Dismantle Civilisation

So says one of the suggestions on a recent post by Sharon Astyk. Good advice.

So don’t buy rice right now. Take a deep breath again, and recognize that you and I will always be able to outbid poor people for rice, and that part of why food storage buying made sense is because my audience was so small – everyone wasn’t doing it. When the problem was not acute, buying rice for your family made sense. Now, it is acute, and it is more important to do what we can to help the poor.

Does this mean you shouldn’t store food – no, you absolutely should, but don’t contribute to the drive up of rice prices. By oatmeal, plant potatoes, buy quinoa – but not big sacks or pallet loads of rice. Forgo CAFO meat, and eat only meat, milk and eggs that is raised on pasture or with minimal human food grain use. Send the money you would spend on that stuff (or on soyburgers – buy whole black soybeans and eat them instead) to the relief of the poor.

If we all start rushing out and panic buying now, we will only make the situation worse and push prices up even further. So what should we be doing? Plenty more good ideas on Sharons post. The problems are of the longterm kind, so after breathing 
deeply and relaxing (panicking never helped anyone), get out of your car, do something in your garden or community. Something that actually improves your longterm situation, forges closer ties to your neighbours or increases your food growing capabilities.

Next, take a look at what you would want to accomplish if you had a couple more years and some money. Make a list. I’m going to bet that there are some duplications on both lists – that is, there are things you have to do that you want to do anyway. Guess which things are now numbers 1 and 2 on your priority list. Maybe you still won’t be able to do them – but at least you know. And maybe you will.

But think it through. I know, it isn’t much fun – it is far nicer to ask “what do we want the world to look like.” But just in case, have a plan for fucked up too. If you need guidance, I would encourage you to read Dmitry Orlov’s articles on his life during the Soviet Collapse, and to read his book as soon as it is available – it is terrific.

Of course there’s more – health care, transport, education…but start here. Breathe first, then get to work. Yes, things are falling apart rapidly, we’ve acknowledged it. But then again, your life is different from yesterday now…how?

Thanks Sharon for these words of wisdom. The world that we have grown up in is coming to an end. We are at a crux, where we can continue to allow big business and heirarchies to dominate our realiites, watching as they finish chewing up what is left of our planet. Or, just maybe, if enough of us see the opportunities, we can create a world closer to how we’d like to live. Time to get those garden tools out, and invite the neighbours around for a chat and a cup of (local herbal) tea.

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The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis

By Beat Balzli and Frank Hornig

Biofuels and global warming have been blamed for shortages driving up the price of food, and both trends have played their role. The planet’s grain reserves are almost empty for a number of reasons, including global population growth and greater prosperity in some countries like India. Feed corn is in short supply because industrialized nations have used it for ethanol. Droughts — in Australia, for example — have devastated rice and wheat harvests. Wheat reserves worldwide are only sufficient right now to cover about 60 days of demand.

This helps to explain why commodity prices have rallied since early 2006, with the price of rice ballooning 217 percent, wheat 136 percent, corn 125 percent and soybeans 107 percent.

But classic supply and demand theory offers only a partial explanation. Sudden price hikes since last January have been alarming. The UN estimates that at least $500 million (€312 million) in immediate aid will be needed by May 1 to avoid serious famines. Agricultural scientists at the world body’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have presented a report on the world food crisis. And criticism is growing that hedge funds, index funds, pension funds and investment banks bear part of the blame.

Obvious really. Allowing our food supply to be manipulated by investors is insane – a few people are getting very rich speculating on the price of food, while millions starve. This is capitalism doing what it is best at.

But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.

Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.

“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”

He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”

Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.

A recent post from Little Blog in the Woods is calling us all to ACT now. The media is pretty much ignoring the role that speculation in the food markets is having on the price of foodstuffs. We can change this, if enough people draw attention to the immoral activities of investors, making huge profits from betting that food will increase in price (and therefore pushing up those prices).

So. For the first time, I’m going to ask the readers of this blog to DO something. For us all.

Many of the causes of the world food crisis are beyond our immediate reach; we can’t fix global warming this morning.

But one cause is NOT beyond reach. It’s HUGE- and virtually UNRECOGNIZED.

It’s Food “Investment” – otherwise known as- SPECULATION.

Blog reader DC sent in a comment with this link; International Herald Tribune. Even some insiders know it.

The politically engaged population of the US – and the WORLD – does not know it’s there; and do not know that potentially- it could be OUTLAWED. Next week.

It could. Life-critical resources have always been protected from speculation (theoretically!) – it’s an absolute obscenity to sell water to people dying of thirst- the whole species feels that way.

That’s the anger we need to stir; and this post has been written as an introduction to the situation.

So: PLEASE DO THIS:

Do you have a blog? Link to this post. Write about it. Spread it to other blogs. Tell them to read the previous several posts here, too.

In 15 minutes: Email this post to 10 of your contacts who may think as you do. Ask them to pass it on.

Email this post to your legislators; if you know some, personally, send it personally, and ask to talk to them about launching legislation.

Do you have friends in hungry countries? Email them this post- ask them to pass it on. Get them to put it in the hands of their government.

Get this post to your pastor, rabbi, or imam- ask them to turn it into a sermon- and get your congregation RILED.

Do you have contacts in universities? Get this post to activist groups on campuses- get them to work on… DEMONSTRATIONS. There should be THOUSANDS marching down Wall Street, with banners saying-

“MURDERERS!!”

Please join us in bringing this obscene situation into the spotlight. Access to food is a human right, and rich investors should not be allowed to profit from the misery of other people. The internet is a great medium for enabling ordinary people to spread information – do you have a blog or a website? Please publish something about the role speculation is having on world food prices. Spread the word.

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A BBC article warning that consumers should prepare for the price of clothing to increase.

“It all comes down to energy,” explains Bradley George, head of commodities and resources at Investec Asset Management. “We are basically short of power in the world right now.”

Hence, it is not only a question of whether land should be used to grow crops for food or cotton. It is also a question of how much energy should be used to produce clothes in factories.

Fertiliser costs are also soaring, adding to raw material costs, and the credit crunch is adding to the squeeze as low-margin clothes manufacturers are finding it harder to raise finance.

More worrying, an article in Wired explains how aquifers and rivers are running dry.

That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.

Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they’re quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest’s half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.

This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it’s useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can’t always be found where people need it, and it’s heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world’s freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

And of course, water supplies require energy. As peak oil hits harder, peak water is an inevitable consequence, along with peak everything else. And climate change adds to the problem.

Australia has always been dry. It’s the most arid continent after Antarctica. Covering an area roughly the size of the lower 48 states, it supports less than one-tenth the US population, and even that is an enormous strain on water supplies. The country was founded during the second-worst drought in its history, but the worst dry spell is unfolding right now. Rainfall, which has declined to 25 percent of the long-term average, is projected to plummet another 40 percent by 2050.

Three factors are working to desiccate the landscape. One is simple overexploitation of existing resources. More water is withdrawn to support agriculture, industry, and cities than the system can handle. Another is El Niño, a weather pattern that periodically alters rainfall, further drying the continent. The third is climate change. Australia is growing hotter, which compounds the other two problems by boosting both consumption and evaporation.

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Jim Kunstler talking about the long emergency.

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How will the U.S. have to adapt?
Virtually anything organized on a grand scale is liable to fall into trouble—government, finance, corporate enterprise, agribusiness, schools. Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.

Original article.

James Howard Kunstler publishes Clusterfuck Nation blog, and is the author of World Made by Hand, a novel of the post oil world, and other books, including The Long Emergency.

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Another sense-filled article. Orginally published at Counterpunch. By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF.

Why do we tolerate it — and the near-totalitarian control exercised over our food supply by a handful of giant agribiz combines? In part we tolerate monopoly and lousy quality in our food economy because the public believes industry propaganda that (in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase) There Is No Alternative.

Exactly. Why? How have we allowed ourselves to be relegated to being simply consumers and wage slaves?

Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture — that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling — produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.

Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, “growing” it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay “tribute” and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).

Through force and the inherent threat of force, peasants have been coerced into growing cash crops, to pay taxes, rent, mortgages. This inevitable leads to soil depletion as farms become strip mines to make money, reducing the cash crop returns, or forcing the farmers to use more and more chemical inputs – more debt, more need for cash, more intensive farming, more depletion of the land, more debt, more chemicals… and on it goes. Apparently 35 Uk farmers per day are now going bankrupt. Historically this has often been the norm. Small farmers fail to make the income needed to farm the chemical way, and are forced into selling their land, which invariably ends up in the hands of bigger and bigger agro companies, who only care about their ability to pay shareholders dividends today. Screw tomorrow, screw the land, screw the quality of the food being produced. Just so long as profits are made. But you cant keep taking, cant keep spraying more and more poisons. The strip mining mentality impoverishes everything.

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money… which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.

But by design, we mean learning — as in the design philosophy of “permaculture” — how to work with nature, and not to attempt the vain conquest of nature. The key to that design — aside from the mechanical tricks of trellising, water catchment, etc. — is to create the conditions for increasing dynamic biotic complexity, beginning at the micro-level with the soil itself.

Of course they dont want ordinary people to realise that growing food is actually quite easy. Far easier than the 40+ hour per week wage slavery in which many of us are imprisoned.

36 million households in the US are “food insecure,” because food is largley available only on the monetized economy; and poor people have very little money. This is a food issue. The food we do eat is filled with chemicals and contaminants — because the regulatory agencies (like the Food and Drug Adminsitration) have been converted into industry advocates by the determining role of money in politics (Ethanol, for example, is a vote-buying scheme, with ADM behind the scenes.). And because the industrial methods of farming require chemicals and contaminants to compensate for their pathogenic and violent treatment of creatures and biotic systems. These are food issues.

Health authorities increasingly acknowledge that the “western diet,” especially the western/industrial junk-food diet, is associated with the onset or the exacerbation of many debilitating diseases and conditions. Meanwhile, our medical care system is in crisis, in an endless death spiral of increasing demand and increasing cost. Our hospitals contain McDonald’s franchise outlets. These are food issues.

Our children are subjected to crap-food propaganda in school; and they eat crap food there. Corporations are behind this; and they intentionally addict our kids to crap-food. Some schools have begun to grow their own food; and the gardens are used as practical pedagogical tools as well as a source for clean food, with great success. Behavioral problems drop dramaticaly when kids eat clean, fresh food. These are food issues.

Food issues, food politics – probably the most important politics, and yet it is rarely discussed as such.

Food dependency has always been the most essential weapon of the oppressor. That applies to the abused wife who will be cast into penury if she leaves her abuser (we ask, “How will she eat?”); and it applies to the alienated suburban technodrone, who knows — deep down — that he doesn’t know how he would eat without money. It applies to the indigenous population forbidden to grow their traditional crops by colonial masters; kicked off the best arable land by colonial masters; made dependent on second-rate food exports from the colonising nation; etc. It applies to the yeoman farmer deprived of common land and forced into the pool of desperate, hungry, deracinated wage-slaves who staffed the first industrial factories. It applies to citizens of Zimbabwe forbidden by President Mugabe and his political clique to keep vegetable gardens in the yards of their urban and suburban homes.

Our masters have manipulated us into food insecurity, into giving control of our food supply to huge faceless corporations and their shareholders. But it doesnt need to be this way – there are alternatives.

The kitchen garden — the “victory garden” — represents not only the ability to sustain resistance (or aggression) against a foreign enemy, but the ability to resist domestic authority and to withdraw, at least partially, from the money economy and the wage-slavery and debt on which it is based.

Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

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Another article worthy of a full reprint:

Is the Western consumerist culture that we inflict upon the rest of the world truly the pinnacle of our evolution? If it is, I resign my membership in the human race. Though I don’t fear that I’ll be compelled to tender my resignation any time soon because our so-called “non-negotiable American Way of Life” is a piece of shit, for myriad reasons.

We in the Western “developed” nations, particularly in the United States, are an utter disgrace to our species. Our myopic, self-centered, jejune, hubristic, and benighted ways of examining and interacting with the rest of the world, including other human animals, non-human animals, and Mother Earth herself, are reprehensible to the point of nausea and beyond.

And why wouldn’t they be? We carry perceived entitlement to such pathological lengths that we actually believe that the world and all of its inhabitants are resources we can objectify and use to enhance and ensure our “prosperity,” “security,” and “the growth of our economy.” We are conditioned to believe ahistorical, manipulative and grossly distorted sound-bites streamed into our shriveled, atrophied cerebrums by well-coiffed, polished talking head sycophants who owe their careerist souls to a system that is destroying the world.

And why wouldn’t we US Americans believe that our “shining city upon the hill” is entitled to whatever our little hearts desire (and our $1 trillion per year military can plunder)? We are all living large thanks to the genocide our forefathers committed against the natives of Turtle Island. After all, who’s going to worry about a little thing like 10-100 million dead “red men?” Or the 100 million black slaves who contributed mightily (and involuntarily I might add) to the development of our economic juggernaut of a nation? I can already see the shoulders shrugging and people assuaging potential guilt with the shop-worn arguments that “we’ve more than made it up to them,” “you can’t change the past,” or “I wasn’t there when it happened.” Well, guess what. I’m not suggesting reparations or apologies. Fuck applying band-aids to gaping wounds. We are barbarians masquerading as enlightened Christian folk—we’ve even deluded ourselves into believing our shit smells like roses. How far do we go before we call a halt to our insanity?

Stocks of large marine animals have fallen 90% since 1950. The polar bears and penguins are drowning and disappearing in droves. Cattle, pigs, and chickens suffer unspeakable horrors in torture facilities euphemistically labeled factory farms mostly so we can get our “fast food fix” and destroy the world one burger at a time by eating at McDonald’s. 50% of the world’s tropical forests are gone and if present trends continue they will all be gone by 2090. A unique species of life goes extinct every 20 minutes.

Conscienceless sociopaths like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney routinely rise to the ultimate positions of power, visibility and responsibility in our nightmare society. We have already slaughtered over a million Iraqis in retaliation for the 3,000 people they DIDN’T kill on 9/11. Disproportionate scapegoating at its finest. Job well done, USA! (One shudders to think how many we would’ve killed had Iraqis been the actual perpetrators of the WTC bombings).

I wonder, dear reader, if you are wondering the same thing I’m wondering as I’m writing: Just what the fuck is wrong with us? We US Americans excel at paying lip service to worshipping Christ and/or the God of the Old Testament, but the truth is that our real god is Mammon. Even those who reject mainstream culture and its obsession with wealth and material possessions are forced to subjugate themselves to the almighty dollar in our filthy capitalist dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all system.

We fancy ourselves to have a monopoly on “freedom” and “decency.” In fact, we’ve mind-fucked ourselves into believing it is our “duty” to “civilize” the rest of the world. In reality we are wage and debt slaves who each play a role in perpetuating a system that is grossly immoral, exploitative, and malevolent. We export our evil via our blood-drenched foreign policy. “Get them before they get us” is our motto—even if we happen to be the equivalent of Mike Tyson pulverizing an infant. Hey, he might’ve attacked us when he grew up, right?

For those of us who haven’t had every shred of moral decency indoctrinated out of us, there is cause for some optimism. Like a pyramid balancing on its apex, capitalism is destined to topple. Linear, short-sighted, chaotic, grossly immoral, and dependent upon infinite growth in a finite world, it has already reached obsolescence in the minds of most intellectually honest critical thinkers. Its myriad victims have discovered perhaps its ultimate vulnerability: asymmetric warfare. In its insatiable thirst to commodify everything, capitalism is at odds with Mother Nature herself. If the victims of imperialism and monopoly capitalism don’t bring this son of a bitch down, the Earth will. And I feel confident that I speak for many when I state that the world will be truly blessed when our violent, hierarchal, and malignant culture of murder and mayhem is throttled to death like a perpetrator who finally encounters a victim with the means to eradicate him.

Meanwhile, we can accelerate the demise of the dominant culture, as Derrick Jensen has labeled our rotten-to-the-core Westernized, capitalistic way of being. As Jensen suggests, we need to build upon the culture of resistance that is rapidly expanding in the pre-revolutionary environment in which we find ourselves.

As the inevitable revolution or crash approaches (the power elite can only fuck the people or the environment so hard before the backlash takes them out), there are many things we can do (each according to our abilities and resources) to monkey wrench this merciless, murderous machine.

Students of history will note that all manner of people and activities are necessary to bring down a deeply entrenched rotten and oppressive establishment. Strikers, boycotters, organizers, thinkers, writers, spiritual leaders, protestors, civil disobedients, conscientious objectors, providers of resources, and groups engaged in direct action like the ALF are all essential to the success of resisting the considerable might and tenacity of those who hold a majority of the world’s wealth and power.

So, as Jensen suggests, find what you love and do it in such a way that it puts a little more wobble on that inverted pyramid.

And when the time comes, those of us who are clinging to our guns so bitterly will know what to do with them.

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As the world’s seed supply is increasingly owned by multinational companies, farmers and gardeners are losing control of the seeds available to them. Vegetable varieties that were valued for their superior flavor are being replaced by varieties that can withstand traveling across the country, or across the world, in today’s global food market.The seed bank reverses this trend by teaching people to save the seeds from their favorite vegetable and flower varieties that grow in their own backyards. Just like those from my grandpa’s “old-timey” tomatoes, seeds are saved from fruits and vegetables because they taste delicious, or perhaps grow particularly well in our unique New England soils and climate. The seeds are then collected and stored in the seed bank and made available to the community. Some seeds are sold to the public, while others are distributed free to seed bank members on the condition that they will grow, save, and return to the bank double the amount of seed taken.

Original article from Orion magazine.

We’d love to hear from anyone creating their own local community seed bank.

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A recent issue of the ecologist has two articles:

10 reasons why organic can feed the world 

9. Seed-saving

Seeds are not simply a source of food; they are living testimony to more than 10,000 years of agricultural domestication. Tragically, however, they are a resource that has suffered unprecedented neglect. The UN FAO estimates that 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost over the past 100 years.36

Traditionally, farming communities have saved seeds year-on-year, both in order to save costs and to trade with their neighbours. As a result, seed varieties evolved in response to local climatic and seasonal conditions, leading to a wide variety of fruiting times, seed size, appearance and flavour. More importantly, this meant a constant updating process for the seed’s genetic resistance to changing climatic conditions, new pests and diseases.

By contrast, modern intensive agriculture depends on relatively few crops – only about 150 species are cultivated on any significant scale worldwide. This is the inheritance of the Green Revolution, which in the late 1950s perfected varieties Filial 1, or F1 seed technology, which produced hybrid seeds with specifically desirable genetic qualities.37 These new high-yield seeds were widely adopted, but because the genetic makeup of hybrid F1 seeds becomes diluted following the first harvest, the manufacturers ensured that farmers return for more seed year on year.

With its emphasis on diversity, organic farming is somewhat cushioned from exploitation on this scale, but even Syngenta, the world’s third-largest biotech company, now offers organic seed lines. Although seedsaving is not a prerequisite for organic production, the holistic nature of organics lends itself well to conserving seed.

In support of this, the Heritage Seed Library, in Warwickshire, is a collection of more than 800 open-pollinated organic varieties, which have been carefully preserved by gardeners across the country. Although their seeds are not yet commercially available, the Library is at the forefront of addressing the alarming erosion of our agricultural diversity.

Seed-saving and the development of local varieties must become a key component of organic farming, giving crops the potential to evolve in response to what could be rapidly changing climatic conditions. This will help agriculture keeps pace with climate change in the field, rather than in the laboratory.

10 reasons why GM won’t feed the world 

10. Wedded to fertilisers and fossil fuels

No genetically modified crop has yet eliminated the need for chemical fertilisers in order to achieve expected yields. Although the industry has made much of the possibility of splicing nitrogen-fixing genes into commercial food crops in order to boost yields, there has so far been little success. This means that GM crops are just as dependent on fossil fuels to make fertilisers as conventional agriculture. In addition to this, GM traits are often specifically designed to fit with large-scale industrial agriculture. Herbicide resistance is of no real benefit unless your farm is too vast to weed mechanically, and it presumes that the farmers already farm in a way that involves the chemical spraying of their crops. Similarly, BT toxin expression is designed to counteract the problem of pest control in vast monocultures, which encourage infestations. In a world that will soon have to change its view of farming – facing as it does the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil – GM crops will soon come to look like a relic of bygone practices.

Great articles, even if their titles imply that this planet can sustain 6 billion plus humans!

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