This article, originally published at the start of 2008, and written by Nafeez Ahmed ( his blog here ), clearly explains the situation facing us 'civilised' humans.
This may be repeating things for many of our readers, but the article is concise and clear, illustrating the unfolding crisis of civilisation.
The article at Indymedia , where you can also read part one and part two .
Today, we enter into a new year which brings us yet closer to the imminent convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises that threaten not only the end of our species, but the end of all species on the Earth.
In previous posts in this series, we reviewed the origins and evolution of the modern world system through a long historical process of protracted military and economic violence, violence that continues today in the imperial atrocities being committed across diverse strategic peripheries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Northwest Africa.
This global system is hugely destructive of human life. Devoid of the capability to recognize and enact ethical values, it is driven purely by the imperatives of profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. Consequently, it is not only destructive of human life; it is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself.
It is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 10-15 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now.
These crises can be categorized broadly into four key themes:
- 1. Climate catastrophe
- 2. Peak oil
- 3. Food scarcity
- 4. Economic instability
These are summarized below.
1. Climate Catastrophe
Industrial civilization derives all its energy from the burning of fossil fuels, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The C02 emissions from the industries that drive our economies, our societies, that sustain our infrastructures, are the main engine of global warming in the last few decades. This doesn't mean that all climate change ever is due to human-induced C02. Scientists know that there are many other factors involved in climate change, such as solar activity, as well as periodic changes in the Earth's orbit. But they have overwhelmingly confirmed that these are not the primary factors currently driving global warming. The primary factor is C02 emissions induced by human activities.
Die Ursprünge des Klimawandels sind nicht mehr eine Frage der ernsthaften wissenschaftlichen Debatte. Anfang 2007 den Vereinten Nationen Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) die Ergebnisse einer dreijährigen Studie Projektion der Anstieg der Temperaturen durch die globale Erwärmung durch 600 Wissenschaftler aus 40 Ländern berichteten von Peer-600 mehr Meteorologen überprüft. Der Bericht bestätigt, dass Menschen verursachten globalen Erwärmung ist "eindeutig" geschieht, und dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass der Klimawandel durch menschliches C02-Emissionen liegt bei über 90 Prozent war.
Tatsächlich Klimaforscher im vergangenen Jahr veröffentlichte die Ergebnisse der neuesten Forschungen über die Beziehung zwischen der Sonne und den Klimawandel in den Top Zeitschrift Nature. Die Londoner "Times" berichtete über die Studie wie folgt:
"Die Wissenschaftler haben verschiedene Proxys von Solarenergie-Ausgabe über die letzten 1.000 Jahre untersucht und haben keine Beweise gefunden, dass sie korreliert mit der heutigen steigende Temperaturen. Satelliten-Beobachtungen über die letzten 30 Jahre haben auch nichts gemacht. "Die solare Beitrag zur Erwärmung ... vernachlässigbar ist," schrieben die Forscher in der Fachzeitschrift Nature. "[1]
Was genau ist wahrscheinlich auf das Klima mit dem derzeitigen Tempo der Emissionen geschehen? Laut IPCC Der erste Bericht vom vergangenen Jahr, bis zum Jahr 2100 könnte die globale Durchschnittstemperatur von 6.4C, was zum drastischen ökologischen Veränderungen, die das Leben in den meisten Teilen der Erde unmöglich machen würde. Dies ist, was soll passieren bei 6c: ". Leben auf der Erde endet mit apokalyptischen Stürmen, Überschwemmungen, Schwefelwasserstoff und Methan Gas Feuerbälle Rennen auf der ganzen Welt mit der Kraft der Atombomben, nur Pilze überleben" [2]
Wachsende Anzeichen dafür, dass der IPCC-Projektionen extrem konservativ sind, und dass die Klimakrise wächst schnell außer Kontrolle geraten. Laut Dr. David Wasdell, Klimaexperte und einem akkreditierten Gutachter des IPCC-Berichts, wurde der Abschlussbericht nach westlichen Regierungsvertretern bewässert vor der Freigabe, um seine Entdeckungen erscheinen weniger katastrophal. Dr. Wasdell sagte der "New Scientist" (8. März 2007), die frühe Entwürfe für den Bericht von Wissenschaftlern im April 2006 vorbereitet "viele Hinweise auf das Potenzial für den Klimaschutz schneller ändern als wegen der" positiven Bewertungen "im Klimasystem zu erwarten enthalten. Die meisten dieser Hinweise wurden von der endgültigen Version nicht vorhanden. "[3]
Die folgenden IPCC-Bericht jedoch Destillieren der Forschung von 2500 Klimaforschern, im November 2007 veröffentlicht nur bestätigt, dass der ursprüngliche Vorsprung zu optimistisch war. Zur Vermeidung von Erwärmung der Erde durch das mögliche Mindestmaß, durchschnittlich 3,6 Grad Celsius, der weltweit spiralförmige Wachstum der Treibhausgas-Emissionen bis spätestens 2015 zu beenden, und muss beginnen, schnell fallen nach diesem Gipfel. Bis 2050 müssen Kohlendioxid und anderen atmosphärischen umweltschädliche Gase, die durch 50 bis 85 Prozent gesenkt werden, nach den Schätzungen. Aber auch das ist schon zu spät. "Wir haben vielleicht bereits überschritten dieses Ziel", sagte David Karoly, ein Mitglied des Kernteams, dass der Bericht schrieb. Aktuelle Emissionen bereits kurz vor der Grenze im Jahr 2015 erforderlich, um die Erwärmung auf 2 Grad Celsius zu begrenzen, hat er in Interviews von Valencia.
Aber die westlichen Regierungen haben diese Gefahr seit Jahren bekannt. Im Juni 2005 auf der britischen Regierung Konferenz "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" an der Met Office in Exeter, berichteten Wissenschaftler ein Konsens, dass die Erderwärmung bleiben muss "unten ein durchschnittlicher Anstieg um zwei Grad Celsius, wenn Katastrophe vermieden werden soll", was bedeutet, sicherzustellen, dass Kohlendioxid in der Atmosphäre bleibt unter 400 Teile pro Million. Jenseits dieser Ebene ist gefährlich und entlaufene Klimawandel wahrscheinlich irreversibel sein [4].
Etwa zwei Wochen nach der Regierungskonferenz gewarnt dieser Mindestgrenze, beauftragte die Unabhängige Untersuchung von Keith service, Leiter der Abteilung Meteorologie an der Universität von Reading. Unter Verwendung der neuesten verfügbaren Zahlen (für 2004), Professor Shine berechnet, dass "die CO2-Äquivalent-Konzentration, weitgehend unbemerkt von der wissenschaftlichen und politischen Gemeinden, hat nun über diese Schwelle überschritten." Accounting for die Auswirkungen von Methan und Lachgas, fand er, dass die entsprechende Konzentration von C02 ist nun 425ppm und schnell steigt, die gewährleisten, dass die globale mittlere Temperatur um 2 Grad steigen. Folglich können einige der schlimmsten prognostizierten Auswirkungen der globalen Erwärmung, wie die Zerstörung von Ökosystemen und erhöhter Hunger und Wassermangel für Milliarden von Menschen im Süden, auch unvermeidlich sein. Gefragt nach den Auswirkungen, sagte Tom Burke, ein ehemaliger Berater der Regierung Umgebung, die Independent:
"Die Weitergabe dieser Schwelle ist der enorme Bedeutung. Das heißt, wir haben tatsächlich eine neue Ära eingetreten - die Ära des gefährlichen Klimawandels. Wir haben den Punkt, wo wir sicher sein, zu bleiben unterhalb der 2-Grad steigen, da die Schwelle für die Gefahr einstellen können weitergegeben. Was uns das sagt ist, dass wir schon den Punkt, wo unsere Kinder nicht mehr auf einem sicheren Klima zählen kann erreicht werden. "[5]
Laut dem US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) der Anteil der Landfläche der Erde von Dürre mehr als der 1970er bis Anfang der 2000er Jahre verdoppelt geschlagen, von etwa 10-15 Prozent auf 30 Prozent, hauptsächlich aufgrund steigender Temperaturen . Verbreitet Trocknen über weiten Teilen Europas und Asien, Kanada, westlichen und südlichen Afrika und Ost-Australien aufgetreten. [NCAR Pressemitteilung, "Dürre's Growing Reach" (Boulder, Co: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 10. Januar 2005]
Die globale Erwärmung ist nicht nur das Schmelzen des arktischen ist es Schmelzen der Gletscher, die Futtermittel in Asien der größte Flüsse - Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Jangtse und Gelb. Weil Gletscher ein natürlicher Storage-System sind, die Freigabe Wasser während der heißen trockenen Perioden, konnte den schrumpfenden Eismassen erschweren Wasser Ungleichgewichte verursachen Überschwemmungen etwa das Abschmelzen beschleunigt, gefolgt von einer Verringerung der Fluss fließt. Dieses Problem ist nur Jahrzehnte, vielleicht sogar Jahre dauern, was in Hunderten von Millionen von Afrikanern und Millionen von Lateinamerikanern, die Wasser haben, wobei kurzer Sinn, wahrscheinlich in weniger als 20 Jahren. Bis 2050 könnten mehr als 1 Milliarde Menschen in Asien Gesicht Wasserknappheit, und bis 2080, Wasserknappheit könnte 1100000000 bis 3200000000 Menschen bedrohen. Einige Klimamodelle zeigen Subsahara-Afrika Austrocknung bis 2050 [6].
2. Peak Oil
Es gibt noch eine weitere Krise Schwellenländern, die auch unsere Abhängigkeit von fossilen Brennstoffen verbunden ist. Das ist der Energiekrise. Heute sind die prominentesten Energiequelle ist natürlich konventionellen Öl. Hier in Großbritannien, von wo ich jetzt schreibe, 90 Prozent unserer Energie kommt aus konventionellem Erdöl, Erdgas und Kohle, sondern vor allem Öl. Ohne diese Energie liefert, wäre das zivilisierte Leben in Großbritannien einfach zusammenbrechen. Transport, Landwirtschaft, moderne Medizin, Landesverteidigung, Wasserverteilung, sowie die Herstellung von selbst Basistechnologien wäre unmöglich. Diese Formel gilt auf der ganzen Linie, im gesamten westlichen industriellen Zivilisation.
Die Grundregeln für die Entdeckung, die Einschätzung und Produktion von Erdöl Reserven wurden zunächst mit dem weltbekannten Geophysiker Dr. M. King Hubbert gelegt. Hubbert wies darauf hin, dass Erdöl eine endliche Ressource ist, die Produktion muss zwangsläufig durch drei Phasen durchlaufen:
1. Produktion beginnt bei Null.
2. Produktion steigt, bis er einen Höchststand erreicht, die nicht übertroffen werden kann. Dieser Peak neigt dazu, an oder um den Punkt, wenn 50 Prozent der gesamten Ölreserven erschöpft sind auftreten.
3. Nach dieser Spitze, die Produktion sinkt mit zunehmender Geschwindigkeit, bis schließlich die Ressource ist völlig erschöpft.
Einer der angesehensten Studien bisher auf Peak Oil und seine Timing wurde von Dr. Colin Campbell und Jean Laherrere durchgeführt, das führende Experten aus der Ölbranche, im Namen der in Genf ansässigen Petroconsultants. Die Petroconsultants Datenbank, die von allen internationalen Öl-Unternehmen genutzt wird, ist die umfassendste auf Daten über Öl-Ressourcen außerhalb von Nordamerika - und gilt als so bedeutend, dass es nicht in der Public Domain. Campbell und Laherrere kam in ihrem Bericht zum Preis von $ 32.000 ein Exemplar und schrieb für Staats-und Unternehmensanleihen Insidern, dass "die Mitte des letzten konventionellen Ölförderung von Jahr 2000 erreicht würde und dass der Rückgang würde bald beginnen." Außerdem prognostiziert, dass "Post-Peak Produktion würde etwa alle 25 Jahre zu halbieren, eine exponentielle Abnahme der 2,5 bis 2,9% pro Jahr." [7]
Nach Angaben des Instituts für Nachhaltigkeit und Technologie-Politik an der Murdoch University, ist dieses Ergebnis wahrscheinlich das genaueste, bezogen, wie es ist auf Performance-Daten aus Tausenden von Ölfeldern in 65 Ländern, einschließlich Daten über "fast alle Entdeckungen, auf die Produktion Geschichte nach Ländern , Feld-und Unternehmens sowie wichtige Details der Geologie und Geophysik. "Aufgrund ihrer beispiellosen Zugang zu solchen Daten, Campbell und Laherrere im Gegensatz zu anderen Kommentatoren Ölindustrie, sind in" einer einzigartigen Position, um den Puls der Erdölindustrie Sinn , wo es herkommen und wohin sie geht auf. Ihr Bericht zahlt viel Liebe zum Definitionen und gültige Interpretation von Statistiken "Eine Überprüfung der Forschung von Senior-Industrie Geologen in Petroleum Review erwähnt, abgesehen von kleineren Meinungsverschiedenheiten über den Umfang der verbleibenden Reserven", die allgemeine Akzeptanz der Substanz ihrer Argumente;., Dass der Großteil der restlichen Entdeckung wird in immer kleineren Bereichen etabliert Provinzen werden. "[8]
Rapidly rising oil prices and growing reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has already occurred, or will do, well within the dawn of the 21st century. London's Petroleum Review published a study toward the end of 2004 concluding that in Indonesia, Gabon, and fifteen other oil-rich nations supplying about 30 percent of the world's daily crude, oil production is declining by 5 percent a year — double the rate of decline a year prior to the report. Chris Skrebowski, the Review's editor and a former BP oil analyst, noted that: “Those producers still with expansion potential are having to work harder and harder just to make up for the accelerating losses of the large number that have clearly peaked and are now in continuous decline. Though largely unrecognized, [depletion] may be contributing to the rise in oil prices.”[9] Indeed, Chris Skrebowski reported in early 2005 that production in conventional oil reserves are already declining at about 4-6 per cent a year worldwide, including 18 large oil-producing countries, and 32 smaller ones. Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India are due to peak in the next few years.[10]
According to an official report published by British Petroleum late last year, we have about 30 years before we peak. This is supposed to be an 'optimistic' assessment. Apart from the fact that this is hardly good news, it is a clearly politicized claim from an oil industry fighting to sustain its credibility as the Oil Age nears its demise. Colin Campbell, himself a former senior BP geologist, argues that the data shows we have less than 4 years; and in the meantime, former US government energy adviser Matt Simmons argues that we have most likely peaked years ago, but won't know for sure until we start feeling the crunch within a few years.
3. Food Scarcity
The convergence of these two global crises, climate change and peak oil, threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.
At the British Association's Festival of Science in Dublin in September 2005, US and UK scientists working at the Hadley Centre described how shifts in rain patterns and temperatures due to global warming could lead to a further 50 million people going hungry by conservative estimates. “If we accept that broadly 500 million people are at risk today, we expect that to increase by about 10 per cent by the middle part of this century.”[11]
Then toward the end of 2006, a study by Met Office's Hadley Centre funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought making agriculture impossible will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people already struggling in conditions of dire deprivation over the precipice.[12]
The grim truth is that we are already pushing the limits on world food production within the existing structure of modern corporate agriculture. According to new maps released in December 2005 by scientists at the Centre for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Navin Ramankutty, “Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops.” The maps thus show that the Earth is “rapidly running out of fertile land” and that “food production will soon be unable to keep up with global population growth.”
World food production probably peaked shortly before the new millennium. Lester Brown, a former international agricultural policy advisor for the US government who went on to found the World Watch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, reports that since world grain consumption has exceeded production since 2000, such that 2003 saw a deficit of 105 million tones. On that basis, Brown predicts a global grain deficit within the next few years. In 2003 he noted that “World grain harvests have fallen for four consecutive years and world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 30 years.” This is partly why world grain prices are steadily rising.
This is not centrally about population, but about modern intensive agricultural methods as practiced by the globalized corporate food industry, which are simply unsustainable. US structural geologist Dave Allen Pfeiffer points out that while it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil, in soil made susceptible by modern agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65 per cent each year. Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from US agricultural soils every year. Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.
Already, populations in the South are suffering from the grim reality of these crises. Near the end of last year, the Guardian reported:
“ Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products. Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years. ”[13]
Peak food will be exacerbated beyond all proportion in the context of peak oil. Modern intensive agriculture that produces most of our food, is industrialized, mechanized. It needs oil. Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.
4. Economic Meltdown
According to the United Nations Development Programme, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989. The rewards of globalization are increasingly “spread unequally and inequitably — concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations and corporations, marginalizing the others.”
Successive UN Human Development reports give us the broad contours of the manner in which this system inflicts protracted death-by-deprivation on the majority of the world's population. Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, almost a third — about 1.3 billion people — have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children in the world receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people — a third of the human race — suffer from anaemia. 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Thirty million people die of hunger every year, half of whom, UNICEF estimates, are children. Over 840 million suffer from chronic malnutrition, almost a sixth of the population. Three billion people — that is half the world population — are forced to survive on less than two dollars a day. Indeed, as Ignaciot Ramonet wrote several years ago in a famous editorial for Le Monde, of the 6 billion people in the world, only 500 million live in comfort — that is approximately one-twelfth of the world population. This leaves a massive 5.5 billion people living in need — over five-sixth of the population.
According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.[14]
And what of neoliberal globalization? Have the policies advocated by the international financial institutions that govern the capitalist world system alleviated or exacerbated these despicable trends? Thanks to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC, we now have some serious economic data by which to derive a plausible answer to these questions. Using IMF and World Bank data, the CEPR conducted a comprehensive study of economic growth and other indicators for the period between 1980 and 2005. The results are shocking. In the period hailed widely as neoliberal globalization's golden age, the vast majority of the world's economies have been systematically retarded. Mark Weisbrot et. al. argues that for economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, these 25 years have exhibited an empirically incontrovertible decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980] in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.[15]
But the global economic system is not merely inherently unjust and unequal. It is also inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises, and as events of the last few months have shown, it is increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Financial institutions, corporate investors and even mainstream economists have been aware of the dangers for several years before the recent crisis that erupted from the depths of faultlines in the housing market. In March 2006, an unprecedented IMF report Safeguarding Financial Stability criticized the twin strategies of deregulation and liberalization, the staple policies of the global economy, as “the potential for fragility, instability, systemic risk, and adverse economic consequences”. Deregulation has caused “national financial systems [to] become increasingly vulnerable to increased systemic risk and to a growing number of financial crises.”[16]
In mid-2006, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, warned that the world “has done little to prepare itself for what could well be the next crisis.” About a month earlier, Roach had already warned that a major financial crisis seemed imminent and that the global institutions that could forestall it, including the IMF, the World Bank and other mechanisms of the international financial architecture, were utterly inadequate.[17]
Consider also the prescient analysis of UC Berkeley economist professor Brad DeLong, for instance, who in March 2007 argued that a global economic recession was in motion, principally due to three factors:
“1) A Federal Reserve that finds itself with less inflation-fighting credibility than it thought it had; 2) upward pressure on inflation from rising energy and, perhaps, import prices; and 3) millions of middle-class homeowners who for too long have treated their houses as gigantic ATMs, using home equity loans and refinancing to generate extra spending money.”
A crisis, he notes, is by no means guaranteed. But a key trigger could be the housing market — the unprecedented use of home loans to squeeze cash out of equity, permitting middle-class consumers to spend well beyond their means.
“Someday this spending spree has to come to an end. If it comes to an end suddenly, at a time when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates a little too much, then we have our recession… Make no mistake about it: The US economy is close to the edge… What can be done to head off the danger? Unfortunately, very little. The bag of macroeconomic tricks is empty. ”[18]
And worse, in July 2006, came another high-level warning. Dr. David Martin, a former professor at the University of Virginia and founding CEO of M-CAM (a financial institution that is the international leader in intellectual property-based financial risk management) gave a speech at the Arlington Institute, a futurist think-tank in Washington set up by a former US Department of Defence official John Peterson. Dr Martin warned his listeners that a collapse of the global banking system could be imminent as of January 2008, and that it would start with the housing crisis. Martin's warning may well serve not to be borne out so specifically – but clearly, over a year before the current economic crises, he was disturbingly on target. While US financiers may well be able to re-jig the system for a few more months, or perhaps even years, it is clear that we are fast approaching the end of the tunnel.[19]
5. The Way Forward…?
All of these global crises are escalating on their own terms as a direct consequence of the very structure of the global social, political and economic system. Not only, by their own logic, do they threaten the future of humanity, they are currently intensifying and converging over the next few years. While their individual impacts are clearly devastating enough, their cumulative or simultaneous impact would be so devastating that it is perhaps beyond imagination.
This wide-ranging, but very brief, analysis of social and global systemic crises converging over the ensuing decades ultimately leads us to one major conclusion: the failure of the prevailing social, political and economic system. That we need an alternative is no longer disputable. It is a given, manifest reality.
What we need now is a civilizational paradigm shift. Not just a new economics, or new politics, or new social vision. We need a whole new vision of life itself to replace the dead, broken materialistic vision associated with the concurrent global imperial system. The good news is that the civilizational paradigm shift is not only happening now as I write – its seeds have already been planted. More on that in part 4, coming soon.
So, one twelfth of the worlds population go to bed with full stomachs, but increasing numbers of them suffering from the civilisation-induced diseases of anxiety, stress, mental illness, addictions, cancer, allergies, to name just a few. Many of us are increasingly unhappy, working long hours in boring or dangerous jobs, for faceless corporations, doing things we dont like, living stressed out lives that make us ill. Actually the only winners in this system are the corporations themselves (perhaps we should view them as lifeforms that eat everything?), and maybe a tiny elite of people who are truly comfortable and happy in their lives, exploting and oppressing the masses?
As we have said before, we need to change the way we view the world, and how we interact with the natural world, each other and ourselves. The system impoverishes, and the crash of the system will further impoverish if we continue to be dependent upon it.
The permaculture principles are a good place to start thinking: earth care, people care, fair shares.
