Dismantle Civilisation

This essay, taken from The Earth Blog, argues that humanity, and more specifically our individual selves, are what matters to us most of all and thus anything that threatens our survival is fundamentally bad. It’s a tough argument to make, largely because the values of those of us brought up in the civilized world have become so skewed towards whatever the capitalist economic system tells us is important. I don’t know it is possible to morally justify an “important” economic war or the systematic destruction of a life-supporting habitat in the name of “essential” growth, but since when did morals ever play a part in industrial progress?

I am about to make you feel uncomfortable. Sorry, but there’s no way of avoiding it if I’m going to tell this story as it should be told.

You are a human being; a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, although the second “sapiens” was only put there because we like to feel we are important. Remember that. There used to be other species within the genus “Homo” but they died out, or were possibly killed off, most recently a few thousand years ago when Homo neanderthalensis finally succumbed to the insurgent sapiens somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula.

On a smaller scale, you are a collection of major and minor organs, bony structures, muscles, ligaments, tubular networks, soft tissues and various other organic materials; all structured in such a way that you are capable of living in a vast range of habitats and climatic zones, under tremendous pressure from all sorts of predators and invaders, from large animals to minute single-celled organisms. Through an extraordinary evolutionary process, your constituent parts have developed to fill an optimally agile and self-regulating body such that they are able to function in tune with each other, symbiotically and independently as required, while you get on with the business of being a conscious and self-aware individual.

Each of these constituent parts are constructed from billions of cellular structures of various types which, if not part of your body, would be considered organisms in their own right: fragile, yes, but only because they have evolved to become at least partially dependent upon the whole of which they are a tiny part. Within each of your cells are components called mitochondria, which convert the raw materials of proteins – amino acids –into energy, which the cell uses to fulfil whatever function it is required to as part of the multi-cellular thing that is your body. This may involve fighting off viral invaders, absorbing nutrients from food, expelling waste from blood, moving in time with muscular activity or firing off a message to a neighbouring cell to recall an image of something that happened in your past.

Each of these mitochondria are specially adapted bacteria, that once independently existed, but at some point were “hijacked” by or may have taken up residence in, an animal cell that would, from then on, benefit from the energy produced by the mitochondria – the same cells that constitute an infinitesimally small part of a component of an individual human being, among something like 6.8 billion other human beings on Earth. 6.8 billion human beings that are utterly dependent upon the rest of the massive food web of which they (we) are just a tiny part.

You eat fish? The chances are that if you live in the Industrial West, your fish was a carnivore that ate other fish. If you live in China or Indonesia, it is more likely that your dinner was vegetarian, missing out a few links in the chain, and retaining a lot more of the food energy that came from the algae, or phytoplankton, that ultimately derived its energy from sun by virtue of the photosynthetic process that uses solar energy to split carbon molecules off from oxygen molecules, and create carbon structures that constitute the building blocks of life.

But, of course, it’s not only the animals or plants you eat (and that they may eat or utilise in the form of soil and “waste” products) that you are dependent upon, but the crucial role each of these organisms plays in the various natural processes that take place on Earth: regulation of the climatic-oceanic system; soil formation; water purification and enrichment; nutrient distribution…in the world we live in today we would not survive without all of these processes operating at a high level of efficiency. Interfere with these processes at a local level, and ecosystems can collapse; damage these processes at a global scale, and the entire biosphere is forced to readjust. With humans at the very top of the food chain, and so dependent upon everything else, we will be some of the first casualties of any global extinction.

Try and balance a pencil on its tip.

The Psychosis Of Civilization

This beautiful continuum, of which we are such a physically insignificant part, takes some imagining. The numbers are mind-numbing – individual nematodes alone stretch into the quintillions, and bacteria are many orders more numerous – as is the complexity of the ecological nets that link together different animals, plants, fungi and the countless other organisms that actually constitute the great majority of all life on Earth. We sit as a delicate flower waiting to be blown away in the next breeze of extinction; yet what do we see as the most important factor in our role as human beings?

Money.

As I have discussed on The Earth Blog previously, our values have become outrageously skewed in favour of whatever benefits the onward march of the global economy. We do not see the rise and fall of habitat viability on the television news, instead we see the rise and fall of the markets in the capital economy; we do not count specie extinctions in newspaper bar charts, but we urgently count companies going bust; we do not map the catastrophic breaks in the energy flows between different parts of an ecosystem, but we do acknowledge every time a budget airline discontinues a route, or whenever a main road has “severe” delays. As if it matters.

The psychosis of Industrial Civilization is endemic: every person that places his or her trust in the system of hierarchies, politics, markets and mass consumption, undergoes a fundamental readjustment in priorities. No longer does the fate of our species rest upon our increasingly precipitous position within the global ecology; we can all hold hands, actually or virtually, and celebrate the majesty of the global economic miracle, safe in the knowledge that it will take us forward into a glittering future of jobs, money and all the other civilised things we have been taught to desire.

How we have become so determined to destroy the continuum of life in search of something so utterly trivial, has its roots in the history of civilization. Every civilization has had its own goals, but ultimately they have all come down to one thing: the insatiable desire to progress in whatever way is dictated by the elite members at the very top. Such “progress” takes many forms, but whether it be exploration, scientific discovery, technological prowess, imperial power or simply the idea of being “the best”, civilizations have to feel they are progressing in some way; and so its subjects – the civilians – become part of that collective desire. For what are we if we don’t keep progressing? Failures. From our fear of failure, others above us draw their strength – just at the moment we seem to be reaching the end, and as we stretch out our fingertips, another line is drawn even further away. So we note the new goals and conform to the wishes of the system; continuing to do as we are told.

Through this psychotic behaviour, civilizations thrive…until they fail.

What Is Really Important

When I wrote the chapter called “Why Does It Matter?” in my book, Time’s Up! I felt rather uneasy; as though I hadn’t managed to explain myself properly. The problem was that, beyond the physical argument for the continuation of our DNA that I offered, there was also a complex and deeply-philosophical explanation that I also had which didn’t translate well into words. It was like a version of the argument that Descartes gave for the existence of God; to paraphrase: “I have within me a perfect and unequivocal representation of God; how could that be so if there were no God.” It’s a terrible argument, but it demonstrates well how a very good idea – which Descartes no doubt thought was perfect at the time – completely fails to work when written down.

I’m going to have another go.

So, how do you feel about your place in the world? Do you feel small, insignificant, worthless, just a tiny part of something far greater than yourself? This natural feeling of inferiority when you realise you are just a tiny part of a greater whole is the reason why medieval religious leaders were so resolute about our exulted position in the Great Chain of Being, just below the angels, but above all other forms of life – so long as you accepted that monarchs, priests and landowners were considerably more perfect than the rest of us.

It’s the same in the industrial economy: there is this global system that has enormous, if transient, power over the whole of existence; that governs every aspect of the lives of the civilised, but you don’t have to feel small, so long as you are told how important it is to go to school, get a job, go to the shopping mall or buy something online, follow the latest fashions, and cast your vote. You are empowered by your participation in these activities. It’s just that some people are more empowered than others.

But why on Earth do you need to be told how important you are? It speaks volumes about our state of mind when in order to feel worthwhile we have to, for instance, achieve good grades at school. We are all human beings, for goodness sake! Even more than that, we are what we are: our consciousness is bound up in our physical being, and everything we know and feel – everything we will ever be – is determined by our personal interaction with what is around us. We are at the centre of our personal universe; not in any selfish way, but simply because we can never truly perceive anything outside of our point of view.

Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, summed this up beautifully in his essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”:

After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

Substitute “human” for “bat” and it is obvious that human experience has to be a unique thing for humans and, by extension, for each individual human. That is why we are important; not because humans are essential to the global ecology or even because we are essential to the absurd construct we call Civilization, but because what matters, is what matters to us.

How could it be any other way?

Think about this for a short while and it becomes clear that the civilised world’s destruction of the natural environment cannot under any circumstances be acceptable, for it will endanger the one thing which matters above all else: ourselves.

Decision Time

You have to make a choice. Are you going to continue supporting and extending the global reign of Industrial Civilization; or are you going to once again learn to value yourself as the centre of your universe, and the only thing that really matters?

To me that choice is remarkably easy, but you might take some persuading, not only because of the insidious hold that the civilised world has upon everything we do, but because you are possibly thinking that I have left something out – the other things that also matter dearly to you. Fear not; this is what I wrote in Time’s Up!

More than just our natural tendency to survive, though, is the manifestation of that survival instinct in the way we think. Consider the question: What would you risk your life to save? My initial instinct is to say ‘my family’, then ‘me’, then, with a little more thought, ‘the Earth in general’ and ‘my friends’. Remove the Earth from the equation and you have the kind of answer that most people give.

In fact, all three typical responses are directly related to the natural instinct for survival. We instinctively want to protect our families in order to secure the continuation of our DNA through blood relatives and the people they depend upon to survive. We want to protect ourselves in order to protect our own DNA, and the opportunity for that to be further replicated. We want to protect our friends because they too are human beings, but not only that, we have consciously chosen our closest friends because of what they have in common with us – they are almost like family.

I have said that I was not entirely happy with the strength of reasoning I gave in the book, but with the addition of the philosophical argument to the obvious need to replicate our DNA – the survival imperative – then we can all be justified in wanting not only to protect ourselves, but also our families and those other people we really care about and need: the community.

Community is the antithesis of civilization for civilization thrives on the division of humanity into tiny, atomised, competing parts; but community is the form in which humans have always survived best. The choice is simple now: Civilization or Community; Progress or Humanity; Death or Life.

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www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com

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David MacKay’s book, can be read on-line.
Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

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Gene Logsdon at OrganicToBe. The long-awaited, and much-anticipated 2nd Edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers
is now available.

No sooner had the news come out that rice stocks worldwide were at an all time modern low, and that the price of wheat had hit historic highs, when I started getting calls and letters from all over. Modern homesteaders wanted to know where they could get a copy of my old book, Small Scale Grain Raising.

It is gratifying to know there are still Americans who, instead of wringing their hands at a possible problem headed their way, start figuring what to do about it. I only wish I had some copies of that book left. It was published in 1977 and was as high as $300 a crack on the Internet. But I am happy to report that a new edition is now available.

I don’t really know if the high grain prices have anything to do with renewed interest in that book. What seems to me more likely is that self-reliant people are taking a look at what is happening in our financial world and wondering if it is time to plow up the backyard or that old horse lot and plant some food.

In my little world of writing books about rural life and culture, this is all the talk right now, as it was in 1973, 1982, and 1995 when the economy did “readjustments” like it is doing now, only not quite so profoundly. (In an economy ruled by interest on “pretend” money, as I call it, about every ten years there has to be a shakeup to bring the dreamers of riches, floating around in their bubbles, back down to earth again.) The idea of growing and threshing out several bushels of wheat (a bushel makes about 50-60 loaves of bread) in the backyard makes sense to self-reliant people. It isn’t really that difficult to do.

My wife and I first tried it in the late 1960s when living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, just for fun. We scythed the wheat we grew in our backyard, made bundles of it, shocked up the bundles and when the grain was dry we beat the bundles on a bed sheet with plastic ball bats, threshing out the grain. The kids thought it was great fun. We winnowed out the chaff by pouring the grain slowly from one bucket to another in front of a window fan.

That experience became the genesis of the book mentioned above, though at the time that wasn’t in my plans. I grew the wheat in the first place to feed to our chickens. I would just throw a bundle into the henhouse every day and the chickens would do the threshing, leaving the straw for bedding. It was only as a sort of afterthought that Carol decided to try to bake bread with it. She milled the grain in her blender, but that was very slow, so eventually, we got a hand-cranked mill which we still use today. I haven’t grown wheat for a few years now, having kindly farm neighbors who will sell us a few bushels out of their combine harvester.

A fellow small-scale farmer, Tim Moreland in Oregon, recently sent me a picture of his amazing way to harvest oats for his livestock. When it is nearly ripe, he cuts and windrows it like hay, then when it is suitably dry, forks it into huge sacks he found locally, suspending the sacks, one at a time, from the prongs of his front end loader (see photo). His whole family helps in the forking, which is another reason why we small-scale farmers do such crazy things. They involve the whole family. He then hauls the oat “hay” to the barn and feeds it to the livestock in winter or when pastures are short. The animals eat the grain and most of the straw as roughage.

I can remember when wheat was still ground into flour in mills in our county. It just beats me that in places burgeoning with grain like this area, that those local mills could not remain profitable. Did people just quit baking at home in the 1950s? Looks to me like home bread-making is on the rise (oh those puns) again, especially now with all the new kitchen flour mills and bread-makers available.

If you type “local flour mills” into your search engine. I think you will be surprised. There’s quite a few of them all over the U.S. and Canada. While the political pundits and the banking bandits wring their hands and steal our money and then promote rather tasteless mass-produced bread at over two dollars a loaf, there’s still a “grain” of contrariness in many Americans. That’s how we’ve survived so far.

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Interview with Matthew Stein, P.E., author of When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability and Surviving the Long Emergency, originally posted at Alternet.

Taylor Haynes: A lot of people are now really concerned — or even hopeless — about the state of the world and what our future holds. Peak oil and climate change, the global food crisis, the war in Iraq, a weak economy and a number of recent devastating natural disasters give us real reason for concern, but many of those things weren’t even on the radar — or were, but to a lesser extent — when When Technology Fails was published in 2000. What was your original intent in writing the book?

Matthew Stein: My original intention was to provide a practical handbook to help people to plan for, and deal with, the difficulties that most of us will face as we pass the peak in global oil production and experience the consequences of escalating ecological decline exacerbated by catastrophic climate change. It is my hope that many millions of people will wake up to the realization that making the shift to sustainability is a matter of economic and ecological survival. If enough people awaken to this understanding, we will be able to force our governments into making the radical changes that are needed to change our course and avert economic, social and ecological collapse.

TH: You write, “Emergency preparedness isn’t about a bunch of survivalists crawling around in the woods, preparing to fight off the starving hordes in some grim post-9/11 apocalyptic fantasy.” That stereotype does exist, but given a rising level of alarm, do you think more middle-of-the-road folks are beginning to think about emergency preparedness?

MS: My book is quite unusual in that it appeals to eco-green types, survivalists and all the average folks in between who simply want to be able to help their friends and families in times of emergency. Emergency preparedness is kind of like car insurance — you hope you never need it, but when a real emergency does arise, you thank God that you had the foresight to spend a few dollars and a few hours of your time on basic preparedness supplies and planning.

TH: When Technology Fails is — at its root — a comprehensive handbook of survival skills. Those skills range from building an emergency shelter and purifying water to foraging for food and dealing with medical situations at home. Obviously the future is uncertain, but can you give us a list of your Top 10 most crucial survival skills?

MS: OK. Here’s 10:

1. Be Prepared: I strongly suggest that everyone put together a basic 72-hour “grab-and-run” survival kit (see page 51 for full list of items). This kit should cover the basic food, water and survival needs for you and your family for at least the critical first three days after a disaster. Most of us could survive for a month without food, but a single day without water in extreme heat is enough to kill a person.
2. Develop Your Intuition: Most survivors credit their instincts and “gut feel” with saving their lives. Natural selection has bred the most incredible survival mechanism into man. It is called “intuition,” and primitive man has relied upon it for untold millennia to help him to make life-and-death decisions in a split second.
3. Disaster Plan: See the Short-Term Preparedness Checklist on page 50. Discuss a plan with your family for communicating and responding to a disaster when phone lines may be dead (select a predetermined local meeting area and out-of-town contact; know how to shut off your home’s gas and electricity supply, etc.).
4. Learn First Aid: In the back country, as well as in most natural or man-made disasters, knowing fist aid (including CPR) saves lives.
5. Go Camping and Backpacking: Most people have not camped or backpacked since they were a kid, or perhaps never at all. If you are in this category, start with some car camping for a few weekends. I suggest you get comfortable with car camping before graduating to overnight backpacking trips. Backpacking will accustom your body to hiking several miles at a time and carrying whatever you need yourself.
6. Know How To Start a Fire: Being able to build a fire is important for cooking, purifying water, preventing hypothermia in cold climates, keeping wild animals away at night (in some areas) and signaling potential rescuers. Starting on page 76, my book gives illustrated instructions for building fires including: starting a fire with matches; using a flint-and-steel; starting a fire with a primitive fire drill; using a “fire plough;” etc.
7. Learn How To Find and Purify Water: Unless you are in a cold climate, a single day without water will make you quite miserable, and three days could kill you. Bees and birds can lead you to sources of fresh surface water. A primitive solar still can collect enough water for survival from plants and ground moisture.
8. Survivor Personality: Developing the mental traits of the “survivor personality” will help you to navigate and thrive in spite of life’s challenges. The best survivors are flexible, tend to keep their cool in stressful situations, don’t give up, have a playful curiosity, have a good sense of humor, don’t tend to “cry over spilled milk,” follow their “gut feelings” and are often “bad patients” and poor rule followers.
9. Learn the “Plant Edibility Test”: Most people will not happen to have a guide to wild edible plants on hand when they are thrust into a survival situation. If you know how to perform the “Plant Edibility Test” (see page 81), you will always have a safe way to test local plants for potential edibility.
10. Learn How To Make a Primitive Shelter: Learn how to make a “Scout Pit,” “Squirrel’s Nest,” snow cave and other primitive shelters. In severe weather, a shelter could save your life, and at other times it will make your life far more comfortable.

TH: Has your life ever depended on any of the skills in this book?

MS: Yes, on a number of occasions. I used to enjoy taking solo back-country trips through the high Sierra in the dead of winter, which required several of these skills. From extreme skiing, to rock climbing and mountaineering, to surviving avalanches, several times my body has reacted perfectly to potentially deadly situations faster than my mind could think of the proper thing to do. I have also used the “Pit of the Stomach” method to help me make a few critical decisions. I once kept the airway open for a woman who had fractured her skull in a mountain biking accident. She was gurgling and choking on blood, and may have suffocated before the ambulance arrived had I not intervened.

TH: At one time — and not really that long ago — it was considered impractical for a middle-class college kid to want to learn to farm, whereas learning computer skills was seen as critical for a young person’s future. Do you think ideas about what is practical and impractical — good versus not-so-good investments for the future — are changing at all?

MS: The truth is that if technology fails in a big way, your ability to do things with your hands, like grow food, make a shelter and heal people without high-tech pharmaceuticals, will be quite valuable. Your ability to work well with others, and to be well liked and personable, will also be quite valuable. The lone wolf will face a miserably lonely existence and will be easy pickings for someone who is tougher, has more buddies and is better armed. Strength will be in tight-knit communities with a shared pool of resources and skills cemented by strong personal bonds.

TH: You write that you doubt we will see technology fail completely. What do you think will fail and — if you don’t mind indulging your imagination — how do you think it will happen?

MS: If we don’t proactively develop carbon-neutral alternatives to both oil and our current ways of burning coal for making electricity and cement, I believe that the dual threats of climate change and economic collapse will take our society down. We are already seeing huge economic repercussions from the past year’s record-breaking oil prices, and I believe that this is just the beginning, because even though the world’s output of traditional crude oil has been dropping for the past few years, this drop has been offset by increases in production from tar sands and biofuels, which are much harder to process than good old “sweet crude” oil.

In the next year or two, it appears that the declines in traditional oil will accelerate and the gains in biofuels and tar sands will not be able to keep up with these declines. Adding to this problem is the fact that India and China’s rapid industrialization is increasing their appetites for oil at a rate of about 10 percent per year. The world’s declining oil fields just won’t be able to keep up with the demand for oil, so unless we hurry to develop and implement the technologies to get us off the oil and coal habit (burning coal contributes nearly twice as much greenhouse gasses per unit of energy as does burning oil), then our economies will collapse under the strain of escalating fuel prices exacerbated by horrendous global calamities due to climate change.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba’s supply line to foreign oil, consumer goods and spare parts evaporated. Most Cubans lost at least 20 pounds of weight, agriculture switched from oil- and chemical-intensive methods to organic methods, and natural healing replaced most pharmaceuticals. Most people’s lives went on fairly well, so Cuba is a good example for how to make the best of a bad situation.

On the other hand, as a result of the same Soviet Union collapse, the lights and the heat went out for most North Koreans, and many millions of people starved or froze to death in the harsh North Korean winters.

So, do we proactively do our best to minimize the pain of our transition from “business as usual” and a fossil fuel based economy to a sustainable way of life, or do we just try to pump the oil faster, net the last remaining fish in the sea as quickly as possible, and cut down the last rain forests so we can maintain the illusion of a good bottom line for as long as possible before the depleted natural systems collapse all around us while we go out with a bang?

TH: So, uh, what happens when our iPods won’t work?

MS: We may have to learn how to sing, play banjos and gather round the camp fire to entertain ourselves, much like our ancestors did.

TH: Are there positive aspects of technological failure?

MS: In general, technology failures usually bring out the best in people. When the Cypress Freeway collapsed in Oakland, Calif., during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, homeless people became heroes risking their lives to crawl under tons of debris and pull survivors from their wrecked vehicles. I think the heroes in New Orleans outnumbered the looters and rapists by at least 20-to-1. Local catastrophes usually nurture a strong sense of community and the desire to serve others unselfishly.

If technology collapses totally, we will probably take many of the earth’s ecosystems down with us in our final efforts to keep business-as-usual running, but my guess is that most humans will die off after the collapse of technology, and then nature will rebound quite well within a couple hundred years. Good news for nature — bad news for us!

TH: OK, this is my last question and I’m sorry, but I can’t not ask you. Remember Y2K? Is it possible that you’re advocating preparedness for scenarios that will never happen, except in the case of localized natural disasters? Is there any part of you that thinks that, actually, for the most part things will be just fine, and mostly we’ll just keep on keeping on in the future pretty much the way we’ve kept on keeping on until now?

MS: No. I never thought that Y2K would amount to much since it was all about a silly little computer glitch, and the private sector had too much at stake to not implement some relatively simple software fixes. This was a simple problem with a simple solution.

On the other hand, oil depletion, climate change, overpopulation and global ecological degradation are trends that have been foreseen by scientists for many years. These are real problems with difficult solutions. The implementation of these solutions will take major financial, resource and time commitments, coupled with huge shifts in public policies. Just because our scientists know this is happening does not mean we will be successful in changing our course and implementing the right solutions.

Take a look at New Orleans. For over 50 years, engineers had been warning politicians that the levies needed replacing. They warned that there was no way that the city’s levies could withstand a direct hit from a storm like the hurricane that flattened the city of Galveston [Texas] in 1900, killing an estimated 8,000 people.

Some people might ask, “Mankind has been on this planet for many thousands of years, so how could things get so bad so quickly?” The answer lies with global population growth exacerbated by rapid industrialization and consumption that has effectively multiplied the effects of population growth many times over.

From the time when I was a kid in the 1960s and the Earth’s population was 3 billion, it took only 40 more years for the planet to double again to reach a population of roughly 6 billion in the year 2000. It has been scientifically estimated that the global footprint of mankind exceeded the Earth’s biocapacity in the mid-1980s, and that since that time we have been operating in an “overshoot” mode, meaning that we are consuming the planet’s resources faster than they are regenerating.

Any scientist will agree that the continuation of this pattern is 100 percent guaranteed to result in collapse. So, if we do not change the way we do business on our planet, we will collapse and business will fail! Back in the mid 1800s, many millions of people decided that slavery was an evil whose time had passed, and they put Lincoln in power to end it. The world never would have defeated Hitler if it was No. 10 on the priority list.

“Making the Shift to Sustainability” will not be easy, but it is doable, and it is much better than the alternative. Shouldn’t saving the planet be at the top of our world’s priority list?

When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability and Surviving the Long Emergency

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Prologue excerpted from the book American Holocaust
by David Stannard.

In the darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New Mexico desert named after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy Trinity, the first atomic bomb was exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by the thunderous roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he said, were silent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line from the Bhagavad-Gita:
“I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”
There is no reason to think that anyone on board the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, on an equally dark early morning four and a half centuries earlier, thought of those ominous lines from the ancient Sanskrit poem when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the windward side of the island they would name after the Holy Saviour. But the intuition, had it occurred, would have been as appropriate then as it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the New Mexico desert sands.
In both instances-at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in 1492-those moments of achievement crowned years of intense personal struggle and adventure for their protagonists and were culminating points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries. But both instances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness that, each in its own way, attained a scale of devastation not previously witnessed in the entire history of the world.
Just twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people-at least 130,000, probably many more-died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had re-named Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people-those Columbus chose to call Indians-had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only the beginning.
Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples had been exterminated. The pace and magnitude of their obliteration varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. What this means is that, on average, for every twenty natives alive at the moment of European contact-when the lands of the Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people-only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was over.
To put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.
Scholarly estimates of the size of the post-Columbian holocaust have climbed sharply in recent decades. Too often, however, academic discussions of this ghastly event have reduced the devastated indigenous peoples and their cultures to statistical calculations in recondite demographic analyses. It is easy for this to happen. From the very beginning, merely taking the account of so mammoth a cataclysm seemed an impossible task. Wrote one Spanish adventurer-who arrived in the New World only two decades after Columbus’s first landing, and who himself openly reveled in the torrent of native blood-there was neither “paper nor time enough to tell all that the [conquistadors] did to ruin the Indians and rob them and destroy the land.” As a result, the very effort to describe the disaster’s overwhelming magnitude has tended to obliterate both the writer’s and the reader’s sense of its truly horrific human element.
In an apparent effort to counteract this tendency, one writer, Tzvetan Todorov, begins his study of the events of 1492 and immediately thereafter with an epigraph from Diego de Landa’s Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan:
The captain Alonso Lopez de Avila, brother-in-law of the adelantado Montejo, captured, during the war in Bacalan, a young Indian woman of lovely and gracious appearance. She had promised her husband, fearful lest they should kill him in the war, not to have relations with any other man but him, and so no persuasion was sufficient to prevent her from taking her own life to avoid being defiled by another man; and because of this they had her thrown to the dogs.
Todorov then dedicates his book “to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.”
It is important to try to hold in mind an image of that woman, and her brothers and sisters and the innumerable others who suffered similar fates, as one reads Todorov’s book, or this one, or any other work on this subject-just as it is essential, as one reads about the Jewish Holocaust or the horrors of the African slave trade, to keep in mind the treasure of a single life in order to avoid becoming emotionally anesthetized by the sheer force of such overwhelming human evil and destruction. There is, for example, the case of a small Indian boy whose name no one knows today, and whose unmarked skeletal remains are hopelessly intermingled with those of hundreds of anonymous others in a mass grave on the American plains, but a boy who once played on the banks of a quiet creek in eastern Colorado-until the morning, in 1864, when the American soldiers came. Then, as one of the cavalrymen later told it, while his compatriots were slaughtering and mutilating the bodies of all the women and all the children they could catch, he spotted the boy trying to flee:
There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire-he missed the child. Another man came up and said, “Let me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.” He got down off his horse, kneeled down and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.
We must do what we can to recapture and to try to understand, in human terms, what it was that was crushed, what it was that was butchered It is not enough merely to acknowledge that much was lost. So close to total was the human incineration and carnage in the post-Columbian Americas, however, that of the tens of millions who were killed, few individual lives left sufficient traces for subsequent biographical representation…
***
Moreover, the important question for the future in this case is not “can it happen again?” Rather, it is “can it be stopped?” For the genocide in the Americas, and in other places where the world’s indigenous peoples survive, has never really ceased. As recently as 1986, the Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States observed that 40,000 people had simply “disappeared” in Guatemala during the preceding fifteen years. Another 100,000 had been openly murdered. That is the equivalent, in the United States, of more than 4,000,000 people slaughtered or removed under official government decree-a figure that is almost six times the number of American battle deaths in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.’
Almost all those dead and disappeared were Indians, direct descendants-as was that woman who was devoured by dogs-of the Mayas, creators of one of the most splendid civilizations that this earth has ever seen. Today, as five centuries ago, these people are being tortured and slaughtered, their homes and villages bombed and razed-while more than two-thirds of their rain forest homelands have now been intentionally burned and scraped into ruin.’ The murder and destruction continue, with the aid and assistance of the United States, even as these words are being written and read. And many of the detailed accounts from contemporary observers read much like those recorded by the conquistadors’ chroniclers nearly 500 years earlier.
“Children, two years, four years old, they just grabbed them and tore them in two,” reports one witness to a military massacre of Indians in Guatemala in 1982. Recalls another victim of an even more recent assault on an Indian encampment:
With tourniquets they killed the children, of two years, of nine months, of six months. They killed and burned them all…. What they did [to my
father] was put a machete in here (pointing to his chest) and they cut open his heart, and they left him all burned up. This is the pain we shall never forget … Better to die here with a bullet and not die in that way, like my father did.”
Adds still another report, from a list of examples seemingly without end:
At about 1:00 p.m., the soldiers began to fire at the women inside the small church. The majority did not die there, but were separated from their children, taken to their homes in groups, and killed, the majority apparently with machetes…. Then they returned to kill the children, whom they had left crying and screaming by themselves, without their mothers. Our informants, who were locked up in the courthouse, could see this through a hole in the window and through the doors carelessly left open by a guard. The soldiers cut open the children’s stomachs with knives or they grabbed the children’s little legs and smashed their heads with heavy sticks…. Then they continued with the men. They took them out, tied their hands, threw them on the ground, and shot them. The authorities of the area were killed inside the courthouse…. It was then that the survivors were able to escape, protected by the smoke of the fire which had been set to the building. Seven men, three of whom survived, managed to escape. It was 5:30 p.m..

In all, 352 Indians were killed in this massacre, at a time when 440 towns were being entirely destroyed by government troops, when almost 10,000 unarmed people were being killed or made to “disappear” annually, and when more than 1,000,000 of Guatemala’s approximately 4,000,000 natives were being displaced by the deliberate burning and wasting of their ancestral lands. During such episodes of mass butchery, some children escape; only their parents and grandparents are killed. That is why it was reported in Guatemala in 1985 that “116,000 orphans had been tabulated by the judicial branch census throughout the country, the vast majority of them in the Indian townships of the western and central highlands.”

Reminders are all around us, if we care to look, that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century extermination of the indigenous people of Hispaniola, brought on by European military assault and the importation of exotic diseases, was in part only an enormous prelude to human catastrophes that followed on other killing grounds, and continue to occur today-from the forests of Brazil and Paraguay and elsewhere in South and Central America, where direct government violence still slaughters thousands of Indian people year in and year out, to the reservations and urban slums of North America, where more sophisticated indirect government violence has precisely the same effect-all the while that Westerners engage in exultation over the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America, the time and the place where all the killing began.

Other reminders surround us, as well, however, that there continues among indigenous peoples today the echo of their fifteenth and sixteenth century opposition to annihilation, when, despite the wanton killing by the European invaders and the carnage that followed the introduction of explosive disease epidemics, the natives resisted with an intensity the conquistadors found difficult to believe. “I do not know how to describe it,” wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo of the defiance the Spanish encountered in Mexico, despite the wasting of the native population by bloodbath and torture and disease, “for neither cannon nor muskets nor crossbows availed, nor hand-to-hand fighting, nor killing thirty or forty of them every time we charged, for they still fought on in as close ranks and with more energy than in the beginning.”

Five centuries later that resistance remains, in various forms, throughout North and South and Central America, as it does among indigenous peoples in other lands that have suffered from the Westerners’ furious wrath. Compared with what they once were, the native peoples in most of these places are only remnants now. But also in each of those places, and in many more, the struggle for physical and cultural survival, and for recovery of a deserved pride and autonomy, continues unabated.

All the ongoing violence against the world’s indigenous peoples, in whatever form-as well as the native peoples’ various forms of resistance to that violence-will persist beyond our full understanding, however, and beyond our ability to engage and humanely come to grips with it, until we are able to comprehend the magnitude and the causes of the human destruction that virtually consumed the people of the Americas and other people in other subsequently colonized parts of the globe, beginning with Columbus’s early morning sighting of landfall on October 12, 1492. That was the start of it all. This book is offered as one contribution to our necessary comprehension.

We would suggest that 1492 was not the start, but that civilisation by its very nature needs war and oppression, murder and theft of resources to exist and grow. Right from the start it has been a system of expansion and domination, competition and environmental devastation.

We are now reaching its endgame, where we either watch things get more and more difficult and desolate, trying to maintain privileges and the economy as it is, or we look to the indigenous of the world, those who all too often have suffered the most from the ravages of our dreadful behaviour. We should admit our wrongs, and those of our ancestors, recognise the magnitude of those wrongs, the evil that has been done in the name of civilisation, and humbly seek forgiveness from indigenous peoples and the rest of creation, and commence trying to set things right wherever possible.

Perhaps we might be able to relearn how we should live together on this fragile planet, and learn from our brothers and sisters who continued to live close to the earth, while we civilised turned our backs on her, thinking ourselves invincible and god-like, skills and wisdoms that might make the difference between life and death for many of us.

It is indeed time to put things right, on many levels.

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Excerpt from The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.

Imagine sitting down to a salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes that you grew yourself. Or a Sunday omelet of eggs laid that morning, served with a thick slice of fresh sourdough, butter and apricot jam — all homemade, of course. Or imagine toasting your friends with a mead made from local honey. Where would you have to move to live like this? A commune in Vermont? A villa in Italy?

My husband Erik and I have done all of this in our little bungalow in Los Angeles, two blocks off of Sunset Boulevard. We grow food and preserve it, recycle water, forage the neighborhood, and build community. We’re urban homesteaders.

Though we have fantasies about one day moving to the country, the city holds things that are more important to us than any parcel of open land. We have friends and family here, great neighbors, and all the cultural amenities and stimulation of a city. It made more sense for us to become self-reliant in our urban environment. There was no need for us to wait to become farmers. We grow plenty of food in our backyard in Echo Park and even raise chickens. Once you taste lettuce that actually has a distinct flavor, or eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again. Our next step down the homesteading path was learning to use the old home arts to preserve what we grew: pickling, fermenting, drying and brewing. A jar of jam that you make of wild blackberries holds memories of the summer, and not the air of the Smucker’s factory.

When you grow some of your own food, you start to care more about all of your food. “Just where did this come from?” we’d find ourselves asking when we went shopping. What’s in it? At the same time, we began to learn about cultured and fermented foods, which have beneficial bacteria in them. Few of these wonder-foods are available in stores. The supermarket started to look like a wasteland.

A little history

The idea of urban farming is nothing new. Back in the days before freeways and refrigerated trucks, cities depended on urban farmers for the majority of their fresh food. This included small farms around the city, as well as kitchen gardens. Even today, there are places that hold to this tradition. The citizens of Shanghai produce 85% of their vegetables within the city, and that’s just one example of a long Asian tradition of intense urban gardening. Or consider Cuba. Cubans practiced centralized, industrial agriculture, just as we do, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Overnight, Cubans were forced to shift from a large, petroleum-based system to small-scale farming, much of it in cities. Today, urban organic gardens produce half of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Cubans.

The United States once was a nation of independent farmers. Today most of us do not know one end of a hoe from the other. In the last half of the 20th century, a cultural shift unique in human history came to pass. We convinced ourselves that we didn’t need to have anything to do with our own food. Food, the very stuff of life, became just another commodity, an anonymous transaction. In making this transition, we sacrificed quality for convenience, and then we learned to forget the value of what we gave up.

Large agribusiness concerns offer us flavorless, genetically modified, irradiated, pesticide-drenched frankenvegetables. They are grown in such poor soil — the result of short-sighted profit-based agricultural practices — that they actually contain fewer nutrients than food grown in healthy soil. Our packaged foods are nutritionally bankrupt, and our livestock is raised in squalid conditions. The fact is that we live in an appalling time when it comes to food. True, we have a great abundance of inexpensive food in supermarkets, but the disturbing truth is that in terms of flavor, quality and nutrition, our greatgrandparents ate better than we do.

There is a hidden cost behind our increasingly costly supermarket food. The French have a term, malbouffe, referring to junk food, but with broader, more sinister implications. Radical farmer José Bové, who was imprisoned for dismantling a McDonald’s restaurant, explains the concept of malbouffe:

I initially used the word ‘shit-food’, but quickly changed it to malbouffe to avoid giving offense. The word just clicked — perhaps because when you’re dealing with food, quite apart from any health concerns, you’re also dealing with taste and what we feed ourselves with. Malbouffe implies eating any old thing, prepared in any old way. For me, the term means both the standardization of food like McDonald’s — the same taste from one end of the world to the other — and the choice of food associated with the use of hormones and Genetically Modified Organisms as well as the residues of pesticides and other things that can endanger health. — The World is Not for Sale by José Bové and Franois Dufour

So what are the strategies urban homesteaders can follow to avoid malbouffe? Farmers’ markets, co-ops and natural food stores serve as good supplements to the urban homestead, but we’ve found that growing our own food, even just a little of it, rather than buying it, not only results in better quality food, it has changed our fundamental relationship to food and to the act of eating itself. Now, now not only do we know our crops are free of pesticides and GMOs but we discovered an entirely new world of taste and flavor that big agribusiness had stolen away from us. Growing your own food is an act of resistance. We can all join with José Bové in dismantling the corporations that feed us shit.

We’ve also shifted from being consumers to being producers. Sure we still buy stuff. Olive oil. Parmigiano reggiano. Wine. Flour. Chocolate. And we’re no strangers to consumer culture, not above experiencing a little shiver of desire when walking into an Apple computer store. But still, we do not accept that spending is our only form of power. There is more power in creating than in spending. We are producers, neighbors, and friends. Think you don’t have enough land to grow your food?

Change the way you see land.

Before you start thinking that you have to move somewhere else to grow your own food, take another look around. With a couple of notable exceptions, American cities sprawl. They are full of wasted space. As a homesteader, you will begin to see any open space as a place to grow food. This includes front yards as well as backyards, vacant lots, parkways, alleyways, patios, balconies, window boxes, fire escapes and rooftops. Once you break out of the mental box that makes you imagine a vegetable garden as a fenced-off parcel of land with a scarecrow in it, you’ll start to see the possibilities. Think jungle, not prairie. The truth is that you can grow a hell of a lot of food on a small amount of real estate. You can grow food whether you’re in an apartment or a house, whether you rent or own.

Do you have 4′ ? 8′ feet of open ground? If you don’t have a yard, do you have room on a patio or balcony for two or three plastic storage tubs? If you don’t have that, then you could get a space in a community garden, a relative or neighbor’s house, or become a pirate gardener, or an expert forager — some of the tastiest greens and berries are wild and free for the taking.

Think you don’t have time? Think again.

We homestead at our own pace, to suit ourselves. Some things, like bread baking, have become part of our regular routine. Other kitchen experiments, like making pickles, come and go as time allows. More ambitious projects, like installing a greywater system, take time up front, but save time once implemented. It’s unlikely that we spend any more time on our food-producing yard than we would on a traditional lawn-and-roses-type yard. You can set up your urban (or suburban) farm so that it takes minimal time to keep it going — we talk about ways to do that in this book.

Sometimes, when life gets too crazy, we don’t do anything beyond the barest maintenance, and eat a lot of pizza. Nothing wrong with that.

Besides saving time, with the exception of a few ambitious projects, like converting to solar, everything we talk about in this book is also cost-effective. Homesteading is all about reusing, recycling, foraging and building things yourself. Seeds are cheap, composting is free. Nature is standing by, waiting to help. And as oil prices continue to rise along with the cost of food, learning to grow your own may be one of the wisest investments you can make.

The paradigm shift

Urban homesteading is an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life. When you spend a Saturday morning making a loaf of bread, or go out on a summer evening after work to sit with your chickens, or take a deep breath of fresh-cut basil, you unplug yourself from the madness. Many of us spend a lot of each day in front of a computer. Homesteading hooks us into the natural world and the passing of the seasons, and reminds us of our place within the greater cycle of life.

Our style of homesteading is about desire. We bake our own bread because it is better than what we can buy. We raise our own hens because we like chickens, and we think their eggs are worth the trouble. Erik bicycles everywhere because that’s a thrill for him. There’s mead brewing in our guest bedroom because you can’t buy mead at the corner liquor store — and because fermentation is the closest thing to magic that we know.

Maybe you aren’t so into gardening, but would like to brew your own beer. Maybe you’d like to tinker with a greywater system for your house. Maybe you want to make your own non-toxic cleaning products. Try it! Start by doing just one project, one experiment, and you may well unleash the homesteader within.

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By Ron Jacobs, at CounterPunch.

Since it became clear that the intention of Israel’s latest military assault on Gaza is to destroy Hamas, various newspapers in the US have printed opinion pieces echoing the Washington line that it is Hamas’ fault that Gaza is being pummeled by Israeli warplanes. Now, there may be some things one can blame Hamas for, but firing missiles at people and buildings in Gaza from Israeli warplanes is not one of them. It has been the desire of Tel Aviv and Washington to eradicate Hamas as a political force for a long time. The military Israeli assault currently going on is but the latest installment in fulfilling that desire.

Just prior to the assault there was a Israeli-enforced blockade on Gaza. This blockade prevented necessary goods from reaching the people living there. There was also an Israeli incursion in November that was the culmination of a series of border clashes between Israel and Palestinian gunmen. These clashes resulted in the deaths of at least 16 Palestinians. Of course, these occurrences were but a continuation of the low-intensity conflict between Hamas and Israel that in themselves are but a part of the conflict between Israel and Palestine that has continued since 1948. Hamas is but the most recent organization to represent the militant wing of the Palestinian resistance and, therefore be at the receiving end of Israel’s most violent responses. At this point in history if Hamas did not resist, there would be no resistance to Tel Aviv’s plans to render the Palestinians completely irrelevant in their own land. Most Palestinians understand this and are understandably angry at the current campaign in Gaza, no matter which political faction has their allegiance.

Despite the constant presence of Hamas in the news of the western world, most people reading that news know very little about the group. Back in 2006 journalist Khaled Hroub wrote a clear, concise and informative guide to Hamas. Simply titled Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide the author utilizes a question and answer format to explain the politics and tactics of Hamas, their relationship to and with other Palestinian organizations, Israel and the rest of the world Hroub, a Palestinian supporter of a secular and independent Palestinian state, also examines the role of religion in Hamas’ internal and external politics, as well as the group’s opinion of democracy and theocracy.

The picture presented in these pages is certain to hold some surprises for its English readers. Having been fed anti-Palestinian propaganda for years, the Hamas described here is of a group that understands its religious desires are not what garnered it enough support to win the aforementioned elections. Although Hroub never denies that there are those in Hamas that would like to impose an Islamic state in a free Palestine, his text proves that this is but one element of the Hams organization. Indeed, the organization described in these pages is an organization that listens to its members and, even more importantly, listens to those it wants to represent — the Palestinian people. Given this, Hamas proves to be a surprisingly democratic organization with a degree of political understanding rarely attributed to an Arab or Muslim organization. It is Hroub’s contention that the results of the January 2005 election that gave Hamas a solid majority not only substantiates Hamas’ claim that their positions on the essentially dead Oslo Agreements and the Israeli occupation of Palestine are the predominant positions of the Palestinian people, the aftermath of their victory has also shown that Hamas understands that it is its role as an agent of national liberation (and not its religious agenda) that has the support of the Palestinian majority. In the same way that the Israeli failure to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon, the current assault will most likely only strengthen this support should Hamas merely remain intact as an organization once the attacks are over.

As the attack continues in Gaza one wonders if Hamas will respond with a campaign that includes suicide bombings. These grisly news events are examined in Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide. Hroub traces their beginnings to the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshipers by Baruch Goldstein in a Hebron mosque. While acknowledging that suicide attacks have cost the Palestinian movement dearly in some quarters of the world, Hroub explains (without endorsing) the Hamas position on these attacks as tactically necessary. At the same time, he notes that Hamas targets only Israeli citizens and soldiers in the Territories and Israel itself. Although this may not be much solace to the western reader, the fact is, as Hroub tries to make clear throughout the book, Hamas considers the Israelis and Palestinians to be in a state of war. Consequently, the tactics of war are what rules Hamas’ military actions.

The intention of Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide is not to gloss over the harsh realities of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Nor is it the book’s intention to portray Hamas — an important part of that struggle — as a group without imperfections that sometimes engages in reprehensible tactics. This book will certainly not satisfy those whose notion of Hamas is framed solely by the US and Israeli characterization of the group as terrorists. However, for the average reader interested in trying to understand the group’s motivations, philosophy, and plans, Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide is an essential starting point. Furthermore, it might allow those an understanding as to why Israel’s expressed hope to eradicate Hamas and bargain with the Palestinian Authority for a Tel Aviv-Washington imposed peace will most likely fail. Bare of propaganda either for or against the group, this text is the most fair-minded and balanced piece of literature on Hamas in the English language.

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This article by Charles Eisenstein, at RealitySandwich.com, gives a very simple explanation of money as debt & how money works, the crisis we face explained as ‘we are running out of things to monetise’ & how informal-economy activity will hasten the collapse but also minimise some of the negative impact of that inevitable collapse. A great article explaining how civilisation has, at an ever increasing rate, converted social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into resources/money and how the present crisis is simply that we are running out of things to monetise.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right?

Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine’s insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

The result is that the supply of money — and the corresponding volume of debt — has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a vast, systemic scale.

So what do we do? The system is flawed and can only lead to greater environmental devastation and social impoverishment. Rather than try to keep the moentary system afloat we should be looking for alternatives. The author suggests that we should remove ourselves from the monetary system wherever we can, and that everything we do for each other without money is helping to hasten the collapse, which we should view as an opportunity to free ourselves.

Money has dehumanised us, and the quest for money is making our planet uninhabitable. To embrace the collapse, and the opportunities it offers, is also to embrace and consciously work for the informal economy.

In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. “Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?” I would like to suggest a different kind of question: “What is the most beautiful thing I can do?” You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.

We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money — to accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest — to remove things from the realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will reemerge.

In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine’s lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life’s necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money.

In previous essays I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own inseparateness, from each other and from the totality of all life. Interest denies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self and the expense of something external, something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective. The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.

The author of this excellent article, Charles Eisenstein, is also author of the book The Ascent of Humanity.

The Ascent of Humanity is a radical exploration of the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the human sense of self. Eisenstein traces all of the converging crises of our age to a common source, which he calls Separation. It is the ideology of the discrete and separate self that has generated these crises; therefore, he argues, nothing less than a “revolution in human beingness” will be sufficient to transform our relationship to each other and the planet. And this revolution is underway already. In all realms of human endeavor, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth-pangs of a planet in crisis. The range and depth of Eisenstein’s thesis is breath-taking. Encompassing science, religion, spirituality, technology, economics, medicine, education, and more, he details a vast paradigm shift reflecting a more fundamental shift in the human sense of self. Even in this dark hour, he says, a more beautiful world is possible — but not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control. The convergence of crises is revealing the final bankruptcy of those methods. Soon, he says, we will abandon the Babelian effort to build a tower to Heaven, as we realize that the sky is all around us already. Then, we will turn our efforts to creating a new kind of civilization, a conscious civilization designed for beauty rather than height.

The book is available free online here, in the desire to distribute the ideas contained within.

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Video by Stefan Molyneux that will coax you further to “take the red pill” and escape the matrix.
Stefan’s website is Free Domain Radio, with philosophical podcasts and books, many of which look very interesting.

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