Dismantle Civilisation

In America, there’s a lot of hoopla going on right now about the upcoming election. American citizens are given several choices for a presidential leader, and must choose the one that they feel represents them the most. Then a new dude gets elected and we’re all happy and get on with the next four years of our lives.

Democracy is one of the biggest delusions we have been taught to believe. You want to know why? First of all, the elections are controlled by the people already in power. The people who have the most access to campaign resources (and the most money to buy them) will obviously have the most successful campaign.  Second, we are given two choices for a leader. Two. Yes, I know there are a whole list of independent candidates on each ballot, but election propaganda sets up political freedom as an either/or choice; You pick this guy because you hate that guy. And since the majority of Americans vote for one of the two main candidates, even if you do support a minority party, your vote pretty much doesn’t count and usually ends up working against you in the end.

And the more subtle fallacy at work? A president is not elected based on popular vote. It’s electoral votes that count. So it’s easy for the people in power to do their research and figure out how they can manipulate the votes in certain areas and get a chosen candidate elected. And if that doesn’t work, then they can just “lose” or “misplace” a few thousand votes and call it good.

Of course, there is still a bunch of red tape rigamaroll invented to trick people into thinking their votes are very important. Voters must be registered. All votes are anonymous. Voters must go to the proper precinct to vote. All of this crap, and the president isn’t even chosen by us! Not to mention that the current voting process makes it impossible for low-income individuals to vote. How do they know where to get their registration forms if they don’t have a phone or internet access? How do they pick one up if they don’t have a car? How do they vote if they have to work a 10-hour shift that day, and don’t have the postage to send in an absentee ballot?

But I digress. I’ll lay my cards on the table and admit that I’m planning on voting on November 4th, and I’m really excited about the idea of having Barack Obama as a leader. But on the other hand, I know that nothing I think or say or do matters when the same old boys club is going to be reigning in the White House until the end of time. And I wish everyone else could see that too. Some do, but they still allow elections to divide them and break them down. Can’t we start believing in something other than the republic? How about ourselves? Or our communities? Or anything else that hasn’t already become corrupted by out-of-control, unbridled power?

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By André Angelantoni, on The Oil Drum.

The future most people are living into is beginning to disappear. The financial crisis threw the first punch, but oil depletion will deliver the knockout blow. The moment people realize that the society they have known their whole life can no longer function the same way without the energy provided by oil, it will become glaringly apparent that the future will be very, very different. It’s not just that we will no longer have fresh food flown in from around the world. Some of the fundamental assumptions held by people living in the rich countries will no longer hold:

• many jobs that have never existed before will once again no longer exist
• retirement, a phenomenon only a century old, will disappear
• accumulating “wealth” will be out of reach for most people
• most children will no longer be able to attend institutions of higher education
• diseases and conditions that are easily treated now will once again claim lives

Once a person has realized that these and many more futures will no longer exist, they will ask themselves the following question: If the future I’ve lived with my whole life will not longer occur, what will my future be?

People will react in many different ways as they consider the question of what their future will be. Some people will become resigned and despondent, others will become resolute as they concentrate on the job of making sure they and their family are sheltered and adequately fed. Still others will become happier as they leave the rat race and simplify their life. If you are considering this question, hopefully you will realize that creating the future rather than waiting for it to happen to you will give you a better result. That’s what this article is about.

Being aware that this society and the advantages it provides to corporations and large organisations/projects, impairs the lives of most people within it, is devastating the natural world and enslaves us all, is surely sufficient motivation for radical change, even if oil were not running out. We have all been sold ‘the american dream’ which turns out to be more of a nightmare, not just for those who live in poverty, and are enslaved to make the trinkets and plastic toys, but also those who have been fed the lie of privilege, and, in economic terms, are ‘doing alright’. We are all connected, and we all suffer when we allow our landbases to be damaged. We all need clean water and air, decent food, and community relations. Modern industrial civilisation is poisoning all of these and more.

Quality of Life vs Standard of Living
We’re almost ready to discuss how to create a future worth living into. I’m going to make one more distinction that should help the transition. With the loss of inexpensive and plentiful oil you are not just confronting the loss of vacations in the Tropics. It will look like the sudden loss of much more than that. But what is it you are losing, exactly?

At this point it’s valuable to get yourself clear on what you are actually going to lose. If you don’t stop your brain, it is likely to say, “Everything!”, send you down a dark tunnel and leave you there. But you aren’t going to lose everything; you aren’t even going to lose the most important things, as you’ll soon see. That’s because almost every person tends to make one fundamental mistake (myself included when I’m not paying attention).

We tend to confuse what economists call “standard of living” with “quality of life.” The two are not the same, no matter how many vacation advertisements try to convince you otherwise. The standard of living index measures the number of things a person can purchase or possess. This is again useful only to a point. Beyond the very basics of life, like food and shelter, we want things not for the things themselves but for what they give us at an emotional level.

We want money to go on vacation so that we can have fun. But is it necessary to leave town to have fun? We want to send our kids to college so that they can “create a future for themselves.” But what does that mean? Are people who don’t go to college incapable of experiencing happiness in their life? If your children were healthy and happy, wouldn’t you have done your job as a parent? We know that the poor can be happy and the rich can be (often desperately) unhappy.

Things and circumstances fool us into short-term happiness, and then the happiness wears off and the cycle starts again. Have you noticed as your income rose, your expectations rose with them? If you hadn’t noticed that, you’re in the standard of living trap and you don’t even know it.

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Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit, Orion Magazine.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that’s about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the other side of all our divides. The indigenous central Mexicans who are driven by poverty to migrate have begun to insist that among the human rights that matter is the right to stay home. So reports David Bacon, who through photographs and words has become one of the great chroniclers of the plight of migrant labor in our time. “Today the right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival,” he writes. “But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca’s Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their looms, to talk about another right, the right to stay home. . . . In Spanish, Mixteco, and Triqui, people repeated one phrase over and over: the derecho de no migrar—the right to not migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just inequality and exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons why people have to migrate to begin with.” Seldom mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family that remains behind.

Cheap food is one of the problems, with agricultural corporations undermining the very foundation of local communities. Cheap, energy intensive, food imports destroy local markets, forcing farmers into bankruptcy and emigration, while monoculture transgenic seeds, which need expensive fertilisers and pesticides, and have to be bought each year from the agricultural corporations hammers another nail into the lid of of the coffin of local food production. The need for money, and the propaganda of the corporations, encourages small farmers to plant cash crops for export, instead of subsistence crops for their own consumption, or a variety of crops for local markets, and the debt that is necessary to do so.

Everything is set up to undermine local economies, and transfer ownership and control of land and the world’s food supply into the hands of fewer and fewer corporations (and hence people). Throughout the world, small farmers and local agriculture has suffered under globalism. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, and local farming diversity needs support.

From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it’s not so good for us either. Most of the people I know regard with bemusement or even chagrin the harried, scattered lives they lead. Last summer I found myself having the same conversation with many different people, about our craving for a life with daily rites; with a sense of time like a well-appointed landscape with its landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense of measure and proportion, as opposed to a formless and unending scramble to go places and get things and do more. I think of my mother’s lower-middle-class childhood vacations, which consisted of going to a lake somewhere not far from Queens and sitting still for a few weeks—a lot different from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unknown and all the other models of hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now.

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. Which seems to be what Bacon’s Oaxacans want as well, although their version of being uprooted and out of place is much grimmer than ours.

Cheap abundant oil has made our society transient. Few people have a connection with the land, and few feel like they belong. Housing in the west has become an investment, with the reality of a ‘healthy housing sector’ meaning that houses are bought and sold as a means to create wealth and income, instead of as real homes, places to be that generations share through the decades and centuries. Communing with a region or a piece of land is something that takes time, and many of us in the west have no time.

Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca’s farmers get to stay home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture? Will we stay home and grow more of our own food with dignity, humanity, a little sweat off our own brows, and far fewer container ships and refrigerated trucks zooming across the planet? Will we recover a more stately, settled, secure way of living as the logic of ricocheting like free electrons withers in the shifting climate? Some of these changes must come out of the necessity to reduce carbon emissions, the unaffordability of endlessly moving people and things around. But some of it will have to come by choice. To choose it we will have to desire it—desire to stay home, own less, do less getting and spending, to see a richness that lies not in goods and powers but in the depth of connections. The Oaxacans are ahead of us in this regard. They know what is gained by staying home, and most of them have deeper roots in home to begin with. And they know what to do outside the global economy, how to return to a local realm that is extraordinarily rich in food and agriculture and culture.

The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home to tend them.

And be content in place, in symbiotic relationship with wildlife around you, watching the trees grow over the next 50 years!

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By Kari Lydersen, article on alternet.

From the mining of raw materials to energy production to the manufacturing process itself, industry guzzles tons of water.

…..The rampant waste of freshwater for general public use — lawn watering, the creation of suburban fake lakes, excessive bathing and household washing — has been well documented, as has the politically charged use of water in US agriculture. But the use and abuse of water in various parts of the global industrial economy is often overlooked. From the mining of raw materials for manufacturing to energy production, to the manufacturing process itself, the US industrial economy uses a significant amount of water every year.

Exact numbers for the amount of water used outside of agriculture or home consumption are difficult to come by. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that industry uses about five percent of all the water in the US, but does not include mining or electricity generation in that figure. A report from Dow Chemical puts the figure much higher, at around 20 percent. And perhaps more importantly, neither number takes into account the volume of water pollution that occurs in the course of industrial processes. At the very least, it’s clear that every year, billions of gallons of water are used — not to grow food or to meet physical human needs — but to quench our society’s thirst for the modern conveniences and technological devices we have come to rely on.

Water Equals Power

Nothing gets manufactured without electricity — and manufacturing electricity often requires water. Power generation is the thirstiest sector of the industrial economy, slurping up 195 billion gallons per day, according to the USGS. While about a third of this is saline (either ocean water or brackish groundwater), the rest is freshwater from lakes and rivers.

About 70 percent of US electricity comes from coal and nuclear plants, each of which produce power by heating water to make steam, which spins a turbine. Typical coal-burning or nuclear power plants have “open” or “closed” cooling systems. Closed systems reuse the same water multiple times and therefore require much less water. An open system runs water just once through the plant and then returns it to the source. In plants that use “once-through” water systems, the water is returned to the lake, ocean, or river it came from about 30 degrees warmer.

This increase in water temperature can cause fish kills, algae blooms, or otherwise greatly alter the natural biological makeup of the water body. Meanwhile, the intake pipes for such open cooling systems can be lethal for fish and aquatic microorganisms; electricity plants must sometimes be shut down when the pipes are clogged by fish, debris, or ice. Nuclear energy is an especially water-intensive technology.

A 1,400-megawatt nuclear reactor requires enough water to fill 5,000 Olympic swimming pools per year, according to a 2006 Australian study. The study, commissioned by the Queensland government, warns that the country’s severe drought could be exacerbated by building more nuclear power plants, which use about 25 percent more water than coal plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists calls nuclear power plants’ need for water “insatiable.”

The mining of the coal and uranium needed to feed these electricity stations is also highly destructive to local water sources. Until it was shut down by a lawsuit in 2005, the infamous Peabody Western Coal Company used precious groundwater from the dry Navajo and Hopi Nations to mix with pulverized coal and piped the slurry all the way from its Black Mesa mine in Arizona 275 miles to the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada. In Appalachia, many residents are no longer able to drink from their wells because blasting for coal has fractured their water tables and left their wells dangerously contaminated.

In 2003, Maria Gunnoe, a West Virginia mother who gained national attention for her activism against coal strip-mining, found her well contaminated from runoff from two nearby containing ponds storing waste from coal processing — waste that included selenium, lime, arsenic, and other toxins. “I had a 55-gallon fish tank, and I changed the water and this albino catfish I had had for eight years died instantly,” she said. “The water was all green. This happened overnight. When I turned on the shower, the smell was so awful I couldn’t take it. My kids and I all got skin reactions.”

Gunnoe started buying bottled water for all their household needs, to the tune of $250 a month. To add insult to injury, the road to her house was so damaged from blasting at the mine that she had to walk long distances to carry the heavy store-bought water home. And once-lovely Appalachian river valleys have been “in-filled” with waste from mountaintop removal mining. That is, the rivers essentially have been filled up with jumbled earth and ore sliced off to get at the lucrative coal seams. Regional activists have been fighting a loophole in the Clean Water Act that currently allows this destruction to occur.

Uranium mining poses similar environmental risks. Record-high prices for uranium in the past year mean that companies are hoping once again to mine uranium in the American Southwest, home to a thriving uranium industry from the 1940s to the 1980s. Much of the mining was done on or near Navajo land, and many of the miners were Navajos. The government is still processing compensation claims for miners suffering from lung cancer and other diseases caused by uranium exposure. Navajo Larry King remembers seeing his cows’ coats turn yellowish and their hooves brittle, and even seeing them keel over and die after drinking from uranium-contaminated wells on his land.

“Before, even people drank water from the windmill,” says King, referring to the well that is pumped by wind power. “We bathed in it and everything. Then they told us it wasn’t good for humans, so we had to start hauling water from Gallup. But some families still let their livestock drink there. They’re drinking uranium.” King remembers the day in 1979 when the Rio Puerco River, which runs by his land, was inundated with 90 million gallons of radioactive uranium-laden liquid from a waste pond after a barricade burst.

“Cattle drank from the wash, and they just started dropping dead for a few years,” he says. “Even now I find bones there.” This time around, companies want to use a method called “in situ recovery.” Instead of hauling the uranium-laced ore out of the ground, they would inject water into uranium-laced aquifers, mobilizing the uranium so it can be pumped out along with the water. Companies aiming to use this process say they will use reverse osmosis to clean the water to its original baseline condition. But critics are doubtful.

Eric Jantz, a lawyer challenging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to allow in situ mining in New Mexico’s Navajo country, says there is a “100 percent chance” the aquifer will be radioactively contaminated from in situ mining. Like coal and uranium mining, oil extraction can also require vast amounts of water. With the current oil crunch, companies are taking extreme measures to squeeze every last drop of oil from sources that previously would have been considered unprofitable or inefficient. In older oil fields, water is often injected into the wells to help pry the last sticky remnants out of the ground.

One of the most water-intensive petroleum extraction methods occurs in the gooey tar sands of Alberta, where it takes three to six barrels of water to harvest each barrel of oil, a process that sucks Canadian rivers and aquifers dry. Low river levels have already been attributed to tar sand excavation, and the industry is only in its nascent stages. As the Canadian organization Global Research put it in a December 2007 article: “While Canada has more water than any other country — it is the Saudi Arabia of water — polluting the planet’s largest supply of freshwater for a short-term burst of energy production is one of the most insane behaviors imaginable.”

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Tonight I watched a program on MSNBC called Undercover: Sex Slaves in America. The documentary was an investigation into human trafficking in large cities, specifically revolving around Korean, Thai, and Latina women. Apparently, these women are told they can have a free ride to America, and once they get there, they must pay off debts of $55,000 or more. Their debtors force them to work in $60 “massage parlors” in order to pay off the money in time. They are told they will only need to work 6 to 7 months to do this, but then are forced to stay there for 10 to 20 years by the “massage parlor” owners.

Obviously, human trafficking is in a category of its own, but as I watched the documentary, I couldn’t help but wonder how the women felt about all of this. The government has decided to “solve” the problem by busting into the parlors renegade-style, issuing fines and closures, and then subsequently “setting the women free.” It’s interesting that we only choose to use the term “slavery” when referring to sex work, even though all lower- and middle-class citizens are also slaves of the economy, forced to work endless hours in horrible conditions for very little pay on a daily basis.

In video after video, the U.S. Health Department can be seen shaming the women, shutting down the parlors, and, in general, wreaking havoc on the women’s lives. The funny thing is that the documentary never addresses the question of what happens to the women after the parlors are busted. My guess is that they are forced into low-wage jobs, flipping burgers or working registers. They will struggle to make enough money to pay for rent and food, even though they will work long hours with no benefits, very little time off, and no maternity leave. They will also probably treated poorly due to the fact that they are foreign and don’t speak English.

My point is this: we’re so quick to identify slavery when it relates to sexuality, but what about all of the other forms of slavery going on around the world? And who are we to deny underprivileged women an opportunity to make $1000 to $2000 dollars a week, if that’s the only way they are able to do so?

Sex slavery would exist even if there weren’t a bunch of slimy dudes looking to make some money off of immigrant women, because the racism and sexism prevalent in our society enables it on a daily basis. Corporate greed and the hierarchy imposed by the status quo already enforce the slavery of the American people without even having to break the law. It seems to me that sex slavery is just a natural extension of racism, corporatism, and patriarchal attitudes, which are all things that many Americans fight staunchly to protect. Therefore, the cause of our troubles doesn’t originate from some random evil guys living in big cities – it comes from our own backyards.

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Written by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #206, Oct. 18, 2008

Society’s sad and terminal state is not an abstraction of issues or dollars. It is the wasted human potential of the intelligent, charitable individual who is stifled and hemmed in. Yet, our many wonderful members of society are creatures of artificial “comfort.” Convenience comes at costs such as cancer and heart disease that were rare diseases until the last hundred years. Forced by the present economy to be self-centered, we also suppress our creativity and innate potential for triumphing over a clear threat.

For the most part the modern human being labors in exchange for essentials handed over at whatever the market will bear. Food, shelter and clothing are not won or collected from nature, or in cooperation with helpful tribe members, but rather obtained in exchange for becoming a kind of slave. Neuroses from overcrowding are apparent, but none dare call it overpopulation.

The result of living this way, with little daily activity in healthy nature, is a weakened race unable to survive in the wild, much as a domesticated animal such as a dog would do poorly in a forest where the wolf belongs. Some humans are exemplary in capabilities and resolute spirit, but they are the small minority in a mass of humanity remarkably passive as disasters close in.

On our way like sheep to the slaughterhouse appears to be our fate. In past centuries and decades people were tougher and closer to the land, so when they got hungry enough they revolted and took what they needed. Today’s people are confused about what constitutes real wealth and power, such that they may be sitting ducks for those who would take away further the freedoms and normal responses that should be present among healthy, strong humans. Unless people riot uncontrollably and breach the walls of the gated communities and fan out from there, they may be prey to urban social control mechanisms designed to remove the threat that the masses pose to those who may be sitting well in the countryside with a ready, sustainable food supply. Little of this will occur in societies far less petroleum dependent.

The more I travel and interact in this country, I get a bad feeling about living in a U.S. city today. To see a homeless person or deranged street person is to feel the failure that is U.S. society. It’s just as clear when one meets an expanse of asphalt and cars; the terminal nature of our society is in our faces.

I want to live but they want me to die
I’ve got to give the best of myself
They only want me to lie
I gotta give the best of myself
They only want me to lie

- Warhorse, “Solitude” (from Mojo Magazine’s compilation Heavy Nuggets 1968-1973 British rock songs).

The future can only get worse before it gets better, from an understanding of energy, ecology and social response to stress and deprivation. My feelings and outlook easily elicit “Nothing new! Join the club!” Yet there may be something more for me to say of some value to you. I actually bring good tidings, even if the prophetic “doom and gloom” stereotype works unintentionally as blinders.

The barren social wasteland is on its way to complete desertification; then the deluge. Before this urban existence is washed away forever, we’re experiencing historic intensification of alienation from nature and our fellow humans. The tribe is gone, the buffalo are gone, the salmon almost gone, along with the climate. But there’s good news.

Having money and material things for security is rapidly expiring. The expiration date for consumer culture and materialism could be 2009, 2012 or later, but the exact date is not the point of this prediction. We can’t claim it’s far off if we’re honest about observable trends. So it’s time to get off our asses and separate ourselves from those who are constipated and are hopelessly in denial. The alternative is to take one’s drug of choice to the extent one can afford, and revel in gratifying consumption such as a juicy steak.

The non-money culture has to begin now. Impossible? Well, maybe for you, so you must get out of the way and be bid adieu. People have been extricating themselves from Babylon for a long time as individuals and small groups finding real community closer to nature.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of us live day-to-day routines of desperate existence. If anyone believes their life in an urban U.S. “community” is better than that, they’re delusional. How can it be a delusion be when money buys happiness and freedom? Well, anyone ingesting plastics and radiation (most of us today) is getting screwed. We want to believe we’re taking minute risks in exchange for techno-bliss. Piss on it and walk away from the fray. Those who have awakened do not need further explication or convincing. Preparedness for petrocollapse and climate chaos is the only sensible course.

Society’s downward spiral must play out before positive social change kicks in, which it will — like gangbusters. We pick up the pieces. Many columns and short stories from Culture Change have described this process in an as optimistic fashion as reality can merit. It is up to you to make it better or succumb to the tragic script others have written for humanity and all life as we know it.

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If you had to identify the major driving force of the concerns in the current economic crisis, the goal at the core of capitalism and ultimately civilisation itself, it is the concept of infinite growth. The economy must grow every year to make us prosperous! The nation must expand its influence and territory! We must conquer the wild lands and civilise them to make them productive! Growth created the current state of the world. So how come it hasn’t been focused on at all in environmental campaigning?

When people talk of growth, for example in our economies, it is often in single figures, say 7%. This lulls us into thinking that it’s really rather small and trivial. However, a growth rate of 7% would result in that economy/entity doubling every 10 years using the rule of 70 (divide 70 by the growth rate to get the number of years before it doubles) – suddenly this small figure is put into proportion to what it actually means. And as that economy doubles every 10 years, so will its resource uptake double, and ultimately double the burden on the planet’s ecosystems. In order for growth to be maintained over the next century the amount of resources civilisation will have to consume will be hundreds and even thousands of times what has been consumed before now, all because of this exponential growth. To think this can continue despite the decline in nearly all natural resources is insanity, yet the political leadership of this civilisation are desperate to keep this system going as long as possible.

Another effect of exponential growth is to make energy conservation initiatives proposed by many environmentalists almost completely ineffective in the long-term. For example, if every conventional car in the West was replaced by a Hybrid equivalent, there would be a reduction in oil consumption at first. But within about 5 years we would be consuming as much oil as we were before the switch, as more cars come on the road as a result of economic growth, and will rapidly increase after that point. It’s like running up a down-escalator – no matter how hard and nobly we try, eventually we will be pulled down with it. Another side-effect is that by reducing ones own oil consumption by cutting out air travel or car ownership for example, it makes these things slightly cheaper overall, encouraging other less environmentally concerned people to take up what you would have used. We are in the impossible situation of knowing we personally have to eliminate our impact on the earth, yet overall and in the long-term economic growth will make our attempts hollow gestures.

How can we break out of this impossible cycle? We, and environmentalists in general, need to accept that any attempts at conservation and cutting our resource usage will only have an effect if economic growth is eliminated and even reversed. Without this, all our efforts will be thwarted by the growing appetite of civilisation.

It is a Permaculture principle to turn every problem into a solution. In this situation, the problems of money can be turned on its head to become a tool of rewilding. As I have described in previous posts, local demurrage currencies can not only get people through the coming economic troubles, but can also create the conditions for resource conservation efforts to have a real, long-term effect as these economies will eliminate the problem of growth. Any attempt to rewild within the current system with economic growth at its heart will ultimately result in failure. If we want to dismantle civilisation we have to turn money, one of its core constituents, on its head to serve rewilding instead.

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How shall I live my life? -On Liberating the Earth From Civilization is the title of Derrick Jensen’s new book, a series of interviews/discussions with ten people who have devoted their lives to underming the destructive dominant culture.

Derrick’s introduction:

We are in the midst of an apocalypse. This culture is killing the planet. Resistance must take many forms, from the physical to the emotional to the intellectual to the legal (and illegal) to the philosophical and so on.
The people interviewed in this book have all made powerful contributions to helping us see our way toward resisting this deathly culture. David Edwards helps us to disentangle ourselves from some of the illusions that keep us tied to the system. Thomas Berry helps us to remember what it feels like to be connected to ‘the natural order of things’ . Carolyn Raffensberg turns this culture’s use of science on its head. Kathleen Dean Moore asks that most central of all questions: How shall I live my life? And Vine Deloria talks about the fundamental differences between western and indigenous ways of being.

I offer this book – these conversations with these and other authors – to strengthen readers’ necessary and often desperate resistance to this culture’s onslaught against all that is natural, all that is wild.

Information about Derrick Jensen’s books:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/published.html

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Warns Richard Heinberg at postcarbon.org

A perfect storm is brewing in the global food system, and North Americans and Europeans may not be spared this time.

Contributing factors:

The economic crash is still unfolding (no need for explanation here, just pick up any newspaper). It is inherently deflationary in nature because trillions of electronic dollars and euros are simply vanishing on a weekly basis. Efforts by central banks and the US Treasury to re-inflate the system are so far proving ineffective. This ultimately means less money in the pockets of consumers. If things go badly, it will mean NO money in the pockets of a great many would-be consumers.

Meanwhile input costs to farmers are at an all-time high, despite the recent fall in oil and natural gas prices. Moreover, farmers need loans in the course of their normal operations, and loans are hard to get now. That means many farmers just won’t plant as much as they ordinarily would. Many will decide they just can’t afford their hobby any more and go looking for work that actually pays.

On top of this we have the trends that have already led to high food prices in recent months—biofuels mandates, weather impacts (and crop failures) due to climate change, and higher transport costs for farm inputs and outputs.

Meanwhile, farmers’ incomes are not rising—just the opposite. Even though food prices are leading the inflation index, none of the expanding portion of the food dollar is finding its way into the pockets of the people who make the whole system go.

Michael Pollan’s excellent article in the most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine describes what we should be doing to avert a looming food crisis. Every nation and every state and region needs to be formulating a food plan along these lines.

Otherwise, we will be leaving our food system to the vagaries of the market, as we are doing with our energy system (see my previous commentary). The consequences are likely to be similar: less food to go around, extremely volatile prices, and farmers dropping out just when we need more of them.

The time available for the formulation and implementation of an effective policy response is very brief indeed.

Time to start planning next year’s garden.

Repeat: “The time available for the formulation and implementation of an effective policy response is very brief indeed”. If you arent already growing food, learning the skills of preserving etc, perhaps you really need to think about where your food comes from?

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