Dismantle Civilisation

Reprinted from Reality Sandwich.

If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Whilst, like you, I’ve read many a tale of imminent ecological collapse, impending disaster, and fervent fear mongering within the pages of some of our more dubious dailies, I could never say I’d been “shaken to the core” in terms of impact to my everyday life. Obviously I’d had a certain appreciation for the gravitas of the climate and resource situation — just enough to become involved in the UK transition town movement, founding Transition Town Wandsworth in SW London, and even persuading our local council to give us “waste” land to turn around into community gardens. And of course, I’ve seen all those documentaries, from Chris Martenson’s excellent Crash Course, through to the ultra bleak End of Suburbia, and onto the more hopeful Power of Community, yet the ingrained inertia of routine remained.

“What’s it going to take to wake you up?,” you may ask. Indeed, my — and almost everyone else’s — determined denial of the coming tsunami of change seems to be a very interesting (but not very helpful) by-product of our information saturated media existence. Perhaps the picture is too big for one mind to get a handle on, or maybe we’re overly skeptical, because of a saturation of conflicting data, and wary of misinformation — throwing out the baby of facts with the bathwater of sensationalist dross? My personal opinion is that most may only make the necessary maneuvers when their direct interests are perceived to be under threat — sad but true.

Or maybe the situation will just change in time (although I don’t think we have too much more of that) as different perspectives dawn. It certainly did for me.

It was only two more straws that finally broke this particular camel’s back. Rob Stewart’s excellent Shark Water, a film that pulls no punches documenting the hellish worldwide decline of 90% of shark species as a result of a needless finning orgy to fill the stomachs of the Eastern rich, directly followed by a reading of a particularly unsettling Friends of the Earth report, Climate Code Red. I finally internalised the idea that yes, we are actually all screwed. Now, today, this generation, in our own backyard, your life and the life of everyone you know RIGHT NOW. There is no room for any more complacency — THIS. IS. IT. Needless to add, for me, all the dots have very much joined.

“Well now,” you might say from behind your hastily Googled climate models, government reports and caseloads of petroleum dollar funded refutations,”‘there’s no need to worry, as it is a fact that the whole solar system is warming.” Well friend,”so what?,” is my response to that particular short cut to thinking. Even if it’s true that it’s all a cunning ruse orchestrated by the PTB to raise revenue or put a clamp on your “way of life,” what about all the other data? What about the disappearing rain forests, species extinction, increasing seawater acidification, depleted fish stocks, GM contamination of the biosphere? Is it all an exaggeration? Are you prepared to bet thousands of carefully balanced eco-systems, the future of our descendents, the future of hundreds of thousands of species and everything that nature has attained so far (including us) on your own opinion? As the Climate Code Red report states, you probably wouldn’t travel by airline if the risk of crashing was 1 in 1000, yet we’re prepared to bet EVERYTHING on lesser odds. A risk only the insane would take (no offence if you are crazy, you are absolved, but please turn out the lights when you leave the room).

Now I’m not going to deny that little red devils routinely prod at my best intentions or slam the door to my optimism, but these facts even out-do the worst my sometimes-Sunday-night pessimism can conjure up. In short, it is time for action. But I’m not advocating anarchy, stepping out with the sandwich board, or even escaping into some new-age wishful group-think. We know the risk, so the time for business-as-usual navel gazing has now passed; we need to take action; it’s not easy, but you’d be surprised what could be achieved. For example, I live and work in London, around people who most of the time seem as indifferent to what’s coming as they are to each other. Yet plunge them into an emergency situation, the Blitz, IRA, or bombs on the tube, and time and again they step up and act together. So regardless of the drag of the day-to-day chains of obligation typical of the western lifestyle, I think we’re capable of making ready for the fast approaching day when they break irrevocably; clear the decks on our own terms, as we don’t want to merely react.

But it can only happen if we act together.

Whenever there’s a catastrophe under way, it helps to start by creating a bit of space — not only for the casualty (the environment), but also for those on the scene (us). It allows a proper evaluation of what needs to be done. As the repetitive riffs from the media become ever more conflicted and frantic, now’s the time to create just enough space for your own story to grow. As I’m sure you’re already aware, fixations on incessant fear mongering, blind chattering from the “celebrity” circus, and the monotonous arm lock of pop culture can play havoc with your ability to actually think for, and be, yourself. How about you stop absorbing other people’s junk (even mine) and make your own with your own (community/ family) — it’s what you’re here for. It will also prevent you from panicking.

What I’m suggesting here is, aside from the somewhat run of the mill act of distancing yourself from all the crazes and cravings of consumerism (giving all the stuff you don’t need away, giving up on the pre-packed lifestyle), is some kind of commitment to the consequences of your lifestyle. It might sound like an easy deal, until you realise that I am definitely NOT talking about your own desires to take more than you need, follow your personal ambitions and appetites, or ignore the realities of where you live. Given the way the future is shaping up these things have probably become a liability anyway — they certainly are to the planet.

No, the best thing you can do is to wake up to the precarious situation you’ve found yourself in. When it all goes down, on whom are you going to call? Where’s your next meal coming from? What are the origins of the resources you depend on and are you capable of emulating them if/ when the plug is pulled? Did you think we could carry on doing what we’re doing in this way forever? (Well, speaking personally, I did actually.) Finally, do you think that any authority actually gives a damn about you?

Maybe what we should all be doing is getting out from the shadow of all those screens and becoming well acquainted with the people and possibilities of where we live. After all, pretty soon we may have to find allies in the former who can help you fully make use of the latter. If we strengthen our ties to our locality, we’re all the more likely to ride out any big waves of change headed our way. I’m talking community gardens, knitting circles, brewing collectives, sports teams, musical associations, recycling and composting committees, swap shops, social events, and children’s herb patches. Do whatever suits you and your particular neck of the woods, but try and be inclusive of everyone — you don’t just want the”‘usual suspects” (white, educated, left leaning folk) involved. The best way is to appeal to everyone through their interests, not through your own dogma.

So is binding to your immediate surroundings what you call an effective response to species extinction and ecological collapse? Can getting to know your neighbours make a jot of difference now that so many of our bridges are already burned? I believe it can. The authoritarian ideal of keeping us separated and ideologically strangled (it takes several thousand hours of airtime to keep that up), has only served to disempower us into accepting a life we’re not really into anymore. As you can’t break it all by yourself, force of numbers is the finest option. Besides, I believe that creating space for reflection, space for the story of others, and space for personal creativity (we’re going to need lots of that) is actually a better way to live than blind acceptance of the way things are, especially as that way leads to a dead end.

We’re in a time of massive challenges which some predict will really put a squeeze on everything we are used to now. Even though I find it somewhat surreal to even write these words, it’s impossible to overstate the responsibility that we now have. Afraid as I was of thinking for myself, so accustomed to the really big choices being out of my hands, and so insulated from the consequences of my actions, I’ve found creating space for my community to be my best response so far to a systemic inertia that is keeping us all strapped to this careening car crash. I want to put the wheel back in my hands and quit just being the passenger.

No Comments »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try and balance a pencil on its tip.

The Psychosis Of Civilization

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

Money.

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

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

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

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

What Is Really Important

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

I’m going to have another go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How could it be any other way?

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

Decision Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Comments »

An interesting piece on wildness contrasted with sustainability, from the new going feral blog:

Wildness

Everything on this earth is inherently wild – if it lives and dies, it is part of the wildness that is life. Our word ‘will’ is rooted in the word wild; the will of a creature – the will of the land, is it’s wildness. In a culture dedicated to denying this truth, we tend to think of wildness as an exception – as something that exists in isolated pockets of wilderness here and there. Wildness is the rule, not the exception. If it exists, it is either living unhindered in a wild state or it is the victim of domestication. The keyboard I type this on comes from different parts of this wild earth – tortured and mangled together into the image of a keyboard. Everthing has will; a desire for how it want’s to exist and express itself – everything is inherantly wild.

domestication

Domestication is what we are surrounded by – and it is something that has happened to us, so it’s not surprising that we don’t notice it. It is a pretty polite word for a violent process – it might be better called ‘killing the wildness’ – since that’s what it means. A domesticated creature is one that lives according to it’s human master’s will, not it’s own. The more that creature (or plant, land, river etc.) can be helped to forget it’s own will the easier for it’s master to maintain control. If the cows forget that there had ever been anything other than the feedlot, they won’t feel confined.             How is it a violent process? A living thing’s wildness is something potent - it’s strength lies in every cell of the body. Nothing was born to live in captivity, to be droned, subdued, submissive; and nothing goes into such a role without being forced. In order for a feild of wheat to grow, every other living thing in that space must be eradicated. The feild is tilled, loosening up the soil (so that it can wash away), chemical fertilizer is applied, irrigation, pesticides, all to keep the field from remembering how it wants to live. Year after year, the feild is plowed planted and sprayed, consuming enormous amounts of energy, because year after year it wants to go wild, to remember, to heal - and must be beaten into submission.

The final dream of domestication – total control. Soy monoculture in the wake of one of the most biodiverse environments to have ever existed; the rainforests of Brazil.

Once human societies start domesticating each other and their landbases, it seems to become obsessive, it feeds itself. A look around should prove the point. It may be that humans began domesticating and developing agricultural societies with beautiful intentions, but once the process of taking wild space and turning it into a human designed ’production’ begins, things get out of control. Humans are capable of taking forests - home to countless species of plant, animal, bird, insect, mycelium - and after killing their wildness, turning it all into a production space for human food. The possibilities of expansion are limited only by how much earth there is to exploit. The final dream of civilization is that everything will be controlled, organized, categorized; all wildness and spontaneity will be eradicated. Fish will live in fish farms. Trees will grow on forest farms. Animals of utility will live in feedlots. Humans will live in cities completely isolated from any other creatures (except cute pets), isolated from anything that might remind them. The earth will be remodeled in the name of production. Any spontaneous, uncontrolled expression of life will be crushed.              Of course, it isn’t really the future I am describing…..

sustainability

How does this relate to sustainability? Is domestication unsustainable? I would say yes, but that isn’t the issue I want to talk about here. There is alot of buzz in mainstream society right now about who’s ‘going green!’, about how industrial society is voluntarily making the transition to green energy and thus becoming sustainable. Look at the picture above – the brazilian rainforest is cleared to make way for vast plantations of soybeans. What if those tractors were powered by biodeisel? What if they were powered by methane trapped from composting human shit, which was then used to fertilize the feild? Imagine that picture as an example of sustainability – vegan food being farmed using green fuel and human compost. Why would anyone want to sustain that?

The popular concept of sustainability paints a picture something like this:      Humans are burning too much fossil fuel. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with how we live, or how we interact with this earth, there are just some glitches in the system. Acidifying oceans, ozone holes, and most importantly global warming. If we can only make a few simple changes - switch to green energy, organic farming, cloth bags instead of plastic, phase out fossil fuels – the earth won’t burn and industrial civilization will be able to continue indefinately. I don’t want to argue too much here over the issue that it is impossible for this culture to become sustainable – I think it is more important that we consider if it is even desireable! In the sustainability movement, there is no discussion on what it is we want to make sustainable, or even what has been sustainable in the past. A culture of hunter gatherers lived sustainably in the brazilian rainforest for thousands of years, now eradicated and subdued into producing soybeans (pictured above) for the eco-conscious north american. Can a domesticated, modern human have any concept of what is sustainable, being so removed from any real point of reference?  Remember, one of the most important parts of being domesticated is forgetting, or having your memories erased -  your wild nature – who you are and what you need, erased.

The only proven models we have for existing sustainably as humans (the only way humans have ever actually existed sustainably) are hunter-gatherer societies, who did cultivate their landbases in many subtle ways, the important difference from agricultural socety being that they directly depended/depend on the health of their wild landbase – where agricultural society depends on fighting/destroying the health of it’s wild landbase. One way preserves the land, one way rapidly destroys it. Hunter-gatherers are tied to a limited resource base; a culture that kills too many Bison will soon after starve. This gives incentive to not get too big or too greedy. If an agricultural society gets too big or greedy, however, it just clears mor land to plant more grain – and so on, and so on, untill…. it becomes sustainable!

Future plans for Gothenburg, Sweden, transitioning to become a sustainable city.

what do we want to make sustainable?

This is a very important question. Do we want to be able to continue abusing all life on this planet – conforming it to our twisted visions of what is needed? Do we want to have a sustainable human engineered earth, completely ordered and controlled to maximize efficiency? A sustainable world where everyone and everything is tagged, drugged, kept submissive, orderly, tame? Or do we want to give up on the project of controlling all life on earth? Becoming sustainable does not mean allowing the wildness of living things to flourish; letting blackberries and dandelions grow through the concrete, turning the pavement into soil (and food!). It doesn’t mean healing our relationship with the land, or ourselves. Infact, the popular concept of sustainability, if enacted, would simply mean making the war against wildness perpetual. Domestication is the root of the giant chasm between humans and the non-human world, it is the engine that propels us towards killing the planet. Yet, somehow, it has completely snuck under the radar of the ongoing discussion on ‘going green’, probably because it is a much more ancient and deeply rooted problem than burning fossil fuels. It makes the solution much more complex.

The ancient civilization of what is now called Iraq successfully deforested rainforests of giant cedars, planted them with wheat, and turned them into desert in just a few centuries using primitive stone, bone and wood tools, as well as farming organically. Phasing out fossil fuels isn’t enough. Going back to a pre-industrial level of technology isn’t enough. There is a darkness at the heart of this culture, something very powerful and destructive that we need to see. We need to enter into a conversation with the land we take from in order to live; allow ourselves to hear it’s screams. We need to have relationships that aren’t manipulative and abusive, with one another and the earth. ’Sustainability’ is not primary, it might even be a destructive goal - that wild aliveness flourish is what matters.

the only war that matters

is the war against wildness

all other wars are subsumed by it

We agree – the sustainiability proposed by many green organisations and commentators will perpetuate the system which has destroyed the earth in the first place.  Why should we perpetuate this destructive and suicidal system any further?  True sustainability lies in undomesticating people, rewilding our economies and communities and promoting wildness as opposed to civilisation.  Whenever you see the term sustainability used, look beneath the surface greenwash and see the real message – is it perpetuating civilisation or is it rewilding and dismantling civilisation?

No Comments »

Asks Luis de Sousa, at the Oil Drum, Europe.

Consulting an on-line Dictionary, a definition for Sustainability can be retrieved as the ability to perpetuate existence. In the same resource the definition for Development will be given as growth or progress. A concept gathering these two words together forms what the Greeks termed an oxymoron, an idea devoid of logical sense. Can Sustainable Development be sustainable? Naturally not, for merging together two antonymous concepts, it simply cannot exist.

So why is this oxymoron in the order of the day? Why does it get such attention? Why are so many so willing to discuss it so passionately?

Sustainable Development is one of several philosophical concepts (having as much eeriness as mythology) that emerged in the wake of a series of decades of breathtaking, unprecedented growth. Growth as in development, the physical expansion of the Human-sphere, its population and interactive processes with nature, harnessing energy and concentrated matter, deploying waste heat and dispersing matter. These mythological concepts are simply a reflex of a society intoxicated with growth in front of the first signs of physical constraints to its development.

Sustainable Development became the language of those that promise perpetual growth, and more, the profits that should come along with it. It is the language of those that do not want to reconsider their way of life. Of those who expect the XXI century to be the same as the XX century. Of those that expect to run all the cars on french fry oil or firewater. Of those who call Carbon Capture and Sequestration an energy source. Of those who promote the Hydrogen Economy, forgetting about the Nuclear energy system for which it was conceived. Of those touting Nuclear as Salvation. Of those touting Nuclear as Condemnation. Of those who expect Carbon Trading to reduce the OECD’s dependence on OPEC. Of those dreaming with a CO2 atmospheric concentration of 1000 ppm by 2100, accompanied by a 6ºC global temperature rise. Of those saying that the Earth’s hydrocarbons are not fossil fuels. Of those drilling their way forward. Of those waiting for the Free Market to replace Fossil Fuels. Of those thinking all they need is changing light bulbs to continue living in 400m2 cardboard houses. Of those claiming to be in their hands a reduction of Fossil Fuels consumption.

Sustainable Development is the philosophy of those fooling themselves, thinking that the Earth is flat, refusing to accept that the planet is a spherical object and thus finite. Of those refusing to face reality, refusing to wake up from their dreams.

A decade from now Sustainable Development will be out of the agenda. By then the word of the day shall be Survival. The Survival of a Culture, a Social and Political Framework, a Civilization.

Hopefully some will be able to wake up in time, leave the intoxicating dreams behind and face reality, however grim. Because then they’ll be able to devise a New Future. A Better Future. A Future founded on the real physical entities that run through our Economy, not in abstract, growth dependent, illusions. A Future where each man and woman have their place and are not enslaved by a spiral of virtual accumulation and spending. A Future where having more than the next man isn’t a goal in itself. A Future were work and excellence are rewarded by things that have real physical and meta-physical meaning.

A Future.

George Draffan: “We can fantasize about living however we want, but the only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age. What we have now is the merest blip—we’re one of only six or seven generations who ever have to hear the awful sound of internal combustion engines (especially two-cycle)—and in time we’ll return to the way humans have lived for most of their existence. Within a few hundred years at most. The only question will be what’s left of the world when we get there.”

3 Comments »

This is a very long, but brilliantly well researched essay by Peter Salonius, taken from The Oil Drum. The basic premise is that we stopped being sustainable thousands of years ago (this is the general feeling of most anti-civ writers working today) and that without phenomenal population reductions in tandem with a complete cultural change in the way we approach food production, humanity stands no chance of keeping the Earth in a habitable state. In essence, we have to become sustainable while retaining a tiny proportion of our current numbers.

Tough words, and not something most people would be happy to stomach, but if his research is right, then we have to be heading towards this state rapidly.

Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago

Part 1: Life Before Agriculture

The major departure for humans as just another member of the global animal species assemblage came when fire was first used about 400,000 years ago by Homo erectus (Price 1995). The dynamic cyclical stability of complex systems has been shown for most animal populations, except top predators, to depend on predation to dampen overshoot and runaway consumption dynamics of prey species (Rooney et al. 2006). The ability to control and use fire removed the influence of wild animal predators as moderators of human numbers. The use of fire made possible the colonization of cold lands at high latitudes where fuel for heating shelters was available in some form such as animal oil, dried dung and wood. Even though their shelters became more complex and elaborate, they were, for the most part, temporary encampments whose main structural components could be transported across the landscape so as to benefit from variable food availability as the seasons changed.

The bulk of human history has been that of a culture of hunter gathers or foragers. They did not plant crops or modify ecosystem dynamics in any significant manner as they were passively dependent on what the local environment had to offer. They did however domesticate dogs as early as 100,000 BCE (Vila et al. 1997); these animals were useful as hunting aids, guardians, and occasionally as food during times of scarcity. Hunter gatherers maintained social organization and interdependence, and prevented the loss of food to spoilage by sharing the harvest among community members. These people lived in harmony with their supporting ecosystems and their ability to unsustainably stress and damage their environment was limited by the fact that if their numbers exceeded the carrying capacity of the complex, self-managing, species diverse, resilient terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems from which they gained their sustenance, then hunger and lower fertility exercised negative feedback controls on further expansion.

They used culturally mediated behavior like extended suckling, abortifacients and infanticide to keep their numbers far below carrying capacity, and to avoid Malthusian constraints like starvation (Read and LeBlanc 2003). Warfare between groups competing for the same resources, before the evolution of states, also appears have been a significant constraint on the growth of human numbers (Keeley 1996).

Part 2: The Evolution of Agriculture

The development of agriculture is of great interest to us because it produces most of our food and it was a prerequisite for the tremendous growth of human numbers, and also for the various complex societies that have evolved since this new culture began (Diamond 2002).

After the advent of agriculture, mortality rates, caused by conflict, decreased somewhat as local raiding by chiefdoms evolved into long-distance territorial conquest by states (Spencer 2003). These cultural and conflict behaviors that limited human population growth served to maintain balance between humans and other species during most of the historical record. Read and Leblanc (2003) suggest that humans, in areas of low resource density, tend to maintain generally stable populations, while high resource density, such as that produced by agriculture, decreases the spacing of births more rapidly than the increase in resource density, which results in repeating cycles of carrying capacity overshoot and population collapse.

Nomads and Pastoralists

The earliest movement from strict hunter gathering toward agriculture came when people noticed the changes in ecosystems that they burned to move game animals to places where they could be more easily killed; sometimes the post-fire vegetation consisted of an increase in the numbers of plants used as food, such as berries and bulbs and also vegetation assemblages, like the sparse oak parkland of the U.S. Pacific Northwest that produced acorns for both human food and for the deer that they hunted (Angier 1974; Oregon State University 2003), while in other areas grasslands were periodically burned to encourage the growth of tender vegetation that was attractive to game animals.

Even though some hunter gatherer/ foragers did modify the vegetation or successional state of vegetation assemblages in specific areas with fire, these areas seldom were productive enough to support year round occupancy. Thus began the first steps of humans as a ‘patch-disturbance‘ species (Rees 2002), whose expansion would ultimately extend to and modify almost all of the ecosystems on the planet.

Movement toward actual cultivation agriculture began with the domestication of cereal grains at a time when postglacial climate warming was interrupted by climate reversal, even before the beginning of the consistently warm conditions of the Holocene (Hillman et al. 2001). Diamond (2002) shows that plant and animal domestication first occurred in areas where the most valuable and easiest species to cultivate were native. These species were later moved to new and more productive areas by the migratory expansion of their cultivators who overran resident hunter gatherers. As people worked with and cultured wild species, the process of genetic selection began to produce more easily managed individuals with modified behavior. Diamond (1997; 2002) outlines characteristics of wild animals dealing with diet, growth rate, captive breeding, disposition, and social structure that make individual species either candidates for domestication or that make domestication very difficult.

Nomads, inhabiting grassland / prairie ecosystems, who had relied on hunting herds of herbivores, learned enough about the habits of these species to begin the process of controlling some of them. The resulting pastoral herding culture of such animals as camels, goats, sheep, cattle, yaks, alpacas and reindeer made locating meat much less chancy, and allowed the further developing use of secondary products from living animals such as blood and milk. This very early form of species domestication without cultivation provides considerable independence in the face of environmental fluctuations because herds are moved to different areas as the seasons change and during periods of drought. These people developed a culture that moved to adapt to the environment as opposed to forcing changes on the environment to accommodate a particular food production culture, even though they did burn land to rejuvenate pasture and prevent forest growth from encroaching onto grasslands.

Pastoralists, like hunter-gatherers maintained close social organization and interdependence, and they prevented the loss of food to spoilage by sharing the harvest among community members. Hunter gathering, foraging and pastoral lifestyles are often thought of as precarious and requiring very hard work, while both archaeological evidence and the health of the few groups that have not yet been displaced by farming suggests that they lived quite long and much easier lives with better health and diets than the first people who practiced cultivation agriculture in the same localities (Diamond 1987).

Pastoralists were subject to the same constraints as hunter gatherers; their ability to unsustainably stress and damage their environment was limited by the fact that if their numbers exceeded the carrying capacity of the complex, self-managing, species diverse, resilient terrestrial ecosystems from which they gained their sustenance, then hunger and lower fertility exercised negative feedback controls on further expansion. There have only been a few groups that have been able to maintain the hunter gatherer life style even as they have been displaced and forced onto marginal land by agriculturalists. Pastoralists may continue to thrive into the modern era because the semi-arid lands they utilize are usually inappropriate for cultivation agriculture.

Of interest is the move back to nomadic pastoralism in some of the Central Asian republics that has followed the demise of the money economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1990s. Modern grass-fed cattle and sheep ranching, although not a subsistence culture, has a lot of similarities to pastoralism except that it is carried on in a grander scale to produce commodities for markets.

Beginnings of Cultivation Agriculture

The evolution of agriculture appears to have been an accidental, ‘hit-and-miss’ development that almost certainly sprang, not from necessity (Diamond 2002), but from the propensity of humans to experiment. Selective harvest and replanting of specific races of food plants took place at an accelerating pace as the hostile and unpredictable climate at the end of the Pleistocene gave way to warmer and more predictable conditions (Richerson et al. 2001). Although some authors suggest that the growth of human populations during the last 10,000 years has resulted in pressure to produce more food to feed them (Boserup 2005), most see the increased food production by cultivation agriculture as the driver of population growth (Abernethy 2002; Hopfenberg and Pimentel 2001; Hopfenberg 2008).

Cultivation agriculture usually began with shifting or ‘slash and burn’ techniques that utilized the accumulated nutrients, built up under native forest or grassland, and also those nutrients in the ash resulting from burning native vegetation. Reasonable productivity for cultivated plants lasts for only a few years on upland soils under shifting cultivation. Permanent agricultural cultivation appears to have been possible in river valleys that were fertilized annually by new soil carried by floodwaters. When soil nutrients are depleted on upland soils, it is necessary to move to a new patch of native vegetation cover and repeat the ‘slash and burn’ process. After the abandonment of temporary fields, a considerable period of native vegetation regrowth is necessary before soil nutrient levels are again built up to the point where another short cycle of cropping and nutrient depletion is profitable. On better soils in tropical climates the period of early successional woody vegetation growth may only need to be a few years before the next cultivation cycle, because temperature-driven soil weathering rates are very high in these areas.

Shifting cultivation is usually labor-intensive and the small plots involved do not produce enough to support humans and horses, oxen or other draft animals that could assist with tillage. Year round multi-cropping in tropical climates on erosion prone slopes such as areas of the Philippines sometimes involved as many as 40 different crop species on the same field so that there was always enough plant cover to break the force of the rain and minimize erosion. Shifting cultivation is only viable if the population remains low enough that the next cycle of temporary cultivation is not required until native forest or grassland regeneration on abandoned fields has rebuilt the supply of nitrogen (by biological fixation) and levels of plant available phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and micronutrients (by soil weathering).

At the time of European contact in eastern North America, from mid continent and southward, much of the low altitude land had already been submitted to enough Amerindian shifting agriculture that the settlers discovered a landscape mosaic of cleared gardens, abandoned clearings returning to forest vegetation and maturing forest that was ready for yet another cycle of clearing, burning and temporary cultivation (Williams, 2006). European settlers, whose rapidly moving diseases had already decimated the Amerindians, were able to start farming on cleared land that had been prepared by the former residents.

Amerindians did utilize the nitrogen fixation capabilities of leguminous beans in mixtures with squash, corn and various other crops, and they did augment depleting soil nutrients with the placement of fish in planting spots. However at the time of European contact, Amerindian population dynamics were probably already on the same ‘increase and collapse’ trajectory as those of other populations, whose numbers increase to exceed carrying capacity as food production is increased by the adoption of cultivation agriculture (Costanza et al. 2005). Rees (2002-03) states, as did Malthus (1826), that unless there are constraints on animal (including human) expansion, all populations grow to the point that they destroy some critical resource and then they collapse.

Intensive cultivation agriculture provides adequate food to allow the growth of large scale, populous societies living in settlements with permanent dwellings that are near enough to the food growing areas to facilitate their management and that allow for the storage of food from season to season. The transition from the passive dependence on existing complex self-managing ecosystems by mobile hunter gatherers gave way to the greater control of food sources provided by cultivation agriculture on land in specific localities with radically altered ecology. Its practitioners were tied to the land, and they were vulnerable to environmental vagaries that could produce local crop failures.

Diamond (1997) suggests that the development of plant cultivation agriculture was a ‘trap’ that precipitated massive changes in the way we feed ourselves and in the social organization that is a natural product of land ownership and control of stored foodstuffs. The thinking with regard to this ‘trap’ is that, as populations rise to utilize the increased food supplied by cultivation agriculture, it is very difficult to revert to less productive food producing systems without incurring hardship and starvation.

The egalitarian food-sharing social organization systems of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and shifting agriculturists, based on kinship, gave way to the class stratification of societies that rely on intensive cultivation agriculture. The stratum of society that controls the means of food production, and the land required for it, develops a hierarchy of property owners and leaders who are rich enough to thrive during periods of severe food shortages, while the less powerful, who are employed by them, suffer famine much more directly.

Eventually this social stratification and evolution of complex labor division proceeds to the point where merchants, craftsmen, military, clergy, bureaucrats, politicians and royalty occupy urban areas where food from the countryside is used, but not produced. A rich and politically powerful stratum develops absolute property rights that are accumulated as wealth and transferred to its descendants; this stratum, often doing very little labor, becomes more numerous and difficult to support as the ratio of elites to producers increases (Costanza et al 2005).

As economic class distinctions developed, the social changes usually included a decline in the status of women who were more equal partners in subsistence societies. While close to 100% of the people in foraging and hunter gatherer societies were involved directly in producing food, less than 60% of the population in non industrial agricultural societies may participate directly. In contrast, industrial, modern, mechanized agriculture that depends on non renewable fossil-fuelled machinery usually employs less than 5% of the population directly in food production.

The migration of foragers and hunter gathers to colder northern climates, the shift to more intensive food production systems that included increased densities of people living in the confines of enclosed permanent structures, the further migration of people into Asia, and the modern evolution of urban living conditions have all been accompanied by genetic changes in humans. The most well known of these changes are the adaptive development of resistance to “crowd diseases” spread from domesticated animals (Diamond 2002), food tolerances, the various blood groups we see in human populations, as well as the selection for lighter skin colors that has allowed people living in northern climates to use limited sunlight to accomplish the metabolic transformations of chemical precursors into Vitamin D (D’Adamo and Whitney 1996).

The transition to large-scale intensive cultivation agriculture in permanent fields often involved complex water management (irrigated rice) and the use of large animals such as horses, water buffalo and oxen to pull plows which turn up buried soil nutrients into the planting layer and aid in controlling weeds. Even though intensive cultivation agriculture did produce more food than subsistence food production on a specific area, severe local food shortages were not eliminated by the development of these techniques. Famine was caused by cyclic drought, climate cooling episodes and the natural propensity of humans to increase population numbers to meet then surpass any elevation of carrying capacity during benign conditions (Hopfenberg 2003).

Societies grew and prospered until soils were exhausted or as long as there was new land to cultivate, but they declined when they ran out of fertile soil options (Montgomery 2007). Temporary overshoot of carrying capacity has caused human numbers to fall back precipitously with some regularity throughout history (Stanton 2003), while less regular complete collapses of societies have been the norm since the advent of agriculture (Costanza et al. 2005).

Cultivation agriculture has resulted in a tremendous depletion of both soil mass by erosion ( Montgomery 2007; Sundquist 2007) and plant nutrients in soil (Williams 2006; Salonius 2007). Plant nutrients are lost because of bare soil cultivation and the lack of the very efficient recycling that is a characteristic of diverse, deep rooted, nutrient-conservative forest and grassland / prairie ecosystems. Nutrient replacement with fertilizers is the process that allowed intensive cultivation agriculture to continue after all of the arable soils on the planet had been occupied.

The Agricultural Revolution and Beyond

The Agricultural Revolution was the first of several food production improvements that took place after 1700. Soils, whose plant nutrients would normally be depleted after a period of cultivation, were augmented in the earliest stages of intensive agricultural development by forest leaves, animal manures, wood ash, fish, seaweed, mud from tidal zones, and pulverized bones. As a complex transportation industry began to develop based on coal and then petroleum for railways and ocean going ships, long distance transport of guano, Chilean nitrate, limestone, potash salts and rock phosphate allowed depleted soils to produce enough crops for domestic use and export. The absolute necessity for including legume crops in crop rotations was circumvented after the Haber- Bosch process began producing ammonia using methane and atmospheric nitrogen 1913 (Vance 2001).

Science-based management of soil nutrients and fertilizer materials became necessary as crop fertilization had to become increasingly efficient. The guiding principle for crop fertilization was Liebig’s Law of the Minimum that states that only by increasing the supply of the scarcest or most limiting soil nutrient would crop growth be improved. Later the emphasis shifted from crop fertilization to nutrient management planning which attempted to assess soil nutrients that would be released into solution during growth, the acidity of the soil as it effects plant nutrient availability, the nutrients contributed by manure applications and nitrogen fixing plants, and the possibility of environmental (especially to water) damage by nutrients that are not used by the existing crop or that are not held in the soil until the next crop begins to grow.

The next major increase in food production occurred as the Industrial Revolution began. Energy for manufacturing farm implements was first obtained from falling water. With the invention of the steam engine, energy from burning wood supplied power for the manufacture of farm machinery such as plows, mowers, diggers and threshers. The motive power to operate this machinery was provided by draft animals. Later these machines were pulled and operated by power obtained from internal combustion engines that slowly reduced reliance on draft animals such as oxen and horses, whose feed formerly came from the same arable land that grows food crops for people. Thus the Fossil Fuel Revolution began.

Since 1750 human society has increasingly augmented the solar energy that it relied on exclusively for most of its history with a progression of temporary supplies of non-renewable geological energy sources (coal, petroleum, natural gas and fissionable uranium). The profligate consumption of these energy subsidies has allowed tremendous increases in agricultural production and the global trading that removes the necessity for food to be produced in the region where it is to be consumed.

Thomas Malthus (1826) predicted that agricultural production increases would not be able to meet the requirements of a steadily growing human population. However he was not aware that the depletion of soils by the agriculture, that was feeding less than one billion humans in the 1700s, was already unsustainable in the long term. Malthus could not have conceived of the temporary increase of carrying capacity and food production that would be made possible by the use of non-renewable fossil and nuclear fuels during period after his death. The abandonment of the effective controls on human birth rates, exercised by pre-agricultural societies, and the decrease in mortality by warfare that followed the evolution of states have allowed the exponential expansion of human numbers to be fuelled by increased availability of food.

Human populations had grown very slowly until the advent of agriculture. Population grew rapidly in the context of both increased food security and the wealth that agricultural productivity created until the middle 1800s. During the latter part of this period, as soil productivity became seriously diminished by cultivation agriculture, and a scarcity of forest land that could be cleared for farming developed, migration to new lands such as North America and Australia was used to decrease the pressure on existing land. These new areas presented migrants with fertile land so that soil-depleting agriculture could continue (Manning 2004; Williams 2006).

This migration and exploitation of new lands continued the accelerating population expansion that increased agricultural food production makes possible. The historically unprecedented rapid exponential population explosion after 1800 was driven by the increased productivity that was made possible by the labor saving machinery of the Industrial Revolution in concert with the increasing access to cheap and abundant geological energy that characterized the Fossil Fuel Revolution.

Part 3: Our Current Agricultural Situation

The Green Revolution produced the last major improvement in food production during the latter decades of the twentieth century as new crop varieties were created by plant breeders. These new varieties depended on large inputs of fossil-fuel dependent fertilizers, irrigation, insecticides and herbicides. William Paddock (1970) warned, at the time of the beginning of the Green Revolution, that the increased agricultural productivity would simply produce more malnourished poor people if curbs were not applied to the increase in human numbers that would result from increased food availability. Global population growth since the beginning of the Green Revolution has borne out the futility of increasing food availability in the absence of measures to control human fertility (Diamond 2002).

Some forms of modern industrial agriculture, combined with the transportation necessary to ship food produced, use more than 10 calories of fossil fuel to deliver one calorie of food to the market (Younquist 1997). Montgomery (2007) states that before 1950, most increases in food production were the result of increased land under cultivation and better husbandry, but recently most of the increases have been the result of mechanization and escalating fertilizer use. Albert Bartlett (1978) has said, “Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food.”
Salonius (2005) summarized evidence for the necessity that modern civilization must face the prospect of decreasing access to the cheap and abundant exhaustible geological energy that has served agriculture so effectively during the recent past. The cost of this energy is poised to increase and that eventually fossil fuel and fissionable nuclear energy will become economically unavailable.

The looming scarcity of fossil fuel resources will create great difficulty in continuing to supply fertilizer nitrogen for agriculture by the Haber-Bosch process. Inexpensive rock phosphate supplies are forecast to become depleted in as little as 60 years (Vance 2001). Dery and Anderson(2007) demonstrate peaking phosphorus production from several sources including the United States that follow the same trajectory as the Hubbert Peak for petroleum; these authors suggest that world rock phosphate production is already in decline and that future agricultural production will depend upon diligent phosphorus recycling.

North America has the largest reserves of potassium in the world that can be manufactured into fertilizer materials. Concerns about the stability of limited supplies as well as the increasing costs of transport, that are driven by petroleum scarcity, produced rapid escalation in the price of potassium fertilizer during the early years of the twenty-first century.

As fertilizer supplies and long distance transport are expected to dwindle in concert with fossil-fuel depletion during the twenty-first century, organic agricultural techniques are expected to replace the industrial agriculture that has been powered by fossil fuels and nourished by chemical fertilizers. The International Fertilizer Industry suggests that organic agriculture is only capable of producing one quarter of the protein produced when large amounts of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are employed (www.fertilizer.org/ifa/sustainability.asp); however, Pimentel et al. (2005) have shown that weathering rates appear to be able to meet plant demand for nutrients when organic agriculture relies on nitrogen fixing by legumes on some soils.

Sustainability issues are becoming increasingly apparent to systems analysts who have begun to understand the dilemma faced by human populations that have overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystems they rely on for the production of food and fiber. This understanding usually encompasses the looming current depletion of non-renewable fossil and nuclear energy subsidies, however more basic depletions are becoming recognized as having been sidestepped for the last 10,000 years.

The global human family has become dependent upon the enhanced food production made possible by temporary supplies of non-renewable geologically stored fossil and nuclear energy. The energy market, upon which present affluence levels are based, is a global one, and the availability of geological energy supplies cannot be maintained. As access to the energy upon which complex industrial societies are dependent becomes more expensive and less available during the twenty-first century, human population numbers will have to be brought into balance with the sustainable productivity levels of the local ecosystems upon which they rely for their sustenance.

The ecological deficits, that humans have sidestepped by migration to new lands, mining soil mass (erosion) and soil nutrients (leaching), and access to one-time supplies of exhaustible energy, will have to be squarely faced as the level of affluence diminishes. Food production per capita must fall as horses and oxen must again be fed from crop land and as access to fossil fuel dependent fertilizers diminishes.

Part 4: Intensive Crop Cultures Are Unsustainable

A growing number of commentators, such as Alan Weisman (2007), have begun to suggest that a world with fewer people would be far better placed to deal with climate change and the exhaustion of the dirty fuels of the industrial past. Many appear to think that high technologies such as nuclear energy and yet another agricultural revolution, this one supplying Genetically Modified crops, in combination with curbs on population growth, would begin to dampen the environmental disruption caused by human society that is becoming increasingly obvious. However the problem is even more serious than that visualized by these thoughtful individuals who are convinced that the neoclassical economic model of open-ended expansion and so-called ‘sustainable growth’ is a recipe for disaster.

William Rees (1992) originated the idea of the Ecological Footprint to measure the amount of land that people with different lifestyles both occupied and drew on for their sustenance. Wackernagel and Rees (1997) further developed this concept, calculating how many Earths would be required if all of the people on the planet lived at particular levels of consumption; they appear to believe that the human family overshot global carrying capacity sometime in the twentieth century. Regardless of the timing, we know we are in serious overshoot and that the total human footprint (whatever enormity it is) must get smaller.

As we run up against all of the renewable and nonrenewable resource depletions (oil, soil, phosphorus, minerals etc.) that will characterize the foreseeable future, we require an entire rethink as to how we do business, because the human enterprise has been living on borrowed time and resources for millennia. It is quite conceivable that most intensive crop culture is unsustainable and that it has been unsustainable since cultivation agriculture began.

It is reasonable to suggest that we begin unsustainable resource depletion (overshoot) as soon as we use (and become dependent upon) the first unit of any non-renewable resource or renewable resource used unsustainably whose further use becomes essential to the functioning of society. Each of the following has facilitated an increase in food availability and thus an increase in the human numbers that must continue to be fed whether the resources become depleted or not: the first tonne of coal, the first litre of oil, the first kilogram of fissionable uranium, the first barrel of fossil water for irrigation that exceeds the recharge rate of the aquifer being tapped, and the first hectare of formerly nutrient conservative native forest or grassland/prairie plowed.

The last item in the list, plowing of virgin ecosystems for cultivation agriculture, sets in motion unsustainable renewable resource depletion (excessive erosion and leaching/export of plant nutrients from arable soils, and more recently the excessive leaching and nutrient depletion that is associated with harvesting of nutrient-rich forest biomass) that has been looming over us, unseen, for 10,000 years (Salonius 2007). Some estimates suggest that nearly one-third of the arable soils on Earth have already been lost to erosion since cultivation began and recent moves to rely on agricultural crops as a source of biofuels (ethanol) are seen by some as trading a system based on mining oil for one based on mining soil (Montgomery 2007). We can expect that the unsustainable exploitation of soil will become increasingly apparent as the depletion of petroleum begins to affect the production of foodstuffs by unsustainable farming, and the production of fiber produced by unsustainable forestry upon which most of us are dependent.

Humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE) and it has been running up its ecological debt since that time.

Part 5: The Future of Food Production

In the context of depleting reserves of the fossil fuels that have supplied modern agriculture with motive power, machinery, fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides, it is expected that the way food is produced will have to change as the twenty-first century unfolds. ‘Permaculture’ (Mollison and Holmgren 1979), and other modifications of agricultural practice that seek self sufficiency, such as those put forward by proponents like the Post Carbon Institute’s Relocalization program (www.postcarbon.org) include local food and biofuel systems, revitalization of local industry, and community cooperation.

These are good first steps that recognize global trade will wane as fossil fuel depletion gains momentum. They are also an attempt to wean people off the industrial food production that treats soil as a medium for fertilizer-dependent hydroponic agriculture, and simply a substrate to stand plants up in. These people are interested in popularizing organic agriculture, minimum tillage or no-till methods, solar powered tractors etc. that will make local economies less reliant on imported materials. However these alterations follow the cultivation agriculture model as a food production system, as they must in the short term.

All cultivation agriculture depends on the replacement of complex, species diverse, self-managing, nutrient conservative, deep rooted, natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems with monocultures or ‘near monocultures’ of food crop plants that rely on intensive management. The simple shallow rooting habit of food crops and the requirement for bare soil cultivation produces soil erosion and plant nutrient loss far above the levels that can be replaced by microbial nitrogen fixation, and the weathering of minerals (rocks and course fragments) into active soils and plant-available nutrients such as potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium on most of the soils on the planet.

Under natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems, erosion rates of soil mass are minimal, and the diverse and deep structure of the below-ground rooting community, with its microbial associates, makes the escape of plant nutrients entrained in downward-moving drainage (leaching) water to the ocean very difficult. Our ultimate goal, as we attempt to achieve a sustainable human culture on Earth, must be to move toward the sustainable exploitation of natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems at rates that do not cause the loss of physical soil mass or plant nutrient capital any faster than they can be replaced by biological and weathering processes.

Obviously, as we move back toward a solar-energy dependent economy based on self-managing natural ecosystems, we will no longer be able to run the massive ecological deficits that temporary fossil and nuclear fuel availability have allowed. Just as obviously the solar-energy dependent economy will not support the human numbers that have been able to exponentially increase slowly as a result of agricultural mining of soil mass and nutrient stores since ~8,000 BCE, and rapidly because of the availability of non renewable fossil and nuclear energy subsidies since 1750.

In order to lower the human population to levels supportable by sustainable exploitation of natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems we must begin to allow these ecosystems to reestablish on lands that have historically been devoted to intensive cultivation during our 10,000 year agricultural past. The best suggestion so far to produce Rapid Population Decline (RPD) is for the collective global human family to adopt a One Child Per Family (OCPF) ‘modus operandi/philosophy’. Even with general acceptance of RPD and OCPF, the human population decrease that is necessary to achieve a sustainable solar energy-dependent culture, will take several centuries. Governments, as they become convinced that RPD is necessary, may choose monetary incentives, tax breaks and/or penalties to achieve general acceptance of OCPF or some other RPD program.

Part 6: Moving Beyond (Back From) Cultivation Agriculture

There are areas of the planet with such low rainfall as to preclude the growth of forest vegetation where a return to pastoral herding, with low stocking levels, will allow the reinvasion of native prairie vegetation. As we move toward the abandonment of unsustainable agricultural practices, it would be advisable to shift away from the cultivation of grains and forages that require bare ground cultivation on these lands.

As human numbers are contracting/shrinking under a OCPF/RPD or some other numbers reduction methodology, the extant population will insist on being properly nourished. The only way enough food can be produced for them is by cultivation agriculture that will further deplete most of the arable soils on the planet. During the centuries of transition, as we move toward a solar-dependent culture that again sustainably exploits natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems, we should be exercising as responsible agriculture as is possible on the shrinking arable land base where it is still practiced. During this transition, the growing amount of land that is abandoned will revert toward natural grassland/prairie and forest ecosystems very rapidly after we cease cultivating it (Weisman 2007).

Balancing of human numbers with the productivity of their supporting local ecosystems may be accomplished by planed attrition, much lower birth rates and the economic dislocations and hardships that a retreat from classical economic growth will incur, or the balancing of human numbers may be accomplished by a catastrophic collapse imposed by natural resource scarcity. The species with the large brain must make the choice between economic hardship and catastrophic collapse.

Cultivation agriculture must be relied upon for the bulk of the food required to support global humanity until we have reduced our numbers to a level that can be sustained by regulated exploitation/harvesting activities that fall within the
(now better understood) capacity of ecosystems to maintain diversity, to form soil and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvesting or leaching.

The attractive aspect of moving toward sustainable co-existence with self-managing ecosystems is that the hit-and-miss process of evolution has already established how to make them work. Our responsibility (after our numbers have fallen to sustainable levels) will be to learn to live within the regeneration capacity of these restored ecosystems. The penalty for exceeding their regeneration capacity will be hunger and privation, as it was for our hunter gatherer, forager and pastoral ancestors.

6 Comments »

Chuck Burr, at culturechange.org writes about how we might begin to extricate ourselves from the empire.

Making a living in our modern culture usually requires that you participate in the destruction of the world. We can’t go back to Homo hunter-gatherer. Is there another way forward?

There is an another way to make a living that enables you to do what you love and save the world at the same time. I call it the “middle way” of making a living between our modern industrial system and hunter gathering. This is a deep subject that deserves to have several books written about it.
Saving the World and Sustainability

What do we mean by saving the world? We mean humanity continuing in some fashion without taking tens of millions of species down with us. Today our culture is solely responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I say, “our culture,” because humanity has lived in harmony with the earth for three or four million years. The problem is not humanity. The problem it is our culture, our growth, and how we make a living.

Some believe that sustainability involves living in a manner that does not diminish the prospects of future generations. That is an “all about humanity” definition that needs to be discarded.

True sustainability has our species, like all others, living in harmony with the ecosystem or Gaia. True sustainability is measured by the growth, not of human population, but of top soil and biodiversity. These two are the only evolutionarily proven measures of sustainability, and have nothing to do with humanity’s success or failure. Permaculture, by allowing succession and by using natural structures such as a forest or old field, is the best examples I know of that both builds top soil and allows for species biodiversity growth.

Why do we need the other species? In some respects we don’t. But in the long run we do. We need the full resilience of the earth’s ecosystems to adapt to an ever changing world. I also believe that the true measure of our intellect is not what we can take or build, but what we can nurture and leave alone.

Yes, we may be the first to reach this level of consciousness, but the question is are we going to be the last, or are we the mentors for those that will follow over the next few million years?

Honestly, for this to happen our modern monoculture and civilization most likely is going to have to be replaced by a wide diversity of earth friendly cultures. Humanity may be able to continue in a powered down version of what we have for the next 10-20 years. If our culture manages to survive in the long run, it will be in a monoculture desert of our own making. The sad thing is that future generations will not know or appreciate what it was like today just as we don’t know what it was like 200-300 years ago.
Tribal Way of Making A Living

A tribe is a group of people working together to make a living, sharing equally, and with no hierarchy. Generally, tribes are fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restricted rules, laws, and enforcement.

All profits, losses, and finds are shared equally. Decisions are made by consensus. It appears that ownership, at least initially, is not so important when getting started. However, since private property leads to hoarding and is a disincentive to sharing, it should be eliminated. All non-household assets should also be communal or part of the commons.
A New Ethic and World View

Here is where it starts to get new. We need to embrace a new world view or honestly remember the original one. Chief Seattle in his 1854 speech and Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael taught that the world is a sacred place and humanity has a place in it. Another way of saying this is that humanity belongs to the earth, our ecosystem, and Gaia.

This is the opposite of the world view that our ancestors created 2,000 years ago that humanity is flawed, we are sinners, and the earth is a proving ground to see whether we are worthy to go to a better place when we die. This belief gave us a “dominion” which we have to relinquish if we, or at least, most of the other species are going to survive.

Permaculture is also based on three central ethics:
“Care of the earth” means that our number one priority is taking care of the earth, making sure we don’t damage its natural systems.
“Care of the people” means meeting people’s needs so that people’s lives can be sustained and have a good quality of life as well but without damaging the earth.
“Accepting limits to population and consumption” is realizing that as a human species we cannot continue to increase and also sustain the planet. Sometimes you will hear this ethic phrased as “share the surplus, invest all of your means in the first two ethics.” This means limiting your consumption so that you can invest your resources in caring for the earth and caring for the people.

These ethics translate to making a living in a way that does not participate in destruction of the earth. This means more than not starting a toxic chemical or genetic engineering lab. This may mean that will have to shift back to giving support to get support instead of making things to get things. A healthy self reliant local community focusing on each other and on giving support will provide greater cradle-to-grave security than our “all about me” culture.

If we are going to make products, they need to be made and consumed by the local community, bioregion, or watershed. If products are made for export and not just local use, the level of consumption will again lead to the depletion of local resources. I see this just driving around Oregon and Washington in the form of missing forests. In Peru 60 people just died in clashes between indigenous protestors and police over drilling for oil and gas in the rain forest. Defending your local resources and bioregion from outside interests is serious business.

Produce what you need now and some reserves, but not a large surplus that can be concentrated. If you concentrate resources or work within a hierarchy, you again will encourage hoarding, and take away the incentive to share.
Develop Community Self Reliance

One of the keys to the success of the Amish is that they do not operate in a way that creates entanglements with modern culture. Their aversion is more about the entanglement and not so much against technology. For example, the Amish use wood wheels which they can manufacture and repair themselves. They do not use rubber wheels because they don’t want to be dependent on modern culture. The Amish have nothing against rubber, but they do not want to be dependent upon us.

No individual or even a small group of people can be an island. It will take enough people working together as a community to bring one or both legs out of modern culture. Maybe one will have to work a day job while building skills and a tribal business with your friends. This will be a process not an overnight revolution. Remember though, petrocollapse will not conform to a gradual or delayed schedule for our convenience.
Set Aside Time for Yourself

Start by doing what you love to do. You will become good at it, enjoy your work, and will make the biggest impact with your life that way.

Don’t work more than maybe 30 hours per week. This not only allows for employment of more people, but it gives you time to work on yourself, to study, grow, explore, and self-actualize. This is part of the reason our culture is stuck where it is. People are worked so much and not given a holistic education to think for themselves. Develop your vocabulary, arts, music, mental constructs, travel, and just general self-actualize. So powerdown, give away a bunch of your stuff, and reduce your overhead.
How to Get Started

Based on my experience as an entrepreneur, I would say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Walk before you run. Try your ideas on a part-time or hobby basis before committing. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.

One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. It may also be easier to coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.

At Restoration Farm we are trying to build a tribal permaculture farm. We hope to be mostly chemical and fossil fuel free. The fossil fuels we use are largely for infrastructure setup and not so much for planting and harvesting. We will be experimenting with U-pick blueberries and food forest, and compost for reduced food cost models.

In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss neighborhood sustainability. See who shows up. Learn about permaculture, and consider taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there.

Finding a benevolent way of making a living that allows you to do what you love and to not participate in the destruction of the world is a journey of a lifetime.

No Comments »

There is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30 hour week is not short enough!

by Don Fitz, at climate and capitalism.

With millions of jobs lost during the first part of 2009, who is calling for a shorter work week to spread the work around? Not the Republicans. Not even the Democrats. But why is there nary a peep from unions?

In the US, auto sets the pace for organized labor. The only discussion at the top levels of the UAW (United Auto Workers) is how quickly the gains won during the last 50 years can be given back. Does the UAW have no memory of the 1930s and 40s when a shorter work week was at center of organizing demands?

The gross domestic product (GDP) is plummeting at the same time that jobs are disappearing. Why should there be any connection between the two? If society produces 10% less, why don’t we all just work 10% less? Didn’t things work like that for hundreds of thousands of years of human existence? When people figured out easier ways to get what they needed, they spent less time doing it.

It’s called “leisure.” Leisure is essential for a democratic society involving people in all aspects of self-government. Instead of working frenetically to produce “stuff” that we don’t have the time to enjoy, wouldn’t we be better off with less “stuff” and more time of our own? Research repeatedly shows that, once important needs are met, additional belongings bring no additional happiness. [1] Yet work is strongly related to stress. [2]

A labor-environment connection?

It’s more than stress to the human nervous system. Manufacturing too much stuff stresses every aspect of the environment. The voracious appetite of corporate growth destroys homes of the wolf and bear in North America. Swiftly disappearing are the last refuges of chimpanzees in Africa and orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. Mangrove forests give way to beach resorts as long line fishing kills 100 sea animals for every fish eaten by a human.

Vastly more creatures fall prey to the 80-100,000 chemicals spewed into the air, water and land. Countless molecules of chlorine and fluorine go into pesticides and plastics that destroy immune and reproductive systems. Elemental structures of lead, mercury and, of course, radioactive particles are Thanatos to living systems.

The most frequent building block of toxins is oil. With more than 40 hours of labor contained in each gallon, oil is the closest thing to free energy that humanity has ever discovered. [3] A substance that should be used sparingly so that many future generations could use if for medical and other essential products, oil is being squandered at an exponential rate by a corporate culture determined that its descendants will despise it.

The only way that corporate America knows to shield itself from loathing by its progeny is working overtime to prevent those generations from existing. As climate change changes from “if/when” to “How rapidly is it increasing?” corporations befuddle our senses with a dazzling array of green gadgets, each of which pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere during its manufacture and distribution.

Nevertheless, corporate media propagandizes non-stop that we must be unhappy from the economic downturn and pray for a quick return to the normal rate of planetary extermination. So it’s time to ask why another set of voices is not demanding a shorter work week: Why do the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Federation and a host of other Washington lobby groups fail to point out that an economic slowdown with a fair distribution of jobs would be the treatment of choice for a sick environment?

Centuries of struggle for the working day

Some of the most insightful writing on hours of labor is in Karl Marx’s Capital. While most of it reflects the analytical style of 19th century economic writing, Chapter X on “The Working-Day” reveals Marx’s passionate outrage at what long hours do to workers’ health. The problem started as infant capitalism found the hours of labor under feudalism to be insufficient to satisfy its urges for expansion.

In response to a shortage of labor due to the plague, England’s 1349 “Statute of Laborers” sought to ensure that the working day was sufficiently long. An Elizabethan statute of 1562 lengthened the working day by reducing the time for meals. Emphasizing that it took capitalism centuries to lengthen the working day to 12 hours, Marx noted that one of the milestones was the elimination of church holidays by Protestantism. [4]

By the nineteenth century, some had work weeks of 15 hours per day for 6 days per week plus 8-10 hours on Sunday. [5] At the same time that many were organizing to reduce their hours to 12 per day, the Chartist movement made the 10 hour day “their political, election cry.” [6, 7]

The high point of US labor organizing during the 19th century was on May 1, 1886 when 300,000 workers went on strike for the eight hour day. The brutal repression that came down in Chicago with the Haymarket arrests and executions sparked the international celebration of May Day. [8]

In his classic description of the fervor for an eight hour day that began in 1884 and increased in pitch through 1886, Jeremy Brecher made observations that are still relevant.

First, the leadership of the dominant labor organization of the day, the Knights of Labor, attempted to put brakes on the 8-hour movement. It was often the grassroots that pushed forward, dragging the leaders behind them in city after city.

Second, the 1886 strike wave, far more than previous labor actions, “became above all strikes for power.” [9] The 1886 demands were for control over work hours, hiring and firing, and the organization of work.

Third, and most important, the struggle for the 8-hour day did not wait until the 10-hour day had been won. Unbelievably long hours were still common. Successful strikes meant that, in many industries, workers “of all kinds have reduced their hours of labor from 15 to 12 and 10.” [10] Workers who only a few years earlier had 12-15 hour per day jobs were now demanding the 8-hour day. Marx similarly wrote that the Chartist movement for the 10 hour day was popular amongst those with a work week of up to 100 hours.

Does anyone work for less than 40 hours?

While interviewing Spanish longshoremen in 1989, I spent hours talking to Juan Madrid in Barcelona. Every summer he and his wife had the problem of making sure that they had the same month for vacation. “Do American workers really get off less than a month?” he asked me incredulously.

“Two weeks is the most common; some only get one week; and, many get no paid vacation at all,” I let him know. Factoring in longer vacations, he had an average work week considerably shorter than the typical US worker. This is the rule, and not the exception, in Europe.

Reducing the work week below 40 hours has preoccupied many labor organizations. In the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor lobbied for a 6-hour day. [11] In 1990 BMWs plant in Regensburg adopted a 36 hour week. German Volkswagen employees accepted a 10% pay cut to achieve a 28.8 hour work week. The Digital corporation had 530 employees who opted for a 4-day week with a 7% pay cut so that 90 jobs could be saved. [12]

Victories for shorter work weeks may only be temporary. Tim Kaminski told me that he loved the extra free time he gained from winning a 7-hour day (with no loss in pay) at the St. Louis Chrysler minivan plant in 1992. But the contract stipulated that it would last only until another plant reopened, which happened two years later. [13]

It is not unknown for politicians to champion the cause of fewer hours. Before joining the Supreme Court, as a US Senator Hugo Black introduced legislation for a 30 hour work week in 1933. [14] More recently, the French Senate looked into a 33-hour week. [15]

One of the least known flirtations with the 30-hour work week was by the cereal giant, W.K. Kellogg Company. In 1930, the company announced that most of its 1500 employees would go from an 8-hour to a 6-hour work day, which would provide 300 new jobs in Battle Creek. Though the shorter work week involved a pay cut, the overwhelming majority of workers preferred having increased leisure time to spend with their families and community. [16]

New managers who began running Kellogg had no enthusiasm for the shorter work day. They polled workers in 1946 and found that 77% of men and 87% of women would choose a 30-hour week even if it meant lower wages. Disappointed, management began examining which work groups liked money more than leisure and began offering the 40-hour week on a department-by-department basis.

How long did it take them to get rid of the 30-hour week? Almost 40 years! The desire to have more time to themselves was so strong that it was not until 1985 that Kellogg was able to eliminate the 30-hour work week in the last department.

The experience at Kellogg indicates that it is absolutely false to say that all workers all of the time crave more stuff and will sacrifice anything to get it. Karl Marx made a similar observation when writing about “The Working-Day.” Quoting results of a poll of those who had labored excruciating hours at a Lancashire factory, “They would much prefer working 10 hours for less wages…” [17]

Why would any progressive criticize a 30 hour work week?

Despite all of this, there is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30 hour week is not short enough! There is mushrooming unemployment amidst mountains of useless products. An hour of labor now produces more goods than has ever been the case in the history of humanity. Combining these means that there is no reason for anyone to work more than 20 hours per week.

Every year, clever folks figure out how to churn out more stuff with fewer hours of labor. Jeffrey Kaplan observed that “By 1991, the amount for goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948.” [18] This was a doubling of labor productivity in only 43 years. Jon Bekken calculates a more rapid rate: “Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so.” [19]

In other words, the amount that people produce during an hour of labor doubles every 33 years [give or take 10 years]. We have the ability to produce twice as much during the work day or cut the work day in half and produce the same amount.

Arthur Dahlberg, a consultant to both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, wrote that capitalism was already capable of satisfying basic human needs with a 4-hour work day. [20] He maintained that such a drastic cut in working hours “was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic.” [21]

The issue was revisited in 1991 by Harvard economist Juliet Schor, who concluded that it would be possible to have a 4-hour work day with no decline in the standard of living. [22] Similarly, J.W. Smith argued that “over 50% of our industrial capacity has nothing to do with producing for consumer needs.” [23] Years before issues of climate change and peak oil grabbed the public, Smith forecast:

We’re facing an ecological nightmare as we push to the brink the earth’s ability to support us. We could eliminate much industrial pollution and conserve our precious, dwindling resources by eliminating the 50% of industry that is producing nothing useful for society. [24]

In a more recent analysis, Smith sifts through the US economy sector by sector to conclude that “we could all work 2.3 days per week with no drop in our living standard.” [25]

It’s a rare economist who is capable of realizing that there is no reason to constantly scramble for the possession of more objects that fall apart more rapidly. British philosopher Bertrand Russell also thought that four hours of work per day should be plenty to supply the necessities of life. [26]

Russell was thinking similarly to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote over 200 years ago:

…if every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessities and Comforts of Life, Want and Misery would be banished out of the World, and the rest of the 24 hours might be Leisure and Pleasure. [27]

Labor has become vastly more productive since Ben Franklin contemplated the work day. However, total output grows even faster than labor productivity. By including population growth and people seeking to live the lifestyle of the English-speaking rich, Ted Trainer ciphers that “by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now [28].

This would be a 6000% increase in stuff in 63 years – not exactly healthy for forests, oceans, wildlife and humans. If we want our children to be able to live on this planet, the single most important environmental legislation may be restricting people from working more than 20 hours per week.

What’s stopping a shorter work week?

One factor which is not standing in the way of fewer work hours is “human nature.” Marshall Sahlins estimated that hunter and gatherer societies probably spent 15-20 hours per week obtaining the necessities to survive. [29] Each of us can look inside of ourselves to see the real obstacles to cutting the work week in half: fear that we will lose medical care, pensions, and related survival necessities.

Virtually every working family in American is one medical catastrophe away from bankruptcy. Countless Americans would gleefully shift to a 20-hour work week if it would not cause them to lose their health insurance.

Pensions pose a similar roadblock. As they approach retirement, millions of Americans become acutely aware that pensions are based on factors like the average salary of the last three years. Working part time would cut pension payments during uncertain years.

It is not a well kept secret that employers often give workers less than 40 hours to deny them benefits. A similar effect occurs from forced overtime. Even though there may be a higher rate of pay for overtime, a company may save money if it does not pay for the health care and pensions that putting more people on the payroll would require.

Every environmentalist who wants to stop coal companies from blowing the top off of sacred mountains should be on those mountains screaming that private health insurance and pension plans must be replaced by single payer health care and a social security system with at least a four-fold expansion of payments. In case the environmental significance is not clear…
Halting the cancerous growth of useless fall-apart junk production requires a drastic shortening of the work week; and,
Cutting the work week can only happen if people are not terrified that fewer hours means they will lose health insurance and pension plans.

These are called “social wages.” Social wages also include mass transportation, clean water, breathable air, uncontaminated land and something which is becoming increasingly rare: the right to quality free public education which is coordinated by representatives directly elected by citizens. These social wages are as important environmentally as medical care and pensions.

The right to a home with electricity and heat is part of the same pattern. People who are not fearful of being thrown out of their home or losing their utilities have much less incentive to work long hours.

There remains an enormous problem that permeates every other barrier to shortening the working day. As long as production is based on the maximization of profit, each corporation is pushed to extend working hours as long as possible for fear the competition will do it first. As Marx described with Lugosian clarity:

The prolongation of the working-day, beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, … quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. [30]

In the 21st century, we should update this to say that capital feeds with two fangs: one to suck the blood of labor and the other fang to drain life from Mother Earth. Can the 20 hour work week become a wooden stake held by the environmental movement as it is pounded by labor? Maybe; but not necessarily. A stake that is driven too shallow will allow the demon to awaken with renewed strength.

When US workers struck for the eight hour day in 1886, they were going beyond pay issues and demanding that labor have a role in controlling the process of production. Today, we need a progressive alliance to challenge not only how many hours we work, but the quality, durability and even the necessity of goods we produce. Drastically cutting the hours we work will help save the Earth’s ecology only if it is part of an overarching goal to improve the quality of our lives while reducing the grand mass of manufactured objects.

Don Fitz has been surviving on less than 20 hours work per week since he was forced to retire in 2006. He is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of The Greens/Green Party USA and can be reached at fitzdon[at]aol[dot]com

No Comments »

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.

No Comments »

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

No Comments »

No Comments »