not ‘hope’

More Free Range Humans Needed

Jun 17th, 2009

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation
Another long but brilliant article, this time by Dmitry Orlov, reprinted from Club Orlov.

This talk was presented at The New Emergency Conference in Dublin, on June 11, 2009.

1. Good morning.

The title of this talk is a bit of a mouthful, but what I want to say can be summed up in simpler words: we all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours. I will take as my point of departure the unfolding collapse of the global economy, and discuss what might come next. Image It started with the collapse of the financial markets last year, and is now resulting in unprecedented decreases in the volumes of international trade. These developments are also starting to affect the political stability of various countries around the world. A few governments have already collapsed, others may be on their way, and before too long we may find our maps redrawn in dramatic ways.

2. “Sustainability” — what’s in a word?

In a word, unsustainable. So what does that mean, exactly? Chris Clugston has recently published a summary of his analysis of what he calls “societal over-extension” on The Oil Drum web site. Here is a summary of his summary, in round numbers. I don’t want to trifle with his arithmetic, because it’s the cultural assumptions behind it that I find interesting. ImageThe idea is that if we shrink our ecological footprint by an order of magnitude or so, that should make the whole arrangement sustainable once again. This is expressed in financial terms: here we are lowering the GDP of the USA from, say $100 thousand per capita per annum, to, say $10 thousand. Clugston draws a distinction between making this reduction voluntarily or involuntarily: we should make it easy on ourselves and come along quietly, so that nobody gets hurt. I find the idea that Americans will voluntarily lower their GDP by a factor of 10 rather outlandish. We keep the same system, just shut down 9/10 of it? Wouldn’t that make it a completely different system? This sort of sustainability seems rather unsustainable to me.

3. My plan

I would like to offer a more realistic alternative. Everybody should have one US Dollar, for purely didactic purposes. This way, all Americans will be able to show their one dollar to their grandchildren, and say: “Can you imagine, this ugly piece of paper was once called The Almighty Dollar!” And their grandchildren will no doubt think that they are a little bit crazy, but they would probably think that anyway. But it certainly would not be helpful for them to have multiple shoe-boxes full of dollars, because then their grandchildren would think that they are in fact senile, because no sane person would be hoarding such rubbish.

4. An unpalatable alternative

Clugston offers an alternative to the big GDP decrease: a proportionate decrease in population. In this scenario, nine out of 10 people die so that the remaining 10% can go on living comfortably on $100 thousand a year. I was happy to note that Chris did not carry the voluntary/involuntary distinction over to this part of the analysis, because I feel that this would have been in rather questionable taste. I can think of just three things to say about this particular scenario.

First, humans are not a special case when it comes to experiencing population explosions and die-offs, and the idea that human populations should increase monotonically ad infinitum is just as preposterous as the idea of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. The exponential growth of the human population has tracked the increased use of fossil fuels, and I am yet to see a compelling argument for why the population would not crash along with them.

Second, shocking though this seems, it can be observed that most societies are able to absorb sudden increases in mortality without much fuss at all. There was a huge spike in mortality in Russia following the Soviet collapse, but it was not directly observable by anyone outside of the morgues and the crematoria. After a few years people would look at an old school photograph and realise that half the people are gone! When it comes to death, most people do in fact make it easy on themselves and come along quietly. The most painful part of it is realising that something like that is happening all around you.

Third, this whole budgeting exercise for how many people we can afford to keep alive is a good way of demonstrating what monsters we have become, with our addiction to statistics and numerical abstractions. The disconnect between words and actions on the population issue is by now almost complete. Population is very far beyond anyone’s control, and this way of thinking about it takes us in the wrong direction. If we could not control it on the way up, what makes us think that we might be able to control it on the way down? If our projections look sufficiently shocking, then we might hypnotise ourselves into thinking that maintaining our artificial human life support systems at any cost is more important than considering its effect on the natural world. The question “How many will survive?” is simply not ours to answer.

5. What’s actually happening

ImageBack to what is actually happening right now. There seems to be a wide range of opinion on how to characterise it, from recession to depression to collapse. The press has recently been filled with stories about “green shoots” and the economists are discussing the exact timing of economic recovery. Mainstream opinion ranges from “later this year” to “sometime next year.” None of them dares to say that global economic growth might be finished for good, or that it will be over in “the not-too-distant future” — a vague term they seem to like a whole lot.

There does seem to be a consensus forming that last year’s financial crash was precipitated by the spike in oil prices last summer, when oil briefly touched $147/bbl. Why this should have happened seems rather obvious. Since most things in a fully developed, industrialised economy run on oil, it is not an optional purchase: for a given level of economic activity, a certain level of oil consumption is required, and so one simply pays the price for as long as access to credit is maintained, and after that suddenly it’s game over. François Cellier has recently published an analysis in which he shows that at roughly $600/bbl the entire world’s GDP would be required to pay for oil, leaving no money for putting it to any sort of interesting use. At that price level, we can’t even afford to take delivery of it. In fact, at that price level, we can’t even afford to pump it out of the ground, because the tool pushers, roughnecks and roustabouts that make oil rigs work don’t drink the oil, and there would no longer be room in the budget for beer.

And so, the actual limiting price, beyond which no economic activity is possible, is certainly a lot lower, and last summer we seem to have experimentally established that to be around $150/bbl. which is something like 25% of global GDP. We may never run out of oil, but we have already run out of money with which to buy it, at least once, and will most likely do so again and again, until we learn the lesson. We will run out of money to pump it out of the ground as well. There might still be a few gushers left in the world, and so there will be a little bit of oil left over for us to fashion into exotic plastic jewelry for rich people. But it won’t be enough to sustain an industrial base, and so the industrial age will effectively be over, except for some residual solar panels and wind generators and hydroelectric installations.

I think that the lesson from all this is that we have to prepare for a non-industrial future while we still have some resources with which to do it. If we marshal the resources, stockpile the materials that will be of most use, and harness the heirloom technologies that can be sustained without an industrial base, then we can stretch out the transition far into the future, giving us time to adapt.

6. Key points

I know that I am running the risk of overstating these points and oversimplifying the situation, but sometimes it is helpful to ignore various complexities to move the discussion forward. I do believe that these points are all true, roughly speaking.

1. Global GDP is a function of oil consumption; as oil production goes down, so will global GDP. At some point, the inability to invest in oil production will drive it down far below what might be possible if depletion were the sole limiting factor. Efficiency, conservation, renewable sources of energy all might have some effect, but will not materially alter this relationship. Less oil means smaller global economy. No oil means a vanishingly small global economy not worthy of the name.

2. We have had a chance to observe that economies crash whenever oil expenditure approaches 1/4 of global GDP. Attempts at economic recovery will cause oil price spikes that break through this ceiling. These spikes will be followed by further financial crashes and further drops in economic activity. After each crash, the maximum level of economic activity required to trigger the next crash will be lower.

3. Financial assets are only valuable if they can be used to secure a sufficient quantity of oil to keep the economy running. They represent the ability to get work done, and since in an industrialised society the work is done by industrial machinery that runs on oil, less oil means less work. Financial assets that that are backed with industrial capacity require that industrial capacity to be maintained in working order. Once the maintenance requirements of the industrial infrastructure can no longer be met, it quickly decays and becomes worthless. To a large extent, of oil means end of money.

Now that the reality of Peak Oil has started to sink in, one commonly hears that “The age of cheap oil is over”. But does that mean that the age of expensive oil is upon us? Not necessarily. We now know (or should have learnt by now) that once oil rises to over 25% of global GDP, the world’s industrial economy stalls out, and as soon as that happens, oil ceases to be particularly valuable, so much so that investment in maintaining oil production is curtailed. The next time industry tries to stage a comeback (if it ever does) it hits the wall much sooner and stalls again. I doubt that it would take more than just a couple of cycles of this market whiplash for all the participants to have two realisations: that they cannot get enough oil no matter how much they pay for it, and that nobody wants to take their money even for the oil they do have. Those who still have it will see it as too valuable to part with for mere money. On the other hand, if the energy resources needed to run an industrial economy are no longer available, then oil becomes just so much toxic waste. In any case, it is no longer about money, but direct access to resources.

7. A reasonable set of objectives

Now, I expect that a lot of people will find this view too gloomy and feel discouraged. But I feel that it is entirely compatible with a positive vision of the future, so let me try to articulate it.

First of all, we do have some control. Although we shouldn’t hold out too much hope for industrial civilisation as a whole, there are certainly some bits of it that are worth salvaging. Our financial assets may not be long for this world, but in the meantime we can redeploy them to good long-term advantage.

Secondly, we can take steps to give ourselves time to make the adjustment. By knowing what to expect, we can prepare to ride it out. We can imagine which options will be foreclosed first, and create alternatives, so that we do not run out of options.

Lastly, we can concentrate on what is important: preserving a vibrant ecosphere that supports a diversity of life, our own progeny included. I can imagine few short-term prerogatives that should override this – our highest priority.

8. Managing financial risk

It will take some time for these realisations to sink in. In the meantime, we will no doubt keep hearing that we have a financial crisis on our hands. We must do something to shore up the banks, to deal with the toxic assets, to shore up our credit ratings and so forth. There are people who will tell you that this was all caused by a mistake in financial modelling, and that if we re-regulate the financial sector, this won’t happen again. So, for the sake of the argument, let’s take a look at all that.

Financial management is certainly not my speciality, but as far as I understand it, it is mostly about assessing risk. And to do that, financial managers make certain assumptions about the phenomena they are trying to model. One standard assumption is that the future will resemble the past. Another is that various negative events are randomly distributed. For instance, if you are selling life insurance, you can be certain that people will die based on the fact that they have been born, and you can be reasonably certain that they will not all die at once. When someone dies is unpredictable, when people in general die is random, most of the time. And so here is the problem: the world is unpredictable, but classes of small events can be treated as random, until a bigger event comes along. It may seem like an obscure point, so let me explain the difference in a graphical way.

9. This is (pseudo)random

Here is a random collection of multicoloured dots. Actually, it is pseudo-random, because it was generated by a computer, and computers are deterministic beasts incapable of true randomness. A source of true randomness is hard to come by. Even very good random noise generators can have higher-order effects. Small events are frequent, and therefore we can treat them as random, larger events are less frequent and rather unpredictable, and some of the really large events put an end to the careers of the statisticians trying to model them, and so we never find out whether they are random or not. To a layman, this is random enough, but eventually you run out of randomness and hit something very non-random.

10. This is not random but predictable

Like this. Now this is not random, even to a layman. This is like oil expenditure going to 1/4 of global GDP. That certainly wasn’t random. But was it unpredictable? We had a few years of monotonically increasing oil prices, and the high prices failed to produce much of a supply response in spite of record-high drilling rates, investment in ethanol, tar sands, and so on. We also have some good geology-based models that accurately predicted oil depletion profile for separate provinces, and had a high probability of succeeding in the aggregate as well. So this is definitely not random, and it is not even unpredictable. So, at a higher level, what sort of mathematics do we need to accurately model the inability of our financial and political and other leaders and commentators to see it, or to understand it, even now? And do we really need to do that, or should we just let this nice brick wall do the work for us. Because, you know, brick walls have a lot to teach people who refuse to acknowledge their existence, and they are very patient with students who need to repeat the lesson. I am sure that the lesson will sink in eventually, but I wonder how many more full-gallop runs at the wall it will take before everyone is convinced.

11. His models mostly work

One person I would like to have a close encounter with the brick wall is this fellow, Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prise-winning co-author of the Black-Scholes method of pricing derivatives, the man behind the crash of Long Term Capital Management. He is the inspiration behind much of the current financial debacle. Recently, he has been quoted as saying the following: “Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete.” Now, imagine a structural engineer saying something along those lines: “Most of the time our structural analysis works, but if there is a strong gust of wind, then, for any given structure, it is incomplete.” Or a nuclear engineer: “Our calculations of the strength of nuclear reactor containment vessels work quite well much of the time. Of course, if there is an earthquake, then any given containment vessel might fail.” In these other disciplines, if you just don’t know the answer, then you just don’t bother showing up for work, because what would be the point?

12. We love their lies

The point certainly wouldn’t be to reassure people, to promote public confidence in bridges, buildings, and nuclear reactors. But economics and finance are different. Economics is not directly lethal, and economists never get sent to jail for criminal negligence or gross incompetence even when their theories do fail. Finance is about the promises we make to each other, and to ourselves. And if the promises turn out to be unrealistic, then economics and finance turn out to be about the lies we tell each other. We want to continue believing these lies, because there is a certain loss of face if we don’t, and the economists are there to help us. We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

13. Fastest way to lose all your money

Let’s face it, these are difficult times for those of us who have a lot of money. What can we do? We can entrust it to a financial institution. That tends to turn out badly. Many people in the United States have entrusted their retirement savings to financial institutions. And now they are being told that they cannot withdraw their money. All they can do is open a letter once a month, to watch their savings dwindle.

We can also invest it in some part of the global economy. I know some automotive factories you could buy. They are quite affordable right now. A lot of retired auto workers have put all of their retirement savings into General Motors stock. Maybe they know something that we don’t? (Actually, that’s part of a fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Obama administration, to pay off their banker friends ahead of GM’s other creditors.)

Well then, how about a nice gold brick or two? A bag of diamonds? Some classic cars? Then you could start your own personal museum of transportation. How about a beautifully restored classic luxury yacht? Then you could use the gold bricks to weigh you down if you ever decide to end it all by jumping overboard.

Here’s another brilliant idea: buy green products. Whatever green thing the marketers and advertisers throw at you, buy it, toss it, and buy another one straight away. Repeat until they are out of product, you are out of money, and the landfills are full of green rubbish. That should stimulate the economy. Market research shows that there is a great reservoir of pent-up eco-guilt out there for marketers and advertisers to exploit. Industrial products that help the environment are a bit of an oxymoron. It’s a bit like trying to bail out the Titanic using plastic teaspoons.

Another great marketing opportunity for our time is in survival goods. There are some web sites that push all sorts of supplies to put in your private bunker. It’s a clever bit of manipulation, actually. Users log in, see that the stock market is down, oil is up, shotgun shells are on sale, so are hunting knives, and if you add a paperback on “surviving financial armageddon” to your shopping cart you qualify for free shipping. Oh and don’t forget to add a large tin of dehydrated beans. Fear is a great motivator, and getting people to buy survival goods is almost a matter of operant conditioning: a marketer’s dream.

If you want to help save the environment and prepare yourself for a life without access to consumer goods, then doing so by buying consumer goods doesn’t seem like such a great plan. A much better thing to do is to BUY NOTHING. But that is not something you can do with money. But there are useful things to do with money, for the time being, if we hurry.

14. How to lose all your money (but have something to show for it)

Most of the wealth is in very few private hands right now. Governments and the vast majority of the people only have debt. It is important to convince people who control all this wealth that they really have two choices. They can trust their investment advisers, maintain their current portfolios, and eventually lose everything. Or they can use their wealth to reengage with people and the land in new ways, in which case they stand a chance of saving something for themselves and their children. They can build and launch lifeboats, recruit crew, and set them sailing.

Those who own a lot of industrial assets can divest before these assets lose value and invest in land resources, with the goal of preserving them, improving them over time, and using them in a sustainable manner. Since it will become difficult to get what you want by simply paying for it, it is a good idea to establish alternatives ahead of time, by making resources, such as farmland, available to those who can put them to good use, for their own benefit as well as for yours. It also makes sense to establish stockpiles of non-perishable materials that will preserve their usefulness far into the future. My favourite example is bronze nails. They last a over a hundred years in salt water, and so they are perfect for building boats. The manufacturing of bronze nails is actually a good use of the remaining fossil fuels – better than most. They are compact and easy to store.

Lastly, it makes sense to work towards orchestrating a controlled demolition of the global economy. This calls for a new financial skill set: that of a disinvestment adviser. The first step is a sort of triage; certain parts of the economy can be marked “do not resuscitate” and resources reallocated to a better task. A good example of an industry not worth resuscitating is the auto industry; we simply will not need any more cars. The ones that we already have will do nicely for as long as we’ll need them. A good example of a sector definitely worth resuscitating is public health, especially prevention and infectious disease control. In all these measures, it is important to pull money out of geographically distant locations and invest it locally. This may be inefficient from a financial standpoint, but it is quite efficient from the point of view of personal and social self-preservation.

15. Beyond finance: controlling other kinds of risk

Coming back for a moment to the poor bankers and economists, it seems rather disingenuous for us to treat economics and finance as a special case of people who generate a lot of unmitigated risk. Do we have any examples of risks we understood properly and acted on in time? Are there any really serious systemic problems that we have been able to solve?… The best we seem to be able to do is buy time. In fact, that seems to be what we are good at – postponing the inevitable through diligence and hard work. None of us wants to act precipitously based on what we understand will happen eventually, because it may not happen for a while yet. And why would we want to rock the boat in the meantime? The one risk that we do seem to know how to mitigate against is the risk of not fitting in to our economic, social and cultural milieu. And what happens to us if our entire milieu finally goes over the edge? Well, the way we plan for that is by not thinking about that.

16. The biggest risk of all

The biggest risk of all, as I see it, is that the industrial economy will blunder in for a few more years, perhaps even a decade or more, leaving environmental and social devastation in its wake. Once it finally gives up the ghost, hardly anything will be left with which to start over. To mitigate against this risk, we have to create alternatives, on a small scale, that do not perpetuate this system and that can function without it.

The idea of perpetuating the status quo through alternative means is all-pervasive, because so many people in positions of power and authority wish to preserve their positions. And so just about every proposal we see involves avoiding collapse instead of focusing on what comes after it. A prime example is the push to develop alternative energy. Many of these alternatives turn out to be fossil fuel amplifiers rather than self-sufficient resources: they require fossil fuel energy as an essential input. Also, many of them require an intact industrial base, which runs on fossil fuels. There is a pervasive idea that these alternatives haven’t been developed before for nefarious reasons: malfeasance on the part of the greedy oil companies and so on. The truth of the matter is that these alternatives are not as potent, physically or economically, as fossil fuels. And here is the real point worth pondering: If we can no longer afford the oil or the natural gas, what makes us think that we can afford the less potent and more expensive alternatives? And here is a follow-up question: If we can’t afford to make the necessary investments to get at the remaining oil and natural gas, what makes us think that we will find the money to develop the less cost-effective alternatives?

17. How long do we have?

It would be excellent if more people had these realisations, and started making progress toward making their lives a bit more sustainable. But social inertia is quite great, and the process of adaptation takes time. And the question is, is there enough time for significant numbers of people to have these realisations and to adapt, or will they have to endure quite a lot of discomfort?

I believe that people who start the process now stand a fairly good chance of making the transition in time. But I don’t think that it is too wise to wait and try to grab a few more years of comfortable living. Not only would that be a waste of time on a personal level, but we’d be squandering the resources we need to make the transition.

I concede that the choice is a difficult one: either we wait for circumstances to force our hand, at which point it is too late for us to do anything to prepare, or we bring it upon ourselves ahead of time. If we ask the question, How many people are likely to do that? – then we are asking the wrong question. A more relevant question is, Would we be doing this all alone? And I think the answer is, probably not, because there are quite a few other people who are thinking along these same lines.

18. It’s always personal

I think it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it. When they are touched by collapse, they take it personally or see it as a matter of luck. They see those who prepare for collapse as eccentrics; some may even consider them to be dangerous subversives. This is especially likely to be the case for people in positions of power and authority, because they are not exactly cheered by the prospect of a future that has no place for them.

There is a certain range of personalities that are most likely to survive collapse unscathed, physically or psychologically, and adapt to the new circumstances. I have been able to spot certain common traits while researching reports of survivors of shipwrecks and other similar calamities. A certain amount of indifference or detachment is definitely helpful, including indifference to suffering. Possibly the most important characteristic of a survivor, more important than skills or preparation or even luck, is the will to survive. Next is self-reliance: the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness lack of support from anyone else. Last on the list is unreasonableness: the sheer stubborn inability to surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from one’s comrades, or even force.

Those who feel the need to be inclusive, accommodating, to compromise and to seek consensus, need to understand the awesome force of social inertia. It is an immovable, crushing weight. “We must take into account the interests of society as a whole.” Translated, that means “We must allow ourselves to remain thwarted by people’s unwillingness or inability to make drastic but necessary changes; to change who they are.” Must we, really?

There are two components to human nature, the social and the solitary. The solitary is definitely the more highly evolved, and humanity has surged forward through the efforts of brilliant loners and eccentrics. Their names live on forever precisely because society was unable to extinguish their brilliance or to thwart their initiative. Our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We are evolved to live in small groups of a few families, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that seem to have relied on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human. When confronted with the unfamiliar, we have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed! And so, in fashioning a survivable future, where do we put our emphasis: on individuals and small groups, or on larger entities – regions, nations, humanity as a whole? I believe the answer to that is obvious.

19. “Collapse” or “Transition”

It’s rather difficult for most people to take any significant steps, even individually. It is even more difficult to do so as a couple. I know a lot of cases whether one person understands the picture and is prepared to make major changes in the living arrangement, but the partner or spouse is non-receptive. If they have children, then the constraints multiply, because things that may be necessary adaptations post-collapse look like substandard living conditions to a pre-collapse mindset. For instance, in many places in the United States, bringing up a child in a place that lacks electricity, central heating, or indoor plumbing may be equated with child abuse, and authorities rush in and confiscate the children. If there are grandparents involved, then misunderstandings multiply. There may be some promise to intentional communities: groups that decide to make a go of it in rural setting.

When it comes to larger groups: towns, for instance any meaningful discussion of collapse is off the table. The topics under discussion centre around finding ways to perpetuate the current system through alternative means: renewable energy, organic agriculture, starting or supporting local businesses, bicycling instead of driving, and so on. These certainly aren’t bad things to talk about it, or to do, but what of the radical social simplification that will be required? And is there a reason to think that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does. Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?

20. Better living through bureaucracy

There are still many believers in the goodness of the system and the magic powers of policy. They believe that a really good plan can be made acceptable to all – the entire unsustainably complex international organisational pyramid, that is. They believe that they can take all these international bureaucrats by the hand, lead them to the edge of the abyss that marks the end of their bureaucratic careers, and politely ask them to jump. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to stop them. Let them proceed with their brilliant schemes, by all means.

21. Simpler approaches: investment

There are far simpler approaches that are likely to be more effective. Since most wealth is in private hands, it is actually up to individuals to make very important decisions. Unlike various bureaucratic and civic bodies, which are both short of funds and mired in social inertia, they can act decisively and unilaterally. The problem is, what to do with financial assets before they lose value. The answer is to invest in things that will retain value even after all financial assets are worthless: land, ecosystems, and personal relationships. The land need not be in pristine or natural condition. After a couple of decades, any patch of land reverts to a wilderness, and unlike an urban or an industrial desert, a wilderness can sustain life, human and otherwise. It can support a population of plants an animals, wild and domesticated, and even a few humans.

The human relationships that are the most conducive to preserving ecosystems are ones that are in turn tied to a direct, permanent relationship with the land. They can be enshrined in permanent, heritable leases payable in sustainably harvested natural products. They can also be enshrined as deeded easements that provide the community with traditional hunting, gathering and fishing rights, provided human rights are not allowed to supersede those of other species. I think the lifeboat metaphor is apt here, because the moral guidance it offers is so clear. What has to happen in an overloaded lifeboat at sea when a storm blows up and it becomes necessary to lighten the load? Everyone draws lots. Such practises have been upheld by the courts, provided no-one is exempt – not the captain, not the crew, not the owner of the shipping company. If anyone is exempt, the charge becomes murder. Sustainability, which is necessary for group survival, may have to have its price in human life, but humanity has survived many such incidents before without descending into barbarism.

22. Gift-giving as an organising principle

Many people have been so brainwashed by commercial propaganda that they have trouble imagining that anything can be made to work without recourse to money, markets, the profit motive, and other capitalist props. And so it may be helpful to present some examples of very important victories that have been achieved without any of these.

In particular, Open Source software, which used to be somewhat derisively referred to as “free software” or “shareware”, is a huge victory of the gift economy over the commercial economy. “Free software” is not an accurate label; nor is “free prime numbers” or “free vocabulary words”. Nobody pays for these things, but some people are silly enough to pay for software. It’s their loss; the “free” stuff is generally better, and if you don’t like it, you can fix it. For free.

General science works on similar principles. Nobody directly profits from formulating a theory or testing a hypothesis or publishing the results. It all works in terms mutuality and prestige – same as with software.

On the other hand, wherever the pecuniary motivation rises to the top, the result is mediocre at best. And so we have expensive software that fails constantly. (I understand that the British Navy is planning to use a Microsoft operating system on their nuclear submarines; that is a frightening piece of news.) We also have oceans full of plastic trash – developing all those “products” floating in the ocean would surely have been impossible without the profit motive. And so on.

In all, the profit motive fails to motive altruistic behaviour, because it is not reciprocal. And it is altruistic behaviour that increases the social capital of society. Within a gift-giving system, we can all be in everyone’s debt, but going into debt makes us all richer, not poorer.

23. Barter as an organizing principle

Gifts are wonderful, of course, but sometimes we would like something rather specific, and are willing to work with others to get it, without recourse to money, of course. This is where arrangements made on the basis of barter. In general, you barter something over which you have less choice (one of the many things you can offer) for something over which you have more choice (something you actually want).

Economists will tell you that barter is inefficient, because it requires “coincidence of wants”: if A wants to barter X for Y, then he or she must find B who wants to barter Y for X. Actually, most everyone I’ve ever run across doesn’t want to barter either X for Y, or Y for X. Rather, they want to barter whatever the can offer for any of a number of the things they want.

In the current economic scheme, we are forced to barter our freedom, in the form of the compulsory work-week, for something we don’t particularly want, which is money. We have limited options for what to do with that money: pay taxes, bills, buy shoddy consumer goods, and, perhaps, a few weeks of “freedom” as tourists. But other options do exist.

One option is to organise as communities to produce certain goods that the entire community wants: food, clothing, shelter, security and entertainment. Everyone makes their contribution, in exchange for the end product, which everyone gets to share. It is also possible to organise to produce goods that can be used in trade with other communities: trade goods. Trade goods are a much better way to store wealth than money, which is, let’s face it, an essentially useless substance.

24. Local/alternative currencies

There is a lot of discussion of ways to change the way money works, so that it can serve local needs instead of being one of the main tools for extracting wealth from local economies. But there is no discussion of why it is that money is generally necessary. That is simply assumed. There are communities that have little or no money, where there may be a pot of coin buried in the yard somewhere, for special occasions, but no money in daily use.

Lack of money makes certain things very difficult. Examples include gambling, loan sharking, extortion, bribery and fraud. It also makes it more difficult to hoard wealth, or to extract it out of a community and ship it somewhere else in a conveniently compact form. When we use money, we cede power to those who create money (by creating debt) and who destroy money (by cancelling debt). We also empower the ranks of people whose area of expertise is in the manipulation of arbitrary rules and arithmetic abstractions rather than in engaging directly with the physical world. This veil of metaphor allows them to mask appalling levels of violence, representing it symbolically as a mere paper-shuffling exercise. People, animals, entire ecosystems become mere numbers on a piece of paper. On the other hand, this ability to represent dissimilar objects using identical symbols causes a great deal of confusion. For instance, I have heard rather intelligent people declare that government funds, which have been allocated to making failed financial institutions look solvent, could be so much better spent feeding widows and orphans. There is no understanding that astronomical quantities of digits willed into existence and transferred between two computers (one at a central bank, another at a private bank) cannot be used to directly nourish anyone, because food cannot be willed into existence by a central banker or anyone else.

25. Belief in science and technology

One accusation I often hear is that I fail to grasp the power of technological innovation and the free market system. If I did, apparently I would have more faith in a technologically advanced future where all of our current dilemmas are swept away by a new wave of eco-friendly sustainability. My problem is that I am not an economist or a businessman: I am an engineer with a background in science. The fact that I’ve worked for several technology start-up companies doesn’t help either.

I know roughly how long it takes to innovate: come up with the idea, convince people that it is worth trying, try it, fail a few times, eventually succeed, and then phase it in to real use. It takes decades. We do not have decades. We have already failed to innovate our way out of this.

Not only that, but in many ways technological innovation has done us a tremendous disservice. A good example is innovation in agriculture. The so-called “green revolution” has boosted crop yields using fossil fuel inputs, creating generations of agro-addicts dependent on just one or two crops. In North America, human hair samples have been used to determine that fully 69% of all the carbon came from just one plant: maize. So, what piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil fuel inputs?

I think that what makes us likely to think that technology will save us is that we are addled by it. Efforts at creating intelligent machines have failed, because computers are far too difficult to program, but humans turn out to be easy for computers to program. Everywhere I go I see people poking away at their little mental support units. Many of them can no longer function without them: they wouldn’t know where to go, who to talk to, or even where to get lunch without a little electronic box telling what to do.

These are all big successes for maize plants and for iPhones, but are they successes for humanity? Somehow I doubt it. Do we really want to eat nothing but maize and look at nothing but pixels, or should there be more to life? There are people who believe in the emergent intelligence of the networked realm – a sort of artificial intelligence utopia, where networked machines become hyperintelligent and solve all of our problems. And so our best hope is that in our hour of need machines will be nice to us and show us kindness? If that’s the case, what reason would they find to respect us? Why wouldn’t they just kill us instead? Or enslave us. Oh, wait, maybe they already have!

26. The need to evolve

Now, supposing all goes well, and we have a swift and decisive collapse, what should follow is an equally swift rebirth of viable localised communities and ecosystems. One concern is that the effort will be short of qualified staff.

It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, has made many people too soft to endure the hardships and privations that self-sufficient living often involves. It seems quite likely that those groups that are currently marginalised, would do better, especially the ones that are found in economically underdeveloped areas and have never lost contact with nature.

And so I would not be surprised to see these marginalised groups stage a come-back. Almost every rural place has its population of people who know how to use the local resources. They are the human component of the local ecosystems, and, as such, they deserve much more respect than they have received. A lot of them can’t be bothered about fine manners or about speaking English. Those who are used to thinking of them as primitive, ignorant and uneducated will be shocked to discover how much they must learn from them.

27. Beyond planning

So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It’s no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn’t seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren’t funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

Cuba and Change We Can Believe In

Jun 9th, 2009

by admin.

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by Philip Fornaci, at global research.ca

One of the most notable characteristics of 21st century Havana is what is not there: obvious and visible destitution. The begging and aggressive peddling prevalent in so many poor Latin capitals (and in most US cities) is entirely absent in Havana. There are no homeless people sleeping under bridges or hidden in doorways, no stumbling addicts crashed on park lawns, nor frantic children hawking candy and crafts. The sidewalks are crowded with workers and students and bureaucrats, rushing in every direction, often at a frenetic pace, but at no point is a visitor likely to encounter robbery or assault, or begging.

I recently spent a week in Cuba on a research tour, organized through the Canadian organization, Cuba Education Tours, with a group made up primarily of Canadian and American attorneys, union members, and researchers. It was an extraordinary experience, dispelling much of what I thought I knew about Cuba, and ultimately revealing more about the US than I had anticipated.

Two prevailing American misconceptions about Cuba were dispelled very early in our trip. One is the notion that the island is a society “closed” to the outside world, a stubborn throwback to another ideological moment. But this is typical American myopia, conjuring a country frozen in 1959, when the popular uprising displaced the American playground that was pre-Revolutionary Cuba. To be sure, the US economic blockade has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on the island’s economy, reflected most dramatically in the poor housing stock and lack of industrial development, but Cuba is hardly isolated from the world. Today, Havana is crawling with Canadian, Mexican, European, African, and East Asian tourists, students, and businessmen, and even a fair share of American backpackers and adventurers stealthily defying the US State Department.

The other common, but more complicated, American misconception is that Cuban society is less “free” than American society. We Americans still like to think we live in the Free World, if not the center of it, despite our massive surveillance state, a prison system unparalleled in its size and ferocity, and our militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies. But Cubans, our government and media tell us, are forced to live under a repressive, colorless, and undemocratic police state. This characterization comes as a surprise to most Cubans, who have minimal interactions with police (far less visible in Havana than in, say, Guatemala City or New York), engage in a lively electoral process every 2-1/2 years, and who seem to be among the most engaging and politically astute people I have ever encountered.

In the days following President Obama’s limited overtures to Cuba after the OAS meeting in April, the Administration’s point person on Cuba policy was not the Secretary of State, but Obama’s Economic Advisor, Lawrence Summers. According to Summers, “Cuba’s known what it needs to do for a very long time and it’s up to them in terms of their policies, their democratization and all the steps they can take and we’ll have to see what happens down the road.” President Obama himself echoed this line, lecturing Cubans that “if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.”

This is extraordinary stuff at a time when the US is enduring international rebukes over its publicly-admitted widespread use of torture and the detention of thousands of foreigners and even US citizens without due process of law. According to the oppositional Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), there are currently 232 “political prisoners” in Cuba, not an insignificant number, but slightly fewer than the number of “enemy combatants” currently held in Guantanamo Bay. How could it be that 232 alleged political prisoners – some of whom are leftist opponents of the Castro government and hardly pro-American-– represent the political basis for American hostility to the Cuban Revolution?

These 232 political prisoners have about as much relevance to the US blockade of Cuba as Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” had to the decision to invade Iraq. The selection of Summers as a spokesman on US-Cuba policy, a man whose misogynistic and anti-democratic tendencies were on full display during his short tenure at Harvard, would be odd if the policy issues truly involved democratic freedoms. But of course, the real problem is not with the Cuban political system but with its economic system.

In Cuba, 85 percent of the population owns their own homes, mortgage-free. They have unrestricted access to high quality health care and a guarantee of a free public education through the university level. Teachers and community organizations have pivotal roles in determining educational priorities and curricula, ensuring the accessibility and relevance of the educational system. Every Cuban is guaranteed a basic income, and a job if they can work. One could go on about the percentage of female medical doctors (62 percent) or universal literacy (99.4 percent) or the number of incarcerated juveniles (zero), but in the US, such basic values have nothing to do with democracy or freedom. “Freedom” is reserved for markets and capital flow.

May Day 2009

My own trip to Cuba coincided with the 50th May Day celebration since the Cuban Revolution. For many Americans, the notion of International Workers Day might seem passé, a strange cousin to our own Labor Day celebrations of barbeque and the end of summer. Particularly in 2009, as American workers watch their hopes for long-term job security, health care, college educations, and a stable retirement dissolve in the face of economic meltdown, the notion of working class power feels highly theoretical.

But in Havana, May Day is not “Labor Day.” It is both an act of defiance and a celebration of the survival of Cuban socialism. The 2009 May Day march was more than a million strong – ten percent of the entire population of the island marches – with unionists and community organizations from across the island massed for the festive occasion. The teachers union led off the march this year, with their block-wide banner, “Education is a Labor of Infinite Love,” followed by a three-hour jubilant parade of teachers, doctors, construction workers, dancers and artists, taxi drivers, students, and even scientists and engineers marching past the official reviewing stand. Their hand-made signs declare “We Are A Free Country” and “We Defend Our Socialism,” and of course hundreds of portraits of Che.

One sign in particular caught my eye, and seemed to explain the key role of Larry Summers in the debate over “freedom” and “democracy” in Cuba.

Somewhat poorly translated, the sign reads: “In capitalism in crisis, they impose unemployment on thousands and they close industries. How the working class suffers! Under socialism it is completely different. They create factories and industries, They provide jobs and guarantee work for those affected. We want socialism! Long live Fidel!”

Yes, this is a country that has been led by one man for most of the last fifty years, one of the most successful personality cults in world history. It is a country where travel abroad is difficult for most, and restricted for others, where political parties are banned and the official, monotonous state media allows little room for dissenting views. And most importantly, it is a country where resources are scarce and life can be very difficult for the mass of people.

But it is also a country without health insurance companies, home mortgages, or a usurious banking industry, and not accidentally, a country without unemployment or homelessness. It is a place where laid off sugar cane workers can go to school at state expense to become social workers or organic farmers, where masses of people from all strata of society participate in decisions about the economy and social development. Cubans do not depend on stock market gambles to provide for their retirement (at age 55) nor do they lose health insurance if they quit their jobs. Compare the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, from which New Orleans may never recover, with the devastating hurricanes that hit Cuba during the summer of 2008. In Cuba, there were no casualties, and the storms resulted in not even a single missed school day as teachers moved to makeshift classrooms, and friends and neighbors provided emergency housing.

The American demand that Cuba “change” in order to normalize relations with the United States is in fact anti-democratic, calling for a reversal of the current and overwhelmingly popular economic status quo. In return for an end to US hostility, Cubans must accept multinational corporate domination and privatized education and health care. They must allow the importation of consumer goods, the crushing of domestic industry and agriculture, and, most importantly, unfettered access for international finance. Only then, when Cuba begins to resemble Guatemala or Haiti or Mexico, will the Americans agree to “normal” relations and end nearly 50 years of terror. Only then will Cuba resemble the kind of American-style “democracy” supported by Barack Obama and Larry Summers.

But what became apparent to me as a first-time traveler to Cuba is that the official calls for “democracy in Cuba” are strictly for American consumption. The US blockade of Cuba, and restrictions on American travel there, must continue until there is no longer a Cuban Revolution. Otherwise, Americans might begin to envision a world where health care, education, and pensions are truly rights of residency; where industry is developed to support human needs, not scrapped for the benefit of creditors; and where egalitarianism is a realizable goal, not a utopian fantasy. Americans must never be permitted to see that, even in a flawed socialist economy in a tiny island country, there is no homelessness or starvation or unemployment or illiteracy. It might give us dangerous ideas about “Change We Can Believe In.”

and the article doesnt really mention the huge organic food movement, or the export of trained doctors to other south and central american countries.

As Mussolini said, fascism is the merging of corporations and government, and the US and most of europe live under that corporatism. Castro may be a dictator, but he has protected the cuban people from a far worse oppressor in the form of global capitalism and the corporate elites who would enslave us all, exploit all resources and create wars for profit.

Why do so many millions of us tolerate it?

Look on the Bright Side – Richard Heinberg

Jun 6th, 2009

by techno-peasant.

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I imagine there are people, those of us who care passionately about forests, oceans, wildlife, nature in all her magnificent glory, who have been recognising just how good for the planet the ‘global economic downturn’, as its being called, is. Richard Heinbergs latest Museletter post says what i suspect many of us have been thinking.

And there are undoubtedly millions of indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, people who live closer to their landbases than us children of empire, and evn perhaps trees, who are breathing a collective sigh of relief, and even cheering with all their hearts at each and every step of collapse. Oil and capital have fuelled the seemingly unending march of ‘development’ (so called), pushing people away from the land that has sustained them for 100s of generations, oppressing, exploiting, turning living creatures and in fact the whole web of life into consumer durables, with built in obsolescence, channeling everything – food, people, metals, fuel, water etc, into the ever growing dead zones we call cities.

But, peak oil, round one, and the chaos it has initiated in an economic system that needs huge amounts of energy and unlimited growth (impossible on a finite planet) to exist, has slowed down the devastation in many parts of the world. Its not enough, though.

This culture of empire, this system of death, the forces of darkness, the matrix, whatever you want to call it, is so hugely destructive of all things good – everything from joy to clean water to freedom, anything that can’t be commercialised is destroyed and anything that can will be until it is just a shadow of its former self, a plastic replica of the real thing – that we MUST help bring it down by all means necessary.

The empire thrives on war, and suffering, and is at war with nature. It even wages war on its own citizens, enslaving us, poisoning us, forcing us to suppress our own human natures, our instincts, our joy as living breathing beautiful animals.

The systems own unsustainability is helping to bring it down, and I appeal to all people of conscience, everyone who cares that this planet should be able to sustain life, all who refuse to be cogs in a damned infernal devastation machine. Rise up. Do what you can against the life destroying machine we call civilisation.

Stop buying stuff – particularly food from far away or in packaging. For too long we have been conned into thinking that vegetarianism, or green consumerism will make a difference. Industrial agriculture makes deserts. Full stop. Plastics and other ‘products’ makes poisons. It doesnt matter what the food is, if it has been grown far away, transported, packaged, sprayed, poisoned…. it does you little real nutritional good, and leaves a trail of devastation in its wake.

Plant food forests, rewild, use your time to help repair some of the damage done, and learn from your landbase – watch and it will tell you what it needs to regain its health. As empire contracts more and more damaged places will be abandoned. Nature can repair herself, amazingly, but with a little help from us, planting pioneer nitrogen fixing species, perhaps digging swales to retain water in dry areas, simply planting tree seeds, we can speed up the healing process while directing our local habitats to produce perennial food crops for us.

It wont be easy. Extricating ourselves from empire will be hard for most of us, born into this system, addicted to toxic foods, drugs, lifestyles, habits… but the whole sorry experiment is unsustainable and will fall, even without any help from us, in time, so to start extricating ourselves now will not only help bring down the beast, but is sound advice.

For a time, we may well find ourselves straddling both worlds, a natural world of trees and fresh from the plant foods, freedom and joy of life, while still having to give our pound of flesh to the devil, still having to submit to the boss and pretend to be good little citizens. This can be incredibly difficult, becoming easier and undoubtedly worthwhile when the global supply lines fail as they will, its just a matter of time. Life will become increasingly hard for the citizens of empire, although this may be almost directly proportional to the relief felt by billions of humans and animals as empire slows down, while those of us who has already started living a low carbon, community sufficient (self sufficiency in local communities) and lower energy life will find it easier going than many.

And finally, as the structures of empire become irrelevant, we’ll need to start dismantling them to help nature reclaim – particularly dams that stop the flow of the earths arteries. There are many ways we can help push this poisonous system into collapse. Use your imagination.

Recently I’ve begun compiling a list of things to be cheerful about. Here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist’s lips:
• World energy consumption is declining.
That’s right: oil consumption is down, coal consumption is down, and the IEA is projecting world electricity consumption to decline by 3.5 percent this year. I’m sure it’s possible to find a few countries where energy use is still growing, but for the US, China, and most of the European countries that is no longer the case. A small army of writers and activists, including me, has been arguing for years now that the world should voluntarily reduce its energy consumption, because current rates of use are unsustainable for various reasons including the fact that fossil fuels are depleting. Yes, we should build renewable energy capacity, but replacing the energy from fossil fuels will be an enormous job, and we can make that job less daunting by reducing our overall energy appetite. Done.
• CO2 emissions are falling.
This follows from the previous point. I’m still waiting for confirmation from direct NOAA measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it stands to reason that if world oil and coal consumption is declining, then carbon emissions must be doing so as well. The economic crisis has accomplished what the Kyoto Protocol couldn’t. Hooray!
• Consumption of goods is falling.
Every environmentalist I know spends a good deal of her time railing both publicly and privately against consumerism. We in the industrialized countries use way too much stuff — because that stuff is made from depleting natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) and the Earth is running out of fresh water, topsoil, lithium, indium, zinc, antimony…the list is long. Books have been written trying to convince people to simplify their lives and use less, films have been produced and shown on PBS, and support groups have formed to help families kick the habit, but still the consumer juggernaut has continued — until now. This particular dragon may not be slain, but it’s cowering in its den.
• Globalization is in reverse (global trade is shrinking).
Back in the early 1990s, when globalization was a new word, an organization of brilliant activists formed the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) to educate the public about the costs and dangers of this accelerating trend. Corporations were off-shoring their production and pollution, ruining manufacturing communities in formerly industrial rich nations while ruthlessly exploiting cheap labor in less-industrialized poor countries. IFG was able to change the public discourse about globalization enough to stall the expansion of the World Trade Organization, but still world trade continued to mushroom. Not any more. China’s and Japan’s exports are way down, as is the US trade deficit.
• The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is falling.
For decades the number of total miles traveled by all cars and trucks on US roads has relentlessly increased. This was a powerful argument for building more roads. People bought more cars and drove them further; trucks restocked factories and stores at an ever-growing pace; and delivery vans brought more packages to consumers who shopped from home. All of this driving entailed more tires, pavement, and fuel — and more environmental damage. Over the past few months the VMT number has declined substantially and continually, to a greater extent than has been the case since records started being kept. That’s welcome news.
• There are fewer cars on the road.
People are junking old cars faster than new ones are being purchased. In the US, where there are now more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers, this represents an extraordinary shift in a very long-standing trend. In her wonderful book Divorce Your Car, Katie Alvord detailed the extraordinary environmental costs of widespread automobile use. Evidently her book didn’t stem the tide: it was published in the year 2000, and millions of new cars hit the pavement in the following years. But now the world’s auto manufacturers are desperately trying to steer clear of looming bankruptcy, simply because people aren’t buying. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, more bicycles were sold in the US than cars and trucks put together (over 2.55 million bicycles were purchased, compared to fewer than 2.4 million cars and trucks). How utterly cool.
• The world’s over-leveraged, debt-based financial system is failing.
Growth in consumption is killing the planet, but arguing against economic growth is made difficult by the fact that most of the world’s currencies are essentially loaned into existence, and those loans must be repaid with interest. Thus if the economy isn’t growing, and therefore if more loans aren’t being made, thus causing more money to be created, the result will be a cascading series of defaults and foreclosures that will ruin the entire system. It’s not a sustainable system given the fact that the world’s resources (the ultimate basis for all economic activity) are finite; and, as the proponents of Ecological and Biophysical Economics have been saying for years, it’s a system that needs to be replaced with one that can still function in a condition of steady or contracting consumption rates. While that sustainable alternative is not yet being discussed by government leaders, at least they are being forced to consider (if not yet publicly) the possibility that the existing system has serious problems and that it may need a thorough overhaul. That’s a good thing.
• Gardening is going gonzo.
According to the New York Times (”College Interns Getting Back to Land,” May 25) thousands of college students are doing summer internships on farms this year. Meanwhile seed companies are having a hard time keeping up with demand, as home gardeners put in an unusually high number of veggie gardens. Urban farmer Will Allen predicts that there will be 8 million new gardeners this year, and the number of new gardens is expected to increase 20 to 40 percent this season. Since world oil production has peaked, there is going to be less oil available in the future to fuel industrial agriculture, so we are going to need more gardens, more small farms, and more farmers. Never mind the motives of all these students and home gardeners — few of them have ever heard of Peak Oil, and many of the gardeners are probably just worried whether they can afford to keep the pantry full next winter; nevertheless, they’re doing the right thing. And that’s something to applaud.

But wait, before our cheering becomes an uncontrollable frenzy, we should stop to remember that most of these developments are due to an economic crisis that is taking a huge toll. With the possible exception of the last item on the list (and maybe some of those bicycle purchases), we’re not talking about voluntary behavior that’s evidence of forethought and collective intelligence. Whatever gains in sustainability these trends signify have come at an enormous cost in terms of unemployment, homelessness, and lost retirement savings.

Take all this to its tragic extreme. What if a billion humans died over the course of, say, the next ten years from starvation or swine flu? That would take a lot of pressure off natural systems. There would be more space for other species to flourish, and consumption of natural resources (oil, coal, water, and so on) would decline dramatically, improving the economic prospects of the survivors. So from a certain perspective this unimaginable nightmare might be seen as a good thing — though hardly anyone who actually experienced it would likely see it that way.

Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that this whole line of thought may be dangerous. Some free-market PR hack from the Cato Institute is likely reading along right now just as you are, trying out headlines for a press release. “Environmentalist delights in economic collapse!” might be a good one, or “Environmentalist wants billions of humans to die!” One way to avert that kind of backlash is to keep mum about the fact that economic contraction actually does have benefits, and so far most other environmental writers have been playing it safe in that regard. I’ve crossed the line here, so watch out. I might get us all in trouble.

Now back to our theme. At its core, the dilemma is this: We humans have overshot Earth’s carrying capacity through overpopulation and over-consumption, and have created all sorts of other problems in doing so (such as climate change). But nature will take care of all these difficulties. Overpopulation will eventually be solved by starvation and disease. Over-consumption will be reined in by resource depletion and scarcity. Climate change will take longer to fix, maybe thousands or millions of years — assuming we don’t turn Earth into Venus.

But nature’s ways of solving our problems are not going to be pleasant. And so the enormous, overriding question confronting our species during the remainder of this century will be, Are we humans capable of getting out ahead of nature’s checks so as to proactively rein in our population and consumption in ways we can live with?

Boil down all the environmental literature of the past century, and that’s the essence of most of it. So far, that literature has not had its desired effect: our species has continued to expand both in numbers and in per-capita impact.

But the items outlined above suggest that we’ve turned a corner. It’s no longer a matter of nature “eventually” providing checks on humanity’s boisterous expansionism. That’s starting to happen. And it’s not yet due to climate change: yes, we are indeed seeing potentially catastrophic impacts in terms of melting glaciers and so on, but those by themselves have not tempered the economic juggernaut. Instead, it is resource depletion that has begun to slow the freight train of industrialism. Over the past two or three years, high energy prices burst the bubble of unsupportable property prices and pulled the rug out from beneath the teetering financial derivatives market.

That’s what the whole Peak Oil discussion has really been about. It’s an attempt to identify the key resource whose scarcity will tip the global economy from growth to contraction.

But wait: this essay was supposed to help us look on the bright side. The discussion’s getting kind of dark here.

Okay, my point is this: we have reached the inevitable turning point. The growth trance that has gripped the world for the past several decades is in the process of ending. Even if we get short periods of economic growth, that growth will be in the context of a significantly contracted economy and will only be temporary in any case, as Peak Oil and other resource constraints will quickly damper increasing economic activity. Gradually, as “recovery” gets put off for another month, another year, another few years, people may begin to realize that the expansionary phase of the era of cheap energy is finished. There are of course no guarantees that the public and their business and political leaders will indeed finally “get it,” because the urge to hang onto the growth illusion will be very strong indeed. But if the misery persists, there’s at least a chance that understanding will finally dawn in the collective mind of our species — the understanding that we must get out ahead of nature’s checks and deliberately reduce the scale of the human enterprise in ways that maximize the prospects of both present and future generations.

But all won’t automatically come to that conclusion on their own. A fundamental change in our comprehension of the human condition will depend on more and more public intellectuals articulating the message of deliberate adaptation to limits, so that the general populace has the necessary conceptual tools with which to mentally process their new circumstances. We will also need far more people working on practical elements of the transition. Those will be ongoing needs — a growth opportunity, if you will pardon the irony, for smart and articulate young people interested in making a difference. And they’ll be most successful if they find ways of framing needed behavior and attitudinal changes in ways that are attractive and inviting — as the Transition Initiatives so brilliantly do.

So in that sense, when I say “Look on the bright side,” no irony or sarcasm is intended.

Its the end of the world as we know it, and its up to us to say ‘basta!/enough!’ to those who would make us mindless consumers and slaves, enough to the devastation of our planet in the name of money, and to decide what kind of world we want to live in, start creating it while doing everything in our power to help kill this monster that has been imposed on us.
Just do it!

Resist Do Not Comply

May 26th, 2009

by pylon.

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This is not a video about polar bears, really, although if you just want to watch a video about polar bears, then feel free to watch this anyway. The difference is, there is something more going on here – a simple but potentially effective message about you.

Why haven’t you fought back yet?

Can Cuba Offer An Alternative to Corporate Control Over the World’s Food System?

May 21st, 2009

by admin.

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paper presented at the 20th Conference of North American and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists, Havana, June, 2008

by Joseph Tharamangalam, Centre for Global Justice.

Give us this day our daily bread. (The only prayer Jesus is reported to have taught his followers)

With all the authority of hindsight, it is important to analyze and criticize the methods Cuba has chosen to eradicate hunger…. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the Cuban revolution declared, from the outset, that no one should go malnourished. No disappointment in food production, no failed economic take-off, no shock wave from world economic crisis has deterred Cuba from freeing itself from the suffering and shame of a single wasted child or an elderly person ignonimously subsisting on pet food. No other country in this hemisphere, including the United States, can make this claim” (Benjamin et al.189)

Introduction

This paper draws on an ongoing research project that compares the human development experience of Cuba and the state of Kerala in India, two well known success stories that have achieved an impressive measure of human well being without waiting for the so called trickle down effect of industrial development or wealth creation. Their remarkable achievements (as measured by UNDP’s human development (HD) indictors) have been hailed by many scholars and policy makers. Our research project seeks to identify common patterns in the development experience of these cases and to explore possible lessons for the world, especially for the one fifth of humanity still suffering from chronic poverty and endemic deprivations.

The paper explores the theme of food security in Cuba. Although the UNDP’s measure of HD does not directly factor in food security it is obviously at the very foundation of any system of human development and well-being. The issue of food security has assumed a new urgency in the context of the current world food crisis that is threatening to plunge as many as 100 million people into hunger in addition to the 850 million already in a situation of chronic hunger. As is well known, faced with an even more serious food crisis some two decades ago, Cuba launched a daring and unconventional agricultural revolution, regarded by some as the very “anti-thesis” of the Washington consensus and labeled as an “anti model” by a spokesperson of the World Bank. Many experts who have studied the Cuban experience (including some from Oxfam, FAO, and the WFP) now believe that Cuba may offer some lessons to those searching for alternatives to the current world food system that has failed so miserably in providing food security to vast numbers of people and has destroyed the ability of communities and countries to exercise any control over their food system.
The remainder of the paper is divided into 3 parts: A brief overview of Cuba’s post- 1990 agricultural revolution is followed by the main part of the paper that discusses some important elements of what may be called Cuba’s alternative paradigm. The concluding part will raise questions about sustainability and food security.

Cuba’s New Agricultural Revolution: From Crisis to Recovery

Historically, Cuba has had a classical colonial agricultural system that produced sugar for export, and served the interests of a metropolitan elite based first in Spain and then in the US. After the revolution Cuba became dependent on the Soviet Union and its trading partners. This resulted in an agricultural system characterized by three notable features: 1) its dependence on the USSR for almost all its trade albeit on very favorable terms; 2) its adoption of the Soviet model of large-scale high input and state owned agriculture, and 3) its heavy dependence on food imports.

With the dissolution of the Soviet trading system, Cuba was plunged into a major crisis including a 30% fall in food availability. Among the country’s highest priorities was the need to transform its agriculture from a high-input to a low input, self-reliant, small scale and viable agriculture. To this end Cuba launched a series of reforms that transformed its agricultural system radically. In sharp contrast to the experience of other third world countries around the same time, Cuba’s was structural adjustment with a difference – one that was premised upon relying on the country’s own resources and committed to maintaining its social safety net and social programs.

Many careful observers have noted that through a process of intense mobilization of state and society Cuba overcame the worst forms of food shortages in a matter of some five years, and did so without seriously compromising its social programs or human development achievements. (Koont, 2004, Malhotra, 2000, Sinclair and Thompson, 2004). Sinclair and Thompson (Oxfam America) have made the claim that “Cuba has successfully turned a severe food crisis into a sustained recovery in food production”. And a report by the Food First Institute says that “…by mid-1995 the food shortage had been overcome, drastic reductions to the food supply of the vast majority of Cubans was over” (Rosset, 2000). The same report adds (210) that in the 1996-97 growing season, Cuba recorded its highest ever production levels for 10 of the 13 basic food items in the Cuban diet- and the increase came primarily from small farms. The World Wild Life Fund has listed Cuba as the only country following a sustainable path to development in that it has achieved high HD (greater than 0.8) with low ecological footprint (less than 1.8 hectares). In 1999 the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) was awarded to the Cuban Organic Farming Association (GAO).

Towards an Alternative Paradigm

Elements of a Paradigm

Based on the Cuban experience I identify 7 elements of an alternative paradigm for a sustainable agricultural system that may also provide a basis for food security to Cuba and the world. These are indicative rather than exhaustive, and are drawn heavily on the works of such organizations as the Food First Institute (eg., Rosset, 2003), Oxfam America (eg., Sinclair and Thompson, 2004) and supplemented by our own research during the past 3 years.

1. Ecological Farming

The Cuban government confronted the crisis of the 1990s by declaring a Special Period in Peacetime, and launched a national effort to convert the country’s agricultural sector from high input to low input and self-reliant farming practices on an unprecedented scale (Rosset, 2003, 207). The principles and strategies of a holistic system of agro-ecology were put into practice (Funes et. Al., xiii). These included:

-use of biofertilizers such as earthworms, compost, natural rock phosphate, animal and green manures, and the integration of gracing animals.

-use of biopesticides such as resistant plant varieties, crop rotations and natural antagonists to combat plant pathogens, and better rotations and cover cropping to suppress weeds;

-a move from capital-intensive to knowledge-intensive agriculture; knowledge generated not only by extensive and innovative scientific research, but also by recovering people’s accumumulated knowledge, integrating the two and maintaining synergy between the two(Claudio, 1999);

-animal traction in place of fuel-hungry tractors and other machines;

- urban farms which were first introduced in the aftermath of the food shortages and rising food prices. “Once the government threw its full support behind a nascent urban gardening movement, it exploded to near epic proportions” (Rosset, 2003, 210). Oxfam America reported that urban gardens were now (2003-2004) producing half of all vegetables consumed by Havana’s 2 million inhabitants (Sinclair and Thompson);

-creation and maintenance of within-farm synergies.

Cuba has now proven that organic farming is productive and viable.

2. Decentralization and Diversification:

Emphasis is now placed on small farms and local production, relying on local resources and adaptation to the local ecosystem and the needs of the local community.

Cuba’s success in ecological farming is essentially a success of small farms and small farmers. Large state farms were broken up and redistributed precisely because they had proven to be unsuccessful in adapting to the technology and social organization of organic farming. Small farmers were able to put to use their memory and experience of an earlier form of farming. Most important, it was discovered that in state farms worker alienation was high and productivity low. By contrast, the small farms adopting organic farming were characterised by high levels of worker participation and enthusiasm.

Diversification has had several dimensions- products and exports, types of producers and their relationship to land (land tenure), markets, and finally the economy itself which has opened up more space for private actors while maintaining a strong state sector in critical areas.

Local production also eliminates the need for wasteful transportation, packaging and storage while supplying fresh food to local people.

To facilitate the above, the ministry of agriculture and its administrative structure has also been decentralized.

The Cuban experience has shown the viability of small farms. Peter Rosset ( 2003) contrasts these small farms with the high input industrial farms which, he argues, are kept viable only with huge subsidies by government. And this is not counting the high ecological deficits incurred and the massive scale of the externalization of costs. In terms of classical theoretical debates about the viability of the family farm, it would seem that it is Chayanov, not Kautsky who seems to be carrying the day.

3. Redistribution of Land to the Farmers

Redistribution of land is a prerequisite for creating the small farm sector that has proven to be suitable for ecological farming. In sharp contrast to increasing concentration of land that followed neoliberal reforms in other Latin American countries, Cuba’s land reforms during the special period effectively broke up state farms and redistributed these to a variety of cooperatives and to large numbers of individual farmers. By 1996 there were 2654 Basic Units of Cooperative Production or UBPCs (Enriqez 204) – data from CEPAL 2000, 313). These played their largest role in sugarcane, also in citrus, rice and livestock. State farm sector fell from 82% to 14.4%.

Apparently reviving an earlier idea, the program aimed at “linking people with land”. These farms provided the farmers a greater sense of control and ownership, which, in turn contributed to a greater sense of belonging and greater productivity. “We went to bed as workers and woke up in the morning as owners” as the manager of a successful UBPC told us referring to the creation of that UBPC. (farmer in a UBPC visited by author in December, 2007).

4. A Democratic State Committed to Public Provisioning for its People

The role of the state is critical in two respects. First, it has been amply proven by researchers (especially those associated with the UNDP’s HD Reports) that few societies have achieved high human development without substantial state intervention in public provisioning in the areas of education, health and basic social security. This remains true even in societies (including the US) in which free market capitalism is touted as the dominant ideology (Sen, 2000). Cuba is a well known case in this respect. In Cuba such public provisioning has included a food rationing system that is a controversial issue today, re-examined and debated by policy makers within Cuba, vilified by the country’s detractors as the quintessential sin of socialism, the subject of continuous complaint by many Cuban citizens, who, nevertheless, have come to take it for granted and to expect the “minimum food basket” it provides as a basic entitlement. First launched in March, 1962, as a temporary measure to deal with food shortages, it has, over the years, been probably the single most important institution responsible for the elimination of hunger and malnutrition, the hallmark of Cuba’s uniqueness in the world. But, burdened by high costs, purported inefficiency and a bloated bureaucracy needed to administer it, the system is likely to be redesigned or replaced by such measures as more targeted security or income supplement (Benjamin et al., Alvarez). There is, however, a bottom line that stands out crystal clear: as the quotation at the beginning of this paper makes clear, Cuba’s record in eliminating hunger and mal-nutrition remains unmatched in the hemisphere and certainly in the third world. Furthermore, there is ample evidence across the world that no society has eliminated hunger and mal-nutrition, or come close to doing this, without some state-supported public provision for its poorest and vulnerable population. Cuba’s ration system has been premised on the principles of universal accessibility and equity, a bold initiative to ensure every person’s basic right to food and other basic necessities. It would seem that some policy of this kind would be integral to a paradigm for a just and equitable system of food security.

Second, it is also important to have state support extended to its farmers, especially to the most vulnerable sections of a country’s small farmers. In this respect , Cuba stands out as the contrarian par excellence. While other third world governments were abandoning their farmers in the wake of neoliberal reforms, the Cuban government made extraordinary efforts to support its farmers with all the resources at its command. And unlike the former, the Cuban state maintained its sovereignty exercising full control over the policies affecting its agriculture and food security. To be sure, such support for farmers must be subject to international trade agreements, but the absence of real fair trade is the hallmark of the current world system, and at the root of the current food crisis.

5. Democratic Participation

Complementing the strong and proactive state were the newly expanded and strengthened local level democratic institutions of popular participation that now play an increasing role in planning and governance. Popular participation is an essential ingredient of the new agricultural system, especially in the cooperatives. Participation extends to all areas of farming including research, extension, and implementation; and most important, the produce is distributed in accordance with a democratic decision-making process. The instruments of democratic participation are well organized and institutionalized. For example, the UBPCs are managed by committees elected by secret ballots. The high levels of informed participation in these cooperatives can be described by using the concepts of “deep democracy” and “high energy democracy” – concepts that have been used to describe democracy in Kerala.

It is clear that the expansion of space for such participation and control by individuals and communities has meant some reduction in the role and control formerly exercised by the Cuban state. And this process has not been without tension and contradictions (eg., the role of the independent farmers’ association, ANAIC, Alvarez, 1999; Claudio, 1999). Nevertheless, the viability and effectiveness of the process has depended on the overall synergy between state and society, between local democratic institutions that continuously feed into the working of the central government which, in turn, supports the former. There can be little doubt that popular participation has been a critical element in the success of these farms.

6. Fair Price for Farmers

One of the sources of the current food crisis afflicting the third world in the world has been the declining incomes of farmers in the wake of neoliberal reforms and the import of cheap food from outside. Many independent farmers in countries such as India and South Korea have been driven to desperation and even suicide. By contrast, Cuba’s reforms have led to significant increase in the incomes of farmers relative to other sectors of society, in particular urban salary earners. This has been noted as a major factor behind Cuba’s re-peasantization movement though this movement may have been initially triggered by people fleeing the cities in search of food during the period of the earlier food crisis.

The Cuban experience also shows what small farmers can do if they can get the WTO off their backs.

7. A New Process of Re-Peasantization?

During the special period, especially at the height of the food shortages, there was a process of urbanites migrating to rural areas in search of food and work in farming. Many stayed back attracted by more stable jobs, higher income and access to better food. Some sociologists (Enriquez, 2003) have referred to this as a process of re-peasantization. We do not have any precise data about the extent of this process or if it has continued into the present period. Enriqez (p208) reports that in a study she conducted in several cooperatives in different parts of the country 25% of the sample population she interviewed were former urban workers. Farmers in Cuba today have higher incomes relative to salary earners, and this is true even in the poorer eastern provinces. Needless to say, they also eat much better, and have much better food security.

The re-peasantization movement may point to a possible answer to the question of how small-scale organic farming can be made viable in a country with a small population that has now been at the third stage of the demographic transition for some three generations. The problem of a declining and aging population is compounded by historical prejudices that associate farming and rural life with lower status and less desirable life-style. However, we can argue that Cuba has some unique advantages in addressing some of these issues. First, it has the most modernized and educated peasantry in the world which has achieved human development indicators that are on par with, if not higher than, those of their counterparts in the developed world. Its decentralized system of education and healthcare ensures that farmers’ access to these valued resources is not very different from that of urban dwellers. Cuba’s recent reforms promoting greater decentralization have included the decentralization of tertiary education and its university system. Similarly its political, administrative and cultural systems are also decentralized.

These factors make it possible for Cuba to integrate far more closely not only its agricultural economy with its non-agricultural economy, but also its rural culture and life-style with its urban and national culture and life-style. This process has the potential of creating a rural-urban continuum that will reduce the gap between rural, agricultural life on the one hand and urban non-agricultural life on the other. Arguably, this has reversed the process of rapid urbanization that occurred in Cuba in the 1980s, and may offer a lesson to the countries in the world plagued by an endless process of urbanization and centralization.

The urbanized rural areas which have access to similar educational, health and other services and cultural facilities available in the cities will also complement the cities that have been revitalized with urban farming. Elements of such a model of a rural-urban continuum already exist in the state of Kerala in India where the problem now is one of maintaining the economic viability of growing food crops to ensure long-term food security.

Cuba is experiencing nothing less than a new cultural revolution, a transformation in people’s consciousness (especially ecological consciousness) and world-view, a re-definition of people’s relationship to nature, a commitment to sustaining the earth, and above all, a renewed commitment to the humanist and socialist project the country embarked on half a century ago.

Food Sovereignty?

While this is too complex an issue to address within the scope of this paper, it can be said that the Cuban state has continued to exercise full control over all the important decisions concerning agriculture and food, and has continued to keep its people free of hunger. By contrast, most third world governments, including those who were democratically elected, have stood helplessly in the face of neoliberal policies and WTO rules that produced greater food insecurity, more food shortages, and increasing hunger in their countries.

A Sustainable Model?

The Cuban experience shows that its innovative model of agriculture has been sustainable ecologically, socially and politically. A major issue of sustainability in the future will be the mode of its integration into the global system, and that will depend very much on what happens to Cuba- US relations. For now all indications are that Cuba will assert its sovereignty over its agricultural and food policy. It is resourceful, and it has some unique resources to export including knowledge and models. Cuban agricultural extension workers (like Cuban doctors, social workers, and literacy promoters) are already working in other countries. It has niche markets for some of its products such as pharmaceuticals, and of course, its organic produce. It is already exporting organic produce to Germany and Canada. The situation may change drastically if a market for its organic produce were to open up in the US.

Another challenge will be whether in a changed international situation Cuba’s successful farmers will be tempted to return to the high input model of industrial agriculture.

Food Security?

Cuba still has serious food shortages and depends heavily on imports. It even imports food from the US for hard cash. In 2007 the country spent 1.5 billion dollars on food imports, an increase of some 24% from the previous year due to the higher food prices (Grogg, 2008); its purchase from the US alone amounted to $447, 065,000. (US Census Bureau, Trade Stats for Cuba). Not surprisingly, food is one of the most recurrent themes raised at all policy debates in the country. Raul Castro himself recently assured Cubans that the issue will be given the highest priority (Crogg, 2008). He said: “The country is working on this vital issue with the urgency it requires, because of its direct and daily impact on the lives of the people, especially those with the lowest incomes”.

Cuba faces many problems in reaching self-sufficiency including that of a small, declining and aging population with only less than 20% of them rural. Other issues include the historically low status of farmers, and low productivity. One answer to these problems may be the process described in 1, 7 above.

Assuming Cuba will succeed in substantially increasing its food production, the question still remains if it will ever reach self-sufficiency. But is food security to be equated with self-sufficiency? Or will Cuba (like several other countries) have to resort to the principle of comparative advantage and trade some of its other products for food? Perhaps this question is now premature, if not irrelevant, since the country is still a long way from maximising its productivity and reaching its real potential. It is likely that we will soon witness another major national effort of the kind seen during the special period to increase food production. It is reported that Cuba is already seeking foreign investment in domestic agriculture (Al Campbell, 2008) – presumably in the form of joint ventures and in a manner in which such investment can be integrated into its new paradigm). The analysis provided in this paper seems to provide reasonable grounds to believe that Cuba will be successful in this effort.

thinking about the future

Apr 29th, 2009

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Keith Farnish considers the changes we need to make in our lives, to stop industrial civilisation, and in particular how we talk to those we love about the future and about those necessary (but often scary) changes. Reprinted from CultureChange.

The future is everything we will ever know, and everything we have never known. Some people deny its existence: one group of people are the Pirahã of Amazonia, who have created for themselves a temporal bubble that reflects their highly sustainable, hunter-gatherer lives – the future is irrelevant because life is what is happening now… and they have no reason to doubt that they will continue living in the same way. Another group of people who deny the existence of the future are vast hoards of civilized humans, living in densely populated, money and resource dependent parts of the world: for them, the real future is too frightening to consider so they have created for themselves an artificial one in which they can pursue whatever dream the civilized world considers appropriate to its way of being. If your dream future contains happy children, material goods, vacations, a good career and a fulfilling, healthy retirement in a world of infinite capacity and endless resources, why the hell would you want to know what is really going to happen?!

For the Pirahã, their future may be tragically cut short by industrial incursion, disease and a catastrophic change in their natural ecosystem; but they are not in denial, they have just had no need to fear the change that may come. We, on the other hand, are perhaps in the terminal stages of a terrible collective state of denial, manufactured by a system that dares not speak the truth about the future: Industrial Civilization is close to ending, taking with it a great sweep of the global ecosystem as the machine claws at the air, the earth and the seas in a last-gasp attempt to stay alive. That future is one that even the most hardened survivalist would struggle to contemplate in all its dystopian horror. It mustn’t get to that stage; but have no doubt, it will if we don’t stop Industrial Civilization soon.

There is another future: to quote a recent correspondent, it is one that sits “beneath and between the cracks” of our current ideals. A more “mundane” existence, those that sell the fast-paced, luxury-filled dream would have us believe; a life of “toil”, those that ply the cradle-to-grave career paths of the industrialised civilian would call it; a world of “bleakness”, those that fill our heads with gigabytes and the artificial realities we dumbly obey would have us perceive. These may be the lies that keep us from seeking an alternative, but this alternative is still different. We are tied to our current lives in so many ways that any change – however vital, however potentially rich and fulfilling, however much it reconnects us with the real world – is difficult to perceive.

In order to make a new future, we have to first break with the past.

Breaking Bonds – Making Connections

This isn’t a self-help guide. I don’t know what your current circumstances are, so there is no way that I can guide you through the precise path you would be best to follow if (and that is a big “if”, as you will see) you decide that you – and the people you spend your life with – want to make the break from Industrial Civilization. What I can do is write from personal experience, and share some of the issues myself, and others I know well, are having to face up to. The most difficult of these issues to address, I think, is breaking the bonds that tie you to your current situation.

Here is a short list of things that you may feel you are dependent upon, and which you might find it difficult to sever your bonds with or, at least, stretch them:

Family beyond those you live with

Close friends

People you share a social life with

Work and other sources of income

School

Your “community” in general (neighbours, shops, clubs etc.)

One factor that they all have in common are that they involve people to a great extent: personal ties, however complex or even fraught they may be, are certainly at the forefront of my mind when making decisions about moving to another place, and/or living in an entirely different way. To a certain extent it is about being rejected – how many people do you know that you can honestly say would wholeheartedly support your decision to step out of the world you and they occupy? Rejection can be hard to take, and so can the thought of losing a part of the world that you have become so used to – even if it just means you won’t be able to see (eye-to-eye with) someone as often as you might previously have.

When you consider how important many of these bonds are in an objective sense, when compared to the kinds of connections we have lost with the real world then a sense of proportion does emerge. School is a place to train children to be workers, and work is predominantly a way of earning money to buy things you probably don’t even need; the social interactions they also allow, as a by-product, can be gained in many other places. Those friends and members of your family that you fear you may not see so often: how often do you actually see them, and how important are they really to you…or you to them? The “community” you live in may bear some of the hallmarks of a close-knit neighbourhood, but if it really is a place where people can depend upon each other, then you are in a small minority. You may even be able to take some of these people with you…

The real wrench, though, is change. We all fear change, even though it may excite or enliven us, because change invokes primal fears about the need to be connected to the environment upon which we are dependent. It is for a very good reason that we adapt quickly to repetitive tasks; so that we are able to carry them out while still being aware of changes to our surroundings and, although this is probably a more modern phenomenon, being able to keep our minds busy whilst carrying out tasks that are not exactly stimulating. Sufferers of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) encapsulate this fear of change in any number of habits and behaviours – but really, OCD is just an extreme example of something we all experience from time to time.

Moving beyond civilization is, for most of us, going to be a change of immense proportions, at least in terms of the adjustments we will have to make to our lives in order to live in relative stability. We have become so used to being cosseted in a synthetic shell, that the mere act of reconnecting with a world that has become alien to us, evokes surprisingly strong reactions. My personal experience is that many other people see such connection as highly unusual, even laughable; and that is the reason we are destroying our life-support machine.

Don’t forget that we have grown up in a world where, increasingly, there is seen to be only one way to live, and that one way is intrinsically disconnected from the natural environment that we come from, and are still part of. There are so many other ways to live, even to the extent that the next move you make could be towards a type of living that has never been done before, but which is no more wrong than any other way of living that has, at its heart, a survivable future. It seems that the perception of breaking bonds when we move to a different life is just part of the essential process of reconnection.

Talking About The Future

This essay was originally going to address just one thing: the way in which we talk to the people we love about the future, and specifically how we talk to children. It has become clear that to get to that point we need to address two other key things – the reason we need to change to a different future, and why change does not have to be for the worse. In a way, that simple assessment makes the act of talking about the future, and the inevitable changes we face, through our own tragic inaction or (and how can anyone deny this is better?) our conscious, proactive efforts; far easier to do. That’s not to say it is easy, but at least we have a place to start.

Children seem to have an infinite capacity for change: in a way they are templates for the final, and far more inflexible, adults they will become, having been shaped according to the culture they have grown up in. Ironically, my fear of change is not a fear for myself, but for other people, and particularly my children, who I don’t want to hurt. In fact I am likely to be affecting myself far more than them, due to their natural resilience and, at least in the longer term, stunningly blasé attitude to change. I have observed children who have lost parents, undergone marital breakdown and been dragged all over the world to fulfil the career ambitions of their parents: and, by and large, they seem to have come out of it surprisingly unscathed. This is not to say that such events are not traumatic, but the point I am trying to make is that we, as parents (if you are reading this from that perspective) tend to overestimate the impact of change: you are more likely to traumatise a child by telling them they are going to be traumatised by a change, rather than just getting on with it.

That said, it is absolutely right, and essential, in my opinion, to treat children as equal partners in any decision they are going to – at least materially – be affected by. Conversation is wonderfully enriching for families: not only is it an opportunity to share ideas and opinions, it is also surprising what you can learn from the down-to-earth attitudes of children. Change should be a shared experience for so many reasons, not least because everyone involved is in it together: maybe that’s just a truism, but it’s one that is all too easily overlooked. Different people are affected by different things, and in different ways (as we have seen with the example of OCD); my children are no exception, and seem to change with the tides some weeks – one being highly emotional about an event while the other is completely untroubled by the same thing; then the next day it could swap round entirely. It’s a dynamic that can be frustrating at times, but one that shows how important it is to understand those we are going to be taking with us into whatever future we choose to make for ourselves.

And don’t forget, that although the future may seem bleak, catastrophic and frightening; it doesn’t have to be like that. There is more than one future, and it’s time to start thinking about yours.

fresh the movie – new thinking about what we are eating

Apr 27th, 2009

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“Avenger against oligarchy” wins in Ecuador

Apr 27th, 2009

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Money! – a talk by Charles Eisenstein

Apr 21st, 2009

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Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Formulating a Future: The Case for Anti-Modernism, Part I

Apr 13th, 2009

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Sharon Astyk, at Casaubons Book puts the case for ‘anti-modernism’, which seems very much like the case for dismatling civilisation.

One of the best things about life is the strange bedfellows you find in it. It makes for one heck of a slumber party.

I was thinking about this recently, because I happened to follow out the links that people have been putting in to my posts one afternoon when I had time to kill, just out of curiosity. I do this periodically, but I’d never done so systematically, or sat down to really sort through them. And the juxtaposition, say of the black women survivalists with the urban Catholic distributist nuns, the anarchist social critics and the right wing ones, the Belizian Mennonites, the Mormon food storage people, the Pagan Fiber artists, the Baptist farmers, the socialist Baptist farmers, and the guy who occasionally sticks my pieces in with his essays on South African poetry made for a truly engaging collage. And it got me asking – what do all of us have in common?

We certainly don’t share a primary political bond, or religious faith – or at least most of us don’t. After my post recently on the role of religious communities in the future, I got emails from members of 27 distinct religious groups, not to mention plenty of athiests and agnostics. My readers cross the political spectrum.

National bonds, cultural ones, racial and ethnic ones – all of these are too variable to provide primary common ground. Even common belief about climate change, peak oil or the financial situation isn’t sufficient – I have quite a few readers who are climate change dissenters, but who share my perspective on other grounds, and plenty who think peak oil is a hoax, but have agrarian priorities. And while I disagree with them, I’m truly glad they are part of my readership, since being agreed with all the time is bad for my intellect, not to mention dull.

In the end, there is a common ground, however, and it is simply this – most of my readers come to this blog with a pervasive sense that what industrial society seems to promise them either has not arrived, or is not coming. They see no future for themselves in the path we’ve been on.

And they are not wrong. The whole premise of modernity as we practice it now is that future generations won’t mind the fact that we are using resources they will require, polluting and destroying the future capacity of the earth. The whole and most fundamental premise of modernity is this – that because progress always goes forward, there is no need to consider the future. And thus we create a culture that reverses the ordinary human desire to pass down to one’s posterity more than one already had – now we arrange life so that the future serves the present – children as yet unconceived will pay our debts and clean our messes. The future is always and inevitably enslaved to the present, and since we do not wish to acknowledge this, we do not enjoy looking at the moral consequences of this, there is no reason to think much about the future at all. Thus, modernity at one blow disposes of any future that doesn’t look like a science fiction movie.

I think it is important to realize that we cannot separate out the failures of industrial society in the present from the failures in the future. That is, peak oil and climate change (and the food crisis, overpopulation and the financial crisis and any other problems you want to pile on to the list up to and including waxy yellow buildup) are fundamentally, symptoms of a larger societal problem – industrial modernization. I don’t think that the root cause is energy depletion or the side effects (ie climate change and pollution) of energy use – that too is a symptom of a larger mindset that says that all we have to do is pour more and more resources into technologies and “development” and we can create paradise.

I don’t, thus, want to speak, as some people do, of energy as the master resource in this. Energy is extremely valuable – but the roots of our fossil fuel dependence go deep into our colonial past, and our dependence on the energy of human labor in slavery and colonialism.

And ultimately, it is this that my readership has in common – anti-modernism, a fundamental skepticism that economic growth, more energy, more technology, more shiny things, minor economic social change and other incremental variations on the same basic themes can resolve the deeper problems. Fundamentally, most people have either made a leap to the belief that some new model is required, or they are on the cusp of such a leap, struggling to balance the fact that our society views the price of modernity, even the costs to (and of) the future as a reasonable one, a mere side effect of a progress that is simultaneously inevitable and necessary to keep us all from an endless misery and suffering.

It would be easy to reject the idea of anti-modernity – after all, one could make the case that many positive and noble ideas and advances from longer lifespans and the germ theory of disease to voting rights for women are a product of modernity – reject modernity, the reasoning goes, and we’re back to wallowing in our own filth. Nor is it particularly politically realistic to imagine a wholly agrarian society, in a world of nearly 7 billion people. And this is a reasonable point, to a point. This is one of the reasons I don’t call this agrarianism.

And this would be a fair critique were anti-modernity purely retrospective, the nostalgic longing for a golden past – in that case it would be easy and right to correct it with the reminder that the past was not golden. That’s the cartoon version of anti-modernism, in which it is simply a longing to go backwards. But backwards is a direction not available to us, even if we wanted it. Anti-modernism begins from modernism, from an industrialized society with the germ theory of disease and depleted farm land, civil rights laws and toilet paper. The idea is to go forward towards a future, not to find another futureless image, in which nostalgia is all. There are legitimate debates about what of the good of modernism can be carried with us into the future without compromising our future, but as I point out in _Depletion and Abundance_ there are much less modernized cultures that have lifespans as long as ours, literacy rates that are similar and political power for women.

The progressive industrial worldview, combined with the habit of a false dualism (ie, that there is nothing between apocalyptic misery and the technological perfection of the future, what I often call the “Klingons vs. Cylons” fallacy), and between “techno future” and “regression” is very hard to shake off. Thus it is quite remarkable that as many people have done so as have. In fact, there are encouraging signs, I think, that the society as a whole is beginning to do so – consider the recent poll data that suggested that just about half of all Americans think socialism either might be better than capitalism or don’t know if it might be. While I suspect most Americans don’t really know what socialism (or capitalism) are, this is all the more astounding because Americans are taught to believe in capitalism, not as a fully comprehended thought, but as the “home team” that you root for win or lose. The idea that most Americans are ready to abandon their home team is pretty astonishing. The poll represents not a reconsideration of socialism, I suspect, but a longing for another choice outside the one that has failed them. As usual, the only choice presented are a false dualism – other economic possibilities aren’t even mentioned. But this is no accident – industrial modernity, capitalist or socialist (and both are fundamentally industrial and modernist) is a totalizing worldview, which doesn’t merely affirm one choice, but strives to eliminate alternatives.

And this, perhaps, is what makes me affirm my identity as an anti-modernist, and to think that this might be the right way to think about the common ground that I have with people who I would not ordinarily know or meet, and in many cases, with whom I would ordinarily be discouraged from working. That is, it is all very well for me to wax rhapsodic about the “diversity” of my readership, but our society, which uses enlightenment political categories as weapons, is very clear in its message that I shouldn’t actually try and work with people (and get them to work with each other) who commit the deep sin of standing on the other side of those political and national barriers from one another.

And there are real reasons to wonder whether people who, say, believe that population is the root problem of modernity and should be constrained at all costs and people who believe that reproduction is a blessing and a gift to be welcomed can work with one another on creating a sustainable future. There are real reasons to wonder why those who believe that abortion should be illegal and those who believe it should be a private matter for women and their doctors can ally even tenuously on other matters, and how strong those alliances might be. There are reasons to wonder whether climate change activists and dissenters can work well together on agrarian issues, or how the Global South and North views of ecology might come together. It is not my claim that anti-modernist ties are sufficient to obviate all other political categories. But I would claim that they are sufficient to build something upon.

Of course, this has been done before – the agrarian movement is an entertaining mix of aging Hippies and conservative Christians already, the anti-globalization movement has Pat Buchanan and George Monbiot, and any world climate conference will present fascinating alliances between nations that before had little in common. I’m hardly suggesting anything new.

But ultimately, what I would suggest is that, without overly eliding essential differences, it is possible to imagine that anti-modernism, that is, a commitment to and belief in the future both in the abstract and the real bodies of our real posterity, is sufficient to carry the weight of a movement. If that is not sufficient to bear political fruit, what else is, after all?

I would expect the many and varied debates that are already going on between disparate views of what society should look like to be both engaging and contentious. I think that if such an anti-modernist identity could collectively arise, and a political rubric be created for at least some alliance, we would have to decide what future vision we all collectively stand in favor of, rather than simply opposing the totalizing vision of modernity. I suspect hybrids and factions will arise in fascinating and troubling ways. I don’t know that I will always like what such alliances achieve.

And yet, I think it is necessary. Agrarianism alone, peak oil awareness alone, eco-village culture alone, traditionalism alone, anarcho-agrarianism alone, crunchy conservativism alone, anti-globalization alone, climate activism alone, survivalism alone, distributism alone, radical homemaking alone, or any of the complex personal identities we create for ourselves alone are insufficient to stand against to the totalizing message of modernity, the one that erases even the possibility of our existence. All of these identities alone ultimately leave us…alone, too few to make an impact, without sufficient density of culture to draw others together under our rubric. If we are not to be small outposts alone, dissenting from modernity as it devours our future, our only hope is a unified case to preserve it.

not ‘hope’

More Free Range Humans Needed

Cuba and Change We Can Believe In

Look on the Bright Side – Richard Heinberg

Resist Do Not Comply

Can Cuba Offer An Alternative to Corporate Control Over the World’s Food System?

thinking about the future

fresh the movie – new thinking about what we are eating

“Avenger against oligarchy” wins in Ecuador

Money! – a talk by Charles Eisenstein

Formulating a Future: The Case for Anti-Modernism, Part I

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