I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to launch into a larger discussion about quicker, more all-encompassing ways to mitigate, plan for and design livability for a world that some like James Hansen calls, a world without ice.

He just spoke at a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), business conference that brought “together independent business owners and innovators, local living economy entrepreneurs, community investors, government economic development professionals and sustainability leaders.” McLennon understands that restlessness folk in various forms of the sustainability movement are displaying. His book’s main title describes the grumbling and undertow some of the deep sustainability folk have just prior to a period of great migration, or change. Certain species display agitation and restlessness — a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “zugunruhe,” which McLennan identifies with, shaped by this current zugunruhe pattern emerging among people yearning for a sustainable future.

“Zugunruhe is a work of creative genius that draws us into an engaging journey of self-discovery, brings the biggest and most frightening issues of our time up close, and invites our engagement,” notes David Korten, “It will leave you envisioning human possibilities you never previously imagined.”

Paul K. Haeder: Why aren’t communities taking charge of sustainability when it comes to cities’ decision?

Jason F. McLennan: “We’ve moved backward as a population on these issues of climate change and sustainability. A large percentage of Americans do not believe it’s real. Cities will have to make more substantial progress. We still have our eyes closed using these old sets of laws, regulations. In every community there are people working on making better, sustainable cities. The problem is the cities – planners, architects, engineers, politicians – can only push sustainability … as far as where society can accept it.”

PKH: Why are we stuck in this incremental change mindset, in planning, in development, in sustainability programs?

JFM: Changes will happen for reasons not in our control. But it’s best to put into place models of what we think success is. We need to continue speaking to the choir. We need as many people in our musical group able to play the sustainability part. Look at us as little conductors with little orchestras. We have to spend time focusing on those that do sustainability and teach them to play, and then pull them into deeper commitments to sustainability. We can’t leave people in a place of shame, hopelessness. We have to envision success and a positive end game. People aren’t wanting to hear about the impending catastrophe … about Kunstler’s ‘long emergency.’”

PKH: What’s your take on LEED-washing?

JFM: LEED can be a powerful tool for powerful change … most of the time. However, it doesn’t get used that way. People are trying to game the system. The larger question is why did that group use LEED? Do I think that LEED is perfect? Absolutely not. No system is perfect. And yes, some criticism is deserved – and needed – to keep improving what has become the most dominant green building program in the world. But there is a big difference in criticism that is intended to make the program stronger – so that it can continue to contribute to lowering environmental impact and changing the building culture – and criticism that is intended to tear down and destroy something that I believe has done a lot of good in the world.¹

PKH: Can planners do more to both encourage sustainability in their work and help designing cities under political constraints to take it on more vigorously?

JFM: It will take investment, large sums of money shifting into deep sustainability. The whole paradigm needs to change. It is going to take a lot of people who made money under the old paradigm — who have profited the most – to create the economic conditions for this new paradigm.

PKH: Sustainability lite or green washing. What do you have to say about those issues?

JFM: “We wish Vancouver was doing more. We feel hamstrung at times when we go in as consultants. How far can that mayor push? Not very far. Until there’s a groundswell from the communities. I will say that if we are serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then we need a World War Two effort to retrofit America’s housing. We’d be cutting greenhouse emissions thirty to fifty percent in two years with the right investment – money – very little time, and significant behavioral change.”

Where Is the Planning Profession on Sustainability and Green Washing?

I spoke with John Robinson, Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative; Professor, Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. My biggest concern at the sustainability leadership school was the skirting of social justice and social sustainability throughout the week.

I asked him a question so many others ducked: How can we in this sustainability movement who want net zero waste and living buildings and other sustainability designs to be the way of the future start looking at sustainability on a much more holistic and socially just and deep ecological frame?

Robinson was clear: “This is a real issue, but again I am optimistic. I think the social leg of the sustainability stool is much less well developed, but I also think it is coming. In the academic realm, fields like political ecology put it front and centre; on the activist front, and it is getting increasing attention in NGOs like DSF and Pembina (look at the Transition Towns movement in the UK, for example). Business is a bit slower and government the slowest but I believe it is coming, especially at the local level.”

We also talked about green washing.

“As someone remarked in about 1995 ‘the growth industry of the 1990s is green bullshit.’ This is not a new problem,” Robinson says. “But what is sometimes overlooked is that this growth is accompanied by an equivalent or perhaps even faster growth in our ability to measure and monitor sustainability (metrics, indicators, monitoring systems, etc.) In the 1990s at the University of Waterloo, I asked an engineering class to tell me what was better from an environmental point of view: electric hand dryers or paper towels. They couldn’t answer the question because they couldn’t find lifecycle data on the materials involved. Today, you can easily find the relevant data on the web. So green washing is, over time, self-limiting, I think, as we get better and better at measuring and detecting it.”

We toured Robinson’s brainchild, the hallmark of sustainability on any campus, right smack on the UBC campus: The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). It is being billed as a net positive building, or at least Robinson and others want to see it that way. It will open in Summer 2011. One compelling feature are two by fours turned into ceilings – wood from Alberta’s millions of acres of pine beetle damaged timberland. It is mostly discolored, harvested before it becomes a net positive carbon releaser.

Contrasting views of the planning profession with James Howard Kunstler, John Robinson, Mark Holland (a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office) and Bill Rees (his four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and the International Society for Ecological Economics) is revealing.²

Kunstler:

I do not believe the planning profession as we know it will exist institutionally much longer. It rests on assumptions that to me are just not true – for instance, the idea that we can continue living within the current armatures of daily life, including the metroplex city and the suburbs. I believe our big cities will contract severely back to their old centers and waterfronts (if they are lucky enough to have them), and that the process will be very messy, with ethnic conflict, fights over ownership, massive capital losses, and infrastructure that we will be unable to maintain. Hence, I think the “action” will move to our smaller cities and towns, especially places with a meaningful relationship to agriculture. I see our economy becoming much more internally focused (within North America). Since trucking and commercial aviation are toast, the inland waterways will regain importance. It’s unclear whether we will have the capital or the will to reconstruct our regular rail system (forget about High Speed). These represent epochal shifts. Some parts of the USA (e.g. the Southwest, Florida) may become uninhabitable. This is a scenario that does not admit much of a role for conventional bureaucratic planners who sit in air-conditioned offices drawing charts based on reliable metrics.

Robinson:

I think we are the vanguard of the future and the route to real innovation and increased well being, for both the planet and ourselves. We’ll see who is right. The old sustainability agenda is about being less bad, about limits, and about sacrifice. The new sustainability agenda is about innovation, opportunity and improved well-being (the regenerative concept). I think that is an exciting and empowering concept that will catch on and become irresistible.

Holland:

We proceeded with planning according to a paradigm of modernism and no planetary limits during the massive build out of the 20th Century. The planning profession is getting its head around the new 21st Century reality of constraints and change quickly – but the cities we build and the regulations we have in place (mostly engineering regulations not connected to planners) change very slowly, especially in an atmosphere of recession, financial constraints and fear As we change and accept the global stewardship mandate of the 21st Century and change our rules development, our cities will slowly change. They’ll change a lot faster once the plateau of peak oil is over in a few years and the cost of the factors that have caused our 20th Century cities to become unsustainable become less tenable.

Ironically, the entire week of speakers, workshops, site visit and team building ended with one of the gurus of sustainability, as in the ecological footprint, William Rees. His words stirred the participants after a week of hard work, huge learning curves and spiritual bonding.

Rees: “De-growth is going to be the major issue of the century. While the energy crisis will have severe economic impacts, it is not fundamentally about economics. It is about human ecology and the limits of growth.” Rees is the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Rees is also affiliated with UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. There is a movement, De-Growth Vancouver, working with Rees and others on what this kind of city might look like.

Rees also is on the advisory board of the Carrying Capacity Network with such notables as Herman Daly (theorist of the steady-state economy) and Thomas Lovejoy (who introduced the concept of biological diversity). This larger push to tie immigration to climate change is part of a population control ploy — greenwashing nativism — which has been written about extensively, recently in a Nation magazine piece by Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, and author of Nice Work if You Can Get It.

The threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with one another in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally, and as resources tighten, the most vulnerable citizens and migrants are cut loose.

Sustain the Sustainable – Where Sustainability Is Going

Here is an interesting contrast in perspective by the leader in sustainability, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s words in the preface of “Our Common Future,” published in 1987, 1999, and then officially 20 years after its publication, 2007:

1987

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth – growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.³

1999

Well, first of all, we should maybe be reminded of the key definition that we formulated: that sustainable development amounts to meeting the demands of the present generations while preserving the rights of future generations to meet their own needs. I think that concept is important to be reminded of, because that illustrates the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In fact, if we misuse nature, and the relationship between man and nature, we will not be in a situation one generation from now, or two generations from now, for them who live then, to have choices and opportunities in life to have a healthy and prosperous future. So, that intergenerational picture and very clear link came forward in that report Our Common Future, and I think that was really what made the strongest impression on people, the other one, the clear links between poverty and environment, which also means between poverty and development. If people are poor, they don’t have choices. They are not empowered, often neither by knowledge, or by health, or by choices in their daily lives, to take care of the future of their children, and the next generations, because the immediate need dominates their lives and their choices. That also made an impression on many people. And the fact that this is not only a national question inside each nation, but also a global challenge, because of the big gaps, both inside countries and between countries. So, the global perspective of being in this together came very strongly forward in 1987 when the report was delivered. And those dimensions are as relevant today as they were in 1987.⁴

2007

We were very clear in 1987 that the responsibility for dealing with these problems building up in the atmosphere, that responsibility belongs to the industrialized world. We have to clean up our problems, and at the same time we have to help the developing world have new technologies to make it possible for them to jump over the polluting stages that we have been through.

We have no time to lose. The data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence levels. There is no question anymore about scientific disagreement. So many things are easily done and lead to improved energy efficiency and a number of other benefits.

Unless we start immediately fulfilling the Kyoto Protocol and then continuing with a broader basis with all countries involved, this is going to get completely out of control and we will not be able to cap carbon dioxide levels. It’s a drama playing itself out in front of us, where we are still able to change a very dangerous scenario but we cannot wait for another 5 or 10 years. We must be active now.⁵

1. Go to, “Defending LEED,” by McLennan.
2. For more on Bill Rees.
3. 1987 – Our Common Future, one small part of Chairwoman’s Foreword, Oslo, 20 March 1987.
4. Interview by Patricia Morales and Ann Ferrara, WHO Report Making a Difference,” 1999.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, May 8, 2007.

It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the city of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – their foundation – $25 million.

More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.
• McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
• Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
• The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.
• Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s Chemical War on the World

What’s all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods.

Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, sums up the recent news on GE crops and foods: “Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met Ellie Rose at one of these events; she’s working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. “We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher education graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation’s policy for employees is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.” Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.

Frankenstein’s Agronomists and Etymologists

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.

A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas.

The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle.

Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting …

Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time — and culture.

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.”

Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.

Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly – according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003.

Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, – engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate.

That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through it’s own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types of herbicide.

It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants.

We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.

Climate Change and Seeds

For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.

The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

The Last Fish

Here’s how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered salmon, pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh water bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.

Here’s an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into husbandry and fisheries sciences – a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr.

When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.

Famine, Hunger, Solutions

Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship –climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030.

These factors, seen before and after Durban’s “Climate Conference Debacle,” are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued the African continent for half a century.

But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – food culture and the right to grow they’re called. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices.

Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.

Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West

Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe he’ll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).

UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered bugs.

Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this day), but the company’s claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.

So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered, and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story, here’s what that group has to say about the real questions behind the release:

Who’s regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally and financially liable if something goes wrong?

Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one of the most invasive species on the planet?

Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where “no public consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not sought from local people”)?

The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec’s mosquitoes survive into adulthood (since 3–4 percent have been found to do just that despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?

It’s not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to limit the spread of dengue fever?

Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?

Two Carrots a Day … and Corporations are NOT People

This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend (reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United) also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.

He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
“One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.

“But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don’t lay a hand on systemic reality, don’t touch the structure of governance and law, don’t question the country’s great myths. For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.”

So what’s for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness and death.

Can anyone in the Gates’ Foundations AGRA project understand why this supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing around with one of Nigeria’s key food crops.

It’s about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to finding ways to “beat or speed up mother nature.” Here’s the irony with all of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin A requirement.

Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill Gates, or any stockholders’ greedy interests.

All across the country cities are seeing record or near-record highs, a string lasting nearly two weeks. It’s as though Spring, 2012, can’t wait. Instead of the usual sequence of blooming flowers and trees, it’s as though everything is condensed and blooming at the same time. Very strange.

Many of us see this as another obvious example of aberrant weather due to global warming. Our use of fossil fuels continues almost unabated, as energy corporations leverage their stranglehold on our energy systems to push for more dirty oil and natural gas use. Their failure to value our planet, when it is so obviously stressed, is but one of their many crimes of corruption, legal or not.

This strange, early spring points to our federal government as well, and its failure in its basic duty to protect us from such undue corporate influence. Indeed, not only is the government hapless in the face of this climate crisis, it’s actually an accomplice to big oil in this process. Energy subsidies and tax abatements are still the norm. Our government is literally paying big oil to slowly kill us off.

But could there be more to wild weather than just global warming? More and more of us recognize that we do not inhabit a mechanical world. Life on Earth is more than a machine. It’s alive, and it’s our constant experience. We live here, in these bodies and in this experience of life. And we’re learning that life contains energies and awareness we have long ignored.

What of the emotional reprieve from this early bounty of warmth? What of the energy of so many of us able to be outside much earlier in the year than is typical? What about the cerebral curiosity from experiencing such out of whack weather?  While still anecdotal data, this anomaly of record and near-record temperatures across so much of the country may portend a year of great abnormalities, and not all those related to weather.

We see a spring that can’t wait in the Occupy Movement. After a relatively quiet winter, Occupational activities are on the upswing, with the promise of a summer of political and activist actions like never before. Occupy is finding its focus and its grounding, and and the implications are yet to be understood. There are actions planned around the G8 and NATO Summits; plans for May Day and July 4th;  plans to interject ourselves, however we may, into this corrupt system to clog it; and plans to extricate ourselves from this system to starve the beast.

But this fateful spring belongs to far more than Occupy and those uprising across the planet. It belongs to all of us, human and non-human members of Life on Earth. It belongs to us more than ever because we are recognizing that we belong to the Earth like never before. We are finding our connection to Earth and our kindredness to each other, even as the corporate media keep trying to pull our focus ‘off the ball’ of our Life here together in this moment.

The surge of energies being unleashed in these times is profound. It is seen in the negative energy that causes a ‘hater’ named George Zimmerman to cross the line and kill a young African American,Trayvon Martin, in Florida. It may be the delusional Staff Sergeant Robert Bales whose ‘too much war and too many tours’ past led him to murder 16 Afghani people. It may be the continued stridence of Israel in addressing their Palestinian neighbors, or the over-reaching of Wall Street executives even after it has become apparent that their behavior took down our economy and wrecked millions of lives. This negative energy has been at the heart of the global system for a generation.

But the greater portion of these emerging energies seem designed to heal. The local food movement, sustainable energy production, efforts to reverse the massive influence of corporations on legislators, and efforts to end the permanent war paradigm are all gaining strength. Millions of us our finding our voices like never before. We’re sharing our brotherhood and sisterhood with a new-found trust and endearing warmth. Energies of peace and love are emerging spontaneously, in spite of the resistance from the controlling powers. Energies that will no longer allow the Juggernaut of corporate power to destroy our lives and our Earth in the unholy lust for power.

Finally, there are other curiosities of our time – Spring, 2012. There is an alignment taking place this year between our sun and the galactic center. There is the Mayan prediction of the ‘end of the world’ coming before this year ends – which could mean the end of the corrupt culture we’ve all be subjected to. And there is the growing view within science that our reality is ‘holographic’ – amenable to our attention and reactive to consciousness.

This spring cannot wait because we cannot wait. Our broken system must be replaced by a system of ethics – principles like peace and love – because if we do not change, we die. This spring that cannot wait may be the very force of Life, conspiring with Sun and Earth, to bring about the end of globalization and to create a new narrative of peace and love.

Since the Nordic country experienced the systemic failure of its entire banking sector in 2008, a number of Iceland’s senior banking executives have been arrested, sacked or sued. Grass roots organisations, including the Ministry of Ideas that was featured in the film, have since hosted a National Assembly of unprecedented scale. The government-backed Assembly was designed to focus specifically on the nation’s next steps; to agree on a set of collective values and to establish a clear vision for how to rebuild their economy from the ashes of the old. While the film did not focus on the Assembly itself, progressives would not be surprised by its outcome: participants emphasised the importance of robust public services, establishing an environmentally responsible and sustainable economy, and ensuring equality and transparency in the country’s future renaissance.

There are some important parallels between the Icelandic response to financial collapse and what concerned citizens and activists attempted to do in 2011 — from the Arab spring to the multitude of public occupations in towns and cities around the world. After the collapse of their financial sector, Icelanders took the opportunity to reflect on what went wrong. Given the various interconnected crises that humanity faces at this crucial juncture in history, it would be prudent for us all to do the same. Moreover, we need to identify the root causes of these crises and create a public dialogue to ensure that these causative factors are widely recognised and understood. Like the Icelanders, we also need to agree on the core values that should guide the reform process, and communicate a practical vision of how these values can create a more sustainable and equitable world.

Identifying the Crises We Face

Of the many crises facing humankind, none is more pressing than the reality of poverty and deprivation, a crisis that humanity has routinely failed to address since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was first adopted in 1948. Despite decades of ‘development’ pledges and donor aid, three billion people still live on less than $2.50 a day, two and a half billion do not have access to clean water and sanitation, and almost a billion people are classified as hungry. According to the World Health Organisation, around 40,000 people a day die from a lack of nutritious food, clean water and rudimentary medical care — over 14 million people every year.

Another fundamental concern is how a deregulated and globalised economy has locked large swathes of humanity into unsustainable patterns of overproduction and overconsumption. This irresponsible economic model is the real cause of our environmental problems, which include the rapid depletion of the world’s natural resources and surging carbon emissions that governments seem unable — or unwilling — to contain. We are also confronted by an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the excessive influence of corporate power, on-going financial instability and economic uncertainty.

A commentator in Future of Hope identified one of the root causes of their financial collapse as the domination of aggressively masculine business practices sanctioned by their government. These, he went on to explain, would still be considered successful strategies if they hadn’t ultimately precipitated the country’s collapse. The same blinkered approach to commerce applies across the world. The inherent flaws in the ‘business as usual’ model remain largely unacknowledged despite the grave financial and environmental crises it has exacerbated, and policy makers continue to blindly pursue their intimate relationship with the corporate sector.

The values that have driven this aggressive and ideological approach to business and politics are not difficult to identify: self-interest, excessive competition and greed. These values are embodied in the ‘neoliberal policies’ of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation that facilitate wealth accumulation through the pursuit of profit and endless GDP growth. We have constructed a world where national institutions and systems of global governance are very much guided by these policies. And everything from world trade, global finance, climate change mitigation, and even international development is influenced by this ideological approach to politics and policymaking.

Much more needs to be done to stimulate a popular debate about the impact of neoliberal policies on our everyday lives. Just as challenging is establishing a common vision for what a sustainable and equitable future world should look like and how to make it a reality. A key theme of the Iceland film was that of ‘sustainable sufficiency’ — the need to produce and consume only what we really need. Localising economies and rethinking patterns of international trade, production and consumption can go a long way to achieving this. But this is not enough. As Icelanders interviewed in the film appreciated, we can only succeed in creating a more sustainable world if we replace the outdated values that underpin our failed policies of the past with ones that more accurately reflect what it means to be human.

Rethinking Human Values: Sharing and Cooperation

Self-interest, competition and wealth accumulation have had their day and reaped havoc in the process. It stands to reason that their ill effects can be counterbalanced when the principles of sharing and cooperation occupy the hearts and minds of future policy makers. These are values we are all familiar with — we practice them in our homes and communities and teach them to our children. Placing international cooperation and sharing at the heart of policymaking has the potential to transform our economies, our societies and our relationship with the natural world.

The redistribution of financial resources is the logical first step in making this fundamental shift in economic, social and environmental policy. If implemented as a program on an international scale, redistribution can rapidly end deprivation and prevent needless deaths. More equitably sharing the world’s financial resources will not address the structural causes of our global malaise, but it is the most practical way to ensure people everywhere have access to basic food, water and medicine in the immediate future. Financial redistribution can also fund climate adaption and mitigation programs in developing countries, and can even help plug the hole in public finances when nations are forced to implement measures of economic austerity.

The world is awash with money, and there are many options available to governments for harnessing it for redistributive purposes. For example, hundreds of billions of dollars can be raised by closing tax havens, preventing tax evasion, implementing financial transaction taxes and a tax on carbon. Vast sums can be raised by reducing military budgets, redirecting fossil fuel subsidies and ending the most perverse subsidies provided to large scale industrial farming corporations in rich countries. It is also possible to tap into the IMF’s massive gold reserves and to harness the Fund’s Special Drawing Right’s facility. The list goes on.

Redistribution also presents a starting point for broader reforms to the global economy. Central to these in an era of dwindling natural resources and escalating emissions is the sustainable management of the global commons. Applying the principle of sharing to the way natural resources are managed requires us to recognise that they are limited in quantity and that they must be distributed and consumed more equitably across the world. By conserving and regulating our use of the world’s resources through this understanding, economic sharing can help nations to move away from patterns of overconsumption and excessive carbon emissions.

Building World Public Opinion

Future of Hope conveys the message that humanity’s entrepreneurial spirit can ultimately overcome adversity and rebuild life for the better. This hope and vision will be sorely needed in the coming years as campaigners continue to highlight injustice and demand that governments enact reforms that are commensurate with the basic needs of the majority of the world.

The crises we face and the movements campaigning for change are an increasingly global phenomenon. The process of reform, therefore, must also take place on an international scale. A worldwide public debate about these issues is something that until recently might have seemed an unlikely possibility. But with so many options for global collaboration now available — all turbocharged by social media platforms and the extended reach of the ‘networked individual’ — it is entirely conceivable that world public opinion will eventually take its rightful place as the real superpower in world affairs.

As the burgeoning array of movements for social and economic justice continue to connect across national borders, it is clear that our collective progress depends on the growth in our sense of global unity and an appreciation of humanity’s interdependence. Within this new paradigm of collective responsibility and vision, it seems only natural for nations to shift away from upholding the values of self-interest, competition and greed, and to focus instead on sharing the world’s financial and natural resources more equitably and sustainably.

• Future of Hope is a documentary film following individuals that strive to change the world of consumerism, a system of credit and debt that the Icelandic economy was built upon for the past 10 years or more.

The authors contributing to Fleeing Vesuvius represent an impressive range of expertise. Six are economists, four environmental scientists, three specialists in green commerce and marketing, two architects, two community organizers, one an environmental engineer, one a psychotherapist and one a former corporate attorney. Others have backgrounds in appropriate technology, ethics and local government. All are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.

The first two sections of Fleeing Vesuvius define the problem by outlining the scientific, technological and economic parameters of fossil fuel depletion. The last five focus on solutions, with examples from Europe and North America of pioneering programs local groups and communities are undertaking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.

The Link Between Fossil Fuels, Industrialization and Capitalism

Fleeing Vesuvius deliberately emphasizes fossil fuel depletion more than climate change, owing to the major role it played (according to the authors) in the 2008 economic collapse. The first and most important section of the book, “Energy Availability” addresses the economics of fossil fuel depletion. It lays out hard truths about the link between cheap fossil fuels, industrialization, capitalism and money. We are always taught that the industrial revolution of the late 18th century was the result of British technological innovation, the view promoted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Unfortunately Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil and natural gas, in running the giant machines that replaced human labor.

In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years. He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible – an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it. By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further. Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.

The other side of this argument is that industrialization and capitalism will eventually cease when fossil fuel becomes too prohibitively expensive to support it. In fact,

Douthwaite argues that the skyrocketing cost of oil ($148 a barrel) and food – not speculation in subprime mortgage derivates – were the root cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

The End of Industrial Agriculture

Part I of Fleeing Vesuvius also looks at the link between cheap fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. In addition to the fossil fuel energy required for farm machinery, food processing and transportation to market, oil and natural gas are essential in the production of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are an essential feature of industrial scale agriculture. Doing without them means returning to an era where people produced food and other basic needs with manure, human labor and draft animals. Prior to the industrial revolution, these primitive methods fed a global population of two billion. Many economists question whether it’s possible to provide for our current global population of seven billion without relying on fossil fuels.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI)

In the essay entitled “Future Energy Availability,” environmental physicist Chris Vernon explains the link between Peak Oil and Energy Return on Investment (EROI). EROI is defined as the amount of energy that must be expended to extract or produce surplus energy for business or household use. Although there’s still a lot of oil, gas and coal in the ground, we have reached the point where the reserves that are easy and cheap to extract have been used up. More importantly, owing to the enormous amount of energy required to produce some forms of renewal energy, renewable sources will never have the ability of fossil fuels to produce abundant cheap energy. Although wind, especially off-shore wind, and tidal energy have great promise, energy from these sources will remain quite costly for the foreseeable future. This leads Vernon to draw the conclusion that humankind will have no choice but to downsize their energy intensive lifestyles.

Money and Energy Scarcity

The main focus of the second section of Fleeing Vesuvius, “Innovation in business, money and finance,” is the link between energy availability and money. In it, Richard Douthwaite looks at our current debt based monetary system, which started at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He explains how banks create money out of thin air every time they approve a new loan and why continuous economic growth is necessary in order to pay off the debt created in this way. When economic growth stalls, as it did in 2008, the debt becomes unpayable.

With the end of cheap energy, according to Douthwaite, global leaders must accept that the era of continuous economic growth has also ended. This means our current debt-based system of money creation must also be scrapped. In addition to calling for government to remove control of money creation from private banks, Douthwaite also supports the creation of regional and local currencies. This preserves the ability of low income groups to trade products and services when the national currency is in short supply due to recession and deflation.

The Transition to a Fossil Energy-Free Society

The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle. There are two somewhat technical essays on using biochar as a carbon sink and the importance of soil mineral content in localized food production. Other essays look at national and international strategies for reducing carbon emissions, including the innovative “Cap and Share” approach put forward by Fiesta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) in 2008. This would require primary fossil-fuel suppliers (e.g. oil companies) to buy permits to introduce fossil fuels into the economy. As fossil fuel suppliers pass these costs on to consumers, they, in turn, begin to seek out renewable energy alternatives. At the same time, revenue from the permits is used to help low income customers pay their energy bills.

Part 5 “Changing the way we live” includes an excellent essay by community organizer Davie Phillip describing some of the accomplishments of the worldwide Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins (in Ireland and the UK) in 2002.

Part 6 “Changing the Way We Think” addresses the apathy and inertia that prevents most of the developing world from taking serious measures to address the catastrophic economic, ecological and resource crises we presently face. In “Cultivating hope and managing despair,” psychotherapist John Sharry compares this widespread apathy and inertia to Kubler Ross’s stages of grief in bereavement or impending loss (denial, anger, depression, acceptance). The impending collapse of our current way of life is the worst loss any of us can imagine. It should be no surprise that the initial response to such news is denial. Sharry suggests that Kubler Ross has left out an essential step between depression and acceptance – namely, the hopeful and constructive activity which is often necessary before full acceptance can occur.

Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue in which different authors give suggestions for specific steps people can take on an individual, community, national and international level in preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system.

The North American edition of Fleeing Vesuvius has a preface by Richard Heinberg, author of the End of Growth and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.This edition also contains an appendix, “Should the US try to avoid a financial meltdown?”, a dialogue between two of the economists who contributed essays (Richard Douthwaite and Tom Konrad).

- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations;

- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture; and,

- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster than in any other period in geological history.

Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of human free will, but the window of opportunity for the latter is rapidly closing.  Hopefully it is not entirely shut yet.

Global warming may be lethal, but it is still only one of Earth’s  illnesses.  A debt-ridden, overpopulated, hungry and warring humanity is shredding the biosphere, home to billions of beautiful and innocent creatures like the family of mergansers you see, and at the same time facing “peak everything,” with fossil fuels at the top of the list, along with many of the minerals essential for agriculture and high technology.¹  Our erstwhile governments and most of the seven billion, or if you prefer, the 99%, are sitting in a stupor as if paralyzed.

Some, last spring’s Middle Eastern protesters and the Occupiers around the world in recent months, were awoken by a Middle Eastern fruit vendor who immolated himself. This appeal is made by one of the seven billion, from a tiny American town not far from the home of Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau, explaining why he went to jail rather than pay his head tax to support the Mexican-American War, wrote, “It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.”  That was also the message of the fruit vendor who sacrificed his life for us all.  There is very little evidence that the world’s governments are willing or capable of taking decisive action, so it is up to us, the 99%, or however many of us are willing, to “leaven the lump” and bring back the world from the precipice.

This article will argue that we the people, and more specifically those of us who call ourselves “green,” are losing the battle to stop global warming, and many other battles largely because we all, or at least too many of us, have been indoctrinated to forget:

- Mr. Thoreau’s other reminder, that ‘The government  is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will”;

- what “conservationists” understood before Earth Day 1970, that every environmental problem has its roots in “too many people using too much stuff”;

- what Thoreau and Gandhi and many others have taught us — that relinquishment of material wants is empowerment, not self-sacrifice; and,

- the foremost teaching of religion and spiritualism and ethics for at least four millennia — the Golden Rule.

We are all guilty.  So we need to resolve now to reinstate those principles in our personal lives and the life of society, not tomorrow but today.  It’s a tall order, but, in fact, we are coming so close to destroying civilization and the earth, that only a rethinking of fundamental values will save us.

What is more difficult to understand than that we have been losing the battles against environmental and human injustice is that the people  of the Baby Boom, now in power around the world, or at least in the United States, grew up in the shadow of a great man, John Kennedy, who said, “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”² We believed him then, and indeed it seems self-evident, doesn’t it? So we can believe him now. Yet most of us sit as if paralyzed.

On the global warming front in particular, the test case for survival of the Earth, all the talk and agreements and campaigns since the eighties have not even created a “blip” in the seemingly inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, never deviating in the slightest from a course followed for half a century.³

If the cacophony since the eighties has resulted in any progress, it is not apparent in the physical world, is it?  There are those who say that the talk alone is a sign of progress, and they may be right.  But not for Mama Nature.

Look what’s happened in the last few weeks.  This is what you already know if you’ve been paying attention.

1. International Energy Agency (IEA) scientists, the ones the world pays to know, announced that we have about five years (that’s until 2016, just around the corner) to put a stop to increased greenhouse-gas emissions before global warming gets completely out of control.  Their reasoning was economic.  When you build a power plant or tar sands oil pipeline or widget-manufacturing facility, you expect to pay for the investment out of the sale of electricity or tar sands oil or widgets.  So the construction locks everyone in to producing the widgets or oil or electricity, and if that causes CO2 emissions, the economics make it much harder to cut the emissions than before the construction happened.

Five years from now the expenditures will have been made that lock us into emissions that will cause more than 2 degrees C of warming.  The time to halt the emissions is now, not after many costly new  CO2-generating plants and pipelines have been built, which must somehow be paid for.  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says. “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.” ⁴  Forever!

2. The IEA scientists also announced that global warming is happening much faster than expected; and unless practices and policies change very rapidly, global warming could easily be 3 degrees C by 2050, 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by 2100.  The politicians had made an official finding at Copenhagen that anything more than a 2-degree warming, any time sooner than the end of the century, would have unacceptable environmental and economic impacts. Three times the warming by century’s end or 50% more in less than half the time?

We’re in trouble.  The unacceptable is becoming the inevitable.  It’s getting so warm in the arctic that (a) the ice is rapidly disappearing, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed and less reflected, which in turn means the earth heating up rapidly just because of that regardless of how how much more CO2 we put into the sky, and (b) methane is bubbling up  from under where the ice used to be and from formerly frozen peat – LOTS of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful. than CO2 on a 100-year average basis, and even several times worse than that on an immediate short-term basis  The methane emissions will just keep coming faster, and like the missing ice, they’ll create their own global warming without regard to CO2.

3. There was also agreement at Copenhagen  for the protection of the more vulnerable countries that will be annihilated by rising seas, the 2-degree ceiling should be reconsidered no later than 2015 to be possibly lowered to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

4. As the politicians were about to fly into Durban on highly-polluting planes to talk about global warming, it was announced that 2010 had seen a 5.6% increase in world CO2 emissions, the largest gross increase in human history.  And that’s with the Kyoto protocols in effect as much as they have ever been.  The problem is, of course, that China and the US, the biggest emitters, don’t have to do anything at all under Kyoto, and Europe, which at least gives lip service to it, uses paper emissions trading said by some to be 90% fraudulent. ⁵

5. The politicians flew into Durban knowing that:

-  Kyoto is hardly working at all and in particular that under Kyoto we just saw the largest increase in CO2 emissions in history;

-  we’ve got five years to put into effect something that will halt further commitments to emissions increases;

- they had promised to reconvene in 2015 to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees to protect the more vulnerable nations; and,

- warming is now happening much more and much sooner than the maximum they had declared acceptable at Copenhagen.

6.  What was their Kyoto protocols response?

- they agreed to extend Kyoto, due to lapse next year;

- they agreed to try to come up with a new plan in 2020, already four years after the scientists say it will be too late, five years after they had promised to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees, and thirty years after Kyoto; and,

- they declared a victory and went home for the holidays.

7.  As soon as the folks in Durban announced the extension of Kyoto, Canada announced it was going to walk out of the treaty.  Bad medicine.  Why? Because Canadian tar sands oil is just as polluting as conventional oil when it is consumed, but more polluting in the refining process and the greater source of emissions for tar sands oil is where it’s gotten out of the ground rather than where it is ultimately used.  Tar sands oil will:

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is produced in Canada, where the emissions will be completely uncontrolled with Canada out of the treaty; and,

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is consumed – in the US if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or elsewhere via a Pacific Coast pipeline if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built.

There are those who say that if the pipeline is built, the battle to halt global warming is lost forever, and they are likely right. ⁶  The same is true by the same logic, of course, if the pipeline is not built but the oil is sent elsewhere.

2010 was a bad year for CO2 emissions?  You ain’t seen nothin’.

8. In the meantime,  the government and industry have been busy working to bring Canadian tar sands oil into the US, for all the world as if we should never cease burning oil.  Back in Washington, thanks to 350.org and William Mckibben surrounding the White House with protesters, President Obama said he would postpone approval of the pipeline until there had been further environmental studies done.  Good!   Of course, if the pipeline is blocked, the oil will likely go out to the Pacific Coast by a much more environmentally damaging pipeline route, and will be used elsewhere.⁷  Oh well, at least the US won’t be blamed for the inevitable massive increases in emissions, even if Mama Nature can’t tell the difference. So 350.org declared a victory and the protesters went home for the holidays.

9. And then there is “fracked” shale gas, an immense new source of natural gas, which will become its own immense new source of greenhouse gas emissions.  Anyone who cares about global warming knows that the only thing to do with new fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground at least until there is a global warming treaty, and not make investments in their exploitation that will have to be repaid through their sale. “Fracking”, even if it could be done “cleanly”, is for economic reasons, one more pound of nails in the earth’s coffin.

10. Last but perhaps more appropriately first, the UN recently admitted for the first time that its projected world population of 9 billion by mid-century, already more than can be fed sustainably under any plausible scenario without corresponding increases in fossil fuel consumption, is going to keep spiraling upward to over 10 billion by the end of the century.  The farther we go in that direction, the more locked in we will be to impossibly destructive CO2 emissions, not to mention impossibly destructive losses of remaining forest lands.  As was pointed out years ago, the really “inconvenient truth” about global warming is that uncontrolled population growth means uncontrolled global warming.⁸

Of course, we should have known that our efforts at Durban would fail.  The politicians flew to Copenhagen, accomplished very little, declared victory and went home.  With both the United States and China refusing to commit to anything legally binding, the possibility of meeting the 2 degree ceiling is receding into fantasy-land.  Talks began before 1990, and now the earliest we could even hope for a treaty binding on the largest emitters is more than 30 years later. And the biosphere hangs in the balance.

To this writer what is more difficult to understand about the present state of affairs is this.  We greens will have been hard at work over thirty years trying to convince the governments to do the only thing that can be done about global warming: at this point to tell us to stop putting so much CO2 in the air.  What we have to show for it is thirty years of steadily increasing emissions with no end in sight.  If we fail to get the governments to order us to stop polluting, what stops us from doing it ourselves without orders?  However difficult that may be, what more realistic alternatives do we have, and why does there seem to be resistance to the idea?

The mainstream environmental groups are very vague about who will, in fact, have to stop polluting, and how much, but the truth is that to reach the goals we assert to be needed, we will have to decrease our driving radically, decrease our consumption of electricity radically, decrease our consumption of home heating fuels radically, etc. How much? Probably at least 80% because in the thirty years between Kyoto and our next meeting date, huge volumes of CO2 will have been added to the atmosphere, making additional heating for the next century inevitable.

You and I have to make those cuts or leave an almost unlivable earth to our descendants, yet we go on using whatever fossil fuels are available as if there were no concerns, making small efforts like purchase of hybrid vehicles, which fail to show up on the chart.  “Alternatives” (e.g., solar electricity, biofuels, “hybrids,” etc.) are there, but they appear at this point to be too little, too late.  And when environmentalists talk about decreasing emissions, there are always two fundamental approaches – conservation (e.g., drive less) or efficiency (e.g., fuel efficiency standards).  We hear proposals for the latter, (which have not been shown to be sufficient soon enough, not to mention that they are fleeting at best because they will be negated by population increases), but not proposals for the former.

Forty years ago, it was gospel that the root causes underlying almost all deterioration of the environment were “too many people using too much stuff.”  The fundamental solutions, then, were fewer people using less stuff. For close to four decades, however, the mainline environmental organizations have had a conspiracy of silence about the “too many people” part.  And when it comes to “stuff,” there is a lot of talk about “sustainable alternatives” (clean energy, hybrid vehicles, etc.) but very little talk about “less stuff” –- before Earth Day we called ourselves “conservationists,” but now the major environmental groups hardly talk about conservation at all.  It’s as if the former “conservationists” have acquired a conspiracy of silence about conservation itself as well as population.

From people who saw the root cause as “too many people using too much stuff,”  mainstream professional environmentalists have become folks who won’t say there are too many people and won’t say they use too much stuff.  Of course, the GDP is measured by how many people there are and how much “stuff” they create in monetary terms, so “too many people using too much stuff” is almost the same thing as too high a GDP. Admitting that in today’s world is trouble, so we seek “sustainable growth”.

As has been observed, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  In the global warming context the weakness of the “alternatives” approach (which is also the “sustainable growth” approach) is self-evident.  You build a car with greater fuel efficiency, and that just allows more driving or a larger population of drivers.  The amount of fuel used has to be addressed head-on, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in active programs among the mainline environmental groups.  No wonder we lose.  This blindness shows up directly when it comes to global warming — a refusal to talk about people actually using less of what generates greenhouse emissions.  We don’t want to talk about conservation, yet expect the government to impose it.  Huh?

The primary stumbling block to implementation of the Copenhagen goals was that both the United States and China refused to make any legally binding commitment at all.  When this writer reviewed Copenhagen from his personal point of view⁹, he pointed out that there was little on the horizon that would make the outcome different in future attempts to reach an accord, and said (I’ll repeat verbatim because the facts above only demonstrate that what was apparently true then is unquestionably true now, two years deeper into the hole. For the reader’s convenience, endnotes and inter-lineations are provided for further clarification.)

We are left with the two largest GHG emitters, the United States and China, unwilling to commit to binding goals for reduction. All the while, there’s little hope that the public can introduce any sort of meaningful change in this situation. At the same time, the rest, the signers of the Kyoto accords, increased their emissions when the protocols called for decreases. So much for governments.

All considered, we have lost twenty years [now 31, since the parties at Durban postponed further discussions until 2020] for bringing about meaningful climate change mitigation and we have little time left because every year that the atmospheric CO2 load increases, there is even a lesser chance that the dangerous processes can be reversed. Meanwhile, we clearly face governments in the hands of corporations and corporations blind to any need that could adversely affect the next quarterly report. Are these conditions going to change in the few years we have? It is unlikely. The concerned public has thus far proved incapable of accomplishing meaningful governmental and corporate programs to halt global warming, so how can we have confidence except in more of the same until time runs out?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to depend on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an “inconvenient truth” – inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves.

The inconvenient truth is that there are few, if any, human CO2 emissions not the result of our own individual and collective consumer decisions. There are our direct uses of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating, there is the electricity we consume that is generated by burning fossil fuels or, more recently, biofuels and biomass. There is the energy consumed in production and transport of our food and consumer products. Why?  The catalogue is, in fact, the same catalogue that would have to be dealt with under a global treaty!

So, in fact, we the people, in the United States and all over the world, have no need to wait until we are forced by government programs to take the steps necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. We can do what we’ve been waiting for the governments and corporations to do, and because they are doing nothing, we no longer have any alternative except to make the changes ourselves.

Are we so childish that we can do nothing except whine that we haven’t been told what to do when the future of the earth, the future of humanity, depends upon action? Maybe the answer is yes. I don’t know what you will do, and I don’t know what I will do. Yet if we do not want to be responsible, individually and collectively for the horrors to come, then we must, individually and collectively, say no to any more greenhouse emissions than the scientists say are safe.

Henry Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi taught us that our needs are much less than our wants and that we can peacefully bring down governments and corporations by refusing to accept their measures of our needs.

Thoreau is widely viewed as the originator of civil disobedience as a moral and civic duty, especially in all societies aspiring to democracy. He believed that the Mexican-American war was immoral, yet he found himself requested to pay a head tax to finance the war.  So he said no, and went to jail. We shall never know how far he would have taken the experiment, because his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, over his objection, paid the tax and got him released.

In explaining why he viewed refusal to pay the tax as his duty, he said:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.¹⁰

Obviously we have not wiped our hands of global warming when we buy the fuels or the electricity or consumer goods and not only create  emissions but finance our opponents as Thoreau’s head tax financed the war.  We will not, by ourselves, have stopped global warming, but the example will be seen, and our willingness to make sacrifices for reductions in emissions will for the first time be unquestionable.

As Thoreau explained:

It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing.

Rather, if substantial numbers of people refuse to pay the profiteers  or to engage in throwing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will demonstrate their sincerity in a manner that cannot be accomplished by just asking the government to do something.  We shall, hopefully, “leaven the whole lump,” and, ideally, slow the growth of demand for products destroying the earth.  There will be less profit in building the power plants and pipelines about to lock us into failure, and we can sleep better in the knowledge that we “washed our hands off it”. Besides, nothing else that has been suggested will work.

The core teaching of “Civil Disobedience” is, as Martin Luther King saw it, “Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”  As consumers and users and financial contributors to the makers of the pollutants that are destroying the earth, its biodiversity, and its agricultural productivity for millions of years to come, we must demonstrate our opposition with noncooperation.  Why?    Because:

- it is a moral duty;

- it will “leaven the whole lump”; and,

- nothing else is working at all.

Another important part of Thoreau’s teachings is his examination of our ability and responsibility to reduce our material consumption to the core at which we can carry on our lives as principled members of the community without either imposing on others, depriving ourselves of freedom or violating our own moral beliefs.  That is Walden, which forces us to understand that consumerism locks us out from living our lives with integrity and freedom.  It’s a message essential for giving up the material “needs” for which we are destroying the earth.

Gandhi’s self-imposed poverty gives us the same message — that abandonment of material needs is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.  It’s a view, of course, that is anathema to the global corporations that control our lives through the culture of materialism. Without that understanding, it is unlikely that Americans can voluntarily relinquish their “rights” to a standard of living Russia’s President Putin and undoubtedly millions or billions of others have rightly called parasitism.  As long as Americans maintain that view, they are playing with the danger that the world will quickly and painfully take away the material “rights” they enjoy at everyone else’s expense –- “rights” that will soon be gone in any event as “peak everything” imposes itself on us. To fail to make a virtue of a necessity is the height of folly.

Remember Gandhi’s spinning wheel?  It was a simple declaration of independence from British capitalism, a statement that India could do without the capitalists. “Mahatma Gandhi Album: the Man and the Wheel,”  To the extent we liberate ourselves from the causes of global warming, so will we also liberate ourselves from the corporations of Wall Street which act in arrogant confidence that we are ever their dependents and ever in debt to them.  If we step away from the shiny things they produce, they will have no power over us, so it is time to do it in small ways and large.

 It is time to stop waiting for governments to act as we expected them to act at Kyoto long ago and at Copenhagen [more than two years ago and at Durban most recently].

At this point, exclusively focusing on government action is little more than avoidance of the inconvenient truth of our individual and collective responsibility. So we must get on with the show — convincing and helping ourselves, convincing and helping our neighbors, convincing and helping humanity to reduce CO2 emissions by all means within our power to reach the goals and timelines the scientists are telling us we must meet. We must do it with the good will and generosity so lacking in Copenhagen because our “leaders” showed us in Copenhagen [and Durban] that the needed changes assuredly will not happen otherwise.

There is a little catch. The fundamental rule of social behavior, raised to a pinnacle by “free-market” economics, has been for generations, in the words of 1952 U.S. Progressive Party Presidential nominee Vincent Hallinan, “Fuck you Jack, I got mine!” That is unnatural and unsustainable.

Every major religious text, back at least as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead [four millenia ago], has taught us in substance, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

For specific wording of the rule in twenty of the world’s religions, see  ”Universality of the Golden Rule“. The rule explicitly dictates behavior towards all things living among the Jains, Native Americans, and Nigerian Yoruba, and this writer submits, implicitly does so among others. It is hard to see how a universally accepted rule of behavior can be, as asserted by our colleagues in the corporate world, genetically impossible, and it is, of course, a necessary rule for survival among the hunter-gatherer tribes from which we descend.

The corporate anti-Christ has tried to tell us otherwise for centuries.  That is hardly surprising, because it is increasingly coming to be understood that the structure of large corporations, indeed probably all large integrated organizations, regardless of stated mission, automatically draws to the top, psychopaths, people who, generally through factors of nature and nurture beyond their control, lack the ability to empathize.¹¹

Look where it has gotten us.

There are reasons why the free market rule has repeatedly brought down the US economy, destroyed the Copenhagen and Kyoto efforts and will make our efforts to stop global warming, with or without the aid of the governments, an impossibility. No other rule than that taught by universal religion will work to leave a world to future living beings in which they can actually survive and thrive.

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice. And the governments and corporations are welcome to join us all if they see fit. If the offenders find themselves boycotted, they should not be surprised. So think about this message, start saying no to carbon, along with unnecessary consumption of goods and services. Instead, share the vision for a low carbon footprint with your neighbors, friends, other associates, congregations, nonprofit organizations, everyone. Then ever so nicely, ask them to get with the program post haste, because the responsibility is now with us.

We the seven billion are well-meaning folks on the whole, but with all due respect we are also all the right hand men and women of Wall Street.  Want to bankrupt the global corporations, one or all?  Just stop consuming what they sell, and stop producing future consumers.  It’s that simple, and within decades it will in any event be forced upon us by the limits to growth.  It’s all about “too many people using too much stuff,” so if we fail to do now what the limits to growth will force us to do tomorrow, future generations, if they survive, will pay dearly. We allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated by the corporate psychopaths into believing that we are like them, constitutionally unable to care for our fellow beings.  That’s not us, or wasn’t until they took over control of our minds and our religions.  Things might be different if we decided to “occupy” ourselves without abandoning the occupation of Wall Street, and having done so, to implement the Golden Rule, the central teaching of every major religion on earth, and the principle that conservation is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.

Think of these things, please, but with humor and good will, as you honor in your own way the religious and spiritual holidays.   And to be effective, the nonprofits need to change course too, and stop knocking their heads against walls that will remain unmoved until we all change our ways.

1. Vernon, 2007, “Peak Minerals,” Oil Drum Europe,  There appears to be considerable uncertainty as to the supplies of key minerals, which have not been studied in nearly the detail of oil, so this writer will not vouch for the current accuracy of Vernon’s work.
2. American University Speech, June 13, 1963.
3. Farley, The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming, Monthly Review
4. “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose forever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent Guardian, Wednesday 9 November 2011 05.01 EST
5. “Carbon offsets have already run out of credit,“, and Carbon Trade Watch, which reports, “Carbon trading schemes are awash with paper “reductions” that do not correspond to actual reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, and this is a systematic problem.”
6. Why? because of tar sands oil’s “EROEI” (energy recovered over energy in.)  When the energy recovered in extracting a fuel from the ground is less than the energy needed to extract it (ie EROEI < 1) , getting it out is pretty much worthless, and when EROEI is only a little over 1 (as when you pull 4 barrels of oil out of the ground but burn the equivalent of  three of them to get them), you’ve already expended several times the net recovery to get there, which means the oil from tar sands has already caused more CO2 emissions before it even reaches the refinery than it or conventional oil causes after it’s burnt.  Really bad medicine.   Additionally, meeting recognized scientifically-established goals for reduction of CO2 emissions requires using less than the total reserves of “conventional” oil and gas.  Once development of “unconventional” sources (tar sands oil, shale oil, deep sea oil and “fracked” shale gas) are initiated in full scale, it will become virtually impossible to halt their use, since the investors will fight to retrieve their investments.
7. Pipeline and Tanker Transport Trouble: New report shows the impact to British Columbia’s communities, rivers and Pacific coastline from tar sands oil   December 12, 2011 RELEASE: Another Tar Sands Pipeline Postponed in Major Victory for First Nations and Ecological Internet, Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines.
8. Diane Francis, “The Real Inconvenient Truth“, and “Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?”, one of many discussions of the need to maintain growth of fossil fuels to maintain growth of food production.
9. Copenhagen Failed Us. What Do We Do Next?
10. Civil Disobedience – Part 1 of 3
11. Brian Basham Thursday, 29 December 2011″Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power.”  Basham cites some of the recent peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject

BBC News reported the UN chairperson saying that the talks had ‘saved tomorrow, today’.

But nothing substantive had changed. Carbon emissions, already at their peak, will continue to increase for at least the next eight years, pushing humanity closer to the brink of climate collapse. Rather than address the madness of a global system of corporate-led capitalism that is bulldozing us to this disaster, the corporate media mouthed deceptive platitudes.

A Guardian editorial assured readers that the Durban deal is ‘better than nothing’, and that:

There are times when inching forward can look like progress [...] a moment when it is cheerier to think of how bad things might have been than to rate the success of the final outcome.

Adopting the standard, but discredited, establishment framework to explain the treacly mire hindering serious action on climate, this vanguard of liberal journalism opined: ‘There is an unvarying conflict of interest in the fight against climate change between developed and developing economies.’

No hint there that the conflict is, in fact, between the elite corporate 1% and the 99% of the global population that are their victims.

The Independent, another great white hope of liberal journalism, told its diminishing band of readers that the Durban outcome is ‘an agreement that gives new cause for optimism.’ Indeed, it ‘is an enormous advance on the position now.’

An editorial in The Times (‘A Change of Climate’, December 12, 2011) conformed along similar lines while also taking care to kick the forces of rationality in the teeth:

Scientists and activists will complain that Durban’s only commitment is to more talks and that any agreement will not become operational until 2020. But these campaigners have often proved poor advocates, either exaggerating or misusing data to make their case or showing an unwise disdain for the realpolitik and compromises essential for any deal.

Climate scientists will be dismayed that an ostensibly responsible paper like The Times would make a sneering reference to the unfounded ‘Climategate’ claims of climate data manipulation. But perhaps readers will appreciate the irony that The Times is itself, of course, an enthusiastic practitioner of corporate ‘realpolitik’.

‘A Crime Of Global Proportions’

We are not suggesting that critical comment was entirely missing from press coverage. That would take absurd levels of totalitarian media control. The Guardian managed to find space on its website, if not in the print edition, for the Guardian’s head of environment, Damian Carrington, to write in his blog:

Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world’s leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never.

The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won’t be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban.

This ‘ecological debt’, Carrington added, ‘will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. [...] Cleaning up the energy system that underpins the global economy is inevitable, sooner or later. If not, true economic armageddon awaits, driven by peak oil, climate chaos and civil unrest.’

Friends of the Earth were permitted their token quote in the Guardian, scant reward for decades of soft-pedalling its criticism of the corporate media: ‘This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change.’

Unfiltered by corporate news editors, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement pointing out that, in Durban, the world’s governments

by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change. [...] It’s high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people.

UCS added:

Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can’t amend the laws of physics. The atmosphere responds to one thing, and one thing only – emissions. The world’s collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased, and soon.

In a powerful article on Independent Online, based in South Africa, there were stronger messages still. The environment group Earthlife Africa said the decisions resulting from the Durban summit would result in a 4^oC global average temperature rise which would mean an average increase of 6^oC-8^oC for Africa. This would lead to an estimated 200 million deaths by 2100.

No wonder that Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, said: ‘Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global proportions.’

He continued:

An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apartheid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.

Karl Hood of Grenada, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, responded to the Durban deal with damning words: ‘Must we accept our annihilation?’

Aubrey Meyer, originator of the ‘contraction and convergence’ policy that would, if adopted by the UN, reduce greenhouse gases to safe levels, was also scathing: ‘The islands are being annihilated and we all are now become their assassins. We have informally known this but with this “Durban-Deal” we all have now formally crossed that threshold.’

Janet Redman, of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, spoke the unadorned truth that is so painful, if not impossible, for the corporate media to acknowledge: ‘What some see as inaction is in fact a demonstration of the palpable failure of our current economic system to address economic, social or environmental crises.’

The Eightfold Nay: The Great Unmentionables Of Climate Coverage

In our book, Newspeak in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), we listed the key issues that would be at the heart of debate on the climate crisis in a truly free press:

1. The inherently biocidal, indeed psychopathic, logic of corporate capitalism, structurally locked into generating maximised revenues in minimum time at minimum corporate cost. Because corporations are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, it is in fact illegal for corporations to prioritise the welfare of people and planet above private profits. How can this simple fact of entrenched corporate immorality not be central to any discussion that is relevant to the industrial destruction of global life-support systems?

2. The proven track record of big business in promoting catastrophic consumption regardless of the consequences for human and environmental health. Whether disregarding the links between smoking and cancer, junk food and obesity, exploitation of the developing world and human suffering, fossil fuel extraction and lethal climate change, factory farming and animal suffering, high salt consumption and illness, corporations have consistently subordinated human and animal welfare to short-term profits.

3. The relentless corporate lobbying of governments to introduce, shape and strengthen policies to promote and protect private power.

4. The billions spent by the advertising industry to sell consumer products and ‘services’, creating artificial ‘needs’, with children an increasing target.

5. The collusion between powerful companies, rich investors and state planners to install compliant, often brutal, dictators in client states around the world.

6. The extensive use of loans and tied aid that ensnare poor nations in webs of crippling debt, ensuring that the West obtains or deepens control of their resources, markets and development.

7. The deployment of threats, bribery and armed force against countries that attempt to pursue self-development, rather than economic or strategic planning sanctioned by ‘the international community.’

8. The lethal role of the corporate media in promoting the planet-devouring aims of private power.

One searches in vain for any sensible and sustained discussion of any of these issues in the corporate media; never mind all of them taken together.

No wonder then that, for all the warm words of political ‘commitment’, we are headed for unprecedented desperate times ahead.

In line with a large variety of other scientific studies, the report found that average global temperature has been increasing since the industrial revolution took off, notching up a 1⁰C rise since the 1950s alone.  Scientists at Berkeley found no evidence that other factors were at play in distorting the data, as claimed by climate skeptics.  One of the authors of the study, physicist Richard Muller commented “My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly skeptical”.  Rather a forlorn hope, as Jon Stewart on Comedy Central reported, that news of the study received a mere 24 seconds of coverage across cable television news outlets.

Next consider that according to the US Dept of Energy, greenhouse gas emissions jumped by a record amount in 2010, exceeding the worst-case scenario of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimate made just four years ago.   Globally, a gargantuan 564 million tons of CO₂ were pumped into the atmosphere in 2010, 6% more than 2009, prompting John Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, to remark “The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing”.

Finally consider that in November, the IPCC released a report, compiled over a two year period by a group of 220 scientists on the increased likelihood and impact of extreme weather events and the connection to climate change.  The report is the first of its kind to document the increased severity of torrential rains and the resultant flooding, more intense and frequent storms and extended periods of drought across the world. The likely economic and social impact of record-breaking hot days, previously occurring once every 20 years but soon every other year, will be disastrous to at-risk communities such as older people, the poor and the young.  Massive cloudbursts that saturate and flood the land, instead of coming every 20 years, will soon arrive once in every five.  Conversely, extended droughts are more likely for southern Europe and central Europe, central North America, Central America and Mexico, north-east Brazil, and southern Africa.

In a chilling warning of what this would mean, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics commented,

The report shows that if we do not stop the current steep rise in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, we will see much more warming and dramatic changes in extreme weather that are likely to overwhelm any attempts human populations might make to adapt to their impacts.

Christian Parenti documents the impact these changes are already having on vulnerable communities around the world in his new book Tropic of Chaos.

The IPCC report was released in time to inform the upcoming United Nations climate talks in Durban, known as COP-17 or Conference of the Parties, Year 17 and as a way to influence politicians over the need to stop talking like they cared about climate change and actually take steps to prevent it by initiating an international treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year.

Given the above facts, one might reasonably assume that the people we elected to protect and serve their populations would be rushing to Durban as fast as they possibly could, clutching these reports to their hearts, eager to address this clearly urgent and planetary-scale threat with the utmost speed and determination.  You might reasonably expect our leaders to be asking themselves questions such as, “how quickly can we move to a carbon-free energy system?  What measures should we put in place by the end of the year to start moving in this direction?  What international coordination needs to happen to make sure that we transfer all of our best and most effective non-carbon, low-impact technologies to developing countries to help them make the energy transition?”

Needless to say, such a sane and rational response is not at all part of the thinking that goes on in between the ears of heads of state.  In fact, in order to avoid being too embarrassingly close to a pointless conference where nothing is achieved, many of them aren’t even turning up.  Indeed, in Washington, climate negotiations are so low down the list of priorities that almost nobody is going from Capitol Hill and certainly no members of Congress.  Henry Waxman (D-Calif), who sponsored the failed and flawed climate legislation in 2009, responding to a question about the conference said, “I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it.”  Similarly, Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) said that “It hasn’t been brought to my attention…I’m too busy here”.

Except that the only thing Congress seems to have successfully been busy with lately is passing agricultural legislation that keeps tomato paste on frozen pizzas classified as a vegetable so that it counts as part of school lunches.  Bowing to intense lobbying from the frozen food industry, salt and potato manufacturers, and ignoring the US government’s own agricultural department’s recommendations on how to make healthier school meals for our children, in a craven acquiescence to corporate power they took the $5.6 million spent lobbying on this bill by coca cola and other corporate interests and voted the new rules down.   Leaving aside the fact that tomatoes are, in fact, a fruit and with so much sugar, the paste could more accurately be defined as dessert, Congress has never let science dictate their votes and this is after all the USDA that tests meat for school lunch programs 5-10 times less frequently than the fast food chains, which, incredibly, often have stricter limits on bacterial infection of the meat.  According to a 2009 report in US Today:

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called “spent hens” because they’re past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don’t pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won’t buy them — and they don’t pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on “quality considerations.

No wonder the approval rating for such a venal Congress is 9%; astoundingly, less than half what Richard Nixon polled at the height of Watergate (24%) or BP, at 16%, during the Gulf oil spill.  And, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, Americans prefer the US ‘going communist’ (11%) over their approval of Congress.

If Congress can define tomato paste as a vegetable and, in exchange for corporate campaign dollars, not worry about the physical and mental health consequences for American children, how easy will it be to ignore a conference that, in the words of Natural Resources Committee’s Democratic spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder, is “in South Africa, which is obviously a pretty long flight”.

As if that wasn’t farcical enough a comment, in other countries, it’s not any better.  Brazil was forced to move next year’s Rio+20 Earth Summit so that it didn’t conflict with the archaic British monarchy’s celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  Despite that concession to an institution that should have gone out with the Dark Ages, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, self-acclaimed leader of the “greenest government ever”, still isn’t going to show up to the biggest environmental gathering in 20 years.

The real question we have to ask is: why are government leaders so committed to doing nothing about climate change?  Or, put another way, to quote John Vidal, the Guardian’s environmental correspondent:

If treasuries can find trillions to bail out dodgy banks, if financiers can be paid hundreds of millions in bonuses and the politics of Europe can be redrawn in just a few weeks, then why can’t the rich and big-emitting countries make a deal to try to avert what could be the greatest problem the planet has faced? In short, why are world leaders gambling with the fate of the planet?

Why indeed.  Secondly, what political strategies should we pursue so that we can change this dangerously pathetic and appalling state of affairs?  In other words, how can we raise the temperature of the movement, not the planet?

Because over the 17 years of international negotiations, even as the scientific evidence has dramatically increased and by any measure the rate of environmental devastation accelerated, politicians are moving backwards even from the weak promises they once used to make.

According to a report in the Guardian, rich nations are “giving up” on climate negotiations until 2016 and will then stipulate that there is no enforcement of any treaty until 2020 at the earliest.  In response, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said “If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [holding temperatures below 2⁰C] will be closed forever.”

As noted by a furious UN environment executive director Achim Steiner, putting off doing anything makes the task of doing something all the more difficult and less likely to be successful as greenhouse gases continue to grow instead of shrink:

Those countries that are currently talking about deferring an agreement [until] 2020 are essentially saying we are taking you from high risk to very high risk in terms of the effects of global warming. This is a choice – a political choice…Every year, we build more power plants. Every year, we build more buildings that are not efficient. Every year, our options [to avoid climate change] get less and less.

Clearly, corporate pressure can explain a lot; just ask your nearest Member of Congress.  In 1998 US corporations spent an incredible $1.4 billion on lobbying members of Congress.  That was eclipsed in 2010, when they spent a staggering $3.5 billion; there are more than 13,000 officially registered lobbyists working the corridors of Capitol Hill.

But risking the stability of the whole biosphere by unleashing uncontrollably vast planetary forces must be more systemic than the backhanders and under-the-table deals made by corrupt politicians in the service of corporate interests.  Otherwise, replacing Republicans with Democrats might have made a difference.  But we know from bitter experience it didn’t.  We also know it took massive social ferment and the replacement of multiple governments to elect a government in Bolivia that paid more than lip service to climate change, and even there the supposedly deep-green government of Evo Morales has been physically attacking indigenous protesters as they successfully fought to stop a roadway from carving open their land in order to develop fossil fuel options for the country.

At one end of the spectrum, Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing a frankly slightly nutty “analysis” piece in the New York Times entitled “What Happened to Global Warming?” believes ordinary American’s are to blame for their apparently genetically-inspired, perverse desire to drive juggernauts as expressions of personal freedom, lock up scientists, live in massive houses and waste tons of money they don’t have on energy bills and transportation costs:

Americans — who produce twice the emissions per capita that Europeans do — are in many ways wired to be holdouts. We prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Report on climate change, a report limited in terms of solutions as he abjures taking radical action on climate change but nevertheless, was much more perceptive than many environmental organizations when he argued that the root of the problem is, in fact, ‘free’ market capitalism:

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century. The problem is global and the response must be a collaboration on a global scale.

And from the other end of the political spectrum, Naomi Klein has an excellent piece in The Nation, “Capitalism vs. The Climate”, that argues that taking meaningful action on climate change is essentially an existential threat to the very fabric of the system because it attacks one of the prime operative features of capitalism; namely, that a system predicated on relentless and never-ending growth is incompatible with the requirements of a stable biosphere on a finite planet:

The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits.

What I take from this is that what we need is a social, economic and political revolution.  The replacement of capitalism with an economic and political model based on cooperation not competition, production for need, not profit and predicated on real democracy and active participation by an informed citizenry of equals; a society where there are no corporations and no countries, just collections of people democratically planning sustainable production methods and ways of living in harmony with nature rather than aggressively seeking to dominate it.  A society that in the words of Karl Marx, has a long-term outlook predicated on the simple maxim that production “has to minister to the entire range of permanent necessities of life required by the chain of successive generations” and do so “with the least expenditure of energy”.  I’d call such a system socialism.

While Klein shies away from this conclusion, leaving space for a reformed capitalism with a much reduced corporate sector somehow not tied to endless growth and a “managed transition to another economic paradigm” it is clear we need to win real reforms to build our organizational power and confidence, as well as slow down the rate of environmental degradation and buy ourselves some time.  Fortunately, after decades of defeats, we now have some victories: the recent success in stopping the approval of the XL tar sands pipeline and the cancellation of the vote to lift the moratorium on hydrofracking in the Delaware River basin; both awesome examples of the power of protest in the new climate of the Arab Spring and Occupy.  Klein highlights six things we need to fight for such as taxing the rich, re-regulating the corporations and banks, reviving public space for democratic debate and fighting for the necessity of government planning to make positive societal change.

We certainly need to do all those things, and the ongoing Egyptian revolution and Occupy protests across the world, make them all much more likely.  What seemed pie-in-the-sky idealistic dreaming a few short months ago, in this new spirit of global revolt against the 1%, so much more is now realizable and our horizon for the amount of change that is possible has suddenly shifted dramatically.

But the evidence that the political and economic elite will bow to public pressure and scientific reason and allow for or help facilitate a managed transition to another economic paradigm is incontrovertible; they won’t.  Read the following quote and guess who is speaking about what area of the world:

The United States has spoken out for a set of core principles that have guided our response to events, including opposition to the use of violence and repression, defense of universal rights including the freedom of peaceful assembly, and support for political and economic reform that meets the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.

That is part of a statement released by the White House’s US Press Secretary, November 25, 2011 talking about Egypt.  Clearly he hasn’t been watching US domestic TV.  Or taken a trip to Oakland, New York or 16 other US cities lately, where the state-backed use of violence and repression against the freedom of peaceful assembly has been on vivid and brutal display.  Surely, merely questioning the massive economic inequality rampant in America, and suggesting that the government we elected take some action to re-regulate the banks and corporations and tax the rich via peaceful assembly would seem like a right a democratic government and self-ascribed leader of the free world would support.  The blood on the streets and the pepper spray in the air across a swath of US cities suggests otherwise, not to mention federal intervention and coordination.

Those that run and profit from the operation of the system will stop at nothing to defend their privilege.  That extends into the international realm and brings us to another ecological contradiction intrinsic to capitalism not mentioned by Naomi Klein and left out of almost all debates and discussions of why nation states can’t agree on a climate deal.

The missing factor is the competition that goes on between countries in the service of their own set of corporations; in a word, imperialism.  Geopolitical intrigue and the jockeying for competitive advantage isn’t some occasional thing that a few larger or more belligerent countries engage in, it’s built into the operation of capitalism in just the same way as the requirement for constant growth.

One of the fundamental sticking points in Durban will be between developed nations that have made much of the fact that recent increases in emissions have come predominantly from developing countries which were exempt from binding emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.  Led by the United States, OECD countries have used this argument to cudgel developing nations into agreeing to drop their insistence on any new climate agreement treating poor and rich countries differently.

Using this argument, OECD countries proclaim that they won’t do anything that would undermine their competitiveness when faced with economic competition from developing countries unconstrained by having to limit carbon emissions.  They reinforce their position by trotting out the argument that even if they took action it wouldn’t have any effect because the increases in emissions are coming from the developing world.

Leaving aside the fact that the developed world has a historical debt to pay for bringing the planet to the brink of biospheric crisis by its 150 year production of carbon dioxide, on which that development rests, the United States alone consumes 30% of world resources and produces 25% of CO₂ emissions with only 4% of world population.  The US could not only set an example to the rest of the world by investing seriously in renewable technologies but would simultaneously generate millions of jobs for those millions of Americans currently out of work.  But again, the rules of imperial competition between nation states override taking unilateral action to protect the only planet we have; the myopia of those who run the system and their fixation on profit taking prevents them from recognizing the slogan “There is no Planet B”.

One could argue that the US government has a point: don’t we need developing countries like China and India to reduce their emissions?  Of course, we do; however, the question is: how can this best be achieved?  By refusing to seriously invest in renewable energy technologies the US encourages other countries with less money and technological expertise to do likewise.  As President Obama has authorized the resumption of deep sea off-shore drilling as well as offshore drilling in the Arctic, there’s no incentive for others to do anything except continue to construct coal plants, build roads and clear-cut forests for biofuel production.

While 40% of emissions still come from OECD countries, it’s true that only 25% of the latest increase in emissions came from that source.  However, it is important to note that per capita emissions in the OECD are almost double those of China and more than six times those of India.  Furthermore, these figures are a serious distortion of which countries are really responsible for carbon emissions.  While the EU is likely going to achieve its Kyoto target of 5% emissions reductions from 1990 levels next year, this is only because they outsourced them.

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Under the IPCC accounting rules of only reporting territorial emissions, many developed countries have reported stabilized emissions. However, our results show that the global emissions associated with consumption in many developed countries have increased with a large share of the emissions originating in developing countries.”

If the carbon cost of imports from industry that was relocated to boost profit margins by taking advantage of lower labor costs and weaker health, labor, safety and environmental standards is added to the developed countries column, instead of stabilizing, emissions are shown to have increased by 7%.  Even without accounting for overseas manufacturing, the US is headed in the opposite direction: between 1990 and 2008 US emissions increased by 17%.  If imports are taken into account from US corporations now located overseas, primarily in China, the increase is 25%.  If China’s imports and exports are accounted for, Chinese emissions drop by 20%, putting the country well behind the United States.

As another example, take Obama’s recent trip to Asia.  Here is President Obama, having just dispatched US troops and aircraft to a base in Australia, essentially letting China know in no uncertain terms what will and will not be tolerated in the Pacific:

With most of the world’s nuclear power and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress. As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends…As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.  We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace…The United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay.

The second intractable problem for capitalism in dealing with a global problem like climate change is that any effective plan has to be internationally coordinated because no major country is able to put forward and carry out unilateral actions that would contravene the laws of capitalist competition and undermine its competitiveness on the world market.  The intractable problem faced by the US in particular, with intense economic pressures from rising competitors and an economy built on the premise of endless cheap oil, is that it’s the country least capable of making concessions at climate talks.

As a result, US government representatives are constantly hunting for allies amongst other major polluting countries to bribe or browbeat into obstructing, watering-down and delaying any and all action toward a binding climate treaty.  Whatever the change in language, this is as true of President Obama’s administration as it was of George W. Bush’s.  It appears that in Durban the US will this time collaborate with major coal producer and nuclear ally India, with the likely help of Russia and Japan in order to block any attempt by vulnerable states to take firmer and quicker action to reduce emissions.

As some nations become desperate in the face of climate change, and infected with the power of the Occupy movement for change, some may attempt to force the issue against the interests of the major emitting countries.  In an exciting example of this, the former president of Costa Rica, José María Figueres, has called for vulnerable countries to “Occupy Durban” to force more serious negotiations.  Climate protesters in Durban outside the conference can use this potential split to make their own push for tighter emissions controls and a shift away from fossil fuels, just as Global Justice protesters did in Seattle in 1999 that led to the collapse of international trade talks.

However, it is clear that if we want real change with regard to climate negotiations, we will have to follow the Egyptian people and replace our governments with ones that are more responsive to the democratic demands of their people.  While we should obviously continue to protest outside of climate talks, we need to direct our energies to where we are more able to effect change, which is on the national level.  And if we really want to save our world, we need to see fighting for real reforms and the reining in of corporate power not as an endpoint, but rather as a stepping stone toward a completely different society.  One that, in contrast to a capitalist system based on endless growth, competition in pursuit of profit, exploitation, oppression and imperial warfare, will be based on real democracy and cooperation between all people and the planet we depend on.  For that, we will need a revolution.

Washington continues to insist upon exercising world leadership in all key global endeavors, including the environment, but has failed dramatically in terms of climate change.

In fact, the White House is greatly expanding U.S. access to fossil fuel energy sources even as scientific and environmental organizations are intensifying their warnings about the need to immediately reduce greenhouse gas carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

Although the U.S. recently has ranked second to China in fossil fuel burning, it is by far the greatest polluter of the atmosphere in the last century and a half. Given the differences in population, America still uses three times more per capita than China.

White House policy is fixated on reducing dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and gas by greatly increasing the extraction of fossil fuels closer to home — mainly a vast increase in natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) throughout the United States, expanded drilling for offshore oil, and importing dirty tar sands oil from Canada.

While increasing the development and use of global warming fuels, President Obama is advancing no significant program to replace high carbon emitting fossil fuels with renewable non-carbon solar and wind power.

The U.S. government is subsidizing some major “green” corporations, providing them with nearly no-risk guarantees for developing solar and wind, but this remains a relatively minor enterprise. Progress made so far is being stalled by the unexpected abundance (and thus cheaper price) of domestic natural gas secreted in shale, more secure oil reserves than anticipated, and the probability of reduced federal and state subsidies.

In a major statement from London November 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) called for a “bold change of policy direction toward the use of low-carbon fuels within the next five years. If the major industrial states do not do so quickly, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system,” which is precisely what the Obama Administration is doing.

This recommendation seeks to prevent the rise in global temperatures in this century from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius, which is based upon keeping carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million (ppm). Anything above the target standards will cause irreparable damage to life on Earth.

According to many scientists and environmental groups these standards are inadequate, and that 350 ppm is the maximum amount that can be accommodated without causing a disaster. Atmospheric carbon, which occurs naturally, has reached dangerous levels due to industrialization. It has increased from 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial era to approximately 392 ppm today, which is why it is said warming is well underway and its effects are being felt throughout the world.

Introducing the new report, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven declared, “Growth, prosperity and rising population will inevitably push up energy needs over the coming decades…. Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies.”

The  Environment News Service reports that the “agency’s warning comes at a critical time in international climate change negotiations, as governments prepare for the annual UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28-Dec. 9. ‘If we do not have an international agreement whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door will be closed forever,’ IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned.’” (The main goal of the 17th climate summit is to agree on a resolution to replace the Kyoto Protocols, which will expire next year.)

The IEA describes itself as “an autonomous organization which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond.” Its members represent the world’s leading capitalist countries. Greenpeace and some other environmental groups are critical of the group’s approval of tar sands oil, lower carbon fuels and nuclear energy. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are not IEA members.

Reporting October 26 on America’s hunt for more carbon-emitting fuels, the New York Times quoted Daniel Lashof, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, as declaring:

Giving new life to fossil fuels is a devil’s bargain, probably making solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult. Not only are you extending the fossil fuels era, but you are moving into fossil fuels that are dirtier and release more carbon pollution in the process of extracting and using them.

The Obama Administration has been leaning toward approving a $7 billion investment in a pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to Texas but encountered a fusillade of activist opposition from the environmental movement in recent months. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, has declared that “Tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth.” Dr. James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

Environmental movement criticisms have been compounded by objections from residents of Nebraska with concerns that pipeline spills might pollute the irreplaceable Ogallala aquifer, which occupies 10,000 square miles north to south from South Dakota to Texas and is a major source of water for the High Plains.

In August and September 1,200 anti-tar sands activists were arrested for offering civil disobedience in front of the White House. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the presidential mansion demanding an end to construction of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Four days later, President Obama announced that his final decision would now be postponed until months after next year’s elections, implying that the pipeline route might have to circumnavigate the  immense aquifer.

Some environmental groups have interpreted Obama’s delay as a victory, suggesting that the project is being abandoned, but this view is too optimistic. The White House seeks abundant and stable supplies of oil for the next several decades from sources other than (or in addition to) the volatile Middle East, and tar sands oil from nearby friendly Canada is a most attractive alternative. Canadian oil has been entering the U.S. for many years in existing pipelines, and this is continuing. In all probability, some version of Keystone will greatly increase the supply.

Environmentally-concerned Americans have also launched campaigns against fracking, mainly because of the danger to water supplies inherent in an extraction method that requires the high pressure injection of deadly chemicals deep underground.

The Obama Administration is so intent upon vastly increasing natural gas production that it has been brushing objections aside, as have state governors — such as New York State’s Andrew Cuomo — who argue that what really matters are the additional jobs and tax revenue from massive fracking operations.

Advocates of natural gas argue that burning gas for electricity emits 30% less carbon dioxide than oil, and about 45% less than coal. But recent studies have shown that the process of fracking releases sufficient stores of methane into the atmosphere to compensate for any reduction in carbon from natural gas. Methane creates a greenhouse heat trap about 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. The gas industry maintains that the reduction in emissions from natural gas “outweighs” the detrimental effects of methane.

The New York Times article points out that:

Temporary or permanent fracking bans have been put in place in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Other states are toughening drilling regulations, and the industry is responding with tighter wastewater management, while the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to complete a study on fracking next year. Nevertheless, gas shale drilling appears likely to continue at a fast pace in the most important gas-producing states.

The rest of the world is watching. Moratoriums have been put in place in parts of France, Germany, South Africa and the Canadian province of Quebec; Britain, Ukraine and other countries are moving cautiously forward. Still, the Energy Department projects that gas from shale could account for 14% of global supplies by 2030, with as many as 32 countries having production potential.

If world countries, led by the U.S., continue to disregard environmental objections to fracking, enhanced natural gas production combined with a major increase in oil production by the U.S., it will further subvert incentives toward ending use of fossil fuels. So far, shale gas extraction in the U.S. has increased 500% in the last five years, and that’s just the beginning.

Quoting Ivan Sandrea, president of the Energy Intelligence Group, the Times concluded its article with these words: “The fossil fuel age will be extended for decades. Unconventional oil and gas are at the beginning of a technological cycle that can last 60 years. They are really in their infancy.”

It has been five months since Democratic former Vice President Al Gore stuck his neck out in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone by publicly criticizing Democrat Obama for inaction on reducing America’s addiction to fossil fuels. So far, Obama has done nothing but live up to Gore’s critique:

“President Obama,” he declared, “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change…. The president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ [a conservative slogan] is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Washington’s refusal to take more than token steps to alleviate global warming would be relatively inconsequential were the U.S. a much smaller player on the world stage. But American governments have insisted for decades — based on economic strength and unparalleled military power — on being recognized as the world’s dominant and irreplaceable hegemonic state. Uncle Sam’s leadership is enormously influential, especially in the industrialized world, and America’s sluggish response toward global warming is a global disincentive toward taking speedy, responsible and united action.

U.S. financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthiest proportion of its population are “deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives,” economist Paul Krugman noted recently. These powerful elements are not prepared to accept the economic and political rearrangements required to transform America into an environmentally sound society of minimal carbon usage and many other ecological safeguards.

Such a transformation involves greater government investments, potentially smaller profits for many years, strategic alterations in the country’s disproportionate consumption of resources and products, and substantial changes beyond today’s gridlocked and essentially conservative political process.

In effect — given its disinclination to interfere in the workings of America’s neoliberal capitalist economy, even  to protect all life on Earth — Washington’s continuing unipolar leadership is guiding the world toward irreversible climate change.

The U.S. may change its ways, but economic and political realities suggest an alteration of this magnitude is hardly on the foreseeable agenda. Climate change, however, is taking place now. At  issue are two necessities: (1) strengthening of the environmental and social change movements in the U.S., and (2) a dramatic initiative by other powerful countries and regional blocs to take significant concerted global action to save the Earth regardless of Washington’s dithering.

The amount of energy and water  required to make the oil useable, not to mention burning the oil itself, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that internationally renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said that extracting and refining the oil means it’s “essentially game over” in the global battle to avoid catastrophic climate change.  The question needs to be asked: how did we get from a president who once promised real action on climate change to a man who is complicit in the environmental crime of the century?  And having taken on that question, how should environmentalists respond?

Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100/barrel.  There’s plenty more out there but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  This explains not only the development of Canadian tar sands, which require mining two tons of tar sands to obtain a single barrel of oil, as Shell, Exxon-Mobil and that paragon of environmental responsibility, BP, are all in on the action, but also underpins the hunt for oil in deep-water deposits off-shore and in the new oil frontier of the Arctic as well as shale gas extraction from hydrofracking.

Furthermore, it brings sharply into focus the reality that under capitalism, particularly its unregulated neoliberal variant, massive transnational oil companies will not hesitate to bolster their bottom lines and appease their shareholders before any concern about the stability of the biosphere filters through into corporate head offices.

One tar sands mine in Alberta has excavated more rock and soil than was required to build the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 largest dams combined.  Mining and processing is enough to heat three million homes and such is the electricity demand, it’s helping to fuel the requirement to build another environmental and health menace: more nuclear power stations.   Water use is 349 million cubic meters annually; water that becomes so heavily contaminated that it can’t be put back in the rivers it’s bleeding dry.  It must be kept sequestered in vast lakes of highly toxic effluent that already cover 50 square kilometers and are large enough to be seen from space.  The negative impacts on indigenous land and culture, wildlife, forests, water, air and downstream pollution run on and on.

Considering some of the facts of tar sands mining, and the appalling environmental damage it will cause, this is surely an area where one would expect democratically-elected governments to step in and say: we must find an alternative.  Yet, it seems almost certain that President Obama, who has the authority to stop the pipeline without recourse to Congress, will give the green light to further expansion as Canada seeks an export market to justify further production expansion.  The Keystone XL project, a 1,700 mile pipeline that will be able to carry 700,000 barrels a day from Canada all the way down to the refineries in Texas, cutting through multiple states and risking the contamination of such essential fresh water sources as the Ogallala aquifer is essential to Canadian plans for tar sands development.

Yet we know from Wikileaks that the State Department has been in collusion with TransCanada, the pipeline company, to ensure favorable press and hired a state dept official formerly with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team to guarantee that her new department won’t look too closely at the negative environmental implications.   A company who counts TransCanada as one of their major clients, Cardno Entrix, was hired by the State Department to carry out the environmental assessment.

Desperate to retain their members’ dues base and taking a nationalist and short-term position with regard to “American jobs”, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters union, rather than actively campaigning for jobs with a real future such as those in an expanded renewable energy sector, energy conservation and infrastructure development are backing the pipeline.

Yes, we certainly need jobs, but why do we only ever get offered jobs when it’s in the interests of the fossil fuel corporations or the banks and we have to trade them off for environmental stability?  Or when the government wants young American’s to go and fight and kill other young people in far off lands?  What about the millions of jobs that could be created by manufacturing a clean energy economy, with a new energy grid, retrofitting buildings across the country for energy conservation and in building an updated and efficient sanitation system?  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of teachers we’d need to educate such a workforce.  The bankers foreclosed on our homes and the capitalists and politicians that serve them seem intent on foreclosing on the planet.

Organized by Bill McKibben of 350.org, over 1,000 people were arrested outside the White House this summer to pressure Obama into refusing to sign off on the pipeline project.  While this was a highly commendable and impressive action, it was also rather confusing as McKibben urged activists not to give up on Obama.  Despite more than two years of unremitting disappointment on environmental questions (and much else) activists were encouraged to wear their 2008 Obama campaign buttons at the protests and on their way to jail.  It was confusing because you can’t protest someone you simultaneously support and hope to build a robust and uncompromising movement for change in the teeth of corporate malfeasance and lobbying power.  Either you protest and create a large enough oppositional movement that forces a rethink of government policy, as has happened in Germany with the German government’s u-turn on nuclear power, or you weaken the movement and bamboozle your supporters with misplaced calls for loyal protest actions to get our supposed friend in the White House on the right track.

McKibben has called Obama’s upcoming decision a “watershed moment” for his presidency and environmentalists who previously enthusiastically campaigned for him have vowed to sit out his 2012 re-election campaign if he doesn’t follow through and refuse to authorize the project.  I hope they do.

In a statement that underscores the cynicism with which the Democratic Party take their most enthusiastic supporters, the New York Times quoted democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates…So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.”  In other words, the Democrats will simply run a negative campaign that only promises to be not quite as bad as the Republicans.  Meanwhile, not quite as bad as the Republicans will fry the planet just as surely as if the Republicans had been in charge of the furnaces.

So this is a watershed moment not just for Obama, but also for McKibben and the mainstream environmental movement.  Only a complete and irrevocable break with the Democratic Party will get us anywhere.  In several articles written over the lifetime of the Obama presidency, including when he had super-majorities in both houses of Congress and could have acted with purpose on environmental questions, I have argued that, despite the rhetoric, Obama’s default position would always be to side with the corporations against a rational and forward-thinking environmental program.  One that would protect health, create jobs and give us a chance of avoiding global climate meltdown.  Obama has yet to provide any evidence that my analysis is incorrect.

In a coffin that should really have received its last nail some time ago, it is highly likely that he will further confirm my analysis with his commitment to the pipeline project.  The question then will be, will the mainstream environmental organizations such as 350.org follow through, ditch the Democratic Party, make good on their promise not to campaign for an Obama second term, and help build the only thing that will save us: the construction of a broad-based but completely independent movement for real social and ecological change.

Paradoxically, the only force that might prevent President Obama from burning all his bridges to the environmental movement is Occupy Wall Street, which has already sharply moved the political narrative to the left in the United States precisely because it is independent of the two-party corporate duopoly that masquerades as democratic political choice.  Yet, if OWS continues to grow and the Democratic Party are forced to respond by tacking to the left on environmental and social issues so as not to lose every last shred of liberal credibility, it further serves to underline my argument that we will only win real change when we categorically refuse to get taken for a ride by the Democratic chariot that is hitched so firmly to the corporate horse.

Except those actually there. In fact, the ones out there this past month, for all the cacophony and their occasional sloppiness and disparate messages, seem to make the most sense to me. After all, while it is true that the cowboy capitalism of the past 40 years has wrenched the last slivers of democracy from the clenched teeth of the masses, it is also true that, in toto, we are in a far bigger, global crisis than we admit, and no single name or explanation gets it, in my opinion.

Not too far from where I live, an ozone hole was found above the Arctic, a place with already ever diminishing ice during the year, which, in turn, dulls the reflective nature of the Earth’s surface, making it absorb more heat which raises water temperatures, which causes ever more ice to melt near the Poles, which causes ocean levels to rise and apparently further heats up the planet. Now, while exactly what causes all that continues to have some doubters, I’ll step up and just say that I buy the industrialization and human causes are making things worse explanation, which seems possessed of the greatest “common sense”. This then has a connection to the ever increasing (and consciously manipulated) demand for fossil fuels and the crazily insatiable consumption patterns of the West and those increasingly growing second placers, the Third World.

Capitalism too, obviously plays a big role in this, but a newer kind of capitalism which, though it produces no steel or durable goods which requires maintenance of huge standing armies in order to guarantee access to oil and other resources we need more and more of. This, in turn, requires lying to everyone saying we need to be killing huge amounts of people “over there” in undeclared, unconstitutional wars so we can insure our “freedom” (to buy cheap stuff?) over here. And those men and women doing the fighting will return home injured, to few jobs, little care, loads of domestic problems, and an array of incompetent and clueless politicians who drone on endlessly but as far as I can see are saying nothing of any consequence at all.

To top it all off, while regular wages have been stagnant for the better part of 30 years, USAmericans are no less productive, and yet that the richest 1% own 35% of all the wealth. And, if one expands that number a bit to include richest 5%, we are now talking about an unimaginably large percentage of the total wealth of the US in the hands of basically a few families and their hangers on. This is 1970s El Savadoran proportions of wealth inequality and oligarchy. But there’s more: mercenaries now make up an important part of the US military actions around the world, killing with impunity and becoming an unprosecutable, independent force. Students graduating college today face Promethean levels of debt peonage if they are lucky, finding few jobs which pay significantly more than those same jobs would have a generation ago. Bridges are falling apart, roads stink, schools don’t have enough money for books or desks, teachers are demonized and fired, and the daily grind of staying afloat is tiring more and more people into despair.

A common thread is emerging in all this, though in several themes: first, elections and electoral politics are not working, and so at the very least, money needs to be taken out of the equation, giving average citizens as equal access to their political representatives as corporations and the rich possess now. Second, global, corporate capitalism is what has brought the world’s economy to this terrible state, and it needs to be reined in severely, or dismantled, and replaced. Third, the wealthiest of the country have been receiving an ever greater share of the riches and influence on economic, political, and social policies and this has to end. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” This disparity can only be attenuated through restoration of the progressive taxation rates of the past, and a commitment to maintain them for the future. And fourth, the monies taken by government through taxation should be spent on social needs such as health care and education, rather than a bloated, imperial military, or bailouts for the already wealthy class. There’s also within all of that, the recognition that issues of class need to be addressed as never before, and that the fate of our planet as well as our democracy may be at stake if we don’t.

It’s a big mess out there and nobody is going to tell me that only one solution will fix it all. So leave those kids out there on Wall St. alone. Let them work out their demands, let them vent their anger, and allow the process of democracy to play out. Things are messy and they are tired of all of it and, if we are lucky, they will be the ones to cushion the fall. This American Fall.

Recently I interviewed Christine about her new book, which details the plight of an Alaska Eskimo community struggling to save their land that is disappearing as a result of climate change.

Joshua Frank: Christine, what prompted you to investigate what is happening to the people of Kivalina?

Christine Shearer:  A few things. In 2007, I was part of this interdisciplinary research project at UC Santa Barbara, assessing the biggest “human impacts” to marine ecosystems. To do this we collected data from over a hundred scientists. And it really started to hit me how severe climate change is, particularly how quickly it is happening.

Also, I recently remembered this: we also went to get data from indigenous fishers, to include their traditional knowledge. So I went to a Native American reservation in the state of Washington and handed one of the fishers there this really complicated survey tool we had developed, and he was just kind of like, ‘What is this?’ And rather than fill it out, he walked me to the shoreline and showed me how the water was lapping at one of their buildings and said, ‘This is the biggest problem.’ He was talking about sea level rise.

And so one night I was in an environmental law class, and the teacher read a news headline about this lawsuit, this tiny Alaska Native village suing fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate about climate change, and I just knew I had to write about it.

JF: So you traveled up to visit these people? Can you tell us a little about their culture and history?

CS: They are Inupiat, tracing their ancestry to the northwest Arctic back thousands of years. They are fishers and whalers and live mainly off subsistence, and are pretty cued into the land and its rhythms, because they rely on it for their needs. So the changes in the Arctic have been pretty hard on them – making traveling and hunting more dangerous because the ice is thinning – let alone now that the small barrier island they are located on is eroding away.

I did not know much about the area before going, so I did a lot of reading in the Kivalina school library of their oral histories while there, and also asked questions. I was probably annoying, but they were always incredibly open and friendly, inviting me into their homes, happy to talk and share. When you think about how they live and have lived, it’s pretty amazing, and you can see how the strong social and community bonds would help them survive. The Arctic is not for wimps.

JF: You write about Kivalina’s grievances against ExxonMobil. What prompted it and where does the fight currently stand?

CS: Yeah, the reason the island is eroding is because of warming Arctic temperatures — sea ice now forms later and later in the year, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to erosion from storms. In 1992, Kivalina residents voted to move, and in 2003 and 2006, U.S. government reports said Kivalina had to be relocated within the next ten to fifteen years, due to erosion from warming temperatures.

Around the time of the government reports an environmental justice lawyer – Luke Cole – was working with Kivalina residents because their water was being polluted by a nearby mine. And that began the conversation about filing the climate change lawsuit, because Luke saw that the island was eroding, and the people had been trying to relocate for over a decade with little success or public attention.

So in 2008, Kivalina filed a public nuisance claim against ExxonMobil and 23 other large fossil fuel companies for their relocation costs. They also charged a smaller subset with conspiracy and concert of action for creating a false debate around climate change — Kivalina’s representation includes some lawyers that had been involved in both sides of the tobacco lawsuits.

In 2009 a judge dismissed Kivalina’s claim as a “political question” for the executive and legislative branches, and unsuitable for the judicial branch. The judge also denied Kivalina legal standing to bring the lawsuit. This meant that the secondary claims — which had to do with the climate change misinformation campaign — were thrown out without being commented on. The decision is being appealed, and Kivalina is waiting on that. In the meantime, they are still trying to relocate themselves.

JF: So who is actually to blame for what’s transpired in Kivalina? With the lawsuit against ExxonMobil, will you explain why are they being targeted here?

CS: Under public nuisance law, you can hold people or companies accountable that make a “meaningful” or “substantial” contribution to a harm. The 24 fossil fuel companies were chosen for being among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, while a smaller subset face claims of conspiracy and concert of action for going — in Luke Cole’s words — “above and beyond” in their efforts to try and mislead people about the science on climate change.

So, following the logic of the lawsuit: the companies are substantial contributors to the harm now facing Kivalina, and many of the companies knew of the harm they were creating, and tried to deal with it not by cutting back on emissions, but by misleading people to protect their business. Kivalina is therefore seeking damages – the cost of their needed relocation.

JF: Who is helping Kivalina relocate? What options do they have at this time to preserve their culture and integrity?

CS: There is no formal relocation policy in the U.S., and no U.S. government agency specifically tasked with helping communities relocate. So a lot of the efforts involved in trying to relocate have fallen on the people of Kivalina themselves, and they are working with different agencies at the federal, state, borough, and tribal levels to try and coordinate a relocation. Many government workers are doing what they can for Kivalina, like building a seawall, but they can only act within their prescribed roles and boundaries, which are becoming outdated with climate change.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that a U.S. government agency be tasked with relocation — I think that would help Kivalina out immensely. But now you have Congressional representatives who don’t “believe” in climate change and are trying to cut funding for adaptation and even disaster management, which is incredibly dangerous.

JF: Is the Kivalina situation an anomaly, or is this something that is happening in other locations of the world as well, where people may also be displaced as a consequence of global warming?

CS: I think Kivalina is an anomaly in the sense that most of the discussion around the biggest impacts of climate change are usually focused on the Global South. Kivalina offers an example of how Alaska Natives in the U.S. are being heavily impacted as well, and also face inadequate resources and assistance.

But, yes, people around the world face displacement. There seems to be two types of impacts from climate change. One is the steady threat of displacement, like the people of Kivalina and other Alaska Natives facing erosion and flooding, and the small island states — although I used to think of the threat of erosion as slow, but now realize it can be quick and sudden, putting people in danger. The other type of impact is the increase in the number and severity of “extreme” weather events, like increased droughts, fires, and flooding, which may also make previously inhabited places unlivable, and cause migrations.

JF: What would you tell those who want to get involved in the issue? How can people reach out to the folks in Kivalina?

CS: Yeah, a reduction on greenhouse gas emissions — mitigation — is still very important, but communities like Kivalina show we also need to focus on adaptation policies.

I think the most important thing for Kivalina is that a government agency is tasked with relocation, and a relocation policy is put into place. This will give the people of Kivalina a blueprint for what to do and what they can do. The groups Native American Rights Fund and Three Degrees Warmer are trying to streamline the process of relocation, while human rights lawyer Robin Bronen is trying to institute a relocation policy at the international level grounded in human rights law – climigration. There might be more efforts out there. These groups could use help and support.

Also, we need to communicate to our political representatives that cuts in disaster management and adaptation — which are currently being debated — are unacceptable. The answer is smart policy, not none at all. Climate change is here, and we have to deal with it.

First, I realize that the term “radical political theology” may be annoying. Some people will dislike “radical” and prefer a more pragmatic approach. Others will argue that theology shouldn’t be political. Still others will want nothing to do with theology of any kind. At various times in my life, I would have offered all of those objections. Today I think a politics without a theology is dangerous, a theology without a politics is irrelevant, and radical is realistic.

By politics I don’t mean we need to pretend to have worked out a traditional political program that will lead us to the land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely suggesting that we always foreground the basic struggle for power in whatever work we do at whatever level. By theology, I don’t mean that we need to believe in supernatural forces that will lead us to a land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely pointing out that we all construct a world view that is not reducible to evidence and logic. In politics and theology, it’s important to be clear about what we know, and even more important to recognize what we don’t know, what we can’t know, what is instinct and emotion.

And all this needs to be radical — not in the self-indulgent “more radical than thou” style that crops up now and then on the left — but rather in the sense of an unflinching honesty about that unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live. Whatever pragmatic steps we may decide to take in the world, they should be based on radical analysis if they are to be realistic.

Revolution

I’m not interested in speculating about future revolutions. I don’t take seriously anyone who predicts a coming revolution in the United States, and I doubt that the traditional concept of a revolution is even relevant today — the dramatic changes that lie ahead likely won’t arrive that way. Rather than dream of revolutions to come, it’s more productive to think about the revolutions that brought us to this moment.

Ask an audience to name the three most important revolutions in human history, and the most common answers are the American, French, and Russian. But to understand our current situation, the better answer is the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions. While those national revolutions had dramatic effects, not only on those nations but on the course of the history of the past two centuries, these other revolutions not only reshaped the lives of every human but remade the world in ways that may spell the end of human history as we know it. The agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions were — to use a current political cliché — real game-changers.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted, one political and one ecological. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to band-level gathering-hunting societies, which were highly egalitarian and based on cooperation. This is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life but simply recognize that it was organized in far more egalitarian fashion than what we call “civilization.”

Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans started exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the planet, first in soil. Human agricultural practices have varied over time and place but have never been sustainable over the long term. There are better and worse farming practices, but soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, which makes it the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

We are trained to think that advances in technology constitute progress, but the post-World War II “advances” in oil-based industrial agriculture have accelerated the ecological destruction. Soil from large monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and contributes to dead zones in oceans. While it’s true that this industrial agriculture has produced tremendous yield increases during the last century, no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating that kind of agricultural productivity. Those high yields mask what Wes Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically.¹ That kind of “success” guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system. We have less soil that is more degraded, with no technological substitute for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and we are dependent on an agriculture tied to a fuel source that is running out.

That industrialization of agriculture was made possible, of course, by the larger industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain, which intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and humans assaults on each other. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run the new steam engine and machines in textile manufacturing that dramatically increased productivity. That energy — harnessed by the predatory capitalist economic system that was beginning to dominate the planet — not only eventually transformed all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, but disrupted social relations. People were pushed off the land, out of communities, and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. Traditional ways of knowing and living were destroyed, by force or by the allure of affluence. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.

This move from a sun-powered and muscle-based world to a fossil fuel-powered and machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such levels of comfort on human well-being — in my view, the effect has been mixed at best² — the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice. In short, our world is unsustainable and unjust — the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible? Enter the third revolution.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising/marketing system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being. Although any person or group can employ these techniques, wealthy individuals and corporations — and their representatives in government — take advantage of their disproportionate share of resources to flood the culture with their stories that reinforce their dominance. Journalism and education, idealized as spaces for rationally based truth-telling, sometimes provide a counter to those propaganda systems, but just as often are co-opted by the powerful forces behind them.

Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects that science increased. Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? Some have theological reasons, and for others perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications. But it’s clear that the well-funded media campaigns using these propaganda techniques to create doubt have been effective.³

Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion; it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone understand, all of the fronts on which we are facing serious challenges to a just and sustainable future. As a culture, these delusions leave us acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained simply because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling — particularly that which comes through almost all of the mass media — remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story. Singer/songwriter Greg Brown captures the trajectory of this delusional revolution when he speculates that one day, “There’ll be one corporation selling one little box/it’ll do what you want and tell you what you want and cost whatever you got.”⁴

In summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading.

Resistance

Even if a revolutionary program is not viable at the moment, strategies and tactics for resistance are crucial. To acknowledge that the social, economic, and political systems that have produced this death spiral can’t be overthrown from the revolutionary playbooks of the past does not mean there are no ways to affirm life. We face planetary problems that seem to defy solutions, but the U.S. empire and predatory corporate capitalism remain immediate threats and should be resisted. An honest, radical assessment of our situation doesn’t mean giving up, but it requires us to be tough-minded. We need to understand which resistance strategies and tactics are likely to be most productive at this moment in history.

To advance that discussion, let’s think back to February 15, 2003. Many of us on that Saturday participated in actions in opposition to the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day, the largest coordinated political protest in the history of the world. At least 10 million people participated across the globe, with a clear message for U.S. policy makers: The invasion being planned is illegal and immoral, and we reject not only this war but your right to use violence to achieve your political and economic goals. I was the emcee of the event in Austin, and I remember being amazed at the thousands who gathered at the Texas Capitol, stretching back so far that our loudspeakers couldn’t reach the entire crowd.

We had a compelling message, rooted in international law, political principles, and moral values. We had huge numbers of people. We had an international presence. And none of it mattered; the war came. Why could U.S. policy makers ignore us without consequence? First, those elites knew that a large segment of the public either actively supported the war or would passively support almost any war that was out of sight/out of mind. Second, they knew that when that day of protest was over, most of the people in the streets would go home, satisfied with their public statement and unlikely to go beyond that polite expression of dissent. Political movements are most potent when people are willing to take risks; without a large number of such people, the powerful know they can wait out protests.

For most people, attending an anti-war rally posed no risk. Immigrants and people in targeted groups (Arabs, South Asians, Muslims) had reason to feel threatened, but people who look like me — with only rare exceptions — don’t face serious repression in the United States today for engaging in peaceful political activity, though that can change quickly. What were most of us willing to do beyond attending a rally in opposition to a war being planned? A month later, when the war came, we got a partial answer. The crowd for the standing call to come to the Capitol when the bombs fell was at best one-fourth of the pre-war rally. Most of the people who came on February 15 weren’t willing to come out in public once the nation was at war; even that trivial a risk was too much.

I could be cocky and say that in 2003 I was willing to risk my job, my physical safety, even my life to stop the war. It might be true; I certainly felt the urgency of the moment. But the question is moot, because at that time there was no strategy for taking such risks. These decisions about risk are made by individuals but in the context of options developed collectively, and the movement I was part of had not discussed such options.

So when certain resistance tactics don’t work as part of a strategy that’s not clearly articulated, it’s time to rethink. I have no grand strategy to offer, and I am skeptical about anyone who claims they have worked out such a strategy. But I am reasonably confident that this is not a mass-movement moment, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth. I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people. In short, this is a cadre-building moment.

Although for some people the phrase “cadre-building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind. For me, “cadre” doesn’t mean “vanguard” or “self-appointed bearers of truth.” It signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice. I see this kind of organizing in some groups in Austin, TX, where I live. Not surprisingly, they are groups led by younger people who are drawing on longstanding radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. These organizers don’t have all the answers, and I don’t agree with some of the answers they do have, but I am drawn to them because they recognize the need to dig in.

Revelation

Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning — “revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. What is the nature of this unveiling today? What is being revealed to us?

A reactionary end-times theology turns that particular book of the Bible into the handbook for a death cult, fantasizing about an easy way out. That isn’t the direction I will be heading. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can think of it as a process that requires tremendous effort on our part about our very real struggles on this planet. That notion of revelation doesn’t offer a one-way ticket to a better place, but reminds us that there are no tickets available to any other place; we humans live and die on this planet, and we have a lot of work to do if, as a species, we want to keep living.

That process begins with an honest analysis of where we stand. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted natural forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We need not adopt an end-times theology to recognize that on our current trajectory, there will come a point when the ecosphere cannot sustain human life as we know it. As Bill McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has — even if we don’t quite know it yet.”⁵

McKibben, the first popular writer to alert the world to the threat of climate change, argues that humans have so dramatically changed the planet’s ecosystems that we should rename the Earth, call it Eaarth:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it won’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew — the only earth that we ever knew — is gone.⁶

If McKibben is accurate — and I think the evidence clearly supports his assessment — then we can’t pretend all that’s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; massive changes in how we live are required, what McKibben characterizes as a new kind of civilization. No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations of such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.

This is a revelation not of a coming rapture but of a deepening rupture. The end times are not coming. They are unfolding now.

Redemption

Just as revelation can be about more than explosions during the end times, redemption can be understood as about more than a savior’s blood washing away our sin. In a world in which so many decent people have been psychologically and theologically abused by being called “sinner” by jealous and judgmental scolds, sin and redemption are tricky terms. But we shouldn’t give up on the concept of sin, for we are, in fact, all sinners — we all do things that fall short of the principles on which we claim to base our lives. Everyone I know has at some point lied to avoid accountability, failed to offer help to someone in need, taken more than their fair share. Given that we all sin, we all should seek redemption, understood as the struggle to come back into right relation with those we have injured. If we are to live up to our own moral standards, we must deepen our understanding of sin and its causes so that we can understand the path to redemption.

For Christians, sin traditionally has been marked as original and individual — we are born with it, and we can deal with it through an individual profession of faith. In some sense, of course, sin is obviously original. At some point in our lives we all do things that violate our own principles, which suggests the capacity to do nasty things is a part of normal human psychology. Equally obvious is that even though we live interdependently and our actions are conditioned by how we are socialized, we are distinct moral agents and we make choices. Responsibility for those choices must in part be ours as individuals.

But an individual focus isn’t going to solve our most pressing problems, which is why it is crucial to focus on the sins we commit that are created, not original, and solutions that are collective, not individual. These sins, which do much greater damage, are the result of — we might say, created by — political, economic, and social systems. Those systems create war and poverty, discrimination and oppression, not simply through the freely chosen actions of individuals but because of the nature of these systems of empire and capitalism, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. Humans’ ordinary capacity to sin is intensified, reaching a different order of magnitude, and responsibility for the resulting sins is shared.

There is a politics to sin, and therefore there has to be a politics to redemption. That desire to return to right relation with others in our personal lives is not enough; collectively we have to struggle for the same thing, which requires us to always be working to dismantle those hierarchical systems that define our lives. Within hierarchy, right relation is impossible; assertions of dominance and concentrations of power create domination and abuses of power. That includes the most abusive of all hierarchies: The human claim to a right to dominate everything else. Our most important struggle for redemption concerns our most profound sin: Our willingness to destroy the larger living world of which we are a part.

The first step in redemption is to not turn away from that lifting of the veil, to face honestly what we have done, to contest the culture’s delusions wherever possible. Then we can face what we must do to enhance justice and build sustainable living arrangements.

What does this kind of redemption look like in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to the familiar movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, such as anti-war struggles. We redeem ourselves — especially those of us with privilege that is rooted in that injustice — through that commitment to fighting empire, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. McKibben puts this in terms of a new scale for our work:

The project we’re now undertaking — maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm — requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about town, about neighborhoods, about blocks. … We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down. … We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerability.⁷

Nature Bats Last

The phrase “nature bats last” circulates these days among people who have their eye on the multiple, cascading ecological crises. The metaphor reminds us that nature is the home team and has the final word.  We humans may be particularly impressed with our own achievements — all of the spectacular home runs we have hit with science and technology — but when those achievements are at odds with how nature operates, then nature is going to bring in the ultimate designated hitter and knock the human race out of the ball park. OK, let’s not try to stretch this too far — no single metaphor can work at every level needed. The point is simple: We are not as powerful as the forces that govern that larger living world.

The metaphor offers one other crucial lesson, in this case because of its limitations. When we say “nature bats last,” it implies we are one team and nature is on another, as if it were possible for us to compete with nature. But we are, of course, simply part of nature, one species in an indescribably diverse living world. To imagine ourselves as competing with nature would be like our lungs competing with our heart — either those organs work together, or an individual human dies.

Unfortunately, the architects of modern science didn’t see the world that way. One of the most often-quoted, Francis Bacon, believed that modern science and technology “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations.” Rene Descartes, another of these founding fathers, believed humans could achieve the knowledge and develop the means to know:

the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These thinkers also contributed to our understanding of the workings and power of the natural world. But this language of domination — to conquer and subdue, becoming lords and possessors — is the language not of a baseball game but of war, which brings us to the relevance of this to Veterans for Peace. VFP members have seen through, and gone beyond, the egotistical rhetoric of our national fundamentalism — with all its fraudulent claims about “fighting for freedom” — to reject the U.S. wars of empire and stake out an audacious goal: “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”

We also need to see beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our technological fundamentalism — the claims that infinitely clever humans will solve all problems with gadgets — and stake out an even more audacious goal: To end the human war on the rest of living world.

Life is Hard

If all this seems too much to ask of ourselves, that’s because it is. We live in a time when we must face honestly the whole truth, but to do that is too much to bear. We struggle to claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and find hope where there is no hope.

On power: Those of us in dissident movements understand we face difficult odds, fighting entrenched forces of the state and corporation. We know the keys to prevailing: Fight organized money with organized people; compromise to build a power base but never abandon core principles; find ways to delegitimize authority; raise the social costs for elites to pursue unjust policies; hang in for the long haul. Those organizing basics don’t change, though the application of them must constantly adapt to changes in the structure of power. But the ecological crises change the big picture.

First, we should not assume the long haul is as long as we’ve always imagined. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory. There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere. We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion.

Second, we can’t be satisfied with contesting imperialism in the nation-state and the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism, but also must change the human relationship to the living world. Dissident movements have an advantage, given that a larger percentage of people involved in left/radical politics have less of a commitment to maintaining the dominant culture’s delusions. Radicals don’t have the wealth and power that can appear to insulate us from collapse, which means we have more room to think about what living arrangements are consistent with reality. Elites, who typically mistake temporary domination for real power, have a harder time recognizing that humans are powerless in the face of the forces we have been trying to conquer and subdue. In the end, we can never be the lords and possessors of something larger and more enduring in time. Many traditions recognize this basic reality: We don’t own the earth, the earth owns us. Our power comes in recognizing our powerlessness and adapting to the world as it is, not the world as we imagine it to be.

How does this approach give people hope? It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, because hope is not something you give to people. The political organizers on the liberal/left who are always touting a new way to restore the American Dream are peddlers of false hope, offering allegedly exciting opportunities to allegedly new movements that are stuck in the same old failed ideology of the dominant culture, steadfastly ignoring the depth and scope of the ecological crises. Real hope comes with abandoning the false prophets and moving on to accomplish something. Authentic hope comes when we honestly confront our condition and dig in to create new, or revive old, forms of community. Hope comes from proving to ourselves that we are competent to manage our own lives. Hope doesn’t fall from the sky but rather is built from the ground up.

That hope doesn’t ask for guarantees that our movements will prevail. That hope doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether the human experiment will go on forever. That hope comes from the understanding that while we did not choose to live in a desecrated world, such is the world into which we were born. All we can do is act out of respect for ourselves, for each other, and for nature, in the hope that we can restore the sacredness of the individual, the human community in which individuals find meaning, and the living world of which human communities are a part.

Organizers have long said that the key to successful organizing is making it easy for people to do the right thing. Today, our task is to be honest about how difficult it is to do the right thing. Anyone who thinks it can be easy to do the right thing is part of the delusional culture. Rather than delude ourselves, let’s face the truth and recognize the difficulty of the path that lies ahead. Other social movements have prevailed in the face of great difficulty, but no social movement has had to face this simple but profound reality: We have to become the first species on the planet to practice restraint in the scramble for energy-rich carbon. All life on this planet is based on that scramble, but if we continue on the path unchecked, the planet will be incapable of sustaining human life as we know it. That is a brand new organizing challenge. In facing it, we need to leave the platitudes at home.

The radical political theology I believe we need for this moment in history would acknowledge, rather than try to mask, our confusion and uncertainty. We know we are in deep trouble; beyond that, it’s guess work. Facing that takes a new kind of courage. We usually think of courage as rooted in clarity and certainty — we act with courage when we are sure of what we know. Today, the courage we need must be rooted in the limits of what we can know and trust in something beyond human knowledge. In many times and places, that something has gone by the name “God.”

Religious fundamentalism offers a God who will protect us if we follow orders. Technological fundamentalism gives us the illusion that we are God and can arrange the world as we like it. A radical political theology leaves behind fear-based protection rackets and arrogance-driven control fantasies.

The God for our journey is neither above us nor inside us but around us, a reminder of the sacredness of the living world of which we are a part. That God shares the anxiety and anguish of life in a desecrated world. With such a God we can be at peace with our powerlessness and alive in hope. With such a God, we can live in peace.

1. Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chapter 2. Many of my points in this talk were greatly influence by the work of Jackson and The Land Institute.
2. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
3. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
4. Greg Brown, “Where Is Maria?” from the CD “Further In,” Red House Records, 1996.
5. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 2.
6. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 25.
7. McKibben, Eaarth, p. 123.

It’s all still phrased as a temporary down-turn; they have to call it that or fundamental questions would be asked. Even so, the most optimistic among us realize something is wildly wrong, even if they dare not give the feeling words.

We are the ones who will witness breathtaking change. Every history buff has an era they would like to have been witness to. Would anyone wish to observe our moment? Ours may be the most profound and rapid unraveling to ever color this globe.

We have so many crises converging upon us, like several flood-swollen rivers finding a confluence. It’s conceivable that our problems can be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, but it’s the sheer number and severity of all the factors together which point to a very different world emerging. A dark synergy.

We have built a consumer-driven economy that relies on infinite growth. The folly of this is that it was implemented on a finite planet! Growth is needed in this system; new bubbles have to be inflated. It’s the way of things until the very system devours all that can be had.

The steroid for all this growth has been that of Peak Oil. No longer in the realm of oddball conjecture, respected entities like the International Energy Agency consider that we reached the peak of easily available oil in 2006, and that we are now on the downhill slope. That is not to say that we are going to be out of oil rapidly. It’s that we now are left with oil that is more difficult and dangerous to slurp up.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a perfect example of this. You don’t drill 35,000 feet into the seabed (for comparison Mount Everest is 29,029 feet) if the easy stuff is still to be had. On the opposite end of availability, the Seneca would utilize oil that was available at the surface long ago. They used it for medicinal purposes as they scooped it up with baskets. Babylon was even said to have an asphalt type material within its walls.

We have to drill halfway to hell for it now. No adequate response has been formulated to transition to anything else in quantity, so issues such as food distribution, petro-chemical agriculture techniques, they are all going to become increasingly costly. This puts all of the population at risk. This is what happens when the oil industry is the government (or can at least buy it when necessary).

The easy energy available in the form of petroleum had many branching repercussions in the last century. New inventions arrived at an exponential pace. The problem is that we are now reaching an effect known as the Law of Diminished Returns.

A common example of this effect is that of antibiotic usage. When penicillin became widely available, it was nothing short of a miracle. This happy time has passed, and now due to the promiscuous quality inherent to bacteria, there is ever emerging resistance that we cannot adequately treat. We have a few Gorillacillins that try to thwart these newly outfitted germs, but every year brings us closer to a moment when the return on antibiotics is diminished to the point that we will be essentially back to the era prior to them. This was anticipated and warned against, but we still let it occur. It’s continuing as we speak, especially in the agricultural sector.

Animals are given “maintenance” doses of antibiotics to enable squalid conditions that would normally not be feasible. This is a perfect breeding ground for new resistant qualities to emerge. We will have to maneuver in this new environment with a sense of being part of the natural world, including the microbial. Perhaps this new vulnerable role will mark Peak Hubris, but I doubt it.

Of course, the monster of all shattered future scenarios comes via climate change. If you are still stubborn enough to dispute that this is in play, please just speak to some of your local gardeners. You can bet they have noticed the shifts and the strangeness. People can fight all they want about the causes, but it won’t stop them from having to deal with the reality of it. Climate change has happened in the past, and it’s instructive to look at the human cost of those incidents.  Our changes look to be more drastic than the historical precedents we can study, however.

Around 985 the Norse branched out, settling in southern Greenland. They did this during a relatively warm era, and for a time their colony prospered. But the “Little Ice Age” period began a few hundred years later, causing the colony to dwindle and ultimately fail. The unfortunate souls watched their world become colder and more hostile and unfortunately they did not adapt as the Inuit did. They completely vanished, most likely due to clinging to a way of life that only worked during warmer times.

We are looking at an even more radical change in weather stability with our overall warming trend. If we don’t respond in a nimble manner (as did the Inuit) our fate will likely resemble the Norse colonists.

A very bizarre theory (but frankly plausible) is that the witchcraft hysteria of those centuries was exacerbated by the climate change. Women were considered to be tied to nature more than men (and obviously this was not viewed in a positive sense during these times) and single women were often accused of using their witchcraft to play havoc with the weather. Cold spells and hail decreased crop yields and it was common to place blame in strange places. Hard times and erratic weather are not “crucibles” for enlightened societal behavior.

As if climate change, peak oil, and diminished returns weren’t enough to deal with, we are entering these dangerous times with some of the most venal characters in history leading the way. Political discourse has been relegated to nonsense as the uber-wealthy continue to solidify a new divine right.

It’s difficult to imagine our present day leaders taking on the moral imperative to solve these problems. It’s a reign of narcissism with little eye to the future. Can you picture Bush and Obama conversing by letters in their old age, exploring topics like Adams and Jefferson? I can’t either.

This is to say that we have danger and fright stalking our futures. That damn “may you live in interesting times” curse from an ancient Chinese passive aggressive — well, that’s the fortune for each and every one of us.

The problems are daunting and to be certain, there aren’t going to be easy answers. But one thing is clear; if we make no attempt to steer the collapse in the most equitable way possible, we could very well be looking at a return to something that resembles a feudal society, one with walled off enclaves for the very wealthy and misery for the great majority. They haven’t the right to cause this to happen. We must be focused and know that the upheavals are pending. We can’t be distracted by the short term ploys and the nonsensical behavior that passes for leadership.

The complexity of the issues should not frighten us into submission. It simply means that the status quo cannot continue and a time of collapse and failure of the old ideas opens the possibility for something different. We can try for a system a little less corrosive to the environment and the soul. Tolerating anything less may herald an extinction level event for our kind.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

— Oscar Wilde

We are facing terrible monsters and hard choices in the near future, but we must never think that we only deserve the gutter.

In presenting a “picture” of a future society, and a scenario indicating how that society might be achieved, the intention is not to present a blueprint. Rather, that “picture” simply points in a certain direction. The goal is to convince the reader that societal system change is not only necessary but possible, doing the latter by presenting a (somewhat!) plausible sequence of events. By doing that, the possibility exists that the reader will take the possibility of societal system change seriously, and then begin to act on it. If not in the way proposed herein, then some other way.

No attempt is made here to present a detailed description of the “look” of a future society because doing so would overly direct (or bias, if you will) people’s thinking about the future. The advantage of a brief sketch is that it can help people believe that our society can be changed as the result of planned efforts; we don’t have to simply let “nature take its course.” Also, because a brief sketch has potential for “whetting their appetites,” they may then be inspired to develop their own ideas regarding the direction we should go, and how to get there.

The Structured Interaction Group (SIG) is an ideal vehicle for developing ideas about the future (and how to get there) because it can be used not only to implement the proposal below, but also used to develop other ideas: The SIG is not an institution that is related only to the proposal presented here; it can just as easily be used as an incubator for developing other ideas as to the “look” of the future and how to get there.

Not only can a SIG do that; participation in a SIG can benefit the participants in a variety of ways, as indicated in some of my previous essays on this site. Given that strong possibility, the SIG can be used not only as a vehicle for creating the New Society, but can be an integral part of that society once it is created. That is, there is good reason to retain the institution rather than abandon it, once the New Society has been created.

The Twin Oaks “intentional” community² near Louisa, Virginian, is a cooperative eco-community (CEC) that has been in existence since 1967. On their website is a button for “Policies,” and when one clicks on it, one is presented with a list with six categories of policy, one of which is “Property Code.” Below is offered a somewhat comparable listing of principles, that at the same time identifies some of the major steps (in order, so far as possible) that would need to be taken in planning a Cooperative Eco-Community (CEC).

These principles should be understood not at hard-and-fast rules but, rather, as “talking points”—i.e., ideas that could provide a basis for discussion by members of a group intent on planning, and building (or having built), a CEC for themselves (or, perhaps, for others). If the presentation that follows helps a group(s) accomplish their goal of planning a CEC in an efficient and productive way, its purpose will have been met.

Below both steps and principles are presented, with no effort being made to separate the two:

• The first step would be to decide on the ownership question, and a possibility here would be to have all of the community’s real property (i.e., land and structures) be owned by a corporation—so that, in a sense, the community’s residents would all be “renters” (or at least like renters).

• The group would next need to decide how to finance the community’s creation (i.e., how to pay for the land needed for the community, and how to pay for the construction of any structures that would need to be built).

• Money to meet those expenses could come from the intended residents and/or from individuals/organizations willing to present gifts to the corporation. Money from residents could take the form of outright gifts, the purchase of stock in the corporation, or both. Given that the amount of money available from the above sources might not be enough, solicitation of gifts from members of the Larger Society (individuals and/or organizations) might very well be necessary. Another possible source could be a loan(s), but obtaining a loan might be difficult; and even if some money could be borrowed, it might be advisable to keep this amount low.

• A question inseparable from the financial one is where to build the community, and for what population size—thinking here of the ultimate size, rather than the initial one. Depending on how these decisions are made, the amount of money needed for creating the community will be affected. In buying a parcel of land, it might be advisable to purchase at a location where additional adjacent land could be purchased at a later time—so that the initial cost of purchasing land could be minimized.

• Assuming that a corporation is formed which becomes the community’s owner, and that some of the corporation’s initial capital has been obtained by selling stocks, the rule might be established that stocks be sold only to prospective residents of the community. Second, it might be decided that all adult members of the community should have an equal voice in the community’s decision-making, regardless of how much of an investment one had in the community. The number of stocks owned would have relevance only if a need arose to liquidate the corporation, whereupon the proceeds of the community’s disposition would be allocated proportional to amount of stock ownership.

• Before an actual purchase of land occurs the intended residents should decide, for the community to be created, how self-sufficient they should try to make it, and what they should, and should not produce. I assume that the individuals involved would be committed to a “voluntary simplicity” existence, which fact would have implications for the decisions they made on these matters. Given impending changes due to global warming, serious thought should be given to developing skills in gathering and hunting—skills that our distant ancestors had.

• In choosing a location for a community, consideration should be given to the strong possibility—probability, actually—of global warming; thus, sites near coasts should be avoided, along with areas projected by climate scientists to suffer severe drought conditions. James Lovelock—writing from an Englishman’s perspective—has stated, relative to this: “The northern regions of Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia, where not inundated by the rising ocean, will remain habitable, and so will oases on the continents, mostly in mountain regions where rain or snow still fall.”³ Residents of the United States will need to look to other sources for ideas on this matter.

• The group would need to decide how to meet their housing needs. For example, should one dormitory-like building be created, buildings with several apartments each, or a structure for each family? What materials should be used, and how should structures be designed? Should earth sheltering be employed, if the site chosen permits this? How much housing space should be allotted to each individual? Who should do the construction? Energy efficiency would presumably be a major consideration in making some of these decisions; more broadly, ecological considerations would play an important role.

• Also prior to “taking the leap” the intended residents should agree that there would be certain necessary tasks to perform; and that although those tasks could not be identified with any precision beforehand, they agreed that all adults would spend an equal number of hours per week in performing those tasks. Exceptions might be made for special cases, but a sharing of the necessary work would be mandatory.

• The group should agree beforehand that specific work “assignments” would be developed once the community had been created. The fact that individuals had different skills and interests would be recognized; but also, an effort would be made to rotate the adult members of the community through the community’s necessary tasks—for concerns other than efficiency should be given primary attention. An attempt would be made to reach a consensus regarding who did what, and when.

• As an individual could spend more than the required number of hours working during a week, this fact would be recognized by recording, for each individual, the number of hours worked during any given week. Despite the fact that some tasks might be more “important” than others, an hour of work doing one task would be regarded as an hour of work doing any other task.

• Although various required tasks would provide employment to residents, some of them might be hired out to “outsiders.” Also, if a resident desires to have his/her own private business, that desire should be honored—so long as that business is small. And, because it might be necessary for some residents to have “outside” jobs, that necessity should be recognized. Having such a job should not, however, excuse one from performing one’s “necessary” community tasks (or otherwise “covering” for them). Given that allowing such possibilities has the potential of reducing the solidarity of the group, residents of a community should be sensitive to that possibility, and make employment decisions with that possibility in mind..

• Presumably, the community would not only produce for the needs of community members (trying to be as self-sufficient as possible), but would also produce some excess—but as the result of efficient production, rather than excessively long hours of work. Initially, this excess would be sold to those on the “outside”; but over time the community would attempt to reduce its dependence on the “outside” (not only in terms of selling, but also buying “inputs” and finished goods). This would be done by contacting nearby CECs, and making arrangements with them for inter-CEC trade. Contacts need not be restricted to nearby CECs, though; for example, if there are Amish families nearby, an effort should be made to develop harmonious relationships with them because of shared communal living values.

• As this occurred, different CECs would be able to develop different specializations, although all would attempt to maintain a certain degree of self-sufficiency and a “voluntary simplicity” way of life.

• To enable such a development to occur, once a CEC had become established it should work for a proliferation of CECs near its own location, providing whatever financial and technical support it was able to provide.

• A some point in development some CECs might be able to specialize in providing at least basic medical and dental services, but in the initial stages of development there would be a need for a CEC to provide medical and dental insurance for its residents. Presumably, members would make an effort to eat healthily, get sufficient exercise, and otherwise be interested in their health, so that the need for such services would be reduced. But as one ages, one reaches a point where such care is needed. (I’m rapidly getting there myself!)

• Meals might be prepared in a community kitchen, and served in a community hall. This would not only enable the serving of nutritious meals, but enable the realization of efficiencies in food preparation. An attempt would be made to have some variety for each meal, and the special dietary needs of some members would be considered.

• During free time residents would be permitted to engage in whatever (legal) activities they wanted, consistent with the mores established by the community, although cultural activities (forming musical groups, theater groups, etc.) would be encouraged. (As a former French horn player, and lover of classical music, cultural activities are highly important to me.)

• Given that residents (many of them, at any rate) would have a deep interest in ecological issues, they would recognize that world population growth was a problem,⁴ and therefore would agree that a two-child family was preferable—and that adoption was a preferred method for achieving that goal. They would rightly regard eugenics measures as abhorrent, however.

• Residents of a CEC should recognize that small size has many positive correlates—as Kirkpatrick Sale has pointed out in his massive (!) book on the virtues of smallness: Human Scale⁵ —and keep in mind that the ultimate size of their community should be no more than about 500 inhabitants. Insofar as a given community serves as a temporary refuge for “climate refugees,” this limit might be passed temporarily at times. But if this happens, an effort should be made eventually to reduce the community’s size to a “proper” one again in the near future to ensure the viability of the CEC.

• From a sociological standpoint the efforts of community planners/builders should be to make their community a “family of families.” There is no necessity of abandoning the family as an institution—quite the contrary, in fact. An effort, however, should be made to give the community the feel of a super family. A major problem of contemporary society is that it engenders feelings of insecurity in its inmates—especially as the time nears for “leaving the nest.” Community planners/builders should make an effort to “design for security”—not only in the sense of providing safety to residents, but a feeling of family, belongingness.

• There is no reason to object to “ecological company towns” (ECTs) being created, so long as they avoid the paternalism, exploitation, etc. of past company towns.

As the above discussion should make clear, a rather large number of decisions would need to be made before actions could begin, and because many of those decisions would be interrelated, it would not be possible to make them in a clear sequence. Likely discussion would begin on one matter, then switch to another, to still another …, with the discussion then coming back to the original subject, with this process continuing until a number of decisions were made—and almost simultaneously. Even after the group had reached a point where they felt comfortable proceeding (in purchasing land, arranging for the construction of buildings, etc.), they still would face many decisions of a practical nature. Only after the community had become established, and had “operated” for some period of time would some routine be established. However, one would hope that life never would become boring for the residents of a given community!

It would be helpful if Communities magazine, or a newly-established magazine, would record the progress of the New Society Movement (NSM), along with providing helpful information to those planning, or already living in, a CEC or ECT.

How might that progress occur? In 1984 my scenario/strategy of societal system change was published,⁶ and I will summarize that article briefly here. As that scenario was inspired by a passage in an old book by Ralph Borsodi, and the passage in question is somewhat lengthy, I repeat it in the Appendix below.

I began my article by noting that a book had just been published on “lifestyles,” with some useful categories.⁷ I argued that a movement for societal system change would need some “pioneers,” and that two of Arnold’s lifestyle categories appeared to be particularly promising for providing such individuals—those in the “Societally Conscious” and “Experiential” categories. Being familiar with migration concepts, I used those concepts, along with Arnold’s categories to develop a scenario of societal system change—what I called a “pull, push, pull, push, drag” scenario.

As I thought about our society, it occurred to me that retired people might be especially suitable for “Wave” One—the “Societally Conscious” and “Experientials” among them, specifically. For not only do they have incomes independent of jobs; they may at least sense that any technologically-oriented society involves change which renders the old obsolete and worthless—so that they have a good motive for exiting the Larger Society. I was also encouraged by Philip Slater’s statement: “Older adults have a vested interest in finding a place for themselves in the new society, and whatever place they find will provide a model for new-culture adherents as they age.”⁸

Wave Two I also thought of as involving retirees, but lower-income ones who might be less well-informed, but individuals dissatisfied with their current place of residence—whether because of dwelling unit quality (lack of!) or an unsafe neighborhood. Because such individuals would likely not be well-informed, they would need to be actively recruited by “First Wavers.”

The NSM might now have achieved a magnitude (in numbers of people) that it could attract—as Wave Three—people of all ages. I would expect that in particular “Societally Conscious” and “Experiential” people of “productive” age could be attracted to the movement during this phase. The inclusion of a broader age group would mean, of course, that such issues as child rearing and schooling would now come to the fore.

It is during Wave Four that the Movement could begin to attract significant numbers. During this phase the effort would be made to attract people who are currently “working class.” I say “currently” to emphasize the point that once those individuals would enter the Movement, they would cease being “working class”—because of the basically egalitarian nature of the Movement. If there was a “making of the working class”⁹ during the Industrial Revolution, there would be an unmaking of same during this transition to a New Society.

As my discussion of Ralph Borsodi (in the Appendix) should make clear, with many in the “working class” now being a part of the Movement, those remaining in the Larger Society (no longer that!) would be “dragged” into the Movement. They would, however, be welcomed into the Movement—so long as they relinquished their conviction of being superior, and their habits of domination. This, then, would be Wave Five.

It goes without saying if a process of societal system change were to be initiated along the lines of the about scenario, change would occur in an evolutionary manner that would be unpredictable. My hope is that any such modifications made to the scenario would be of a positive nature, from the perspective of the two goals of (a) addressing the threat of global warming while simultaneously (b) attempting to build a society offering a way of life more in accord with human design specifications.

As to criticisms (or potential criticisms) to my plan (besides that it is too “radical”!¹⁰ ), I will identify—and respond—to five here. First, several decades ago Alvin Toffler, in discussing “future shock,”¹¹ was (p. 2) referring to a phenomenon induced “in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” In referring to change as an “elemental force,” Toffler implied that change was irresistible, a virtual law of nature. However, he was somewhat ambivalent regarding the matter of change, for he then went on to add that we must learn to “control the rate of change” in our “personal affairs as well as in society at large,” or “we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.” Toffler failed to make clear here whether he was referring to the amount of change that had occurred or the rate of change; what he seemed to be suggesting, however, was that the rate of change (a) was excessive, (b) could be reduced, and that (c) an effort should be made to reduce it.

Toffler’s attitude toward those having difficulty coping with change seemed to be somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand it seemed to be somewhat Social Darwinian in that he seemed to perceive those able to cope as the “fit” and those having difficulty coping with change as the “unfit” (used in a pejorative sense). On the other hand, however, he seemed to feel some measure of compassion for the “unfit” because he devoted Chapter 17 (“Coping With Tomorrow,” p. 319-341) to a number of different coping strategies: Direct Coping, Personal Stability Zones, Situational Grouping, Crisis Counseling, Half-Way Houses, Enclaves of the Past, Enclaves of the Future, and Global Space Pageants. At least one cannot fault Toffler for not being creative!

Where Toffler came closest to expressing a condescending attitude toward what might be thought of as communities similar to Cooperative Eco-Communities was in his discussion of Enclaves of the Past. (Of course, the comparison is not perfect, because Toffler was writing at a time when global warming was on the “mental maps” of but a few individuals.) Toffler stated that these Enclaves would be (p. 335) communities “in which turnover, novelty and choice are deliberately limited.” Life in these communities would be slow-paced, relaxed, less stimulating (i.e., dull!). Toffler came close to saying that such communities would be created for the slow-witted dregs of society. Given this, his variety of compassion was of a rather peculiar sort—but not one unknown n the history of the West. Toffler added that such communities should not be thought of derisively but, rather (p. 336), “should be subsidized by the larger society as a form of mental and social insurance.” Thus, it appears that from Toffler’s perspective, the people living in such communities would have no value in themselves; rather, the communities would house unimportant people, and in effect be mental wards! They had the advantage of being good for the “unfit” people who inhabited them, while simultaneously being good for the society—in that they would provide a sort of insurance for those living in the larger society. Just how Toffler did not make clear, however.

Were Toffler writing about the future now, I’m not sure what he would say relative to what he wrote in 1970. But if Future Shock is considered in the light of our current world situation, it comes across as a naïve, ignorant book. A book that shows no awareness of The Discrepancy, of “design specifications,” or the threat of global warming. Thus, even if some in our midst might cite Toffler in criticizing my Cooperative Eco-Community “plan,” it would be foolish of them to do so.

Second, some might argue that my “plan” is so radical that it is simply beyond the scope of everyday thinking; therefore, the “plan” has no chance of being taken seriously. I realize that there is merit in such an argument, but would point out that at least since the time of Plato, some individuals have developed critiques of the then-Existing Order, with some of them also devising “pictures” of their concept of a Better Society.¹²

Third, I would point to those who think my “plan” is “off the wall” that intentional communities have played an important role in American history (e.g., http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1989/1/89.01.04.x.html and http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=995&term_type_id=1&term_type_text=People&letter=U). For example, Dolores Hayden, in her important Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975,¹³ lists (in Appendix B, pp. 362 0 365) 130 such communities. In addition to Hayden’s book there are numerous other books (and articles), including Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative Society in America, 1820-1920¹⁴ and Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias.¹⁵

Fourth, skeptics need to be aware of the fact that there is already, and has been for several decades, a Federation of Egalitarian Communities¹⁶ Their web site offers information to those interested in joining an existing “intentional” community, or initiating one; and the Communities magazine that they publish also provides valuable information on the subject. In addition, this organization publishes a directory of intentional communities in this country and elsewhere (the 6th edition is the one currently available), which publication gives one a good idea of how many such communities exist, and where.

Fifth, a criticism that might be directed at my proposal is that it is asking them to do something that is just plain “unnatural;” that the “American Dream” is to live in a single-family home, and that most of do. What such people need to know is that this “American Dream” was created as part of a propaganda effort on the part of the Hoover administration in the 1930s. “President [Herbert] Hoover organized a national Conference on Home Building and House Ownership in 1931, dedicated to a campaign to build single-family houses in the private market as a strategy for promoting greater economic growth in the United States and less industrial strife.”¹⁷ Also (p. 283): “Industrialists began to consider the strategy of offering white male skilled workers small suburban homes, to be purchased on home mortgages, as a way of achieving greater industrial order.” (Figure 13.1 on p. 283 shows the title page of a booklet put out by Industrial Housing Associates in 1919: “Good Homes Make Contented Workers”!)

A question that might arise with some is: “What about the rest of the world? Other countries will be affected by global warming as well, and what should we do about that fact?” I have three suggestions to make regarding that matter:

• Encourage individuals in other countries to study what we are doing here.

• Lend whatever assistance we can to people in other countries—doing so, however, in a sensitive way that does not involve imposing our will on others.

• Cooperating with other country’s governments in addressing the refugee problem that is likely to arise.

What are the prospects for my “plan”? Paul Gilding (formerly head of Greenpeace International) has stated, “As a species, we are good in a crisis …”¹⁸ When (p. 6) “our backs are against the wall, all the great qualities of humanity, our compassion, our drive, our technical brilliance, and our ability to make things happen on a massive global scale, come strongly to the fore.” When (p. 58) we respond to the global warming crisis, “it will be with breathtaking speed and scale, and it will drive the biggest economic and industrial transformation in history.”

Gilding uses (p. 110) “the example of World War II as evidence of what we are capable of, both economically and physically and in terms of sudden political shifts.” Gilding recognizes that, unlike Adolf Hitler, “climate is hard to personify and is something for which we ultimately have only ourselves to blame.” He concludes, however: “But on closer inspection, while there are some real differences, there are not as many as you might think, and there are many lessons and great encouragement in that experience.” “Without the benefit of a retrospective view,” continues Gilding (p. 111), “it would be much harder to predict when exactly the denial of Hitler’s threat would end. So it’s also hard to predict when the moment will come on climate, even though in hindsight, it will be ‘obvious.’”

Gilding has had wide-ranging experiences, and has occupied important positions; therefore, it would be foolish to ignore his statements. My thinking, however, has been more influenced by James Lovelock—a genuine, and noted, scientist—and I therefore share Lovelock’s pessimism. Besides, I’m convinced that my “plan” is more promising (in potential positive effects) than anything Gilding offers.

Still, the question is whether my “plan” has any chance of being implemented, and this is another area where I am pessimistic. The current (a) political—and general—climate (no pun intended!) in our society seems rather unfavorable for any efforts to address this problem, Peter Shumlin (Governor of Vermont) being a rare exception among politicians.¹⁹ “Denial” propaganda (b) seems to be given as much attention by the media as solid scientific work. And (c) if my “plan” does get initiated, various interests in our society may do all in their power to squelch it.²⁰ In addition, (d) if the “plan” gets initiated, as global warming results in more and more people becoming miserable and desperate, they may use violence against those in the Movement, thereby hindering—if not terminating!—the Movement’s progress.

If intelligent, enlightened politicians were common in our society, we might be able to minimize the consequences of global warming. But they aren’t; and even if they were, the problem of our “unnatural” way of life would not be addressed—or even recognized, for that matter. The only solution potentially capable of addressing both that problem and global warming is the cooperative eco-communitarian one proposed in this essay. And that is why I am “sold” on this solution—but, again, from the perspective of “Sorelian myth.”

The above discussion gives one little basis for hope, but there is some reason to have hope: The pathetic state of our economy at present—with so many unemployed (likely over 20%), people losing their homes, and many homeless (including many veterans)—provides us with a situation such that if an alternative to the prison we currently live in were offered, many might take advantage of that opportunity. In talking with a neighbor recently—who is from northern Wisconsin, and works in construction—I was surprised—pleasantly so!—to learn how close his thinking is to mine, except that his—currently, at least—more individualistic than mine. This suggests to me that many “ordinary” folk, and perhaps especially those who have grown up in small-town America, could be attracted to my proposal, if presented to them in the right way.

A final point: Solutions have been offered other than the one I offer here (most of them having a technological orientation, with such solutions having been discussed by Lovelock in Vanishing Face), but you will need to go elsewhere to learn about them. It’s not that I don’t think that such solutions have merit; rather, it’s because a discussion of such options would lead me too far afield from my principal concern, the necessity—and desirability—of societal system change.

There is a book that has had great influence on my thinking, particularly with reference to the proposal that I presented above, Flight From the City,²¹ by Ralph Borsodi [1888-1977]. The following quotation is taken from Chapter One (“Flight From the City”):

What are the social, economic, political, and philosophical implications of such a type of living? What would be the consequence of a widespread transference of production from factories to the home?

If enough families were to make their homes economically productive, cash-crop farmers specializing in one crop would have to abandon farming as a business and go back to it as a way of life. The packinghouses, mills, and canneries, not to mention the railroads, wholesalers, and retailers, which now distribute agricultural products would find their business confined to the production and distribution of exotic foodstuffs. Food is our most important industry. A war of attrition, such as we have been carrying on all alone, if extended on a large enough scale, would put the food industry out of its misery, for miserable it certainly is, all the way from the farmers who produce the raw materials to the men, women, and children who toil in the canneries, mills, and packing-towns, and in addition reduce proportionately the congestion, adulteration, unemployment, and unpleasant odors to all of which the food industry contributes liberally.

If enough families were to make their homes economically productive, the textile and clothing industries, with their low wages, seasonal unemployment, cheap and shoddy products, would shrink to the production of those fabrics and those garments which it is impractical for the average family to produce for itself.

If enough families were to make their homes economically productive, undesirable and non-essential factories of all sorts would disappear and only those which would be desirable and essential because they would be making tools and machines, electric light bulbs, iron and copper pipe, wire of all kinds, and the myriad of things which can best be made in factories, would remain to furnish employment to those benighted human beings who prefer to work in factories.

Domestic production, if enough people turned to it, would not only annihilate the undesirable and nonessential factory by depriving it of a market for its products. It would do more. It would release men and women from their present thralldom to the factory and make them masters of machines instead of servants to them; it would end the power of exploiting them which ruthless, acquisitive, and predatory men now possess; it would free them for the conquest of comfort, beauty and understanding.

What Borsodi—an economist—was in effect stating here is that the society (in modern times) is also an economy, and that as such its various parts are all interdependent. If one individual were to withdraw from this system by becoming self-sufficient (i.e., homesteading), this would mean that that individual would be:

• No longer providing labor support to the system.

• By not making any purchases, not contributing to the continuing “welfare” of the economy (including whatever sales taxes that might exist, and go to support government).

• Paying no income tax to help support the state and federal government.

• Selling nothing to those remaining behind (except for what would be necessary for the payment of a property tax).

Selling nothing to those remaining behind (except for what would be necessary for the payment of a property tax).

The exit of this single individual from the system would, of course, have no discernible impact on the economy/society. However, were the percent of the population making such an exit to increase gradually, a point would be reached where that egress would begin to have an effect:

• Some firms would be forced to shut down—or move to a different location (e.g., a different country)—because of the loss of a market for whatever they were selling. What would the employees then do—especially if the firm leaves for another country?

• Those who left firms to become self-sufficient would leave those firms in need of new employees. Where would they get them (besides from firms in the first category)? They might be tempted to import labor, but immigration laws might make that difficult. Moving to a different country might, then, be an option; but if a firm’s market is a local one (e.g., a bakery, a service activity), such an option would not be a realistic one. If a firm does move to a different country, its employees are not likely to follow it there, so what would they (the employees) then do?

• As more and more individuals exit the system, revenues of state governments will decrease, as will those of the federal government. And as firms either shut down or move to a different country, tax revenues from such sources will cease. On the other hand, as more and more become unemployed, more and more of a burden will be placed on governmental units, putting them in a real bind. Governments would need to discontinue many activities, in the process laying off employees—further aggravating the unemployment problem.

• Firms that sell to government units (i.e., “feed off the public trough”!) will find their market shrinking, and will be forced to lay off employees. What will these former employees do then?

• Our military—which has perhaps killed about 1,000,000 Iraqis would of necessity be cut back, for lack of funding. Given that the terrorism that we (i.e., the military and CIA) practice against other countries would necessarily be reduced, there likely would be a decrease in counter-terrorist actions against us! So that even we Americans would benefit, not just foreigners, from a significant exit from the Larger Society.

• Etc.

The point here is that this exiting (and perhaps also exciting?!) action on the part of individuals—whether done as individuals or as members of groups (creating communities for themselves)—would, if sufficiently magnified, have significant results. As it is, the individual in our society is vulnerable—often wondering from day to day whether s/he will have a job (there being many in our society at present not having jobs!). But if individuals were to exit the society en masse (while remaining in this country), at some point it would become clear that the society itself is vulnerable. That is, it is conceivable that the society would collapse—and this could be a “good thing,” one not necessarily involving much (if any) hardship to people. During this process people would, of course, be changing their way of life; but if done right, this change could be an improvement! Is there anybody here who believes that our society is not in need of improvement?!!²²

1. See the Prefatory Note of Part I.
2. The founders of this community have attempted to cultivate a sense of continuity with earlier “experiments,” and have named their buildings after earlier communal societies. For example, one building is named “Harmony,” after the settlement established, in 1803, near Pittsburgh, by Johann Georg (“Father”) Rapp [1757-1847]. In 1814 the Harmonists bought land on the Wabash River in Indiana, moved from the Pittsburgh area, and established New Harmony. Then, in 1824 they purchased a parcel on the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh, and established Economy, selling New Harmony to famed “utopian” Robert Owen [1771-1858].
3. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 17.
4. Currently the world’s population is nearly 7 billion; however, an optimistic estimate for 2100 CE is about 2 billion—meaning that a severe culling of the world’s population is likely between now and 2100. Thus, even if family size is not reduced voluntarily, a huge reduction in the world’s population is likely in the next 90 years.
5. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980.
6. “Ecotopia: A ‘Gerendipitous’ Scenario,” Transition: The Quarterly Journal of S.E.R.G.E. (The Socially & Ecologically Responsible Geographers), Vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984), p. 2-8.
7. Arnold Mitchell, The Nine American Lifestyles. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1983.
8. The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, p. 143.
9. An allusion to E.P. Thompson’s book with that title.
10. Why is it radical?! See, e.g., John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism. New York: Verso, 2011.
11. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. The term “future shock” was coined by Toffler, and first used by him in an article (1965) in Horizons magazine.
12. See, e.g., the massive Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979.
13. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976.
14. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
15. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
16. See also “Co-ops & Community.”
17. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 275.
18. The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011, p. 2.
19. See, e.g, Robert Scheer, “The GOP’s Sick Priorities,” Truthdig, 12 July 2011.
20. That such a possibility should be of concern—that we are moving in a police-state direction—is suggested by a recent Chris Hedges column.
21. Flight From the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1933.
22. Paul Street, in reviewing Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2010) states: “Capitalism, Chang proclaims, is ‘the worst economic system in the world, except for all the others’ and ‘still the best economic system that humanity has invented.’ Well, then, with all due respect, we had better damn well invent a new and better system—a democratic, participatory, and egalitarian one.” Street then cites Mike Albert’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003) and Stanley Aronowitz’s Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (2006). I would like to think that Parts IV and V of this series present a “new and better system.”

Some distinguish between “global warming” and “climate change,”¹ but I do not—and also have problems with “climate change.” For given that, by definition, the “climate” of a place is the temporal pattern of atmospheric phenomena (e.g., temperature, precipitation) from an annual standpoint, if no such pattern exists, the place cannot be said to have a climate! That is, given that the sequence of atmospheric “events” for one year must be highly similar to that sequence for any other year for a place to have a “climate,” increasing annual variability in atmospheric events for a given place means that the very concept of “climate” becomes increasingly meaningless for that place.

When Wladimir Köppen introduced his classification of climate types in 1884, what enabled him to do so is that the temporal patterning referred to above existed. Increasingly, however, an expectation of “climate scientists” is that this patterning will be becoming less and less pronounced—to the point that “climate” will no longer have a referent (thereby being equivalent to “unicorn”!). The word will continue to exist, of course, but increasingly it will point to a “thing” that is fading away, perhaps to the point of non-existence. Put another way, global warming does not involve a change from one climate type to another; rather, it involves change from a climate type toward a non-climate sort of situation.

I use the term “global warming” here simply because it is in common usage, meaning by that term the array of atmospheric phenomena (at minimum) identified above.

“Climate deniers” in our midst represent an important obstacle to addressing the problem of global warming. Although some individuals are likely deniers because they (understandably) have difficulty in relating what they observe, day by day, to claims by scientists who have been researching the matter for many years, a much lesser degree of innocence is associated with many others in this group. Corporations involved in industries contributing to global warming have an economic incentive to continue their activities, for their orientation tends to be only to the short-run—making profits in the short-run, so that those who have invested in their business can make a good return on their investments. What many such corporations have done, therefore, is hire “scientists” not expert in “climate science,” and/or scientists willing to work for corporations to provide “proof” that global warming is a hoax. If one goes to Google Books and enters “global warming,” one will find that many hits are of books by such individuals—giving the impression, to the non-specialist, that the deniers have a solid basis for their position.²

In our legal system, defense lawyers are expected to develop a case for their client (e.g., Casey Anthony—who was recently acquitted in her trial), even if they are convinced that that individual is guilty—and no one regards this as unethical: they are just doing what our legal system expects of them. But scientists should not think of themselves as lawyers (God forbid!); rather, they should think of themselves as truth-seekers, whose ethics do not permit them to be “bought off.” But one suspects that at least some of the scientists who are engaged in global warming denial have compromised their ethics. Which is not to say that climate scientists do not have disagreements one with another, however.

For example, a posting by Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt³ is followed by 727 comments (!) at last count by others (mainly other scientists, I assume). But that fact of having divergent views is not a peculiarity but, rather, a common phenomenon in the sciences. Scientists who have not “sold out” are, on the one hand, not afraid of expressing their views to other scientists, with the full expectation that other scientists may find flaws in their thinking. In learning of the reactions of other scientists, they then modify their views, for their ultimate interest is in arriving at objective truth (i.e., statements agreed to by most other specialists in the same area). But scientists are human beings just like the rest of us, so that they are not always able, as a group, to achieve universal agreement. And given that in the case of climate science there is but limited opportunity for experimentation, and projections into the future (which are inherently “non-factual” in that they pertain to the “not yet”) are an integral part of the science, it is by no means surprising that there is perhaps less agreement among climate scientists than most other scientists.

From the fact that universal agreement is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in climate science, it does not follow that scientists should abandon their research in that area, for their research has tremendous relevance for the human future. Nor is it sensible for us lay people to deny the reality of global warming: The hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires (resulting from drought) that have occurred in this country so far this year may not have been demonstrably caused by global warming; these events have, however, been entirely consistent with global warming—and that fact should give one pause.

If some of the deniers have been publishing misinformation, and thereby convincing some and confusing others, another unfortunate fact regarding global warming is that so many in our society are simply clueless about it. As one talks with others, reads the newspaper, watches television, etc., one rarely encounters others who seem even somewhat informed about the topic, or concerned about the implications that may be associated with global warming. One would think that Hurricane Katrina would have been a “wake up” call for many in our society, but it appears not to have been. An example: On July 10, 60 Minutes had a segment on deriving natural gas from shale rock. Neither the interviewer (Lesley Stahl) nor anyone interviewed evinced any concern for global warming. Someone mentioned that natural gas is less polluting than other fossil fuels—which is true—but failed to note that its burning still results in the emission of carbon dioxide.

In discussing global warming, a useful beginning point is simply to note that the earth⁴ has an atmosphere, and this atmosphere not only enables life on earth (through its heat retention—i.e., “greenhouse effect”—and the particular gases present), but protects life. I should add that the atmosphere itself is almost entirely a product of the activities of living organisms at the earth’s surface.

Oxygen (essential for human life) constitutes about 21 % (by volume) of our atmosphere, and carbon dioxide (essential for plant life—and thereby indirectly essential for human life as well) about 0.04 %. Although carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes but a small portion of atmospheric gases, it is important not only for plant life, but important as a “greenhouse gas.” That is, (a) solar radiation striking earth (and absorbed by land, buildings, water, etc.) is short-wave, (b) heat energy emitted by earth in turn is long-wave, and (c) thereby absorbed by certain gases, such as carbon dioxide. Such gases are referred to as “greenhouse gases” because, in playing a role similar to that of greenhouse glass, they are involved in heating the atmosphere. Thus, carbon dioxide is not only essential for plant life (and thereby indirectly essential for human life); its role in heating the atmosphere is of direct importance for human existence.

English scientist James Lovelock has concluded, as a result of his research and reasoning, that (a) earth’s atmosphere has evolved over time, at some point acquiring characteristics that enabled it to support species such as the human species.⁵) In addition, (b) he has concluded that earth behaves as if it were itself a living entity, for earth seems to be somehow equipped (like a human body) with (1) negative feedback mechanisms that “work” to keep it on an “even keel,” and (2) positive feedback mechanisms that behave in a self-destructive manner if and when the system is stressed beyond some “tipping point.” This led Lovelock—at the suggestion of a neighbor (William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies)—to refer to earth as Gaia) the goddess of earth, although Lovelock was not, of course, suggesting that earth was literally a living being.

If earth is able to regulate itself, and thereby incidentally enable life to exist on earth (unlike our near neighbors in the universe, Mercury and Mars), it does not follow from that fact that that ability is absolute. If its system is “shocked” sufficiently (e.g., as a result of volcanic eruptions), it will be “thrown out of kilter,” but may be able to return to “normal” after a certain period of time. There remains the possibility, however, that a “shock” received by earth would be so severe that Gaia would, in effect, “die”—in the sense of changing so drastically as to be no longer able to support life. Such a “shock” could come from various sources, but the most important one for us (from a human control standpoint) is human activities (including breathing!⁶ ) which result in the addition of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) to the atmosphere. In fact, the “global warming” that has been occurring appears to be largely a consequence of human activities.

I’ll comment further on that matter shortly, but first would like briefly to discuss a few historical developments relative to global warming research, beginning with Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier [1768-1830] Fourier can be said to have been the discoverer of the greenhouse effect, because he (a mathematician and physicist) calculated that given earth’s size and distance from the sun, it should be much colder than it is. Fourier guessed that various factors might be responsible for this fact, including the possibility that earth’s atmosphere was somehow acting as an insulator. Fourier was not, however, able to provide a definitive answer as to why earth was warmer than it “should be.”

To Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1859-1927] must be given credit for providing basic understanding of the “greenhouse effect.” In attempting to learn why ice ages had occurred, Arrhenius speculated that there had been changes in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content over time, and that this variation is what caused variations in earth’s temperature. In formulating this hypothesis, he had drawn upon previous work by other scientists, Josef Stefan [1835-1893] and Stefan’s student Ludwig Boltzmann [1844-1906] in particular. Arrhenius did not, however, make note of a change occurring in earth’s temperature during his lifetime—in part (I would assume) because his interests lay elsewhere, in part because such a change was not notable then.

The concept of “global warming” did not arise until after Charles David Keeling [1928-2005] began measuring carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, using an instrument that he had himself developed while at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. The measurements that he made while in California indicated an increase in CO2 level over time, and as Keeling saw significance in that fact he decided—with the help and encouragement of Roger Revelle, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography—to establish a recording station on Mauna Loa, Hawaii (a location chosen for its relative isolation from nearby sources of carbon dioxide emissions). A graph of recordings at that site indicates a definite trend in CO2 increase since Keeling began recording values in 1958. (Of interest is the May 2011 reading of CO2 was 394.16 and the June reading slightly less, 393.69. Also of interest here is historical data.)

The data collected at this station in Hawaii indicated that whereas the CO2 level in 1958 had been 315 parts per million (ppm), by 2005 it had climbed to 380 ppm. Keeling noted that this rise was correlated with fossil fuel emissions, so given the fact that those emissions could basically be attributable to the burning of fossil fuels by humans (as opposed to other possible sources). This conclusion has enabled scientists—in noting that the earth’s mean temperature has also been rising—to reach the very reasonable conclusion that that heating has principally resulted as a consequence of human use of fossil fuels. That is, the global warming that is occurring—and there’s no question that it has been—is largely “anthropogenic.”)

Climate science research subsequent to Keeling’s empirical findings falls into several categories, and I will give attention to five of them here. First, scientists have determined that in addition to CO2 such gases as water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone are greenhouse gases (Indeed, it has been determined that methane is an especially effective greenhouse gas, being about 20 times more effective than carbon dioxide.

Second, the modeling of climate change data has occupied the attention of a number of researchers over the past few years. The following site (of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA) presents a number of projections for the period between now and 2100 CE, and it can be noted here that there are (regarding “emission scenarios”) lines for constant CO2, low growth, moderate growth, and high growth. The reason for the multiple lines is that even if one has a model that predicts past changes in temperature accurately, it does not follow that one can use that model to predict future changes—for the simple reason that the future values that one “plugs” into one’s model as explanatory (i.e., X) variables will, of necessity, be guesses, not facts; they are not facts because, in pertaining to the “not yet,” they cannot be. The EPA states (on the above site) that (using the period 1980-1990 as the reference point) it’s possible that the temperature increase to 2100 CE will be from 2 to 11°F., with the most likely increase being between 3.2 and 7.2°F. Models created by other agencies or individuals would be expected to produce different results, of course.

The web site established by Robert A. Rohle (a Ph. D. student, in Physics, at the University of California-Berkeley) is extremely useful in that it provides numerous graphs, charts, and links. For example, he presents the following chart, with information derived from eight different climate science groups:

(Two of the above groups here are: CCSR/NIES is for Center for Climate System Research/Nationl Institute for Environmental Studies, in Japan; NCAR CSM is for National Center for Atmospheric Research Climate System Model (United States).

Notice, with these different models, that the variation in land temperature varies from 2.7 to 7.0°C, the variation in ocean temperature from 2.0 to 3.8°C, with the total variation varying between 2.2 and 4.7°C. Some might be tempted to interpret this variation as proof that climate scientists don’t know what they are doing—and there is some merit in such a conclusion, in the sense that climate science is a maturing, not a mature, science at present. Apart from that fact, however, there is the fact that making projections regarding future situations/events is inherently difficult, given that projections are, of necessity, always based on some unknowns.

It would seem that the sensible way of perceiving these variations is to recognize that although they differ one from another, they all project an increase in mean temperature; none predicts either no change or decrease. Second, although a 2.2°C change, e.g., between 2000 and 2100 may seem like a small change, in fact it represents a huge amount of heat energy. When most of us think of such a change, we are thinking of the change at our particular location on a particular day—in which case the amount of change is only detectable with a thermometer. When the entire earth is the object of measurement, however, the meaning of a 2.2°C change is entirely different—a matter that I comment on shortly.

Before doing so, however, I would like to note that James Lovelock, as a result of some experimentation, determined that “suddenly, between 400 and 500 ppm of carbon dioxide, a small increase of heat or carbon dioxide causes a sudden nine-degree rise of temperature.” Lovelock went on to note: “The Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse is now well above 400 ppm (carbon dioxide is near 390 ppm but methane, nitrous oxide and the CFCs lift the total effect to nearer that of 430 ppm carbon dioxide).”⁷ (Lovelock’s reference here is to what climate scientists refer to as the “carbon dioxide equivalent”.)

In discussing models I should note that James Lovelock has been critical of many of the modeling efforts to date, on the basis that they “are limited by a climate theory based almost wholly on atmospheric physics, and even this is far from complete.”⁸ As a consequence of their deficiencies in assumptions, Lovelock notes that “as I write this in 2008, more than one thousand of the world’s best climate scientists have worked for seventeen years to forecast future climates and have failed to predict the climate of today”⁹ —a serious deficiency, indeed!

Given that the concepts of negative and positive feedback are key ones in Lovelock’s thinking about earth, he has advocated for their inclusion in climate models. Associated with the concepts of negative and positive feedback is the concept of non-linearity—the idea that (in this case) rather than temperature increasing at a steady (in trend terms) rate over time, it is likely to increase at an accelerating rate—if a certain mean temperature for earth is reached. Put another way, there is the possibility of a “tipping point” which, if reached, will be followed by a period of rapid increase. Uncontrollable rapid increase (very possibly), in fact.¹⁰ Thus, it is incumbent on us humans to do what we can to prevent that from happening.

Which leads, third, to an interesting question: If humans were, beginning tomorrow, to cease emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, what would happen? I posed this question to Goddard Institute for Space Studies scientist Gavin A. Schmidt, and here’s what he emailed back to me: “There is no ‘immediate’ effect of ceasing CO2 emissions on temperature.” However, if one considers not only CO2 emissions but other ones as well, “the immediate effect of ceasing all emissions (including CH4, NOx, VOCs, SO2, etc.) would have an impact—but that would be one of warming! (because the short-lived species have a net cooling effect).” Lovelock explains this by noting that “atmospheric aerosol … reflects sunlight back to space and makes global warming less severe than it might otherwise be.” And adds that IPCC contributors Peter Cox and Meinrat Andreae, in a Nature paper, “warned that if the haze disappeared, global heating would intensify, and dangerous change could be the consequence.”¹¹

The latter conclusion seemingly leads one to believe that “we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t!” And there is merit in such a conclusion. But the proper conclusion to draw from such a conclusion is “let’s get on with it, and the sooner the better.” Doing what? I’ll address that question right after briefly discussing consequences of global warming.

Fifth, then, is the matter of consequences, and it is useful to think of there being at least two levels of consequences, direct and indirect. Direct consequences would include the following:¹²

• At some point in time—and at some locations—temperatures may become so warm, for extended periods, as to be unbearable.
• There will be more storms, and more severe storms.
• The flooding of rivers will become more common..
• Tsunamis will become more common.
• As drought affects certain areas, fires will become more common.
• Diseases will spread.
• Migrations from seacoast areas will be necessary as sea level rises.
• Animal migrations (caused by loss of habitat) may occur (and result in animal attacks in some areas).
• Food supplies will be diminished as some areas become less arable (e.g., desertification, increased rainfall), hail destroys crops, etc.—resulting in increased cost of food, to the point that it becomes unaffordable by many.
• Violence may become a serious problem as more and more people become desperate.¹³

The indirect results of the above events are most important to humans, and include property damage (and the costs therewith associated), increased suffering, and a severe culling of the human population.¹⁴

For example, James Lovelock—who favors technological approaches to the global warming problem—“fears [that] we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects ‘about 80%’ of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began [not quite true!], he says. ‘But this is the real thing.’”¹⁵

Such a prediction is scary. But even more so is Dr. Erik R. Pianca’s recommendation of a deliberate 90% culling of the human population! I hope that Dr. Pianca meant this as a “tongue in cheek” recommendation, but have no way of knowing whether or not it was.¹⁶

Lovelock’s “80% figure” was given in 2008. In his 2009 book (op. cit.) he states (p. 6) “we do have to take seriously the possibility that global heating may all but eliminate people from Earth.” And (p. 33): “The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence.” And (p. 247-248): “Our first imperative is to survive, but soon we face the appalling question of whom we can let aboard the lifeboats? And whom must we reject? There will be no ducking this question for before long there will be a great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food is available.”

Even if one views Lovelock as somewhat of an alarmist, the fact that the vast majority of climate scientists (a) believe that global warming is occurring and (b) poses severe risks for our species (to say nothing of other species, of course) should suggest to us that we take global warming seriously.

How, sixth, should we respond. I am going to keep my comments here short by simply noting that two basic approaches can be used—that of mitigation efforts and that of adaptation ones. As both of those topics are discussed well in Lovelock’s book (among many others), I am simply going to suggest here that the reader explore that literature.

The recommendations that I offer in Parts III and IV can be thought of responding to this statement by Paul Gilding, former head of Greenpeace International: “We have the opportunity to build a society that represents our highest capacities, with extreme poverty eliminated; great technology that works with rather than against nature and provides us with abundant energy and resources; a closed-loop economy with no waste; communities that work and support one another; happiness, satisfaction, and service as the central approach of ‘money=happier people.’”¹⁷

The recommendations offered in III and IV involve both mitigation and adaptation, but are also—and simultaneously—addressed to problems in addition to global warming.

See Part 1.

1. For example, Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, p. 5.
2. For a good discussion of “denial” see Nicole Hodgson. Also see Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change. Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2010. Additional books on the subject include James Hoggan (with Richard Littlemore), Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 2009; Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010; and Haydn Washington and John Cook, Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2011.
3. A noted scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
4. Now being referred to as “Eaarth” by Bil McKibben! See his Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books, 2010. The basis for this renaming is the fact that the change that has already occurred is so significant that a new name is warranted. See Paul Greenberg.
5. An interesting point relative to the view that evolution has occurred on earth is that prior to there being an atmosphere one could say that the situation was “natural,” when plant life began one could say that the new situation was “natural,” when humans appeared, one could say that that new situation was “natural,” etc. Given these facts, it might appear that it is unreasonable for me to assert (e.g., see my Our Primary Problem” and “Some Uses of Bbiology: Three Perspectives“.) that human life today is, for most of us, “unnatural.” Prior to the Agricultural Revolution there occurred a co-development of humans as biological entities and the gatherer-hunter way of life—meaning that each “fit” the others. Since that time, however, our ways of life have changed drastically while our biology has remained basically the same—resulting in a “discrepancy” between the way of life for which we had become “designed” and the way of life that we actually have. (As James Lovelock has noted, “We are perfectly evolved to live as hunter-gatherers.” The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 80). Which fact could very well be the root of virtually all of our problems! Because of this, it is perfectly reasonable to state that our present way of life is “unnatural.” (I am puzzled that Lovelock, in noting that we still are “designed” to be gatherer-hunters, does not—if would seem—see the fact that we aren’t a serious problem.
6. Lovelock (op. cit., p. 74) has stated that “the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets, and their livestock are responsible for 23 percent of all greenhouse emissions.”
7. Op. cit., p. 52.
8. Op. cit., p. 40.
9. Op. cit., p. 7.
10. See, e. g., Dahr Jamail and Gaia Vince.
11. Op. cit., p. 50-51.
12. For further discussion.
13. See, e.g., Ed Vulliamy, “Ciudad Juarez is All Our Futures. This is the Inevitable War of Capitalism Gone Mad”. Vulliamy concluded his article by quoting from Charles Bowden’s Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. (New York: Nation Books, 2010) “Juarez [Mexico] is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order.”
14. Lovelock (op. cit., p. 31) states regarding dangers: “Our gravest dangers are not from climate change itself, but indirectly from starvation, competition for space and resources, and war.”
15. See “Enjoy Life While You Can”.
16. Also see Melbourne neuroscientist Dr John Reid.
17. The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011, p. 7.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/07/global-warming/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/moving-to-the-right/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/moving-to-the-right/#comments Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:59:49 +0000 Alton C. Thompson http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=33686 The late (1937-2002) Viola F. Cordova—a Jicarilla Apache/Hispanic philosopher—asserted that humans are born “’humanoid,’ that is with the capacity to become ‘fully human’ through the exercise of all of their faculties.” “Intelligence” is one of those faculties, but so are the emotions, “for example, guilt, which calls us to rectify what is wrong, and sympathy and empathy, which call us to be aware of the other as someone like one’s self. Humans have many qualities that must be fostered for one to become fully human.” And we have a broader range of capabilities than other creatures, by virtue of our “physical structure: our ability to walk upright, our easily manipulated hands, our stereoscopic vision with a broad color range, our ability to adapt to a variety of geographical environments, our ability to respond to our environment with awe, reverence, or even fear.”

Upon birth, thus, we have tremendous potential; but when we are born, we are merely “humanoids” until—and unless—we develop those potentials. Or, more precisely, those potentials lay latent in us, awaiting a fostering environment. The provision of such an environment is the responsibility of the group into which the birth occurs—a “group that teaches the new being what it is to be human in this group of beings.” For given that different groups occupy different ecological niches, each group of humans will have its own way of “being human.”

In many tribes the new being is not seen as fully human until he or she is five to eight years old (many official naming ceremonies take place at this time). It is at that age that a human being can discern the consequences of his actions on others. He is taught to be human by showing him that he is one human among others. Because he shares the world with other beings, there is an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition; sharing rather than accumulation.¹

What Dr. Cordova suggests is a framework for perceiving societies:

(Cautions: In interpreting this figure no meaning should be attached to the relative sizes of the four areas; and that although the figure may suggest that homogeneity exists within each of the four areas identified, in actuality the expectation is that variability, rather, would be the rule. Note that the figure asserts that if one is driven, one will also, necessarily, be selfish.)

What the above figure “states” is that any given society can be conceived as potentially containing four types of people (adults) from the perspective of the two “dimensions,” (a) selfishness—altruism and (b) drivenness—non-drivenness. (By “drivenness” I am referring to being driven by a desire to acquire—wealth and/or power and/or fame. I assume that “drivenness” is a form of what might be termed “possession.”)

Although Dr. Cordova evidently applied the label “humanoid” only to youth (under the assumption that any First Nation youth would have an environment that virtually guaranteed that s/he would become a human), I make no such assumption here. Rather, although I assume that in a First Nation society (of, say, 1500 CE) virtually all adult members would be in Category 3, in our society today one would find individuals in all four categories. (I will not make any guess as to how many—from a percent standpoint—are in each category.) Category 1 and 2 individuals are humanoids, with only Category 3 and 4 individuals being humans (as conceived by Dr. Cordova).

If asked to rank the three categories from the standpoint of desirability, I would do so thusly: 3, 4, 1, 2. That is, it seems to me most desirable for the members in a society to be in Category 3—neither driven nor selfish. There is nothing objectionable about Category 4 people—indeed, such individuals are rightly admired. Still, there is something “unnatural” about such people—which is why I give them a second-place ranking. Thus, just as Category 2 individuals can be said to be “possessed,” so can Category 4 people, in their own way: both can be understood as having pathologies.

I put Category 2 people in last place because, in being both selfish and driven, the latter will tend to behave in ways that are exploitative relative to others. Category 1 people, although they lack a motivation to help others, at least do not act to harm others. Category 2 individuals, however, in being driven, are so oriented to self that they are oblivious as to how their actions impact others. Thus, although their intentions may not be to harm others, their actions often do (e.g., by expropriating the “surplus value” created by others—to use Marxian language). To use ecological language here: If the humans of our society are perceived as the host, then the humanoid element — Category 2 individuals in particular — are parasites. Indeed, one could go so far, it seems to me, as to assert that that virtually all of our problems—as Americans, as, indeed, members of our species—are attributable to the presence of Category 2 individuals in our midst. (I will not, however, develop that point here.)

Insofar as that is true, the suggestion is that if we are to solve our problems, we must move to the right. In saying “move to the right” I am referring, of course, to the above figure; by no means am I saying that we should become members of the (Koch brothers-sponsored) Tea Party (a party that might better be called the Teat Party—because it really sucks!). I don’t think that we will be able to solve the “global warming” problem: “global warming” is likely to continue, and intensify, resulting in the virtual extermination of our species; our only hope lies in some of us somehow being able to escape extinction.² But those who do escape will have an opportunity to develop societies peopled by Category 3 individuals—and should take advantage of that opportunity. After all, it is such people who live in accord with their “design specifications.”

In anticipation that some reader might be one of those who is able to survive the consequences of “global warming,” the question that such a person might ask is: What should I do now? The only specific recommendation that I would make, however, is that one initiate a Structured Interaction Group (SIG) (see here and here). I would, however, add the following to my list of guidelines presented in the first paper:

• To help members of the group acquire the habit of listening to what others say, a short period of silence (roughly 30 seconds?) should be observed after someone has spoken.

• Members of the group must recognize that what is said during a given session is not to be used as a source of gossip. Generally, a rule of confidentiality should be observed; if, however, one chooses to discuss, with non-group individuals, topics discussed during sessions, one is expected to be discreet.

Given that a SIG—unlike the conventional “circle”—is oriented to societal rather than personal problems, the second guideline above should not be difficult to follow. Since there is the possibility of rather “radical” ideas being expressed during a given SIG session, participants should use discretion in commenting, to “outsiders,” on what has been discussed during a given session. On the other hand, participants in a given SIG should make known to “outsiders” the fact of their SIG participation, and encourage others either to join them or to inaugurate their own SIGs.

James B. Gray, in his discussion of the “Old Testament” (“Worship: An Exercise in Revisioning,” p. 15 – 28), the Law and Prophets in particular, suggests that these individuals used various devices beyond the institution of rules and “preaching” to move their society in a “Restorationist” direction. Given that these individuals were religious people—who would deny that?!—the suggestion is that we moderns not only establish SIGs outside of churches, but encourage our fellow Christians, Jews and other religionists to establish SIGs in their churches-synagogues (or … )—either as substitutes for existing adult classes or as additions to them. After all, supposedly what Christian churches (at least) are “about” is “salvation,” and surely the educated among religionists realize that the sort of salvation of particular relevance today is that of our species—from extinction!

Vincent Bugliosi, in his recent Divinity of Doubt: The God Question,³ states:

… there is only one necessary religion that has any merit to the people who inhabit this earth, and that’s the Golden Rule: “Whosoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (from the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:12). To treat others as you would want them to treat you (the only obvious exception being when acting in any kind of self defense) is the highest, most noble form of human behavior and the basis of all morality. No matter what some papal encyclical says; no matter what some bishops conference says; no matter how many sacraments of the Catholic church there are or chapters and verses in the bible or thick and complex books by theologians or Sunday school classes and sermons by pastors; no matter how many heated arguments there are about God, Jesus, and religion; no matter how many pilgrimages there are to Mecca, Jerusalem, and other holy places; no matter how many thousands of hours Jewish scholars struggle over the meaning of the Torah; no matter how many multimillion-dollar churches and synagogues and grand cathedrals to Christ are constructed, nothing can ever change that simple reality.⁴

What Bugliosi seems to be implying here is that the churches should be focused primarily on the Golden Rule, but aren’t. So there is little hope that many churches would inaugurate SIGs. However, “conversion” is possible—even with the churches!

I may very well be wrong on this score. Indeed, I suspect (irony of ironies!) that I am wrong. However, if a significant number of churches were to recognize the role that they could play in humankind’s salvation from extinction, the probability of that salvation would be significantly increased.

1. Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy, eds., The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova. With Foreword by Linda Hogan. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2007, pp. 152-153.
2. See, e.g., James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
3. New York: Vanguard Press, 2011.
4. Quoted from: “The Sense and Morality of Agnosticism.” I should note here that although Bugliosi quotes Jesus in the Matthew 7:12 passage, the author/redactor of Matthew has Jesus say that the Golden Rule summarizes the Law of the “Old Testament,” Gray’s discussion of the “Old Testament” (cited above) can be interpreted as suggesting that such is not the case. Certainly in terms of the figure that I present at the beginning, it would seem that one could be a follower of the Golden Rule and still be a Category 2 person—i.e., an individual who was both selfish and driven.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/moving-to-the-right/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/conditioned/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/conditioned/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:00:29 +0000 James Lamont http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=33310 The choice of font for the Blair’s Air Conditioning and Heating company says a lot about what we want. The letters are coated in snow;¹ we wish, at least initially, to go from one extreme temperature to another, and may the Floridian that has never had to wear a jacket to an indoor activity be the first to deny it.

Enjoyment of extremes — which can also be seen at beaches — is just one of the methods for weaning ourselves off of refrigerated air that Stan Cox suggests in his book, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer).² As a person from the North of a country in the North of a continent in the Northern hemisphere, I was, until I moved to St Petersburg, fairly uninterested in air-conditioning. Being dependent on electricity, I had imagined that cleaning up its environmental impact would be a simple matter of changing the energy source, at least compared to improving heating systems based on natural gas. But air-conditioning is more than just an ironic indicator of the problems we face in preventing a warming planet. Cox shows that it has changed our world in ways that are hard to comprehend.

The following figures are approximate. Air-conditioning now accounts for a third of electricity use in the U.S. (20% in homes, 13% in the commercial sector). The same amount of electricity is used for AC today as for all purposes in 1955. Between 1993 and 2005, the total amount of energy used for AC doubled. Each American uses as much electricity for AC as 3 Africans use for all of their needs. We would create as much pollution if every U.S. household bought an additional vehicle and drove it around for 7000 miles per year. I cannot bring myself to depress you with the figures projected for AC’s increasing use as the Earth heats up.

The direct energy burdens air-conditioning creates are only part of the story. As Cox points out, “from the desert Southwest to the Everglades, air-conditioning has played an essential role in drawing millions of people to some of the country’s most fragile environments.” It has acted as a bridge between the places humans can naturally thrive and other glorious forms of destruction. For example, a 2006 report by the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition shows that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approves more permits to destroy wetlands in Florida than any other state, approving 12,000 permits between 1999 and 2003. The number of applications rejected: one. Gary Mormino of the University of South Florida is quoted as saying that it is “inconceivable” that 18.5 million people would be in Florida today without AC.

Even without population growth, domestic use of AC would have exploded. The excesses documented are some of the most infuriating problems in the book, but they may well prove the easiest to solve. They include cooling empty winter homes in the summer to protect possessions, and homeowners associations that ban visible fans or window air-conditioning units — both less wasteful than centralized air — on the grounds of aesthetics. More troublesome is the fact that in the last half of the twentieth century, average housing size doubled and per occupant floor space tripled. An “efficient” 3000 square foot house uses far more energy than a leaky 1500 square foot house.

That other great twentieth century innovation, the car, would also be a much different beast without artificially cooled air. A typical vehicle in Hawaii uses 94 gallons of gasoline per year just to run the AC unit; in Arizona the amount is 76, in Florida, 73. When you add all the numbers together, the national cost is 7 billion gallons of fuel annually, or 5.5% of the total — a point worth remembering as we hit peak oil. A habit has developed among some of leaving AC blowing in vehicles whilst they wait in parking lots for their owners’ return. Wealthy Americans can now store their pride-and-joy mid-life-crisis indicators in climate-controlled rooms known as car condos. Cox even ponders whether AC is responsible for the United States’ wider car culture: “It seems worth asking whether the working people of America would be in open revolt by now against the mind-numbing ordeal of ever-lengthening commutes were it not for air-conditioning” and other mobile comforts and distractions.

We should be glad that that band of hippies, the U.S. military, is working on expanding its use of renewable energy, as at present, 85% of the diesel taken into Iraq and Afghanistan is used to run AC. Air-conditioning may not only have made invasions of intensely hot countries possible, it may have made them even more inhumane than they otherwise would have been. Troops in air-conditioned Humvees rather than open top vehicles can’t easily interact with locals, adding to the illusion of the war video game. The concern is not so much hearts and minds as heat and melting.

Air control has affected our health in many ways, including our ability to cope with extreme heat. But as air-conditioning is often not just a health issue, but a life or death issue — as the Immokalee farm workers, living in metal trailers based on oven blueprints, know to their peril[4] — what is the solution? Among his conclusions, Cox undermines several prominent lines of thinking that dominate present climate policy.

The first is that striving for energy efficient appliances is worthwhile under our current program of perpetual economic growth. Efficiency at present simply lowers prices for both producers and consumers of energy and results in higher levels of consumption. The governments Energy Information Agency, for example, expects a 22% increase in commercial sector cooling over the next 20 years, even with improvements in efficiency — the growth of the sector will undo any technological gains made, and then some. This effect is called rebound, and it explains why nothing other than a large global recession seems able to even dent our carbon dioxide output. The only way to slash emissions sufficiently is to cut overall energy use, and that means dumping economic growth.

The second myth, which is found all over the political spectrum, is that we are going to trade our way out of trouble. If there is anybody left who still can’t see a problem with markets, and that accepts climate change science, one simple fact devastates their proposed path to sustainability. Under solely market forces, U.S. renewable energy generation is expected to quadruple by 2030, but that will only provide enough energy to power 75% of AC use, let alone anything else. This again shows that attempting to meet current energy demands rather than using less of it is unlikely to be enough.

In response to these problems, Cox pads his technological and efficiency-based tree shades and solar-powered systems in a bed of other elegant solutions. He shows that when we choose to try and live in natural temperatures, our bodies participate in regulating our internal thermometers, and our tolerance grows as a result. Cooling centers could provide a way to give relief to everyone, whilst bringing us out of the individual homes that air-conditioning has sent us hiding in to. Tough truths also have to be accepted and acted upon. Air-conditionings demands only add to the need to reduce our dependence on the private vehicle. States like Florida need to restrict the over development that is ramping up Northern flight and sending them into the Gulf of Mexico (although the crushing of Amendment 4 by big money this past November 2nd demonstrates how hard this may be[5]). We may simply need to leave some hot areas for good.

Air-conditioning activism provides no excitement for anybody. It allows us neither the glory of storming the local coal power station or the feel-good easiness of eco-shopping. It is so boring in fact that I can barely bring myself to pump up this concluding paragraph. But, as the rest of the world climbs towards American levels of use, we must deal with it. Serious work on sustainability sometimes requires confrontation with drab subjects. The benefits of living with less artificially cooled air, such as more outdoor activities and more employee control of comfort in the workplace, will slowly begin to surface. In the meantime, I can tell you that writing book reviews in your underwear is a good way of keeping the thermostat turned up.

1. Newsletter ‘HomeSense’ from Blair’s Air Conditioning and Heating, Fall 2010.
2. Unless referenced, all other statements are taken from or based on this book.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/conditioned/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/leaving-the-church-of-free-market-miracles/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/leaving-the-church-of-free-market-miracles/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 15:00:01 +0000 Phil Rockstroh http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=32837

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial: we want to re-establish things as they used to be, to put the country back where it was.

– James Hillman

Most of the men I grew up with in Alabama and Georgia deny the veracity of climate change. They are unwilling to make the connection between their ownership (actually the bank’s) of SUVs and oversized pickup trucks and the super storms and massive floods that, now with alarming regularity, ravish the region.

Because their besieged sense of self is intermeshed with their motor vehicles, they hold fast to these symbols of the fading world they know. In their imaginings, these gruesome, noxious (and obnoxious) machines represent power and mobility — exactly the aspects of their lives that have been diminished by the demands and degradations of oligarchic capitalism.

By their self-imprisonment in these sorts of compensatory fantasies, they choose to risk their children’s future, rather than, as one victim of his own curdling testosterone expressed to me recently on FaceBook, “[give up his over-sized pick-up] and drive a 4-wheel vagina, algore-mobile.”

A deep-rooted, malignant anger regarding their diminished sense of manhood seethes at the core of pronouncements such as that, and the following, shared on my FaceBook scroll, this past Earth Day: “Happy Earhart day!!! How did you celebrate? I clubbed an adorable baby harp seal, dumped a barrel of waste oil down the storm drain, and started a giant tire fire!!! Good times….”

The sentiment expressed above is an imprecatory prayer, borne of uneasy submission i.e., the callow voice of deep denial, a manifestation of a culturally re-enforced, self-protective cynicism — a reflexive negation of novel ideas that masks a besieged psyche; it is the nihilistic rage appropriated by the powerless serving as a bulwark against the anxiety created by shifting circumstances and buffeted verities.

In the U.S., life keeps changing for the working class — and not for the better. Hence, an inner voice of doubt and despair falsely informs these men that the agents and effects of change will be of no help to them personally… that no one (especially smug, know-it-all liberals) can be of service to you, and, worse, what little you have amassed will be lost.

It is a common (unspoken) fear of the men I grew up around down south that if they were to let go of what little they clutch, nothing would arrive to replace what would be lost. There will be no place reserved for them and their families in the new situations and novel arrangements that (by their addled take on the situation) elitist environmentalist snobs contrive to force upon them.

Moreover, in the corporate state, the loss of community, in combination with the commercially rendered sameness of the environment and the all-encompassing, manic insistency of mass media — both of which are so devoid of depth, context and meaning — it has become increasingly difficult for an individual to gain then retain the sense of self necessary to know where one exists in relationship to time, place, and changing social and political circumstance.

How is it possible to move in the direction of propitious change when the demands and distractions of the corporate/consumer state have negated one’s ability to remain still and focus long enough to even grasp the nature of the problem?

The relentless exploitation of both earthscape and timescape has had a catastrophic effect upon the inner realms of thoughts, dreams, and imaginings of the citizen/consumers of the neo-liberal economic superstate.

Loss of place and an attendant crisis of identity are inextricably bound to the angst and anomie so evident in the present neo-liberal epoch: Being bereft of connection to land, sky, sea, and polis creates a profound sense of unease.

In contrast, a powerful sense of presence rises from within when standing before oceans, rivers, mountains, and even amid streams of human currents traversing the streets and boulevards of great cities. Conversely, where are we, in relationship to the truths of our being, when we are waiting for an order of processed, fast food in a line of automobiles idling at a drive-thru window or we are engaged in hollow communion with the sundry, glowing screens of information age appliances?

One’s sense of self and one’s beliefs, as well as, the mythos and traditions of a people are inextricably bound with place, landscape, and social situation. When I was a child, growing up in Alabama and Georgia, on occasions such as backcountry fishing expeditions, I would, at times, come in contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally, taking refuge from the afternoon heat of high summer, we would lounge on wooden porches and snap green beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.

The Jesus of their belief system was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed so they may live, then, like their life-sustaining crops, was resurrected as next year’s seed crop. Suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria they lived day to day, these tales held resonance for these rural, farming people; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. The figure of Christ was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.

Now, in an era in which the destination of most all of our objects and accoutrement is the landfill, Deep South mega-churches espouse a cosmology that resonates from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus…when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.

All in all, for both Christians and for secular-minded, market economy true believers, a belief in economic providence has proven our undoing — an insistence on its miraculous influence left us mistaking ad-hoc, bubble-borne affluence for a soul-vivifying portion of divine grace. The corporate/consumer state’s trickster gods of fast buck commerce offer drive-thru-window epiphanies. Members of the congregation of the Church of Free Market miracles believe their prayers will always be answered: Instantly, the consumer state’s homilies of perpetual gratification arrive — their voices crackling like a burning bush from drive-thru order-boxes.

Yet the redeemer gods of product placement cannot provide our dying culture with a longer shelf life. Belief in the deities of empyreal marketplace might provisionally banish doubt and diffidence — yet this mythos cannot shelter us from the anonymous fury of the exponential mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic runaway.

Although every generation inherits a howling wasteland and dwells in structures constructed of the bleached bone legacy of past generations — you’d have to go back to Late Cretaceous to find a generation that stands at the threshold of a mass die-off as we human beings do at present.

The Greek tragedians would have grasped the manic and destructive nature of late capitalism, how an obsessively heroic quest for victory carries the seeds of one’s undoing; ergo, by an over-reliance on his strengths and virtues the classical hero brought on his own demise — because the habit of heroic action rendered him closed off to novel awareness.

Victory is a closed system; in contrast, defeat opens one to the possibility of new adaptations.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYou win a while, and then it’s done –
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYour little winning streak.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspAnd summoned now to deal
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspWith your invincible defeat,
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Leonard Cohen

In the case of Greek tragedy, the hero (even the collective mindset of a people) cannot, in the long run, thrive evincing victory-engendered hubris. He will wend towards tragedy; he, with each successive triumph, will become so self-encapsulated with self-regard that only trauma will reopen his heart to the intimacies availed by earth and eternity

Jason will ignore all council and bring his trophy of war, Medea, back to Corinth, setting events in motion that will cause him to lose everything he loves. He will die alone, in demented revelry, crushed beneath the rotting stern of the Argo, the ship that bore him to glory.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspYou lose your grip, and then you slip
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspInto the Masterpiece.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Leonard Cohen

Apropos, facing tragedy, to paraphrase Camus, is the opposite of naivety. Yet we go on, even though we think we cannot, when we bear the knowledge of the ultimate futility of our aspirations. Although struggling against overwhelming power and collective delusion seems futile, such endeavors thwart one’s drive for perfection: When we seek paradise, we find paradox. Over the long term, the manner we receive, respond, and are changed by these exchanges with the world is called (our) character.

In the sorrow of defeat, one gains the possibility of identification with the oppressed people of the earth. Loss brings an intermingling with the inherent beauty of the neglected things of the world.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbspIt’s evident
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspthe art of losing’s not too hard to master
&nbsp&nbsp&nbspthough it may look like (Write it!) a disaster. 

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp– Elizabeth Bishop

In my better (too rare) moments, I take Walt Whitman’s approach: I believe an individual should endeavor to connect, mingle, even merge one’s broken heart with the various and varied things of the world… polis, people, and landscape.

There are many things, although vile and ugly, I remain on speaking terms with, extant and within me. Although, our cities are decayed, people troubled and landscapes degraded, I don’t avoid those places and situations — because this is the criteria with which I was given to work, by time and circumstance.

Even, at present, towards empire’s end, when we find ourselves bearing much grief, we are stranded amid ferocious beauty.

Where does one find succor and seeds of renewal in times such as these?

It might prove helpful to glance back at what has been dubbed the “do-it-yourself-art” practiced by the pioneers of Punk Rock.

Bored blind by tedious, onanistic guitar solos of the arena rock era, they approached their instruments with a minimalistic aesthetic. In other words, many burned with such fervor to seize back rock and roll from the stultifying, velvet rope elitism of the period that they had neither the time nor inclination to master more than three cords on their instruments — which they played very fast — and did for scant financial compensation, and even less acclaim, in shot-out clubs in decayed downtown locations such as Manhattan’s Bowery district, thus reintroducing the dirty, lowdown exuberance and subversive intimacy of early rock and roll, plus establishing the enduring principle that being an imbecilic, rock and roll egoist should be a democratic process — not exclusively limited to guitar technocrats or even those individuals possessed of the tyranny of talent.

Accordingly, we can cultivate gardens (individual and communal) appropriating the ash of yesterday’s excesses and the mulch of victories long past; we can plant heirloom seeds, both terrestrial and mnemonic. Thus beginning to allow our lives to become imbrued with the purpose and meaning that arrives when one’s labors are directed at making the world anew. While one cannot know the future, one can begin to move away from a reliance upon a dysfunctional present.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/leaving-the-church-of-free-market-miracles/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/our-primary-problem/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/our-primary-problem/#comments Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:01:50 +0000 Alton C. Thompson http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=31563 Paul Craig Roberts, in a recent column, stated:

The obscene wars of aggression, the obscene profits of the offshoring corporations, and the obscene bailouts of the rich financial gangsters have left the American public with annual budget deficits of approximately $1.5 trillion. These deficits are being covered by printing money. Sooner or later, the printing presses will cause the US dollar to collapse and domestic inflation to explode. Social Security benefits will be wiped out by inflation rising more rapidly than the cost-of-living adjustments. If America survives, no one will be left but the mega-rich. Unless there is a violent revolution.

(Roberts, by the way, was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, and was also formerly editor of the Wall Street Journal. I note this so that the reader doesn’t assume, on the basis of his comments quoted above, that Roberts is some sort of “left-winger.”)

I have no reason to question Roberts’s comments on the direction of our economy. What I wish to focus on here, however, is a development “in the works” that is having—and will be having to an even greater degree—effects that will be of an economic nature, true, but go beyond that. The “development” to which I am referring is that of “global warming,” an “event” that has already resulted in the extinction of some species, and can be expected to result in even more. With our own species quite possibly being among them!

Why? Because there is the danger that the negative feedback mechanisms that have been “working” to continue relative stability will soon give way to positive feedback mechanisms—resulting in the process of change “feeding upon itself” (what’s termed “runaway”), thereby resulting in accelerated change. If this occurs, at the very least life will be made very difficult for millions of people throughout the world; but beyond this probability is the possibility that of the numerous species that become extinct, ours will be one of them.

Given this possibility, it is essential that “global warming” be addressed soon—beginning yesterday! But doing so requires that we first obtain sound answers to several key questions:

1. What is “global warming”?
2. Why is it occurring?
3. What are the conceivable courses of action that might be taken to halt further “global warming”?
4. What are the “pluses” and “minuses” associated with each course?
5. Where should the leadership come from in pursuing the course(s) that would seem to be most advisable?

(Let me note at the outset here that my answer to question 3 does not call for a revolution! Which is not to say, of course, that one won’t occur anyway.)

My primary interest here is in addressing questions 3 – 5, but I must begin by saying a few words relative to the first two questions:

What is “Global Warming”

The first point that I wish to make here is the atmospheric phenomena associated with the term “global warming” include more than just warming. What is involved with “global warming” is, true, a trend in increase in the global mean (atmospheric) temperature. But, first, it does not follow from the fact of a global trend that warming is occurring at a constant (or constantly increasing) rate; nor does it follow that the trend for a given region will match that for the entire world. In fact, for some regions there may be an initial cooling trend, followed at a later point by a warming trend.

Second, more than just a warming global trend is associated with “global warming”: increased storminess, an increase in the number of severe storms, and greater unpredictability in weather conditions for any given region (so that the very concept of “climate” is becoming ever more meaningless). Thus, at least four different phenomena are included under the “global warming” umbrella, and each has its own particular consequences (of which I make but limited reference here).

Why is “Global Warming” Occurring?

During human history down to about 1750 CE the major sources of energy were animal and human power, and (burning) wood—with air flow being also harnessed (windmills), but being of minor importance. Beginning about 1750, however, coal came to be extracted and used as a fuel; and about a century and a half later petroleum began to be extracted for use as a fuel. Both of these fuels consist mainly of carbon, so that what their use as fuels involves, in effect, is the transfer of carbon from below the earth’s surface to the atmosphere (in the form of carbon dioxide, CO2).

The problem with this transfer is that carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse” gas—meaning that its increasing concentration in the atmosphere has allowed more and more heat to be “trapped” in the lower atmosphere, eventually reaching a level of concentration such that one could say that “global warming” was beginning to occur. And even if humans, throughout the world, were all to cease putting this gas into our atmosphere tomorrow, it does not follow that “global warming” would cease: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere would gradually decrease in their level of concentration, but it would take decades before a return to the pre-1750 level would be attained. Meaning that the “greenhouse effect” would continue for decades, even were our pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cease tomorrow.

As I stated above, the most significant threat associated with “global warming” is that at some point in time “runaway” will begin (i.e., positive feedback mechanisms will begin to replace negative feedback ones). If (when?) this occurs, the phenomena associated with “global warming” will intensify at an increasing rate—making life increasingly difficult, resulting in many extinctions, and very possibly resulting in our own extinction (see, e.g., Lovelock, and his more recent book). Thus, “global warming” needs to be given the attention that it deserves. The chilling thought here is that we may have already passed the “tipping point,” so that it may not be possible prevent our eventual (by 2100 CE?) extinction. We must not, however, become resigned to that possibility—else we are surely doomed!

As members of the human species, we supposedly have a high level of intelligence, and therefore should be able to recognize the threats that are before us (“global warming” being the primary one). Despite that fact, however, there are many “deniers” among us—and we must not waste our time trying to “convert” them to a rational (i.e., science-based, rather than ideological) view. We must, rather, (a) identify the possible courses of action for addressing this problem, (b) determine the “pluses” and “minuses” associated with each course, and then (c) act on the most appropriate course(s), under the appropriate leadership.

Let us next, then, address the third question posed above, that of identifying possible courses of action in reducing, if not eliminating, the various threats associated with “global warming.”

Possible Courses of Action

I can think of just two basic possible courses of action:

1. The development, and widespread deployment, of energy sources other than carbon-based ones (and also other than nuclear energy, as the recent tragedy in Japan should convince us).

2. Way of life (WOL) changes such that dependence on carbon-based fuels is reduced eventually to zero (or nearly so).

The first of these two possibilities is the “obvious” course of action and the only one given attention in the mass media. Indeed, because information on wind power, solar energy (including passive solar), and biofuels has received a fair amount of publicity, I will eschew discussion of that option here in favor of the second option, that of way of life (WOL) change. In doing so, I would identify two suboptions:

1. Self-sufficient homesteads—“five acres and independence” (to allude to an old book by M. G. Kains).

2. Self-sufficient “intentional” communities.

Note here first that “self-sufficiency” implies reliance on a relatively small area for subsistence, with the further implication that that area would, of necessity, be limited in its resources: Given that it likely would contain no (accessible) fossil fuel, the residents of the area would need to rely on energy supplied by animals, humans, and biofuels (such as wood). How self-sufficient would a homestead or “intentional” community need to be before it would qualify as a truly “self-sufficient” unit? Given the virtual impossibility of being 100% self-sufficient—because some sales would be necessary to pay property taxes, and enough sales beyond that would be necessary to purchase certain essentials—I would be willing to categorize any unit as self-sufficient if it were 80% or more such.

The homesteading option would involve producing one’s own food, making that which would be necessary for one’s existence (e.g., housing), some production (for sale) beyond one’s needs so that one could pay local property taxes and make a few necessary purchases—and doing without that which one couldn’t produce for oneself or purchase on one’s limited budget. Although the grandparents of many of us were farmers, and were relatively self-sufficient, most of us now live in urban centers, and lack even an ability to do much gardening. But despite the fact that most of us lack the skills that would enable us to homestead successfully, an abundance of information exists for the use of anyone interested in attempting to establish a self-sufficient homestead.

The “intentional” community option would involve people establishing and moving to self-sufficient communities, and much of what I stated above regarding homesteading would also apply for this option. I should note that those taking this course would become a part of an important American tradition—which includes historical communities such as the Shaker communities, the Amana colonies, Oneida, New Harmony, Economy, Zoar, Nauvoo, and countless others—to say nothing of many contemporary communities, such as Twin Oaks. (See, e.g., Spann and Pitzer.) A magazine published by the Federation of Intentional Communities provides an abundance of information on contemporary “intentional” communities.

An advantage that this option has over the homesteading one is that it would allow for some division of labor, meaning that the work performed could be more efficient than that done by a homestead. Taking this course would also enable the production of some items beyond the capabilities of a homesteader. In addition, this option would permit more ready socialization with one’s fellows than would be the case with homesteaders—although the socialization opportunities available to a homesteader would depend on the closeness of the homestead to neighbors (some of whom might be fellow homesteaders).

Those designing an “intentional” community should not only do their planning using an ecological perspective, but recognize that (a) modern life does not accord with our “design specifications” as humans, (b) that fact is the source (direct and indirect) of basically all our problems (including health problems), so that (c) an effort should be made to plan communities with our “design specifications” in mind. Books such as The Paleolithic Prescription, by Melvin Konner et al., and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, by Paul Shepard, would be most helpful in identifying such “specifications.”

Comparing the Two Courses

In effect, I have identified three options, rather than two (given that I have identified two way-of-life suboptions); let us now evaluate each of them. Let us assume here three scenarios, the first involving just the alternate energy option being taken, the second just the homesteading option, and the third the “intentional” community one. Assume that in each case complete success is reached after 10 years, so that at that time our society produces virtually no atmospheric pollution (and that what occurs in this country also occurs elsewhere—so that little pollution is produced anywhere on earth 10 years down the road).

1. Were success to be achieved via the alternate energy route (i.e., the development and deployment of non-polluting sources of energy), some changes in the structure of the economy would be involved, but our basic way of life would be retained. Thus, the transition would not be terribly disruptive. A disadvantage, however, is that our society would continue to offer a way of life that was increasingly discordant relative to our “design specifications” as humans, so that the problems (e.g., of a health nature—physical and mental) associated with that “discrepancy” would continue, and become progressively worse.

2. Were success to be achieved via the homesteading route, a drastic change in way of life would be involved. Not only would all retail and service establishments disappear in the process, but so would all manufacturing operations. Government would be reduced to virtually nothing because of the lack of tax monies for its support—one implication of which being that the military would disappear! That fact would mean that our imperialistic adventurism would cease, along with the killing of civilians and “terrorists” associated with that adventurism. Cultural institutions would also disappear—such as libraries, musical groups, museums, educational institutions—because of a lack of an ability to support them. The elite would be unhappy with this situation, because they would have no one to “screw”—and would need either to start supporting themselves or die. The way of life provided by homesteading would be more “natural” than that currently provided, but less “natural” than that which could be provided with the third option.

3. Were success to be achieved via the “intentional” community option, a more “natural” way of life could be provided—given that humans evolved as members of small groups. However, life in a small “intentional” community would provide this only if attention were given to our “design specifications” as humans. Cultural institutions could be maintained to some degree under this option, but government would (as with homesteading) wither away to a significant degree—because of the lack of tax monies for its support. Given the latter, our country would, of necessity, cease having a military—i.e., legal killers—and thereby cease having enemies.

The Leadership Question

Ideally, all three of the courses identified and discussed above would be taken, and taken simultaneously. And note that these three courses are not mutually exclusive in that some of those taking the second and (especially) third options might also use some of their time pursuing the first one. The question that arises regarding these options, however, is: Under what leadership would they occur?

During the Great Depression the federal government played some role relative to the “intentional” community option (see Conkin), but cannot be looked to now for leadership with any of the three possible courses. If anything, the federal government (Congress in particular) appears to in denial regarding “global warming,” and President Obama’s leadership on the matter is virtually invisible. If anything, the crowd in Washington, DC, appears intent on adding to the problem rather than reducing it—not surprising, given its obsession with short-run profits. Even if Washington did undertake efforts to address the problem, its focus likely would be on supporting efforts to develop non-polluting energy sources. So that the discrepancy between our way of life and our “design specifications” would continue, and even intensity.

If the federal government should not be looked to for leadership, neither should the state governments, for they lack the necessary resources—both financial and intellectual. Thus, if any significant movement in the direction of lighter occupance of Earth is to occur, the leadership will need to come from private citizens and private organizations. But will it?

Conclusions: Prospects

Of the three possibilities identified and discussed above, the homesteading one has the least chance of being implemented: Few desire the drastic change in way of life required, and few have the courage/skills to even try it. The “intentional” community option is already being taken by hundreds, if not thousands, of people in this country, and might be taken by even more—given that many in our society are unemployed, under employed, or ill-employed. Some might argue, however, that this option will never “get off the ground” in our society because humans, by nature, are individualistic, selfish, and aggressive. Recent research, however, has turned this claim on its head (see, e.g., de Waal and Keltner). The reason, rather, that Americans are individualistic, etc., is that our society fosters such traits, and gives them “success value.”

It’s likely that research in developing alternate sources of energy will continue, despite the lack of support from the federal government; but doubtful that a switchover to such sources will be accomplished to any significant extent within 10 years.

In conclusion, there is good reason to question the claim that humans are an intelligent species. We know that we are in a precarious situation at present, and also know that there are measures we could take to reduce, if not eliminate, the threat posed by “global warming.” But I see little evidence that we—our governmental and corporate leaders in particular—are taking this threat seriously. Therefore, my best guess is that “runaway” will begin soon (assuming that it has not already begun), and that our species (along with many other ones, of course) will be extinct—or virtually so—by the end of this century.

Those species that manage to survive are likely to feel blessed at our disappearance!

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