The Peasant Revolt

Image: http://eavoss.files.wordpress.com

Reposted in full from Transition Voice, 24 May 2011

'Has our society become so obsessed with economic growth that people have become a commodity? Two items in my morning newspaper strongly suggest the answer to be an emphatic, shameful YES.

The first is a national story about how smuggling people across the Mexico/US border has become a billion dollar business. The Associated Press story reports on “a clandestine business worth billions a year, people packed tighter than cattle and transported like consumer goods in tractor trailers to the United States.” The United Nations estimates this to be a $6.6 billion people-trafficking business.

Making babies makes money

The second is a local editorial lamenting census reports that fewer Coloradoans are families with children. The rant warns of the “dangers of population decline,” and that “we cannot sustain the economy…when old, non-working Americans – dependent on pensions and government subsidies – outnumber people of working age.” It advises we’re in for “a future of poverty and despair,” if we don’t either get busy making babies or importing children. I kid you not! The headline reads, We Must Produce or Import Children.

These sad, but true pieces of modern Americana from today’s paper reveal that the bean counters have won. Persons are now perceived as little more than a commodity, an asset on the balance sheet to be bought, sold, exported, and imported.

The value of a human life is now too often counted by its contribution to an economy. We’ve been seeing the signs of this for quite some time, but today’s local editorial just begged for a bright spotlight to be shone on its unapologetic stance.

The best laid plans…

If it weren’t potentially so tragic, it’d be pretty funny. The writer actually had the temerity to pen, “a minority cannot provide adequately for a majority, any more than a pyramid can balance upside down.” He’s apparently unashamed that he’s defending a (right side up) pyramid scheme. And he clearly disregards that a pyramid scheme, unlike a diamond, is not forever.

The editorial completely ignores what other headlines this week have revealed: populations are starving, oceans are dying, rivers and aquifers are drying up. But don’t let that stop the grow-at-all-costs mind set. God forbid we interrupt this scheme of Ponzi demography and let the rate of population growth – whether it be global, national or local- decline.

Growth-pushers frequently use the pension and Social Security population Ponzi scheme to defend and encourage population growth. And while they’re correct in identifying one of the difficulties inherent in achieving a sustainable population, their analysis is grossly slanted and incomplete. They blow the problem out of proportion, ignore myriad smart solutions, and jump on the easiest but most deadly solution of adding more players to the bottom of the pyramid.

My local paper’s editorial opinionator might just be an uninformed hack. Or perhaps he’d rather hang on to his readership the easy way – by trucking new subscribers into town when the labor and delivery rooms aren’t meeting their quotas, rather than the more difficult way – writing informed, enlightened, thoughtful pieces more of us will want to read.

It’s hard to say.

Life for life’s sake

For now, I offer an alternative view. People aren’t financial assets. We’re not drones to be exploited in service to corporate profits or government tax coffers. We’re not products to be produced or imported.

Continued population and consumption overshoot will result in very serious resource shortages. This is already happening.

Adjusting to the relatively minor challenges of ending an unsustainable population and economic growth scheme is much preferred to dooming our children to a life of hunger and misery. Unless you’re a soulless growth-pusher counting nothing but dollars, a good life for fewer is better than a crappy life for more.'

Legal Rights for Nature

Excerpt from Today's Zaman, 22 May 2011

Two small countries of Latin America have been taking Mother Earth, or 'Pachamama', quite seriously so they have passed a series of laws to protect it, and their worries reached some concerned citizens in Turkey where there has been a vigorous debate going on for making a new, citizen-centered constitution.

“We are just starting a campaign calling for an ecological constitution,” said Turkey’s Green Party spokesperson Ümit Şahin, who is among 40 people including politicians, academics, and lawyers involved in the Initiative for an Ecological Constitution (IEC).

“As Turkey has been talking about making a new constitution, which is supposed to value the individual, then we should be talking about an ecological approach to it,” Şahin said, adding that their role models are Bolivia and Ecuador, which understand the value and rights of Mother Earth. The IEC believes in this approach of the Latin American states, he said, because neither the European states nor the United States have been able to fully address the issue even though there are some examples like France, which has a Green Charter, and some states in the US, which have been adopting ecologically sensitive laws.

He noted that Ecuador’s is the first constitution in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature. Although a small country, Ecuador is home to the Galapagos Islands, Andean Mountains and Amazon rainforest as it is a geologically, ecologically and ethnically diverse country. Ecuador took a bold step in 2008 to add Rights for Nature to their new constitution providing a system of environmental protection based on rights. Şahin noted like many countries, Turkish laws treat ecosystems as articles of property that give land owners the right to destroy even fragile ecosystems, but that a lot of governments have started to enact environmental regulations to limit harm to ecosystems and impose fines for damage.

Additionally, a group of countries led by Bolivia have recently brought the issue to the agenda of the UN General Assembly as they ask for a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature so there will be legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they say are the rights of other members of the Earth, such as plants, animals and terrain.

Supporting the idea, Şahin said communities should be given more power to monitor and control industries and development to ensure harmony between humans and nature...'

International Energy Agency - Crude Oil Peaked in 2006

From the horse's mouth of the International Energy Agency's Chief Economist, Dr Fatih Birol - crude oil peaked in 2006.

'


The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there's a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.
..
I think it would have been better if the governments have started to work on it at least ten years ago.'

Sourced from YouTube, 28 April 2011

'In this special Catalyst investigation, we travel from Paris, to London, to the outer space like world that is deep sea drilling to find out why so many industry insiders now say we'll soon look back on 2011 as the good old days when fuel was cheap.'

Collapse P*rn?

The content of the message, all true (and the same a large number of people have been saying for many years), but the way the message is delivered?

Excerpt from Climate Denial, 29 September 2010

'A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil and climate change are typically communicated...

What is interesting is the way that footage of Ruppert is interwoven with a rolling news format of economic and social collapse. Recent documentaries and disaster movies now frequently use a collage of rapidly edited random footage taken out of context. This slick style aestheticises images of destruction and objectifies the suffering of the people who appear, all too briefly, as bodies being blown up or swept away.

Four years ago an excellent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research identified alarmism in words and images as one of the dominant narratives about climate change. Gill Ereaut wrote:

The sensationalism of alarmism and its connection with the ultimate unreality of the movies also serve to create a sense of distance from the issue. What is more, in this ‘unreal’ and awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’ rather than a constructive message. Alarmism potentially positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse

By this analysis ‘Collapse’ is an 82 minute long apocalypse pornfest that further reinforces the association between the visual aesthetics of disaster and concerns about resource shortages, peak oil, and, by association, climate change.

In terms of public motivation this is very bad news. Repeated research has shown that apocalyptic language and images create a sense of powerlessness and actively undermine peoples’ capacity to act. They can also directly feed a range of associated denial strategies including a short term hedonism and nihilistic cynicism that can be very appealing to young people.

Increasingly - as we are seeing with the political polarisation in the US and Australia- people are not weighing up climate change or other resource issues on the strength of the solid evidence but are choosing between competing worldviews that deliver a package of lifestyle, political and ethical decisions.

On the one side people are presented with a cornucopialist future of endless expansion, built on technical ingenuity and personal freedom. This has now become absorbed into a wider right wing narrative of globalisation, corporatism, minimal government and free markets.

On the other side the apocalyptists promote a future of decline, conflict, corruption, personal guilt, and collapse. This worldview has become deeply associated in the public mind with climate change and peak oil and this movie reinforces it in every way.

So if Ruppert is right he is following the worst possible strategy for raising concern about Peak Oil. By emphasising and reinforcing the existing worldview divides he is following a script that could have been written for him by those opposing action.

That is if he is right. But I think he is wrong. I think that capitalism is, for all the reasons that its defenders use, far more resilient than most apocalyptists believe and has repeatedly shown its capacity to postpone the impacts of resource shortages. What is more, there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot. The images in this film of looting and rioting are rooted in a very American fear of the underclass.

This does not mean that I do not think that we are running into severe problems. There is no doubt that our resource use is insanely short sighted and we are already seeing the first shortages...

Of all resources, the most precious is the willingness of people to listen and change. This too is finite and only changes between generations. We only get one shot at this and we’re really blowing it...'

A Strategy for National Security - Sustainability

Excerpt from New York Times, 3 May 2011

'Here’s a proposition: The death of Osama bin Laden brings a moment to talk about something other than threats — not because they don’t exist, but because for the country to see and speak of nothing else is mortally dangerous.

Col. Mark Mykleby, a senior advisor on strategy to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy wrote a paper calling on the United States to focus on social policies, education and sustainability...“A National Strategic Narrative,” a paper written by Captain Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby of the Marines, which calls on the United States to see that it cannot continue to engage the world primarily with military force, but must do so as a nation powered by the strength of its educational system, social policies, international development and diplomacy, and its commitment to sustainable practices in energy and agriculture.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

The two officers each have more than 20 years of service, and now work as special strategic assistants to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Their paper, which is not an official policy document, was published last month by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and is available on the center’s Web site, wilsoncenter.org...

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” They go on to say that the country’s security may require “a hard look at the distribution of our treasure,” arguing that the historic focus on defense and protectionism has meant the neglect of international development and diplomacy. And with technology piercing the isolation of nations, they write that the United States has a stake in helping countries held down by illiteracy and poverty.

Finally, they write, the world population is projected to reach nine billion by midcentury and the country must face the demands for water, food, land and energy...'

Regime Shifts

Sourced from Regime Shifts, an initiative led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, April 2011

'Regime shifts are large, persistent changes in the structure and function of social-ecological systems, with substantive impacts on the suite of ecosystem services provided by these systems...they may have substantial impacts on human well-being, and are often difficult to anticipate and costly to reverse.

The Regime Shifts DataBase focuses specifically on regime shifts that have large impacts on ecosystem services, and therefore on human well-being.'

nef’s New Economic Model selected as a Semi-Finalist for the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

click link below for larger image

Reposted in full from the new economics foundation, 24 March 2011

'The New Economic Model led by James Meadway and Tim Jenkins at leading independent think-tank nef (the new economics foundation) has been named a 2011 Semi-Finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the prestigious annual design science competition named "Socially-Responsible Design's Highest Award" by Metropolis Magazine. The Challenge awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a whole systems-based solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

nef will build a comprehensive new macro-economic model for the UK predicated on respect for planetary boundaries and global equity of resource use. Principally designed to catalyse the transition to a low carbon, high well-being future economy, the model will be developed through rigorous economic analysis over three years.

“We’re obviously delighted to be named a semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge,” said James Meadway, senior economist at nef and project lead on the New Economic Model. “Our project for a New Economic Model is a perfect synergy with Buckminster Fuller’s own approach to change. As he said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.””

“As the world faces the challenges of climate change and energy depletion to rising inequality and financial instability, the need for a new economic model has never been greater. At nef, we believe that only systemic change will bring about a future of well-being, prosperity and ecological balance. The prize money from BFC will go a long way towards funding both the theoretical work on economic modeling and our public engagement strategy to chart the course for a better future.”

After an initial rigorous vetting process by BFI’s multi-disciplinary review team, which included an in-depth interview, the New Economic Model was chosen from a pool of hundreds of entries from over 35 countries, to be one of 21 Semi-Finalists this year. It will now be featured as a top tier project in BFI’s Idea Index and featured on their website for the remainder of the program cycle.

Semi-finalists will be reviewed and discussed by the 11 distinguished jurors, which includes Valerie Casey, founder of Design Accord; David Orr, writer and professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College; Andrew Zolli, producer of PopTech and Danielle Nierenberg, Project Director of State of World 2011; and Sim Vanderyn, visionary ecological design pioneer.

Finalists will be announced May and the winner, runner up, and honorable mention will be announced at the conferring ceremony in New York in early June.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is the premier international competition recognizing initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet’s ecosystems. The 2011 Semi-finalists are providing workable solutions to some of the world’s most significant challenges including water scarcity, food supply, health, energy consumption and shelter. The Challenge is a program of The Buckminster Fuller Institute which aims to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.'

Austrian Registry Freezes Stolen EU Carbon Permits

This is something Monty Python would have come up with!

Here is why a good, swift kick up the carbon tax might be better than this ridiculousness...

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 8 February 2011

'Austria's carbon emissions registry has tracked European permits that were stolen in a coordinated cyber attack last month to accounts in Liechtenstein and Sweden, where they have been frozen, the registry said.

Austria said last month that 488,141 permits were missing.

"In the course of the cyber attack on the Austrian emissions trading registry in the beginning of January, illegal transactions were carried out. The illegally transferred allowances have been frozen in accounts in Liechtenstein and Sweden," the registry said on its website on Monday.

"Consequently, there is no risk that these allowances are traded on the market and thus no need to publish the serial numbers of the affected allowances," it added.

Austria's public prosecution service has filed a request for the permits to be transferred back to Austria, the registry said.

Last week, the European Commission allowed five national emissions registries to reopen after freezing them for over two weeks following the theft of carbon permits worth at least 45 million euros ($60.9 million).

More national registries are expected to reopen in the coming days and weeks. Austria's registry has not reopened yet as it implements additional security measures.

The European Union's spot carbon market resumed on Friday after the suspension of trade, but it has been quiet as some exchanges remain shut and as traders fear more thefts or seek to avoid getting stuck with unidentified stolen permits still in circulation.'

The Last Thing Our Hungry World Needs is More Food

...yes we do need to distribute food better and waste a LOT less; but continuing to grow and grow the numbers of mouths to feed is not wise; this is still competition for scarcer and scarcer resources, regardless matter how much food ends up in the skip at the back of the supermarket in wealthier nations:

Reposted in full from The Daily Mail, 6 February 2011

'Government chief scientist Sir John Beddington calls it 'the perfect storm'. Soaring world population, coupled with climate change, is set to create a world food crisis and leave billions starving.

'We are at a unique moment in history,' he said recently, while launching a report from his Government think-tank, Foresight.

The Foresight project, Global Food And Farming Futures, says only a revolution in the way the world grows its food can save us. Clearly, David Cameron's top boffin wants to kick-start that revolution.

The world's population will reach seven billion this year and may peak at nine billion by mid-century. There are plenty of things wrong with the world's food system. But the amount of food it produces isn't one of them.

We already grow enough food to nourish nine billion people, probably 15billion people, in fact, for we eat only about one third of those crops.

Much of the global harvest feeds livestock - an inefficient route for delivering our nutrition, since it takes eight calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat.

Plenty more is diverted to make biofuels. An African could live for a year on the corn needed to fill one gas-guzzling SUV fuel tank with ethanol.

That's not all. In the developing world, an estimated 30 per cent of the harvest is eaten by rats and insects, or rots in grain silos. We in the First World are better at preventing losses, but then we throw about 25 per cent our food away, uneaten.

The truth is that the world's farmers could probably double the amount of food they grow - using GM crops and other technologies - and still people would go hungry. This is ultimately not about production or about human numbers, it is about poverty.

Every time there is a famine, it turns out later that someone, usually just down the road, was hoarding food for sale. The problem is that the hungry families didn't have the cash to buy it.

Every few years we get news reports that there are only so many days' supply of grain in the world's warehouses. If the warehouses are full, prices fall and farmers stop producing. When they start to empty, prices rise, farmers start planting and soon the warehouses are full again.

Beddington's 'perfect storm' is the operation of a perfect market. Does this mis-diagnosis matter? Even if we grow enough food, surely growing more can't hurt.

Well, yes, it does matter. Because Beddington's planned revolution stands a good chance of making the poor poorer. It could mean we have both more food and more famines. This is because most of the methods he suggests to increase food production are about big farms and big investment.

Government chief scientist Sir John Beddington's planned revolution could mean we have both more food and more famines

Beddington wants to plough up vast tracts of African cattle pastures and amalgamate the smallholdings of millions of peasant farmers to create giant, high-tech farms. His blueprint will take land away from the rural poor.

Last month, I watched this scenario playing out on the edge of the Sahara desert in Mali. The government there has recruited foreign experts to help it invest in agriculture. Western aid agencies are building irrigation projects to boost production of rice.

Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, Mali's biggest sugar daddy, has just dug a 25-mile canal to irrigate an area of dry scrub three times the size of the Isle of Wight.

The trouble is that these projects will take water out of the River Niger. They will empty fertile wet pastures just downstream, where one million of Mali's poorest people currently live by catching fish and grazing their cattle. They fear the plans will create desert.

Most of the rice from the new fields will go to feed Libyans. Meanwhile, the poor of the Niger wetlands are likely to join the Al Qaeda groups already penetrating the country's desert borders.

Beddington is right that farming needs investment. But it has to be the right investment. Perhaps he should have a word with another of the Government's scientific advisers, Professor Robert Watson, the real Whitehall food expert.

He is currently chief scientist at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Three years ago he chaired an international report on the future of the world's farming.

In the developing world, an estimated 30 per cent of the harvest is eaten by rats and insects, or rots in grain silos

Watson reached rather different conclusions from Beddington. He said African smallholder farmers should be backed, not stripped of their land; that local knowledge of crops would often work better than high-tech methods; and that fighting poverty was the key to feeding the world.

Watson told me: 'It's not a technical challenge; it's a rural development challenge. Small farmers will remain the predominant producers. The question is how to help them.'

Beddington sees the spread of Western farming methods and giant food and seed companies as the solution to the food problem.

Watson sees it as part of the problem. Beddington's report says: 'We need to make agriculture more efficient.'

But more efficient for whom? For agribusiness and its bottom line? Or for farmers and consumers? In an age where the smart investment banks are putting their cash into biofuels rather than bread, and where large corporations are buying farms across the developing world to grow cotton for cash rather than food for people, the two are not the same thing.

Beddington's report chastises countries such as India, which imposed bans on food exports during the food price crisis in early 2008 in an effort to keep their people fed.

He blames them for 'undoubtedly exacerbating' the crisis, and says such protectionist actions should be banned. He has no such strictures for the speculators who caused the soaring prices.

Surely if we've learned anything over the past couple of years, it is that unbridled markets can bring chaos, and speculators are a menace. It was bad enough letting the financial markets run riot. But if the food markets run riot we will have empty bellies as well as empty pockets.'