around rather than addressing the root causes.

One obvious way capital shifts around ecological problems is through simple geographical displacement. Once resources are depleted in one region, capitalists search far and wide to seize control of resources in other parts of the world, whether by military force or markets.

One of the drives of colonialism was clearly the demand for more natural resources in rapidly industrializing European nations. However, expanding the area under the control of global capitalism is only one of the ways in which capitalists shift ecological problems around. There is a qualitative dimension as well, whereby one environmental crisis is solved (typically only in the short term) by changing the type of production process and generating a different crisis, such as how the shift from the use of wood to plastic in the manufacturing of many consumer goods replaced the problems associated with wood extraction by those associated with plastic production and disposal. Thus, one problem is transformed into another – a shift in the type of rift.

The pursuit of profit is the immediate pulse of capitalism, as it reproduces itself on an ever-larger scale. A capitalist economic system cannot function under conditions that require accounting for the reproduction of nature, which may include time scales of a hundred years or more, not to mention maintenance.

This is where the socialist response to global ecological crisis assumes importance. The social order of capital is characterized by rifts and shifts, as it freely appropriates nature and attempts to overcome, even if only whatever natural and social barriers it confronts. It only makes shifts or proposes technological fixes to address the pressing concern, without addressing the fundamental crisis, the force driving the ecological crisis – that is – capitalism itself. As Istvan Meszaros has said, “In the absence of miraculous solutions, Capitals’ arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and time in the end, inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity and Nature itself”. (See Istvan Meszaros, “Beyond Capital”, Monthly Review Press, New York).

The global reach of capital is creating a planetary ecological crisis. A fundamental structural crisis cannot be remedied within the operations of the system. Capitalism is incapable of regulating its social metabolism with nature in an environmentally sustainable manner. Its very operations violate the laws of restitution and metabolic restoration. The constant drive to renew the capital accumulation process intensifies its destructive social metabolism imposing the needs of capital on nature, regardless of the consequences to natural systems. Capitalism continues to play out the same failed strategy.

The solution to each environmental problem further generates new environmental problems – one crisis follows another, in an endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal contradictions of the system. If we are to solve our environmental crisis, we need to go to the root of the problem – i.e., the social relation of capital itself, given that this social metabolic order undermines the vital conditions of existence. Resolving the ecological crisis thus requires in the end a complete break with the logic of capital and the social metabolic order it creates.

It is here that the socialist response to global ecological crisis assumes importance. A socialist social order, that is a society of associated producers, can serve as the basis for potentially bringing social metabolism in line with the natural metabolism, in order to sustain the inalienable conditions for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generation. Given that human society must always interact with nature, concerns regarding the social metabolism are constant, regardless of the society. But a mode of production in which associated producers can regulate their exchange with nature in accordance with natural limits and know, while retaining the regenerative properties of natural processes and cycles, is fundamental to an environmentally sustainable social order.

The above clearly shows that to solve the world ecological crisis we should struggle for the creation of a socialist social order.

The transition from capitalism to socialism is a struggle for sustainable human development on which societies in the periphery of the capitalist world system have been leading the way.

The transition from capitalism to socialism is the most difficult problem of socialist theory and practice, the question of ecology magnifies the importance of finding a way out of this global ecological mess. Human relation with nature lies at the heart of the transition to socialism. An ecological perspective is pivotal to our understanding of capitalism’s limits, the failures of the early socialist experiments, and the overall struggle for an egalitarian and sustainable human development.

The real prospects for the solutions of global ecological crisis can be seen in the struggles to revolutionise social relations in the strife for a just and sustainable society, and are now emerging in the periphery of the world capitalism system, that is the third world societies. They are somehow mirrored in movement for ecological and social revolution in the advanced capitalist world. It is only through fundamental change at the centre of the system, from which the pressure on the planet principally emanates, that there is any genuine possibility of avoiding ultimate ecological destruction. For ecopessimists, this may seem to be an impossible goal. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there is now an ecology as well as political economy of revolutionary change known as ecosocialism. The emergence in our times – the struggles for sustainable human development in various people’s struggle in the global periphery could mark the beginning of a revolt against both world alienation and human self-estrangement. Such revolts, if consistent, could have only one objective – i.e., the creation of a society of associated producers rationally regulating their metabolic relation to nature, and doing so not only in accordance with their own needs, but also in accordance with those of future generations and life as a whole. Today the task of transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one.

The Idea of Ecosocialism

Richard Smith wrote in “The Engine of Eco Collapse”, published in the Ecosocialist journal ‘Capitalism, Nature and Socialism’, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2005:

“If capitalism can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human survival what alternative is there but some sort of nationally and globally planned economy? Problems like climate change require the “Visible hand” of direct planning. Our capitalist corporate leaders can’t help themselves, have no choice but to systematically make wrong, irrational and ultimately – given the technology they command – globally suicidal decisions about the economy and the environment so then, what other choice do we have than to consider a true ecosocialist alternative?” (Richard Smith)

The concept of ecosocialism has been advanced by socialist thinkers like Andre Gorz, James O’Connor, Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster et al.

Ecosocialsm is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative to capitalism’s destructive process. It advances an economic policy founded on the non-monetary and extra economic criteria of social needs and ecological equilibrium. Grounded on the basic arguments of ecological movement and Marxist critique of political economy, this dialectical synthesis attempted by a broad spectrum of authors from Andre Gorz to Elma Aluater, James O’Connor, Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster. It is at the same time a critique of market ecology which does not challenge the capitalist system, and of “productivist socialism” which ignores the issue of natural limits.

According to O’Connor, the aim of ecological socialism is a new society based on ecological rationality, democratic control, social equality and the predominance of use value over exchange value. (See James O’Connor, ‘Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism’, The Guilford Press, New York, 1998). The above aims require: (a) collective ownership of the mean of production by, and (b) democratic planning, which makes it possible for society to define the goals of investment and production, and (c) new technological structure of the productive forces. In other words, a revolutionary social and economic transformation.

For ecosocialists, the problem with the main currents of political ecology represented by most Green parties is that they do not seem to take into account the intrinsic contradiction between the capitalist dynamics of the unlimited expansion of capital and accumulation of profits, and the preservation of the environment. This leads to a critique of productivism, which is often relevant but does not lead beyond an ecologically – reformed ‘market economy’. The result has been that many Green parties have become the ecological alibi of centre left social – liberal governments. (For detailed critique of existing green politics, see Joel Kovel – ‘Enemy of Nature’.

A critique of the productivist ideology of progress and of the idea of a socialist exploitation of nature, appeared already in the writings of some dissident Marxists of the 1930s, such as Walter Benjamin. But it is mainly during the last few decades, that “ecosocialism” has developed as a challenge to the thesis of the neutrality of productive forces which had continued to predominate in the main tendencies of the left during the 20th century.

Many scientific and technological achievements of modernity are precious, but the whole productive system must be transformed and this can be done only by ecosocialist methods, i.e., through a democratic planning of the economy which takes into the account the preservation of the ecological equilibrium. This may mean, for certain branches of production, to discontinue them – for instance nuclear plants, certain methods of mass/industrial fishing (which are responsible for the near extermination of several species in the seas), the destructive logging of tropical forests, etc.

The list is long. It first of all requires a revolution in the energy system, with the replacement of present sources (essentially fossils) that are responsible for the pollution and poisoning of the environment by renewable sources of energy: water, wind and sun. The issue of energy is decisive because fossil energy (oil and coal) is responsible for much of the planet’s pollution, as well as for the disastrous climate change. Nuclear energy is a false alternative, not only because of the danger of new Chernobyls, but also because nobody knows what to do with the thousands of tons of radioactive waste toxic for hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of years, and the gigantic masses of contaminated obsolete planets. Solar energy, which has never aroused much interest in capitalist societies (for not being profitable or competitive), must become the object of intense research and development – a key role in the building of an alternative energy system.

All this must be accomplished under the necessary condition of full and equitable employment. This condition is essential, not only to meet the requirement of social justice, but in order to assure working class support for the structural transformation of the productive forces. This process is impossible without public control over the mean of production and planning, that is public decisions on investment and technological change, which must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises in order to serve common good.

The whole society should be able to choose democratically which productive lines are to be privileged and what percentage of resources are to be invested in education, health and agriculture. The prices of goods themselves would not be left to the law of supply and demand, but determined as far as possible according to social political and ecological criteria. Initially this might only involve taxes on certain products, and subsidized prices for others, but ideally, as the transition to socialism moves forward, more and more products and services would be distributed free of charge, according to the needs and will of the citizens.

The passage from capitalist destructive progress to socialism is a historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture and mentalities. Politics is central to this transformative process. It is important to emphasize that such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and political structures, and the active support by the vast majority of the population of an ecosocialist programme. The development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is a process, where the decisive factor is people’s own collective experiences of struggle, moving from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of society.

This transition would lead to not only a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reigns of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond unlimited production of commodities that are useless and harmful to the environment.

This requires a qualitative transformation of the development paradigm itself. This means putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on the production, in a large scale, of useless and harmful products: the armaments industry is a good example. A great part of the goods produced in capitalism with their inbuilt obsolescence have no other usefulness; is not excessive consumption acquisition of pseudo novelties imposed by fashion through advertisement and mass culture? A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, beginning with those which could be described as the basic requirement of a democratic egalitarian society – water, food, clothing, housing, including basic services like health, education transport and culture.

Only through an ecosocialist politics we can avoid the impending ecocatastrophe, thus saving the planet and human beings.

Brace Yourself: This Is the Tip of the Iceberg for Oil-Induced Enviro Catastrophes

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:09:45 +0000

By Scott Thill, AlterNet

Posted on May 17, 2010, Printed on May 25, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/146879/

After considering laughably titled solutions like the top hat (a containment dome), the junk shot (a pressurized blast of golf balls and shredded tires) and worse, British Petroleum has proven one thing above all else: When the fossil fool hits the fan, it simply has no plan.

The fact that BP was allowed to drill along the shores of the United States in spite of its unwillingness to plan and prepare for accidents is only stunning to those haven’t been paying attention to the feverish pace of deregulation since the rapacious Reagan conservatives took global culture by blitzkrieg. It certainly isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying even slight attention to BP, which boasts a decorated resume of spills and screw-ups.

According to recent revelations, a blowout preventer that could have halted the Deepwater Horizon clustergush failed a crucial pressure test hours before the April 20 explosion, and was never tested by the government engineer who approved BP’s drilling operation. Those kinds of safety lapses are standard operating procedure, an oil industry whistleblower told the Huffington Post, saying he routinely witnessed 100 such shortcuts on BP rigs and others throughout 18 years of service in the sector. The fallback plan, a relief well, won’t be finished until after the summer, by which there will be little reason left to live in New Orleans. Great.

But if you’ve been railing for decades against the fossil fuel sector for everything from deliberately removing safeguards that could have prevented what will likely end up being the worst U.S. oil disaster in history to its lethal emissions that could, in the extreme, end up warming planet Earth to the point that human habitation is an impossibility, well, this is all old, sad news.

Cold Oil Turkey

“While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society,” said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. “We don’t want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we’re indignant.”

The counter-argument to Kunstler’s hard-eged realism — which is thankfully gaining steam every day the Deepwater Horizon disaster gushes hundreds of thousands, if not a million, gallons of crude into the Gulf — is that further regulation and safety enforcement could put at least a partial stop to the fossil foolishness. Which means legally proving that BP, Halliburton and Transocean deliberately obviated what safety requirements existed so that the United States can conduct criminal proceedings which could then levy heftier damages than $75 million cap on liability under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which itself was hastily enacted by Congress under President George H.W. Bush shortly after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

It also means exacting deeper regulation on the nation’s compromised Minerals Management Service, which the Department of the Interior is considering splitting into two separate agencies. From taking drugs and having sex with energy company reps to being exempted from delivering detailed environmental analyses, the MMS is a controversy-soaked frat house. And its parent agency at Interior is the same hot mess. It’s obvious that, when it comes to America’s oil regime, the lunatics are drilling the asylum into the bedrock. So it’s probably no surprise that neither agency returned several calls for comment.

But add it up and it’s one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster’s prime suspect: All of us.

“BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, ‘Screw you, America, we’re moving our operations to Angola,’” added Kunstler. “All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior.”

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they’d rather drill for what’s left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation.

“In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts,” explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. “Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we’re addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all.”

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that’s only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload.

“The administration needs to take this opportunity to explain the multiple hidden costs to our addiction to fossil fuels,” argued Center for American Progress climate analyst Joseph Romm, the author of Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. “As we’re finding out with Goldman Sachs, you just can’t let the industry regulate itself. But ultimately we have to get off the addiction. If the administration doesn’t help us do that, it will be an incomprehensible missed opportunity.”

“We need a serious carbon tax and serious climate legislation to reduce our reliance,” said Drum. “I care a lot more about that than I do about the specific issues related to oil rig safety.”

Infinite Step Recovery

The prospects for such serious campaigns against carbon are practically dead in the water, just like the collateral damage washing up in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Gulf. The current climate legislation drafted by senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman is a capitulation to the fossil fuel industry, offering concessions like increased offshore drilling and a doubtlessly unregulated cap-and-trade derivatives market in exchange for greenhouse gas limits. This mind-numbing arrogance and collusion between the energy sector and rich nations is precisely what led to the failure of last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, according to ex-World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern, who crunched the numbers in 2006 and decided that doing nothing about global warming would end up costing the world around $5 trillion dollars and rising.

The prospects for this year’s retreat in Cancun similarly suck. The Obama administration’s special climate envoy Todd Stern admitted in May that the United States will probably have no climate bill in place by the time it gets to Mexico. Factor in robust public support for further coastal drilling in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it becomes clear that the political will to change our energy game is weak.

But the political capital to be reaped by anger over the spill is strong. On May 13, senators Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Dianne Feinstein, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell and Jeff Merkley introduced legislation to ban offshore oil drilling along the West Coast. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew support for a drilling operation off the coast of Santa Barbara. On the other side of the country, Florida representative Corrine Brown has proposed similar legislation, while governor Charlie Crist has suggested a possible constitutional amendment mandating the same.

Yet the Obama administration is openly supporting not an outright ban on offshore drilling, but Kerry and Leiberman’s weak-kneed concessions. Their bill does include provisions that allow states to ban operations within 75 miles of their coastlines, as well as a sweetener that allows them to siphon off larger revenue from those operations. But they should already have that anyway. And the Deepwater Horizon clustergush occurred over 40 miles offshore; Kerry and Lieberman’s bill would have bought the Gulf coast a few extra days before it was soaked in oil. Plus, fisheries and other natural environments utterly necessary to the economic and civic health of the entire country aren’t strictly on the coastline; some are miles offshore, closer to the rigs than you or I.

Take a look at what the Department of the Interior calls “President Obama’s comprehensive energy plan for the country,” and it’s clear that we’re in for much more, not less, offshore drilling. The color-coded graphics tell it all: Exploration and production plans to cruise northeastward up from the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico to its Eastern region and up into the South and mid-Atlantic. Same goes for the comparatively oily Alaskan region. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Shell Oil starts drilling in Alaska’s cold Chuchki and Beaufort seas starting in July.

“The Arctic region is, in nearly every respect, the exact opposite of the temperate conditions of the Gulf of Mexico,” said WWF president and CEO Carter Roberts. “Technology simply does not exist to clean up a spill in Arctic waters. And, unlike the Gulf with its robust response apparatus close at hand, the Coast Guard lacks the capacity to adequately respond to a spill in the Arctic.”

While the West Coast is currently off-limits, the Interior reminds, especially given the new legislation from Boxer and company, it’s just a matter of diminishing supply until we start tapping that vein. If not for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we might already have. But with public support and White House support fully behind further offshore drilling, and the paranoid specters of foreign terrorism rearing their fear-inducing heads up in Times Square and Arizona, it’s probably going to be a long time before the United States does anything substantial about the Deepwater Horizon incident, much less greater oil exploration or even climate change.

But one thing is most likely certain: We won’t be ready as a nation to mandate change until the peak oil gong rings in 2020, or earlier. And by then, it could be too late.

“Big Oil has obviously funded major disinformation campaigns to mislead the public about the threat of global warming, and the worst-case scenarios for a spill,” Romm said. “But at some point, the painful reality of warming will be so clear that we will be desperate and start to do things differently. But what we need to do first and foremost is pass a climate and clean-energy bill. That is our top priority: Get off the unsafe dirty fuels of the 20th century and get on the safe fuels of the 21st century like wind and solar, which never run out.”

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:53:41 +0000

A new study says the seas are acidifying ten times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And, the study concludes, current changes in ocean chemistry due to the burning of fossil fuels may portend a new wave of die-offs.

by carl zimmer

The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul.

They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.

“In the middle of this white sediment, there’s this big plug of red clay,” says Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.

In other words, the vast clouds of shelled creatures in the deep oceans had virtually disappeared. Many scientists now agree that this change was caused by a drastic drop of the ocean’s pH level. The seawater became so corrosive that it ate away at the shells, along with other species with calcium carbonate in their bodies. It took hundreds of thousands of years for the oceans to recover from this crisis, and for the sea floor to turn from red back to white.

The clay that the crew of the JOIDES Resolution dredged up may be an ominous warning of what the future has in store. By spewing carbon dioxide into the air, we are now once again making the oceans more acidic.

Today, Ridgwell and Daniela Schmidt, also of the University of Bristol, are publishing a study in the journal Natural Geoscience, comparing what happened in the oceans 55 million years ago to what the oceans are experiencing today. Their research supports what other researchers have long suspected: The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean.

“This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” says Ridgwell.

When we humans burn fossil fuels, we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where the gas traps heat. But much of that carbon dioxide does not stay in the air. Instead, it gets sucked into the oceans. If not for the oceans, climate scientists believe that the planet would be much warmer than it is today. Even with the oceans’ massive uptake of CO2, the past decade was still the warmest since modern record-keeping began. But storing carbon dioxide in the oceans may come at a steep cost: It changes the chemistry of seawater.

At the ocean’s surface, seawater typically has a pH of about 8 to 8.3 pH units. For comparison, the pH of pure water is 7, and stomach acid is around 2. The pH level of a liquid is determined by how many positively charged hydrogen atoms are floating around in it. The more hydrogen ions, the lower the pH. When carbon dioxide enters the ocean, it lowers the pH by reacting with water.

The carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has lowered the ocean pH level by .1. That may seem tiny, but it’s not. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that there are 10 times more hydrogen ions in a pH 5 liquid than one at pH 6, and 100 times more than pH 7. As a result, a drop of just .1 pH units means that the concentration of hydrogen ions in the ocean has gone up by about 30 percent in the past two centuries.

To see how ocean acidification is going to affect life in the ocean, scientists have run laboratory experiments in which they rear organisms at different pH levels. The results have been worrying — particularly for species that build skeletons out of calcium carbonate, such as corals and amoeba-like organisms called foraminifera. The extra hydrogen in low-pH seawater reacts with calcium carbonate, turning it into other compounds that animals can’t use to build their shells.

These results are worrisome, not just for the particular species the scientists study, but for the ecosystems in which they live. Some of these vulnerable species are crucial for entire ecosystems in the ocean. Small shell-building organisms are food for invertebrates, such as mollusks and small fish, which in turn are food for larger predators. Coral reefs create an underwater rain forest, cradling a quarter of the ocean’s biodiversity.

But on their own, lab experiments lasting for a few days or weeks may not tell scientists how ocean acidification will affect the entire planet. “It’s not obvious what these mean in the real world,” says Ridgwell.

One way to get more information is to look at the history of the oceans themselves, which is what Ridgwell and Schmidt have done in their new study. At first glance, that history might suggest we have nothing to worry about. A hundred million years ago, there was over five times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean was .8 pH units lower. Yet there was plenty of calcium carbonate for foraminifera and other species. It was during this period, in fact, that shell-building marine organisms produced the limestone formations that would eventually become the White Cliffs of Dover.

But there’s a crucial difference between the Earth 100 million years ago and today. Back then, carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years. Those slow changes triggered other slow changes in the Earth’s chemistry. For example, as the planet warmed from more carbon dioxide, the increased rainfall carried more minerals from the mountains into the ocean, where they could alter the chemistry of the sea water. Even at low pH, the ocean contains enough dissolved calcium carbonate for corals and other species to survive.

Today, however, we are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.

Scientists have been scouring the fossil record for periods of history that might offer clues to how the planet will respond to the current carbon jolt. They’ve found that 55 million years ago, the Earth went through a similar change. Lee Kump of Penn State and his colleagues have estimated that roughly 6.8 trillion tons of carbon entered the Earth’s atmosphere over about 10,000 years.

Nobody can say for sure what unleashed all that carbon, but it appeared to have had a drastic effect on the climate. Temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 Fahrenheit). Many deep-water species became extinct, possibly as the pH of the deep ocean became too low for them to survive.

But this ancient catastrophe (known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM) was not a perfect prequel to what’s happening on Earth today. The temperature was warmer before the carbon bomb went off, and the pH of the oceans was lower. The arrangement of the continents was also different. The winds blew in different patterns as a result, driving the oceans in different directions. All these factors make a big difference on the effect of ocean acidification. For example, the effect that low pH has on skeleton-building organisms depends on the pressure and temperature of the ocean. Below a certain depth in the ocean, the water becomes so cold and the pressure so high that there’s no calcium carbonate left for shell-building organisms. That threshold is known as the saturation horizon.

To make a meaningful comparison between the PETM and today, Ridgwell and Schmidt built large-scale simulations of the ocean at both points of time. They created a virtual version of the Earth 55 million years ago and let the simulation run until it reached a stable state. The pH level of their simulated ocean fell within the range of estimates of the pH of the actual ocean 55 millions years ago. They then built a version of the modern Earth, with today’s arrangements of continents, average temperature, and other variables. They let the modern world reach a stable state and then checked the pH of the ocean. Once again, it matched the real pH found in the oceans today.

Ridgwell and Schmidt then jolted both of these simulated oceans with massive injections of carbon dioxide. They added 6.8 trillion tons of carbon over 10,000 years to their PETM world. Using conservative projections of future carbon emissions, they added 2.1 trillion tons of carbon over just a few centuries to their modern world. Ridgwell and Schmidt then used the model to estimate how easily carbonate would dissolve at different depths of the ocean.

The results were strikingly different. Ridgwell and Schmidt found that ocean acidification is happening about ten times faster today than it did 55 million years ago. And while the saturation horizon rose to 1,500 meters 55 million years ago, it will lurch up to 550 meters on average by 2150, according to the model.

The PETM was powerful enough to trigger widespread extinctions in the deep oceans. Today’s faster, bigger changes to the ocean may well bring a new wave of extinctions. Paleontologists haven’t found signs of major extinctions of corals or other carbonate-based species in surface waters around PETM. But since today’s ocean acidification is so much stronger, it may affect life in shallow water as well. “We can’t say things for sure about impacts on ecosystems, but there is a lot of cause for concern,” says Ridgwell.

Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University, says that the new paper “is highly significant to our ideas on ocean acidification.” But she points out that life in the ocean was buffeted by more than just a falling pH. “I’m not convinced it’s the whole answer,” she says. The ocean’s temperature rose and oxygen levels dropped. Together, all these changes had complex effects on the ocean’s biology 55 million years ago. Scientists now have to determine what sort of combined effect they will have on the ocean in the future.

Our carbon-fueled civilization is affecting life everywhere on Earth, according to the work of scientists like Ridgwell — even life that dwells thousands of feet underwater. “The reach of our actions can really be quite global,” says Ridgwell. It’s entirely possible that the ocean sediments that form in the next few centuries will change from the white of calcium carbonate back to red clay, as ocean acidification wipes out deep-sea ecosystems.

“It will give people hundreds of millions of years from now something to identify our civilization by,” says Ridgwell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl Zimmer writes about science for The New York Times and a number of magazines. A 2007 winner of the National Academies of Science Communication Award, Zimmer is the author of six books, including Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about the prospect of a warming world causing an evolutionary explosion and about using assisted migration to save species threatened by climate change.

Reposted from Yale Environment 360

Nut Case At The Wheel

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:40:30 +0000

By Jan Lundberg

23 May, 2010
Culturechange.org

As the U.S. continues the incredibly wasteful misallocation of resources known as car production and everything that goes with it, the externalized costs in terms of global warming, oil spills, and human isolation as consumers, only mount.

Who is in charge of this mad policy of ecocide? We all are, but we did elect a president named Barack Obama. He was supposed to be the answer to the blatantly destructive and incompetent George W. Bush. But Lo and Behold, Obama’s allegiance proved to be the status quo. Got recession? More cars! Oil spill a la Chernobyl in the U.S. Gulf? Keep on producing cars and using oil!

So, having fooled ourselves again with an election, ignoring the warning by The Who in their landmark song Won’t Get Fooled Again (1970), we look to the driver of our vehicle to see that he is a nut case with his accelerator pedal pushed to the floor. Global peak in oil supply? Pedal to the metal! What’s that above him? A helicopter gunship mowing down people on the other side of the world, in the name of democracy and freedom.

Obama’s calm, intelligent face, our multiracial darling Obama, is on the whole a maniacal puppet. And he’s wearing a mask, whether he knows it or not. Who or what is underneath?

Some who look beyond elections say the problem is essentially one of corporatism: that Obama is just another representative of the corporate elite, as were the Bushes, McCain and the Clintons. True, but is U.S. culture salvageable by targeting corporate rule?

The lateness of the hour tells us the answer is No. Although the modern large corporation is the most virulent form of exploitation of people and the Earth, and needs to be abolished, U.S. culture has gone way too far in its alienation, oppression and general distortion of human values to be cured or transformed by even a major reform.

What, then, are the implications for a nation and people who don’t even have a hope today of getting out from under the car (that’s pinning them down on the bloody, oily pavement)? Ideally, even Tea Party activists realize that significant change or relief from economic and social pressures does not come from another election or series of elections.

What, then — revolution? Is that the real goal of anyone wishing for fundamental change? What would this revolution entail? Would it be political, cultural, or both?

A series of goals or wishes by enough people amounts to a social movement or a coup. It has happened before, and the threat of this feels real to those who find the U.S. to still be somewhat benign. To them, the possibility of a worse form of government and loss of our already diminished freedoms looms large enough that one’s priority becomes that of somehow maintaining the status quo, while hoping for positive developments such as clean energy, an end to oil wars, and a roll-back of the Patriot Act.

However, the time for political change to re-chart the course of a nation is past. Collapse and disintegration have been assured, due in large part to dependence on cheap oil. When the dust settles there will be a proliferation of local cultures. Meanwhile, the extreme state of a society hard wired to consume its way to eco-hell is unchangeable.

This is a blind culture that cannot see its own true roots. Who came to North America to conquer and set up a foreign culture, and what was the prime objective? Sky-god fearing, private-property obsessed, master-slave opportunists: the antithesis of the indigenous nature-revering, communal, more egalitarian, diverse cultures that had found the key to surviving and thriving for a thousand generations.

This does not imply there was nothing good in the newcomers or in their exploits (Jefferson, Tom Paine, or their successors in great thought such as Thoreau and Muir). Indeed, the courageous new Americans loved their small farms, the amazing scenery, and the soul of the land that spawned perhaps the greatest new forms of music the world has ever seen.

How can the goodness of U.S. Americans and the land they inhabit (and have changed irrevocably) be safeguarded and turned into a force for positive change at a time of runaway destruction at the hands of ecocidal, greedy corporations and their tools in political power?

There is no political answer, but there is a cultural-change answer.

By abandoning a way of living that denies our true needs for healthy nature and human closeness, taking steps to conserve the land, air and water, we cannot help but find ourselves cutting the umbilical cord to the terminally ill host. What would we be losing? For one thing, car dependency: we can’t afford it anyway, financially or ecologically. We would then be looking to our neighbors and family for solutions to daily living, losing the isolation of total reliance on shopping and technology.

Organizing household and neighborhood composting, gardening and home repairs are more first steps toward restoring real community and socioeconomic resilience.

Human potential is unlimited. Those who believe deep change is not possible in the foreseeable future, while it is our only choice if we are to turn back the worst of petrocollapse that has clearly been unleashed, will be shocked by the upheaval to come in their own lives and throughout the modern world.

Such a revolution, with eventual political outcomes of a more local-based and nature-respecting basis than the conventional top-down growth-maximizing sort, is within us now, waiting to spread and flower.

The Greeks Get It

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:29:16 +0000

By Chris Hedges

24 May, 2010
TruthDig.com

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare-the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

The former right-wing government of Greece lied about the size of the country’s budget deficit. It was not 3.7 percent of gross domestic product but 13.6 percent. And it now looks like the economies of Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal are as bad as Greece’s, which is why the euro has lost 20 percent of its value in the last few months. The few hundred billion in bailouts for other faltering European states, like our own bailouts, have only forestalled disaster. This is why the U.S. stock exchange is in free fall and gold is rocketing upward. American banks do not have heavy exposure in Greece, but Greece, as most economists concede, is only the start. Wall Street is deeply invested in other European states, and when the unraveling begins the foundations of our own economy will rumble and crack as loudly as the collapse in Athens. The corporate overlords will demand that we too impose draconian controls and cuts or see credit evaporate. They have the money and the power to hurt us. There will be more unemployment, more personal and commercial bankruptcies, more foreclosures and more human misery. And the corporate state, despite this suffering, will continue to plunge us deeper into debt to make war. It will use fear to keep us passive. We are being consumed from the inside out. Our economy is as rotten as the economy in Greece. We too borrow billions a day to stay afloat. We too have staggering deficits, which can never be repaid. Heed the dire rhetoric of European leaders.

“The euro is in danger,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told lawmakers last week as she called on them to approve Germany’s portion of the bailout plan. “If we do not avert this danger, then the consequences for Europe are incalculable, and then the consequences beyond Europe are incalculable.”

Beyond Europe means us. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the current government of George Papandreou, did what the Republicans did under George W. Bush. They looted taxpayer funds to enrich their corporate masters and bankrupt the country. They stole hundreds of millions of dollars from individual retirement and pension accounts slowly built up over years by citizens who had been honest and industrious. They used mass propaganda to make the population afraid of terrorists and surrender civil liberties, including habeas corpus. And while Bush and Karamanlis, along with the corporate criminal class they abetted, live in unparalleled luxury, ordinary working men and women are told they must endure even more pain and suffering to make amends. It is feudal rape. And there has to be a point when even the American public-which still believes the fairy tale that personal will power and positive thinking will lead to success-will realize it has been had.

We have seen these austerity measures before. Latin Americans, like the Russians, were forced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to gut social services, end subsidies on basic goods and food, and decimate the income levels of the middle class-the foundation of democracy-in the name of fiscal responsibility. Small entrepreneurs, especially farmers, were wiped out. State industries were sold off by corrupt government officials to capitalists for a fraction of their value. Utilities and state services were privatized.

What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

We are facing the collapse of the world’s financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies-much of their work done by private contractors-has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.

Dwight Macdonald laid out the consequences of a culture such as ours, where the waging of war was “the normal mode of existence.” The concept of perpetual war, which eluded the theorists behind the 19th and early 20th century reform and social movements, including Karl Marx, has left social reformers unable to deal with this effective mechanism of mass control. The old reformists had limited their focus to internal class struggle and, as Macdonald noted, never worked out “an adequate theory of the political significance of war.” Until that gap is filled, Macdonald warned, “modern socialism will continue to have a somewhat academic flavor.”

Macdonald detailed in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” the marriage between capitalism and permanent war. He despaired of an effective resistance until the permanent war economy, and the mentality that went with it, was defeated. Macdonald, who was an anarchist, saw that the Marxists and the liberal class in Western democracies had both mistakenly placed their faith for human progress in the goodness of the state. This faith, he noted, was a huge error. The state, whether in the capitalist United States or the communist Soviet Union, eventually devoured its children. And it did this by using the organs of mass propaganda to keep its populations afraid and in a state of endless war. It did this by insisting that human beings be sacrificed before the sacred idol of the market or the utopian worker’s paradise. The war state provides a constant stream of enemies, whether the German Hun, the Bolshevik, the Nazi, the Soviet agent or the Islamic terrorist. Fear and war, Macdonald understood, was the mechanism that let oligarchs pillage in the name of national security.

“Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the architects of their own enslavement,” he wrote. “This does not make the slavery less, but on the contrary more- a paradox there is no space to unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most dangerous future enemy of socialism.”

Macdonald argued that democratic states had to dismantle the permanent war economy and the propaganda that came with it. They had to act and govern according to the non-historical and more esoteric values of truth, justice, equality and empathy. Our liberal class, from the church and the university to the press and the Democratic Party, by paying homage to the practical dictates required by hollow statecraft and legislation, has lost its moral voice. Liberals serve false gods. The belief in progress through war, science, technology and consumption has been used to justify the trampling of these non-historical values. And the blind acceptance of the dictates of globalization, the tragic and false belief that globalization is a form of inevitable progress, is perhaps the quintessential illustration of Macdonald’s point. The choice is not between the needs of the market and human beings. There should be no choice. And until we break free from serving the fiction of human progress, whether that comes in the form of corporate capitalism or any other utopian vision, we will continue to emasculate ourselves and perpetuate needless human misery. As the crowds of strikers in Athens understand, it is not the banks that are important but the people who raise children, build communities and sustain life. And when a government forgets whom it serves and why it exists, it must be replaced.

“The Progressive makes History the center of his ideology,” Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man.” “The Radical puts Man there. The Progressive’s attitude is optimistic both about human nature (which he thinks is good, hence all that is needed is to change institutions so as to give this goodness a chance to work) and about the possibility of understanding history through scientific method. The Radical is, if not exactly pessimistic, at least more sensitive to the dual nature; he is skeptical about the ability of science to explain things beyond a certain point; he is aware of the tragic element in man’s fate not only today but in any collective terms (the interests of Society or the Working Class); the Radical stresses the individual conscience and sensibility. The Progressive starts off from what is actually happening; the Radical starts off from what he wants to happen. The former must have the feeling that History is ‘on his side.’ The latter goes along the road pointed out by his own individual conscience; if History is going his way, too, he is pleased; but he is quite stubborn about following ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is.’ ”

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Collapse, Transition, The Great Turning: Why Words Matter

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:22:33 +0000

By Carolyn Baker

25 May, 2010
Carolynbaker.net

As the work I do circulates around the nation and the world, I frequently encounter resistance to the use of the word “collapse” to describe the unprecedented changes that humans and the earth community is now experiencing. Many people insist that we should focus only on “Transition” and the “Great Turning” because these words make more bearable and palatable the challenges of present and future time. The word collapse, they argue, should be ditched.

I disagree and feel adamant about using the term for a number of reasons. In the first place, I am an historian, and as I endeavor to make sense of human history, I notice that monumental changes do not occur in one fell swoop, but over time through a variety of stages. Personally, I am deeply involved in the Transition movement, and I am also strongly aligned philosophically with individuals such as Joanna Macy and David Korten who frequently use the words Great Turning. I could not agree more that in the larger scheme of the unprecedented changes we are navigating, a Great Turning is indeed occurring. However, I believe that it is crucial to hold both the larger picture and the current predicament in our consciousness simultaneously in order to remain effectively present in this moment, as well as in a state of preparation and anticipation for a more redemptive future.

What is more, the Great Turning/Transition is a process, and like all processes, each stage is important. While it is tempting to minimize the stages in favor of our natural human longing for the desirable end result, we may actually jeopardize our appreciation of the destination by refusing to be present with each segment of the journey. The stage in which we happen to find ourselves at this present moment is the collapse of every institution within industrial civilization. I challenge anyone reading these words to give an example of one institution that is not in a state of obvious, irrevocable decline. While in the larger scheme of things, we are in Transition and also experiencing a Great Turning, we are profoundly in the early stages of a shattering unraveling such as our planet has never experienced in human history. That must not be minimized.

In addition, inhabitants of industrial civilization who have not yet understood its consequences seem particularly averse to the word “collapse”. Unlike millions of indigenous and dispossessed peoples throughout the world who have been unconscionably devastated by it, their identities remain invested in the false security that it promises and the hope that the next two or three decades will somehow deliver an extension of what life in present time is like. Therefore, I believe that coming to terms with the reality of myriad, ubiquitous forms of collapse in the first decade of this century is imperative. Long term, a great turning is occurring, and we are in transition, yet we have only to observe the breathtaking changes that have transpired in the past three years to notice an undeniable unraveling of this civilization. A collapse by any other name is nevertheless a collapse.

Within the human psyche reside many themes, including death and rebirth. The two always travel together without exception because both are integral aspects of the human story. Attempt to minimize or eliminate one, and you invariably minimize or distort the other. We all wish to be “in” the later stages of the Great Turning, but we aren’t, period. We are where we are, and where we are is painful, sad, frightening, enraging, uncertain, and yes, dark. Who would not wish to be basking in the light of the journey’s end or near-end? Who would not prefer to look in the rear view mirror (oops, I use an expression from pre-Peak Oil days) and see clearly that we have come through the ordeal, and we are now on the other side of it–free to live out the new paradigm in all of its promise? We can hardly contain our elation as we contemplate that possibility, right?

But we are not in that stage of the journey yet; we have just begun. Our work now is to be present with what is, even as we hold the larger vision in our hearts. To be present means to be willing to look, and the beautiful thing about being present in this moment is that we can utilize all of the qualities of our deliciously imagined future to buoy us in the here and now. In fact, as I emphasize repeatedly in Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, without savoring and practicing those attributes moment to moment, we cannot endure the future emotionally or spiritually.

Notice I said cannot. I am profoundly frightened for the numbers of people I meet who are highly collapse-aware, but who are doing nothing to prepare emotionally and spiritually. Without that preparation, they are extremely vulnerable to breaking down; with it, they are more likely to break through.

The proper response to death is respect and ritual. Respect literally means “to look again.” When people die, we review their lives and renew our appreciation for their contributions and accomplishments. We create rituals to honor those and to express our gratitude for their presence in our lives. Ritual simply means “to fit together” which is to say, we reconnect the broken, separated pieces and in doing so attempt to find meaning in the experience. Given the Great American Death Phobia, this culture is particularly challenged in its capacity to respect death as a part of life and find meaning in it. I believe this may be the principal reason for resistance to words like collapse or unraveling.

What is most challenging for us to hold in the throes of the magnitude of the current oil spill, in the face of being daily deluged with increasingly frightening information about climate change, witnessing around us the beginning of the obliteration of world financial markets and possibly the end of money as we have known it, witnessing the extinction of species at previously unimaginable rates, finding ourselves surrounded with unrelenting natural disasters-this, all of this IS the Great Turning. And at the same time, in this moment, it also IS the collapse of industrial civilization.

Who would not want to be reveling in rebirth? Yet rebirth does not, cannot occur, without death. In present time we may feel marinated in death as its ubiquitous presence threatens to overwhelm us. It is as if we are being asked to walk through a war zone, witnessing around us the fallen everywhere and not knowing if we ourselves will survive. And we my wonder, why can’t we just get to the other side and as Thomas Paine said, “begin the world all over again”?

It may be that our species, tortured and toxified by industrial civilization as it has been, is incapable of beginning the world all over again without having lived through the ghastly consequences of what unprecedented growth and disconnection from the earth invariably produce. Perhaps we need this death in order to mould, shape, treasure, and protect the new life we ache to create.

In present time, what we can do with the unraveling is honor and respect what everything that is dying has given us. We can creatively construct rituals that erupt out of our hearts and out of the earth, acknowledging what the oceans, the land, the animals, and all other treasures of this beautiful planet have provided. We can thank and bless them, and we can invite our loved ones to join and co-create rituals with us.

Above all, it appears that we are being asked to allow our old way of life to die. Something in us is dying as we walk through the war zone. Something in us is dying with maybe as much as 100,000 gallons of oil being released daily into the Gulf of Mexico, now slithering into the loop current of the Atlantic Ocean. Something in us is dying with all the life that this cataclysm is extinguishing. Perhaps we need that death in us in order to unequivocally grasp in every cell of our bodies that disconnection, endless growth, competition, and entitlement kill everything in the universe. Perhaps humanity requires devastation of this magnitude in order to become a new kind of species-the kind of species that will never again allow such madness to prevail on this planet.

A very old myth written in myriad versions in ancient texts may be instructive in this collapse/transition/Great Turning journey, namely, the story of our old friend Noah who was instructed to build a lifeboat. Storyteller and author Michael Meade, in his latest book The World Behind The World, offers a timely, poetic appreciation of Noah’s mission and ours:

The problem wasn’t that the end of the world had come; rather the issue was how to act when it seemed that way. Secretly, each of us is a Noah sent on a distinct and seemingly foolish errand that can help the world as well as fulfill us….Noah stands for the timeless dreamer in the human soul who knows what to do when the floods of change gather and the sense of dissolution grows. (102, 120)

I do not wish to imply that we cannot experience joy or celebration until the Great Turning is complete. Even in the face of horror, we can have moments of humor, play, and elation. Our vision of a “greatly turned” humanity can sustain and inspire us, producing periods of unprecedented community and conviviality in the here and now. The turning is happening, and the collapsing of a way of life that does not work is a pivotal piece in the process. In fact, accepting the natural process of collapse as the first step in the Great Turning is profoundly liberating and empowering.

As always, the poets say it better than prose, especially the mystical poets who catapult our minds to the depths then propel us back up into clear-eyed, laser awareness. So often when they speak of love, they are not referring to human love or romance, but to the soul and the unbounded freedom our intimacy with it generously offers us. Within the cacophony of civilization’s demise, Rumi whispers:

Inside this new love, die

Your way begins on the other side

Become the sky

Take an axe to the prison wall

Escape

Walk out like someone suddenly

born into colour

Do it now
You’re covered with thick cloud
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet
Quietness is the surest sign
that you have died
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence
The speechless full moon comes out now.

Transition, Great Turning, Collapse? The words matter and don’t matter at the same time. It’s all about being fully present where we are while holding the vision of being somewhere incomparably different.