Natural Systems Solutions

Can Civilization Survive Industrialism?

2011-05-02T08:49:00.001-07:00

An increasingly frequent and quite disturbing occurrence are the public pronouncements from people who should know better, such as climate scientists and environmentalists, that nuclear power can be a solution--temporary or otherwise--to our energy woes and quickly collapsing economy and environment.

NASA's Jim Hansen is the latest to join James Lovelock, George Monbiot and the other high-priests of the Church of the Techno-fetishist at the Rocky Mountain Institute in shilling for continued exploitive development with the myth of a need for green economic growth. Some people are pointing out that Bill McKibben seems to be not far behind. Even Lester Brown of all people has called for a need to protect and reinvigorate economic growth as long as it's done "greenly."

Why would otherwise intelligent people be advocating a return to the normal that brought us to the edge of this cliff, albeit with a fresh coat of green paint?

Is a green apocalypse (sustainable apocalypse, anyone?) really any better than what the captains of industry and their financiers have in store for us? The left likes to disparage religious fundamentalists, but the Green Divas' vision of a techno-rapture seems to be every bit as divorced from reality. They say their goal is to save civilization from the imminent collapse that is becoming harder to deny, but that's just a cover story. What they're really trying to protect is Industrialism, and it makes no difference whether the economic system at its base is capitalism or socialism.

Industrial civilization, which requires constant economic growth, which means continuing to regard Earth as both an endless supply of resources and a bottomless pit for waste, has become conflated with the concept of civilization. Intentionally destroying one's life-support system is just about the best definition of insanity I know of. It is anything but civilized.

Although, as we start discussing alternatives we must also keep in mind that civilization as we know it has some rather glaring shortcomings apart from Industrialism--just ask an Indian or any of the other peoples who have experienced genocide for land grabs. Or, open yourself to feel the suffering of other species and the planet itself from the onslaught of unrestrained growth, resource extraction, towering mountains of toxic waste, and festering pools of radioactivity just so a CEO somewhere can build yet another summer home in a protected wetlands.

One point I keep reiterating is that Industrialism is actually anathema to civilization, regardless of how Industrialism is powered--nukes, fossil fuels, or photovoltaics. It requires economic cannibalism in its single-minded drive to grow and subsume. Industrialism (not to be confused with technology) devalues both people and planet, and the underlying paradigm it emerges from--force based ranking hierarchies of domination and a pathological sense of the other--must be delegitimized and replaced.

Industrialism, however, is only one disease whose symptomology expresses in the wounds of empire. Others are spiritual transcendence, scientific reductionism, and various stripes of dualistic dichotomies that all assume a linear, mechanistic, disconnected universe that is unfriendly to life--at least in the here and now.

Yes, it is somewhat mind-boggling that Western minds claim this to be true--the latter point especially--while simultaneously insisting that they're rational.

Fortunately, there is a systemic alternative to all of this. It entails reconnecting with nature (our inner nature, each other, our communities, other species, and our living world--our planetary life support system) and relocalizing our communities and economies as a foundation for change. Reconnecting and relocalizing will improve quality of life for all life. This alternative is solidly based in the systems science of non-linear dynamics in an interconnected and interdependent universe, employs the principles of steady-state economics, and works with and benefits from the self-organizing tendencies of living systems to create mutually supportive relationships. Thus, it would require less energy and effort to make available more of what really matters in the human quest for progress and prosperity than the status quo of Industrialism can even dream of.

Which brings up the other point I keep repeating--we must realize that economic growth and increasing market share are not necessary for either progress or prosperity. We could quite rationally decide to shift our focus to becoming better instead of bigger. If we were to factor in all the waste in the current system, and add in planned and perceived obsolescence, the rational conclusion is that we don't actually need all the energy we're producing today, let alone additional capacity from nuclear power. Standard of living would hardly be affected, and quality of life would measurably improve.

Becoming sustainable does not necessitate moving back to the cave. Should we decide to keep our wits about us (I know, little historical precedence, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible) sustainability and technology could co-exist. We must start being intelligent instead of restrictive regarding family planning, and realize any industry deemed necessary in a sustainable future will have to be clean and zero waste to meet one of the basic tenets of sustainability: The ability to stay within the balance point among population, consumption, and waste assimilation so our life support system can recharge and regenerate.

The systemic alternative I'm advocating is perfectly in keeping with true human nature. It would allow the innovation of an inquisitive, intelligent species to truly blossom as it would no longer be shackled by the limiting, self-serving growth imperative. It would focus on creativity, compassion, and nurturance; it would seek to fulfill our senses of community, belonging, and acceptance instead of offering addictive substitutes and creating pharmaceuticals (or building more prisons) to deal with the pathologies that arise (greed, aggression, narcissism, etc.) from withholding natural expectations for fulfillment in order to further consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a self-selected elite.

This latter system is the one that we the people must exercise our power to withdraw the legitimacy we have granted it. We can, and must, start implementing a practical, affordable alternative that can rationally, emotionally and spiritually provide the fulfillment we seek in both expressing and achieving our potential.

Who is more delusional, the Left or the Right?

2011-04-25T13:51:00.003-07:00

I had a very interesting conversation the other day with a Republican activist--a true Republican, not a Tea Partier. I was explaining relocalization from a political perspective, and she replied that this was a message that Republicans needed to hear, as it tends to resonate with traditional Republican values (think Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt).

She was also wondering if I had any thoughts on how Tea Partiers in general could so willingly accept statements that had no basis in any aspect of reality that pertains to the known universe we spend our daily lives in, and if there was some core defect in that particular political demographic.

Now, I don't generally have a problem with being thought of as a lefty, at least along what is generally accepted as the political spectrum today. Even though I prefer to think of myself as neither left nor right, but out in front (definitely NOT the middle), I had to point out that the left today exhibits the same defective cognitive tendencies in accepting utter nonsense as if it were truth.

The example I used to make my point was the increasing "disappointment" with Obama policies now that the hopium has just about worn off, even though the rabid core of the Democratic Party continues to mindlessly defend him.

Let's honestly examine the facts known before the 2008 general election. Obama is an Ivy League lawyer (not a show-stopper in and of itself, of course, just look at Van Jones. But let's connect some more dots). His campaign received major donations from BigEnergy (hmm, this should start raising some red flags over allegiances as well as ideologies). Finally, he was vetted by the center-right Democratic Leadership Council--over Hillary Clinton, no less--before he was allowed to win the Democratic primary. As this latter fact is the real show-stopper, why would people be disappointed that Obama was doing exactly as he was trained, and is expected, to do?

The left, and especially the liberal elite, rather staunchly refuse to address the fact that we have less freedom today, fewer social liberties, and a larger and more powerful police state under the US's first African-American president than we did under the presidency of Ronald Reagan--and we can no longer blame it all on bush jr. Our overall greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise as fast as the rhetoric of a green energy economy. Corporate welfare is further entrenched with the insurance industry's disease care medical model and the left accepts it as health care reform.

For pure comedic value, though, Tea Partiers do take the prize. Keep your grubby gum'mint hands off my Medicare. The tendency of the radical right to accuse Obama of being a socialist fascist--a contradiction in terms which displays their ignorance of both political terminology and history--is every bit as ignorant as the left claiming Obama has progressive tendencies. Calling Obama a socialist is somewhat mind-boggling when you consider that no actual socialists think that Obama has a single socialist bone in his body. He is a corporate stooge and staunch defender of the status quo Kleptocracy and their agenda of free-market imperialism.

A reality based politics would have today's right embracing Obama much more enthusiastically than the left does, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. But we find ourselves in the rather depressing situation where a carnival freak show has been substituted for rational political discourse, very few seem to have noticed, and even fewer seem to care. What's there to worry about? Wal-Mart is still discounting cheap toxic plastic crap from Asian sweatshops and local governments still give them millions in tax breaks and exemptions for the privilege of covering the health care costs of their minimum wage part-time workers--and this is the economic "normal" both right wings of the Corporate War Party want to return to as the minions on both sides cheer them on.

So, which end of the political spectrum is the most delusional? It sure looks like a toss-up to me.

Monbiot Goes Strangelove

2011-04-09T15:40:00.003-07:00

A number of people have already commented on environmental writer George Monbiot's recent coming-out for the captains of industry with his fresh and exciting love affair with nuclear energy. So, I don't want this to seem like piling on, but this issue isn't going to go away as long as we (Western industrial humans) continue to cling to the growth myth, or even continue with the assumptions that "economic recovery," "increasing energy demands" and a "return to normal" are even in our best interests--either short or long term.

In his article, Seven Double Standards , Monbiot starts by asking why we don't hold other forms of energy to the same standard we're trying to impose on nuclear. So, let me start by giving the short answer--because they don't produce thousands of tons of radioactive waste for which we still don't have a feasible method of disposal. Low level radiation is not the issue. While most of his seven points are good ones, especially why we unquestioningly accept deaths as a matter of course in the coal industry, they are mainly a distraction from the questions we should be asking.

Monbiot is within the environmental majority in seeing the benefits of greatly reducing our overall ecofootprint. I believe he genuinely cares about the welfare and well-being of people, other species, and Earth itself both now and for the future. He believes that anthropogenic global warming and the reasonable probability for disastrous consequences accurately describes reality and that the status quo response is wholly inadequate.

But, like so many others today, he frames his response to life threatening crises in the terms and with the assumptions of the dominate paradigm that created these crises.
It is taken as a given that human ingenuity will rescue us and we can go on with livin' large in a green economy using clean renewable energy--never mind those pesky little concepts like entropy, conservation, and finitude.

While more accurate than many over the years in his description of the damage being done and the sure likelihood of further increases in destruction and suffering by staying the course of business as usual, Monbiot doesn't seem willing to lay the blame on Enlightenment thinking, let alone examine the deeper roots from which this mindset emerged and is being nourished. He falls rather firmly in line with Maggie Thatcher in claiming There Is No Alternative. Even though Monbiot insists this isn't what he's saying, he pulls in references from others who also claim abandoning nuclear power will surely result in increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Monbiot believes in a false dichotomy that comes straight from industry PR when saying the only two possible options to increasing nuclear energy capacity are to either burn more fossil fuels (and we agree that's a singularly bad idea), or "To add even more weight to the burden that must be carried by renewables."

Now, there is no doubt that industrialism is a burden on renewables. But, surprise, industrialism is a burden on humanity and Earth. There is also no doubt that human ingenuity must be pressed into service, and starting to do so sooner rather than later would be a singularly good idea. However, stating these are the only two possible paths for humanity's energy future is a case study for the opposite of ingenuity.

We don't need the majority of the stuff that's being produced (let alone new versions every six months), and we don't need wars of empire. Dealing with those two issues alone would remove the need for any new nuclear power capacity, remove the need to replace reactors ready to be decommissioned, and remove well over half of the need for fossil fuels. If we were to start producing what we do need to last and be easily repairable, implement some sensible conservation measures (like not keeping our cities lit up like a cheap Nevada whorehouse at night), and decentralize (but remain standardized and safety regulated) the energy grid, we'd be just about down to an energy demand that renewables are already producing today and well within their ability to pick up any additional slack if needed.

Then there's building our homes and businesses to require less heating and cooling instead of using the cheap ticky-tack construction approach, and all the other low-hanging fruit options everyone is already familiar with. Estimates are that these will get us 23% of the way down to where we need to be just on greenhouse gas emissions, so they're a good idea regardless of their additional energy savings.

If we also factor in the high percentage of people leading lives of quiet desperation (Thoreau) (without which the travel industry couldn't sell "getting away" and would become a mere shell of itself)--those 50% of Americans who take at least one prescription drug per day, and which led to America being ranked 149th out of 150 countries on the UN happiness scale--we start to see even more clearly and completely how much less energy we actually "need". Because if what we're doing now isn't making us happy, will doing even more of it make us happy, or just a whole lot unhappier? After all, it is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society. (Krishnamurti)

When is the environmental left going to become willing to start supporting organizations and electing representatives who are willing to speak this truth and begin implementing the relocalization alternative that can be shown to improve quality of life? To help people understand that sustainability has real meaning and that it is within the capabilities of humans to decide to start moving in that direction. One thing I can pretty much guarantee is that we won't develop a sustainable future as long as people who should know better keep insisting that it either can't happen or isn't necessary.

Mainstream editorial writers are starting to talk about the need to at least switch fuel sources "without either bankrupting or enslaving the citizenry." (M.D. Harmon, Portland Press Herald ) They realize that biofuels are too expensive to produce without government subsidies, but then the logic flys out the window. We don't need Saudi oil, we just need to lift the ban on drilling off-shore and in ANWR. We need more nuclear power plants, lots of them, really fast. Our demand for energy must be met, and this demand must continue to grow for the sake of the economy--often coupled with the myth this is the only way to lift the developing world out of poverty, with poverty narrowly defined against a Western consumerist model. Sanity seeps back in slightly when they admit we sure can't look to the government to solve this problem, but disappears even quicker with thinking that capitalism can be counted on to solve our energy problem, as long as all regulatory and environmental fetters are removed.

The willful ignorance of the supposedly educated and well informed never ceases to amaze, and mortify, me. Don't call for conservation, don't call for efficiency increases (in the product, its manufacture, and its use), and don't insist on using the Precautionary Principle. Don't think about any of the other factors I mentioned above, and definitely don't call for ways to do more with less. And whatever you do, don't dare mention that the problems we're facing with rising energy costs, shrinking supplies, and increasing biospheric toxicity are a direct result of capitalism's growth economy in support of Industrialism. This is economic cannibalism. Its only logical consequence is ecocide while material wealth continues its upward consolidation into fewer hands until it finally catastrophically implodes.

The only unknown is which will occur first. The implosion or a biosphere inhospitable to life.

It's time to honestly look at the damage our energy demands are doing to the environment and to our spirits. And then to examine the implementation of a rational alternative.

It's time to shift the foundation of the debate. It's time to discover the dynamic resiliency and increased opportunities in steady-state local living economies. It's time to start strategizing to power down, instead of sucking up every last iota of fossil fuels--or shifting even a fraction of the "demand" to the more potentially destructive nuclear industry--in order to support overly consumptive and wasteful lifestyles which require an economic model of infinite growth to service debt that has absolutely no basis in reality. It contravenes the laws of physics. It's not just loss of habitat and species being driven to the brink of extinction, but the ability of the biosphere to support life as we know it that's being lost as we keep breaking links in the food chain simply to continue corporate profits, keep the GNP graph on a positive slope, and the ruling elite firmly in control as they continue to successfully carry out class warfare.

The degree of madness that underlies this frenetic activity is approaching the unfathomable. And it seems to have terminally infected even the best minds of the environmental left.

Press Conference Statement

2011-01-11T16:18:00.003-07:00

I was invited to speak today at a press conference organized by the peace, justice, and sustainability community to examine the tragic events of this past Saturday in Tucson that left six people dead and 14 more wounded. Representatives from 14 groups delivered prepared statements. Following is mine.

My name is Dave Ewoldt, and I'm the executive director of Natural Systems Solutions. Our work emerges from the field of ecopsychology, and one focus is the use of natural systems principles to facilitate the transition into a sustainable future. It is in that context that I prepared my remarks.

We are exhibiting many symptoms of a very sick society. Foremost today, of course, is that we're destroying our one and only life support system to continue an entirely irrational system of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. But, there's another symptom of our cultural pathology that I want to address today.

The rhetoric of hate and fear is propagated and enticed by the only interests that it truly serves--elite power and control hierarchies. These special interests maintain their control by keeping us divided against ourselves. Whether you are a member of the Tea Party or the Progressive Movement, the problem is not big government, but bad government--a government that has been bought by corporate and financial interests that put profit and power before and above people and planet.

Today's so-called conservative movement, which it should be apparent has nothing whatsoever to do with traditional values that seek a better future for all--that has both Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt turning in their graves--has adopted the language of war and retribution; a language that seeks to settle differences by "targeting" and "taking out" your opponents; a language that normalizes violence, aggression, and exploitation for personal benefit; a language that divides and pits us against each other in order to keep us too distracted from where the problem really lies.

We are a culture that sanctions death. We illegally invade and occupy sovereign nations that don't play along with our business interests, and use unmanned drones to drop bombs on civilian populations. We are the arms dealer to the world. Our death... I mean defense... industry and prisons are the only growth sectors left that we don't outsource and off-shore in our economy.

But what is most important to realize in a culture that has lost its way is that there is an alternative to all this that we could consciously choose. While it may sound strange to ears long accustomed to the story of scientific reductionism, materialism, and separation that has emerged from Enlightenment thinking, the alternative follows known patterns of mutually supportive ecological relationships that have been working quite well for billions of years to keep the project of life itself progressing. This alternative starts by no longer allowing those who act against our best interests--against the best interests of life itself--to dictate the terms of the debate.

We could decide to focus on those aspects of being truly and fully human that work with the creative life force such as nurturance, compassion, cooperation and use our intelligence to focus our innovative spirit on creating a sustainable future. A future based on the principles of ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy. We can no longer afford to continue denying that true justice cannot exist without sustainability, and without justice there will be no peace.

Otherwise, our days will continue to be filled with too many that resemble this past weekend. The choice is up to us, and change begins by making new choices.

Truth Needn't be Scary

2010-11-29T13:41:00.011-07:00

For those of you following along at home, Erik Curren has responded to my response. (also archived here) The primary third party to this exchange, Dmitry Orlov, has posted some additional comments on this exchange as well.

A quick semantic clarification is in order, especially regarding my own writing. I don't consider the immanent end of Western industrial civilization--the Industrial Growth Society--to be equivalent to collapse. I tend to think of collapse as something bad. While Western civ is causing collapse in many areas, such as with the rampant biodiversity loss that's breaking numerous links in the food chain, and there's a high probability that it will cause collapse in ways we haven't even thought of yet, ending an era of domination, exploitation and destruction I find difficult to put in the category of collapse.

I'd first like to thank Erik for this opportunity to continue engaging in an intelligent conversation to allow clarification of points. This demonstrates that we're in agreement on quite a bit. The "What I know" section of his response points out many of these areas.

I sure don't know what the future will look like either. But I do know that if we apply a rational framework that is based on the natural systems principles that ecosystems use to become sustainable, we can guide human societies in a direction that works for life in general instead of mainly for the elite control hierarchies that have gotten us into our current mess.

I also know that when the non-profit my wife and I run started doing public screenings of the documentary End of Suburbia in 2004 that it woke a lot of people up. You could, in many cases, quite literally see the fog lifting from people. EoS connected a lot of dots and supplied some badly needed missing information that mainstream sources would rather ignore and deny. Admittedly, the attendees at these screenings were mainly an educated crowd--whether university or self-learners was irrelevant. They were either already aware that the status quo was dysfunctional, or they had that uneasy sense that things were amiss and would rather do something about it other than take any of the culturally popular mood-altering drugs and pretend that everything was just fine.

So, yeah, in American culture today this makes for a small, but growing, percentage of the general population. There are various reasons for this, well known to students of Western culture--the dumbsizing of public education, the debt trap of consumerism which requires longer working hours, the distractions of pop culture, the effects of the world's largest experiment in operant conditioning known as advertising, and the fact that modern psychotherapy focuses on making one feel sane about living in an insane world. It also helps when you can rig an economy so that one's best chance of obtaining a higher education means first taking your chances as cannon fodder and being subjected to military indoctrination.

Something else I know in the area of economics is that our current economy is based on fairy dust. Whether people listen to Nicole Foss or Jeff Rubin means little if their primary goal is to guide speculation in wealth accumulation. The fact is that we're not in a recession; we're at the end of an historic period in Western civilization. And Foss comes much, much closer to speaking this truth than Rubin does.

I also know that we don't need a source of power--at least one that comes from a centralized grid or contributes to the degradation of the natural world--to keep from shivering in the dark. We know how to build extremely efficient zero-carbon homes--they just can't be slapped together in a week by a group of half-drunk minimum wage high-school dropouts and are thus less profitable to the growth lobby. The Inuit managed to survive just fine without Consolidated Edison. But even if this isn't the lifestyle of choice for many people, a technologically advanced society can exist within the carrying capacity of their supportive ecosystems. They just have to be honest about that balance point among population, consumption, and waste assimilation.

The attempt at arguing $225/barrel oil means people can no longer afford insulin is both a strawman and a red herring, as well as a thinly disguised argument in favor of maintaining the status quo. Decent public transportation in walkable cities instead of Lexus payments--as well as not taking on mountains of unnecessary consumer debt in the first place--would allow people to afford their insulin. More importantly, if they were to stop eating processed death foods and washing them down with high-fructose corn syrup that has a few cancer agents plus a neurotoxin and an endocrine disrupter thrown in for color, flavor and preservation they might not need the insulin in the first place. And, of course, getting off their duff once in a while would be a big help too.

Using John Michael Greer in an appeal to authority argument doesn't carry much water either. In a conversation with Rob Hopkins, that I also weighed in on, Greer takes a viewpoint that since we can't forecast the future, that planning is both a waste of time and gives people false hope.

As Curren points out in his "What I know" section, the rapidly accumulating evidence that we are about to slam into a brick wall is becoming inescapable. So Greer's position that rapid collapse is unlikely and we'll have a long, slow, multi-generational descent--I guess because he doesn't want to frighten anybody either--ignores what we know about tipping points, and are coming to better understand about feedback loops. Due diligence is indeed what we should be doing, and post haste. Unfortunately, Greer seems to be advising people to do the opposite.

Giving up on society doesn't automatically mean grabbing your family and locking yourself into a bomb shelter. What I'm talking about is giving up on the failed assumptions of Western industrial civilization. There's a big difference. When coupled with the rational alternative a systemic implementation of relocalization offers, the benefits of a different way of creating our social relationships points to a positive way forward that feels good to participate in.

In Curren's selective quoting of Yevgeny at Club Orlov he rather conveniently skipped the most important final phrase in that quote. "[B]ut that's only if they find enough fuel to get there and back." I'm always having to point out to people that the gangs of Los Angeles aren't going to invade Tucson because we're more than a tankful of gas away. The Sonoran Desert is going to be littered with lowriders, and they're going to be wishing the racist Arizona legislature hadn't shut down all the immigrant water stations.

Because something else I know--from direct experience--is that if you take the time to honestly lay things out for people, they get it. This works best if you first take the time to listen to their concerns and hopes. This is how I ran my campaign for Arizona State Senate this year. I ran as an independent on a platform that used relocalization and steady-state economies as the only rational response to peak oil, global warming and corporatism, and although I lost, I gathered support from across the political spectrum. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate would debate the issues, and spent most of their time talking about how bad the other was. But after every forum or other speaking engagement, I'd have a handful of people come up to me and say I was the only candidate making sense, and that it was so refreshing to hear someone speaking truth and offering actual alternatives. These were people I'd never met before, i.e. they were outside the choir.

Now, some people are just very deep in the consensus trance, but many of the people I've talked with over the years who say "Don't scare people, they can't handle the truth, they'll just shut down," turn out to be stalwarts of the status quo of growth and empire, even when they insist that they're really dog soldiers for the peace or environmental or whatever movements. The conditioning that declares growth and material accumulation as necessary for progress and prosperity runs very deep, and the artificial stimuli that enforce this worldview are constant and applied in myriad ways.

Which is actually one of the things that underpins my optimism, strange as that might sound. Studies in operant conditioning show that as soon as the artificial stimuli are removed and/or the subject is returned to a more natural environment, subjects (from any species) revert back to more natural behaviors much quicker than it took to train them to act against their nature. Other studies show that neuronal growth and new pathways occur in as little as 45 minutes by simply enhancing one's environment. Literacy and the ability to successfully challenge the status quo can take as little as three weeks. There's no reason to accept that the change we seek is going to take generations, or even decades, to come about. And it can start as simply as turning off your TV and attending a meeting of your neighborhood association.

We have the ability to rapidly change. It seems that what we're really lacking at a cultural level is the motivation, which a full set of facts can help provide. So I very much agree with one aspect of Curren's message. We must become better communicators, and use many different communication techniques and styles. One thing that using the models and metaphors of natural systems shows is that there is a whole lot of diversity, so a one-size-fits-all "solution" isn't going to cut it.

Some people are better at certain tactics, some people respond better to certain stimuli (some of the lessons of operant conditioning can be useful), we're all at different points of awareness, and some people respond faster than others. One of the problems I have with any of the stage models of change or development is that they tend to ignore individual differences, that change doesn't have to be tepid incrementalism, and that people have the ability to quickly jump to advanced stages while skipping intermediate stages entirely.

As Derrick Jensen so correctly points out, change begins by believing in it, not by talking ourselves out of it, and definitely not by talking others out of it--and I might add, or the style with which they're most effective.

And for the record, while I support the transition movement as a step in the right direction, I'm not committed to it. I am one of the co-founders of Transition Pima--a Transition US regional hub--but what I'm committed to is getting back in balance with a living, sensuous Earth which relocalization--a practical and affordable process to create a sustainable future--could do when combined with reconnecting with nature and steady-state local living economies.

Hopefully we can make the transition to a sustainable future fun and exciting and all that. It doesn't have to be about sacrifice and austerity (except for people who just can't give up the bankster mindset). And in fact, when one honestly examines what passes for Western "civilization," it's not hard to come to the conclusion that sacrifice and austerity is its modus operandi.

I think most people would quite willingly give up their body burden, despair, and the lack of time to develop any type of meaningful, lasting relationships with family, friends, community, and environment. The truth needn't be scary, especially when there are alternatives to the dysfunctional status quo to be offered. But we must be honest about how much damage we've already caused, about how it's come to be, and about what we could start doing differently. Because what we're facing now is a global Truth or Consequences.

Peak Oil: Apocalypse or Promised Land?

2010-11-29T13:28:00.003-07:00

The Energy Bulletin published on November 24 the following response I wrote to an article by Erik Curren, which was first published on Transition Voice which you might want to read through first for the full context, and especially to some of the articles Curren links to as they provide good background information on what we're facing.

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I found it rather hard to tell what point of view Erik Curren is actually arguing for or against in "Peak oil risks becoming an apocalyptic cult." But it seems to be don't tell people the truth as they might ignore you, or even worse, laugh at you. So, let's browse through the sections of Curren's article.

First off, though, if we can't honestly admit that staying the course means slamming into a brick wall at high-speed before the wreckage sails over a very high cliff we won't make the necessary changes to do any more than stave off the inevitable--at best. The reality of the global situation today is that if you're not scared, you're not paying attention.

Predicting collapse becomes a pretty safe bet considering how far into the overshoot range we are--in the areas of population, consumption, and waste generation--and the fact that our "leaders" still believe we can get away with even more of what got us into our current dire straits, coupled with their insistence that we're not actually in dire straits, but even if we were, some whiz-kid will invent something to take care of it and we can all happily get back to the normal that created our dire straits in the first place. This is the type of optimism that makes pessimism redundant.

Curren starts out with a refrain that is becoming a bit too familiar. Mentioning the facts that the Industrial Growth Society is entirely dependent on cheap and abundant supplies of fossil fuels to power the growth necessary to pay off yesterday's debt, and since we've passed the peak in conventional supplies the global financial system can't survive much longer is somehow seen as equivalent to the American survivalist movement--and Curren throws Glenn Beck in as an additional bogeyman just for good measure.

Now, if one were to stop their inquiry into the peak oil movement at that point it would be easy to come to the conclusion that it's nothing more than bunch of doom-n-gloom misfits who can't adapt to civilization and are praying for the apocalypse. But being that superficial is generally associated with swimming at the shallow end of the gene pool.

The peak oil movement, pretty much since its inception, has always pointed out that there is an alternative--at least if we begin to implement it before too many tipping points are passed. Powering down, relocalizing, reconnecting, and remembering how to build mutually supportive community relationships are all mainstays of the peak oil movement. As well as of the global warming, social justice, and ecological integrity movements.

Communities are sets of relationships which operate at many scales. Curren says the guest post by Yevgeny on Dmitri Orlov's blog "deconstructs the idea of 'community.'" I'm at a total loss to see how he comes to that conclusion. Yevgeny does an excellent job of describing exactly what community is when talking about his father's village. The word itself may not be exactly translatable into Russian, but the concept is pretty universal. Who is rejecting the idea of community? I sense an attempt to create a straw-man, but I'm not sure who or for what purpose.

Nicole Foss does a good job of helping people realize our current economy is built on fairy dust. If Transition Norwich is an indication, I'm glad to see the Transition Movement waking up to reality, and especially their very mature response to it: "We didn’t have to be Pollyannas anymore." The end of affordable consumer goods would be a blessing in disguise, because none of them actually deliver on their promise of fulfillment. $225/barrel oil would help people discover they don't actually need the stuff in the first place.

By remembering how to share, build stuff to last, decentralize the grid with clean renewables, and a handful of other common sense changes that are technologically feasible today, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that we could have technologically advanced societies that are sustainable (and yes, there's a humane way to deal with the overpopulation problem). The only "downside" is that none of this supports economic growth. The main concept that changes is growth being necessary for progress and prosperity goes into the dustbin of history. The only suffering falls on bankers and insurance salesmen. But as Richard Heinberg says, we need 50 million more farmers anyway. The sunshine will do them good.

The collapse of an economic system that is based on debt, exploitation, and destruction is the opposite of an apocalypse, especially when relocalization/transition offers a positive alternative that actually can improve people's lot in life. Innovation and entrepreneurship can finally fully blossom because it won't be narrowly tied to only those products and industries that prop up the growth machine.

The fact is that we've been lied into our current perception of reality by the status quo, and it's not meeting the needs of everyday people, let alone offering anything approaching fulfillment. Cultural maturation beyond this story sounds much more like the promised land than the apocalypse.

Mitigating Global Warming: Protecting Water

2010-10-03T14:05:00.002-07:00

The following is a transcript of my talk at Transition Pima's Oct. 2 Chautauqua for Change, where the focus of the day was water.

Good afternoon. I'm glad so many of you could join us today. My name is Dave Ewoldt, and I'm one of the co-founders of Transition Pima, as well as being an independent candidate for Arizona State Senate in LD 28.

My research background, professional life, and community activism are built on a foundation of ecology, systems science, and policy analysis pertaining to sustainability and its basis in scientifically validated natural systems principles. I've also been a member of the Arizona Hydrological Society, and had a paper published in their annual conference proceedings a couple of years ago, so I'm at least marginally qualified to speak on the issue of water.

Today, more groups such as the Southern Arizona Green Chamber of Commerce, are springing up almost daily whose primary interest is sustainability; who advocate a community based on ecologically sound policies and sustainable practices; and who lobby to enact practical legislation to encourage green practices in our communities. Locally, the City of Tucson and Pima County have created sustainability departments. We also have the Watershed Management Group, Drywater Harvesters, Sonoran Permaculture Guild, Barrio Sustainability Project and other groups who focus on food and energy security that is sustainable.

My contention is that in order for these efforts to be successful, the first thing we must do is honestly define what we mean by sustainability. This can be done in both an ecologically sound and a legally defensible manner. This will provide a foundation that is consistent, that will allow rational planning, and will provide a yardstick by which to measure progress.

Most of you here today have heard the definition I propose using before, but I'll repeat it because we must keep it in mind as we talk about the water situation here in Southern Arizona. This definition contains three clauses that are intimately interrelated and that inform and support each other.

Sustainability: 1) Integrate human social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain rather than degrade or destroy the environment; 2) A moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; 3) Entails determining, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation so that bioregions, watersheds and ecosystems can maintain their ability to recharge, replenish, and regenerate.

The third clause it what gives the definition its legal teeth, because it is scientifically measurable. It provides the foundation for setting growth threshhold standards and optimum population size studies which have been successfully carried out in other communities around the country.

With this definition in mind, one thing that stands out to me in the various water forums and symposiums I've attended or participated in over the past few years is a term commonly used by local, regional, national, and international water experts. This term is overdraft. Everyone says, that everywhere you look, fresh water supplies are decreasing. We're using more than can be naturally replenished. But then, often in the very next sentence, they all go on to say we're not in danger of running out of water.

Now, I realize that math skills are also decreasing in this country, but what planet are these people from? Is there a parallel universe, or another dimension that I'm not aware of where all this water is going to come from? Isn't "inventing" new water supplies the same as the alchemy used in the Middle Ages to turn lead into gold? The best any of these experts could offer is a belief in a future technological miracle occurring to save us from ourselves. I call this the techno-rapture. None of the experts want to address the inconvenient truth that pretty much every technology that we've applied against the natural world has had the unfortunate side-effect of decreasing the ability of the natural world to sustain life.

I have this bad habit of looking at everything from a systems perspective; of studying relationships; of being concerned with underlying causes. If we don't understand what the real root of the problem is, the solutions we develop won't change anything because we'll be responding to the wrong problem.

When properly presented, sustainability additionally provides an overarching meta-vision of a just, equitable, and peaceful democratic society that is in balance (or, more accurately, in holistic integration) with the natural world. Sustainability, when strongly defined from the perspective of ecology--which is the study of relationships--fully informs the work of progressive activism, as well as providing the support and nurturing necessary for progressive activists. While some people take the narrow view that sustainability is an environmental movement, sustainability is actually a community movement.

I'll get into some of the details of why here in a moment, but the status quo needs to change while there's still anyone left around to change it. And the experts who look at global warming trends (more accurately referred to as catastrophic climate destabilization) say we're going to be looking at greatly reduced populations in the Southwest deserts over the coming decades. There is an intimate relationship here with water.

Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in regard to diminished supplies of fresh water in the Western US from the 30-70% reduction of mountain snowpack says, "There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster, and that’s in the best scenario." There are a number of credible studies that have been published within the past few years that come to the conclusion that the Colorado River could be functionally dry as early as the next years or two, but at least within the decade if trends continue.

Speaking of trends, it's instructive to note that many of the worst case global warming scenarios from less than ten years ago, which weren't predicted to occur until 2085 to 2100, have already occurred. The best example is the opening up of the Northwest passage in the Arctic.

We must begin being honest about the reality of the situation we find ourselves in. There is actually no disagreement that our current water supplies are running out. The water table in the Tucson region has dropped from 20 feet to over 300 feet in the past three generations, and is continuing to drop between 2-4 ft/yr. In the 1940s in Phoenix you couldn't build a house with a basement because the water table was too high. Now it's at 1,000 feet.

We're selling water to industry for $5.80/af, but the cost to CAGRD (Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District) to secure increasingly difficult to find replenishment supplies is $200/af. The snowpack in the headwaters of the Colorado River is decreasing and is expected to be at 40% below normal in the coming years. The Central Arizona Project is pumping water over 300 miles 2000 feet uphill to Tucson in an open concrete ditch through the middle of the Arizona desert.

We're betting our future on paper water. The current ADD water process (Acquire, Develop and Deliver Water) is analogous to the fed printing money to "solve" the financial crisis. It allows the continuation of rubber-stamping growth without the water actually being there. And we're allowing our local planning departments to continue approving trophy subdivisions in the foothills, and 60,000 home "planned" communities south of Tucson. As if putting the word "planned" in there makes everything alright. Everybody seems afraid to point out that smart growth gets us to the exact same place as dumb growth, we just get their first class.

One of the things we're told by status quo water managers is that we can continue growing if we manage our water resources better; for example, if we all just begin water harvesting.

What I'm going to spend the rest of my time talking about today involves deepening this overly simplistic view. We require a much fuller understanding of the system relationships within hydrologic cycles in order to craft realistic water policies.

The executive summary is that our collective abuse and displacement of water is contributing to both global warming and local weather disruptions. Abuse through industrial and agricultural pollution is fairly well understood. Displacement is less well known and concerns moving water from where it sustains healthy ecosystems and hydrologic cycles to where it gets used in irrigation or for cities, where it generally ends up in the oceans. There is also a "virtual trade" in water due to globalization, which is the 20% of daily water use for humans that is used for export crops or manufactured goods. Urbanization, deforestation, and wetlands destruction also cause the removal of vegetation necessary for a healthy hydrologic cycle, which leads to a loss of precipitation over affected areas. This all contributes to global warming, as well as lowering nature's ability to sequester carbon dioxide. Solutions must protect water as well as watersheds and all of their users.

Here are the details on how this functions and occurs. Much of the following is taken from the work of Maude Barlow, board chair of Food and Water Watch and senior adviser on water to the president of the U.N. General Assembly.

We can't ignore the interconnected nature of our world, its cycles, and humanity's role in them. Global warming is having negative impacts on global fresh water supplies. Warmer temperatures cause increased evaporation from rivers and lakes, decreased snowpack and earlier runoff, and increased glacier melting.

However, our collective abuse and displacement of fresh water is also contributing to global warming. This issue must be added to our strategies to mitigate global warming as well as the restoration of watersheds and the replenishment of aquifers.

There are two major factors in this.

The first is displacement of water from where it sustains healthy ecosystems and healthy hydrologic cycles. We've polluted so much surface water that we're now mining aquifers much faster than nature can replenish them. We move water from where nature has put it to where we need it for food production where much of it gets lost to evaporation, and to supply the voracious thirst of cities where it usually ends up as waste dumped into waterways and oceans.

We also lose water through the virtual trade in water. This is the water used for export crops and manufactured goods, and it accounts for about 20% of the daily water use for humans that is exported out of watersheds. Piping water long distances for industry leaves behind parched landscapes.

The second factor is loss of the vegetation necessary for healthy hydrologic cycles. Urbanization, deforestation and wetland destruction destroy water-retentive landscapes and leads to loss of precipitation over the affected area.

The living world influences the climate mainly by regulating the water cycle and the huge energy flows linked to it. Transpiring plants, especially forests, work as a kind of biotic pump, causing humid air to be sucked out of the ocean and transferred to dry land. If the vegetation is removed from the land, this natural regulation system is interrupted. Soil erodes, reducing the content of organic material in the ground, thus reducing its ability to hold water. Dry soil from lost vegetation traps solar heat, sharply increasing the local temperature and causing a reduction in precipitation over the affected area. This is the unmentioned side of the urban heat island effect. This process also destroys the natural sequestration of carbon in the soil, leading to carbon loss.

So, just as removing vegetation from an ecosystem will dry up the soil, removing water from an ecosystem means reduced or non-existent vegetation. Taken together, these two factors are hastening the desertification of the planet, and intensifying global warming. Even if we successfully address and reverse greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels, we will not be able to stop global warming if we do not deal with the impact of our abuse of water.

It is also a tenet of sustainability that a region--however defined--cannot consider itself sustainable at the expense of another region. Central and Southern Arizona will not be sustainable as long as it depends on Colorado River water. The same can be said for some of the current pipe-dreams such as building another water canal from the Mississippi River or building desalinization plants. As if the communities dependent upon the Mississippi River would even allow the former to occur in the first place.

And of course there's also the tie-in to our energy production and use. Coal-fired power plants use approximately 1.5 trillion gallons of water a year in the US. Some folks might actually use more water turning on the lights in their foothills McMansions than by drinking a glass of it. Power plants also create more toxic waste than the plastic, paint, and chemical industries, and this waste gets dumped into rivers and other waterways from the scrubbing process. So, we've managed to clean up the air a bit and instead of breathing the toxins, now we drink them.

So, how do we answer the increasingly loud cry of, What can we do?

The solution to the water half of this crisis is massive watershed restoration to bring water back into parched landscapes. It's instructive to remember that the Tucson Valley used to be a desert wetlands. The only remaining example of this is a small section of the upper San Pedro River valley.

We must return water that has disappeared by retaining as much rainwater as possible within the ecosystem so that water can permeate the soil, replenish groundwater systems, and return to the atmosphere to regulate temperatures and renew the hydrologic cycle. This means we must be ecologically realistic about the unsustainability, as well as the basic infeasibility, of supporting a local population of one million entirely through water harvesting. Don't even get me started on the current growth lobby fantasy of doubling our local population by 2050.

We must restore forests and wetlands - the lungs and kidneys of fresh water. For this to be successful, three basic laws of nature must be addressed.

1) We must create the conditions that allow rainwater to remain in local watersheds by restoring the natural spaces where rainwater falls and where water can flow. Examples of water retention include: roof gardens in family homes and office buildings; urban planning to allow rain and storm water to be captured and returned to the earth; water harvesting and drip irrigation in food production; capturing daily water discharge and returning it clean to the land through technologies such as living machines.

2) We cannot continue to mine groundwater supplies at a rate greater than natural recharge. Future generations will not look kindly upon us if we do. Governments must regulate groundwater takings before these underground reservoirs are gone (and before our cities subside into them). This means a shift in policy from export to domestic and local production.

3) We must stop polluting our surface and groundwater sources, which is usually done merely to increase corporate profits. Water abuse in fossil fuel production and in mining must stop. We must wean ourselves of industrial and chemical-based agricultural practices and the techno-fantasy of water-guzzling agro-fuel farming. National policies and international trade rules must support local food production in order to protect the environment and promote local sustainable agriculture. Policies must also discourage the virtual trade in water, and ban the mass movement of water by pipeline. Government investment in water and wastewater infrastructure would save huge volumes of water lost every day. Local laws could enforce water-harvesting and grey-water recycling practices at every level.

Governments around the world must acknowledge the water crisis and the role water abuse plays in the warming (and drying) of the planet. All activities that will impact water must conform to a new ethic -- backed by law -- that protects water sources from pollution and over-pumping. This will require a strong challenge to government policies that exclusively focus on unlimited global economic growth, as well as directly challenging those who insist that it is politically infeasible to propose, enact, or enforce any regulations that might decrease profitability.

International policies currently focus on giving the two billion people in water stressed areas more access to groundwater sources. But current levels of groundwater takings are unsustainable. To truly realize the universal right to water, and to protect water for nature's own uses, requires a fundamental reordering in our relationship to the world's finite water resources, as well as all the other resources our economies, lifestyles, and very lives depend upon.

Until we find the courage to perform a systemic and comprehensive carrying capacity analysis, we won't know what we have to work with, or even the general direction we should be heading. This makes all of our current planning efforts moot.

We are currently overdeveloped. We are in the overshoot range of both environmental and economic carrying capacity. This is a very inconvenient truth, made all the harder to hear because we have defined our very essence by its negation.

Addressing these issues is a fundamental aspect of the relocalization project--a viable and pragmatic process to cooperatively develop a sustainable future. We're running out of time to get busy on it. But, it is something that is within our ability to do. And it starts by simply making new choices, in our lifestyles and with the people we elect to set our governing policies and regulatory framework. Simply replacing one color of the status quo with the second most popular color is not a choice our grandchildren are going to be very happy about.

Or our children. Or our spouses, for that matter. The time, quite literally, is now.

In a Nutshell

2010-08-17T10:00:00.006-07:00

Since what we're doing today obviously isn't working when it comes to improving our lot in life and protecting our life support system, and we have an urgent need to develop realistic responses to the rapidly converging Triumvirate of Collapse--Peak Oil, global warming, and corporatism--who or what might be standing in our way? More importantly, what could form a realistic foundation for doing things differently?

The main group standing in the way of getting back in balance with the natural systems principles that create and nurture life seem to be those 1) who believe that economic growth and financial incentives are necessary for progress and prosperity, not that we're naturally innovative, inquisitive and intelligent creatures, 2) who believe we are separate from and in control of the natural world, and not subject to the consequences of our actions, 3) who believe that money and material accumulation are acceptable substitutes for spiritual and emotional health and well-being, 4) who believe we can "greenly" resume business as usual and have an economic recovery that returns us to "normal" and don't want to admit that normal is what brought us to this point, 5) who believe that because compound interest can be mathematically shown to expand to infinity that this "proves" natural resources can do likewise, and thus banksters are to be venerated in their wisdom of usury and worship of mammonism (the deification of greed), 6) who believe this is a cruel and heartless dog-eat-dog world and not that the Universe is friendly to life and its evolution, and 7) basically, those who believe that force-based ranking hierarchies of domination and a pathological sense of an inferior other (anything outside the ego) are normal.

While this may make life-supportive change sound next to impossible, I think it is important to help people realize that it's all based on nothing more than a story that emerges from #7. We (Western industrial civilization) can remove the legitimacy we grant to that story, and we can develop a new story that better meets our needs, which necessarily includes a healthy living world that increases diversity by remaining within the carrying capacity limitations of bioregions, watersheds and ecosystems.

I believe we can help people remember and rekindle their fundamental connection to a sensuous living world in which the prime activity of living organisms is the tendency to self-organize into mutually supportive relationships. This is the basis for community. For those missing this important link in the way we think, this part of the process can be easily learned through Project NatureConnect.

Depending on one's perspective, there really aren't major, if any, sacrifices to make--except within a few economic sectors like banking and insurance--when it comes to powering down and evolving beyond growth. Well, we'll sacrifice our body burden, as well as the major contributor to stress, depression, angst, anxiety, despair...

And there's a sizeable chunk of people who would welcome the opportunity to find an alternative to the rat race; to shifting their focus from having more to being more. This is what social studies for the last half century have been saying is exactly what people really do want.

However, no one in their right mind would accept less and contribute more to a system that practices economic cannibalism and ecocide. That's why modern psychotherapy and pharmaceutical companies exist. As J. Krishnamurti said, it is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

There's a rational economic and ecological alternative that addresses the "doing with less" and austerity concerns of dropping the myth of infinite growth and that embodies the intrinsic rights of the natural world. This alternative is known as relocalization--a practical and affordable process to create a sustainable future--that is the polar opposite of, thus the antidote to, corporate globalization. It combines reconnecting with nature, steady-state economies, permaculture, bioregionalism, natural healing, non-hierarchical communication and organization methods, eco-cities that are people friendly instead of car friendly, alternative energy, and related areas. The leaders and teachers we need today are those already involved in all of those areas, as well as those working in the hundreds of cities around the world focusing on powering-down and becoming sustainable through Transition Initiatives.

For practical examples, we could make less stuff if it were built to last and be easily repairable. We could share infrequently used stuff with friends and neighbors (or have a community rental coop). We could quit believing Madison Avenue when it insists that we are unworthy if we have last years stuff. We could make stuff less toxic, using less toxic processes, and more energy efficient by simply admitting that people and planet are more important than profit. We can build carbon neutral dwellings. We could decentralize the energy grid, quit losing the 25-50% that gets lost on long distance transmission lines, and have local energy independence.

We already know how to do all of these things but don't because of fear of losing "competitive market advantage" and the need to pay usurious interest rates on bank loans that have been extended on easy credit to keep the overall economy growing. What much of this comes down to is that we must admit it is highly irrational to continue believing that we can all continue to benefit forever from our mutual indebtedness--financial and ecological.

If we were to also get global population down to a sustainable level (and we've already proven it's possible to reduce birth rates below replenishment levels through education and giving women the right to control reproductive choice), we could probably get by just fine with even less alternative energy than we're already producing. It must be more widely distributed, but we don't need more of it. We could end our addiction to fossil fuels today. And I haven't even mentioned all the common sense conservation methods we can build into the social milieu, instead of propagating the fear that by conserving ourselves we're simply making it possible for others to use more.

Becoming sustainable doesn't require donning hair-shirts, moving back to the cave, and carrying water. Unless, of course, that's one's preferred lifestyle. (Most of us would probably skip the hair-shirt part.) I think most people would gladly contribute more if they knew they were contributing to mutually supportive community that was consciously and spiritually aligned, or holistically integrated, with a sensuous living planet. This is also the best manner of getting more back ourselves. Being a responsibly contributing member of one's community is how we satisfy those natural expectations for fulfillment that our senses of community, belonging, and acceptance require to be whole and healthy ourselves.

Changing the concepts of wealth and status from the size of one's bank account, yacht, or lawn to the quality of one's personal, social, and environmental relationships is integral to all of this. But I don't see anything irrational or unnatural about becoming better instead of bigger. This is actually where much of my overall optimism springs from, along with all the research that demonstrates that people can make fundamental change in a short time-frame with the proper motivation. The tricky part is finding that motivational trigger point for people thoroughly embedded in the consensus trance of the Industrial Growth Society.

We can mature beyond mechanistic, reductionistic, dualistic Enlightenment thinking and realize that in an interconnected and interdependent world, wisdom emerges from the combination of science and spirituality. While we must first heal the disconnection among body, mind and spirit so they can fully inform and support each other, we can simultaneously build on a framework that combines ancient indigenous wisdom with evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and ecology that requires less energy to increase opportunities for all to work toward their potential.

I believe this is the path to sustainability, and that a sustainable future is only possible if founded on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy. This means it must be founded on the core natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. The models and metaphors amply supplied by a climax ecosystem as it develops health, vitality and resiliency--a system which has been successfully functioning for billions of years in order for life to support more life--can be used to create lifestyles and social systems that are every bit as sustainable.

Before it's too late, if it's not already. Gaia, our living planet, original mother to us all, will eventually heal. But without humans, she will have lost her voice for many centuries, probably millennia, more.

The system is not invincible. Elites are neither supernatural nor immortal; they exhibit the same weaknesses and foibles as you and I; their greed and arrogance is just slightly more pronounced. Systems of power--hierarchies of domination--have been created by humans, and we can remove the legitimacy we bestow on those systems. True systemic change starts by believing in it, not by talking ourselves out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it.

This means we could do it today; it is a natural aspect of who we truly are; we don't need to wait for a new technology to be invented, or for a new prophet to emerge; we can think and act the way that nature works. Collectively, we the people are more powerful than we dare to believe, and it's time for us to mature from Nature's children into Nature's adults regardless of the manner in which we internalize--the name we apply to--the creative life force.

The nexus of sustainability and the peace movement

2010-03-01T09:33:00.004-07:00

I was asked to be one of the speakers at Tucson's annual Peace Fair and Music Festival on February 27, 2010. Here are my prepared remarks.

Good afternoon. My name is Dave Ewoldt. I'm an ecotherapist, systems scientist, and executive director of Natural Systems Solutions, a non-profit whose tagline is "Facilitating Sustainable Lifestyles, Organizations, and Communities." Our work is based in ecopsychology and involves reconnecting with nature for health, healing, and wisdom. If you've seen the movie Avatar, we help you remember how to deeply connect to our own living planet without sensory fibers coming out of the end of your ponytail. We do personal and group counseling, but since you can't counsel an organization (even though they actually need it), we "consult" with them to institute sustainable changes in all levels of business relationships. We also work with communities on sustainable policy development and economic resiliency without the disempowing and costly dependence on growth. It's all about becoming better instead of bigger. To try to sum all that up, I've started calling it Paradigm Shift Coaching.

Today, since this is Tucson's annual Peace Fair, I'm going to talk about the nexus of sustainability and the peace movement, and connect the dots amongst the greatest set of converging crises facing industrial civilization and perhaps life on earth as we've become comfortable with it, which are global warming, peak oil, and corporatism (which I refer to as the Triumvirate of Collapse), but we can't ignore economic growth, material accumulation outrun only by accumulating waste, empire and hegemony, an ever widening wealth gap, environmental toxicity, biodiversity loss, and the paradigm underlying them all--force-based ranking hierarchies of domination and control that depend on fear and a pathological sense of the other, whether that other is the natural world, a different culture, or a different name for god.

And I'm going to let you know that there is something we, together, can do about it all--a readily available, viable, systemic alternative. One that doesn't make us put on hair shirts, return to the cave, and start carrying water. That would improve people's quality of life and start giving ecosystems the opportunity to begin their own healing.

But, that's quite a bit to cover in five minutes, so you're going to have to listen up.

Our modern times are waiting for the terms and expressions to emerge necessary to describe them. Apocalypse is forecast, but never arrives. Unprecedented systemic changes are taking place, and the blue-light specials are still available at K-Mart. From an ecological perspective, apocalypse may well have occurred already. We really have no fucking idea how to even really begin to measure it. And it's started to take on a feeling of normalcy, as it unfalteringly unwinds itself on a daily basis. We've come to expect it, and that in and of itself is probably the greatest violence that's being done to our sense of self and nullifying our potential as a species.

So, we find ourselves with front-row seats to a planet in steady decline; a catastrophe in slow motion.

Whatever shall we do? Do we really want to institute change, or have we become resigned to an eventuality? Do you find yourself thinking that this is just the natural state of things, the only way it could have happened, it's our human nature and couldn't be changed even if we did want to? Perhaps you're among the group that's silently praying that some genius will invent something to allow us to go on livin' large, while simultaneously hoping that a Predator drone didn't just drop a bomb on his wedding party.

I'll tell you one thing. If we have any hope of pulling our collective ass out of this one, it's going to take more than the cosmetic and superficial changes of swapping out squiggly lightbulbs and buying Priuses. In fact, the latter just has to cease post haste. We have to quit wasting our collective dwindling resources and money on making the world more convenient for, and continuing our dependency on, the automobile. We also can't waste our time hoping for things to return to normal, because normal is what got us into our current sorry state.

But we can change, and do so rather quickly should we decide to. I base this assertion on evidence, research, experience, and historical precedence. There is a viable, pragmatic alternative available. Whether or not we can do it in time is an open question. But, there is no inherent reason, no natural law or principle putting roadblocks in our path, only cultural ones--which means it is nothing more than blind adherence to a story that is holding us back.

When activists get together and talk about creating coalitions or hub organizations of some type, they often come to the conclusion that we must organize around our commonalities. I submit that our core commonality is that we all come from the earth, and in an interconnected and interdependent universe, that is fundamentally friendly to life and its evolution, what we do to the earth we do to ourselves. Thus, the one goal that can support all of our individual passions and life's work as change agents is the goal of creating a sustainable future.

To do this we must first realize that sustainability is not a meaningless buzzphrase. It can be defined in a way that is both legally defensible and objectively measurable. We must quit allowing the other side to define our terms and then tell is that it's not possible.

There are three necessary clauses that make up a viable, comprehensive definition of sustainability. They are:

1) The integration of human social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain rather than degrade or destroy the environment; 2) A moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; 3) Determining, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation so that bioregions, watersheds and ecosystems maintain their ability to recharge, replenish and regenerate.

Transition Pima, which is a regional hub for Transition US, is an organization based on these principles that can provide the framework for a "big tent" type of effort. Generically speaking, the transition movement looks to create a sustainable future through an on-the-ground process known as relocalization. More than just food and energy security, though, transitioning into a sustainable future--which means one based on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy--requires all the puzzle pieces, including the one labeled "fun," to be in place. We don't get partial credit if any of the people who contribute to quality of life are missing--ecstatic dancers, farmers, caregivers, bookkeepers, cops. Relocalization is not slapping band-aids on the wounds of empire; it is both anathema and antidote to corporate globalization. It's not single issue branch clipping; it's pulling the diseased root of domination and empire all the way out and planting and nurturing something completely different.

At a fundamental level, sustainability is a term that connotes any living system's ability to adhere to the natural systems principles that allow an ecosystem to become and remain healthy, vibrant, and resilient. This also means adherence to ecological carrying capacity (the third clause in the definition of sustainability), which is the point at which most Westerners tend to run screaming in the opposite direction. Sustainability spells the end of the culture of narcissism. It sounds the death knell for dominator hierarchies, centralized control, and economic growth. It forces us to face the addictive substitutes we've come to rely on for the natural fulfillments that are withheld, through various means from schooling to advertising, in a paradigm that focuses almost exclusively on consumption, accumulation, aggressive competition, and hyper-individualism.

Sustainability is not a special interest--it is life. It isn't my way, it is our way if we truly wish to leave a habitable planet to future generations; if we want to learn how to holistically co-exist with the other millions of species that make up the web of life and the food chain on which we depend for our basic sustenance--as well as all higher levels of fulfillment.

Sustainability is foundational to the peace movement. A truly sustainable world will be a world at peace, but the reverse is not necessarily true. We could quite peacefully and "greenly" consume ourselves into extinction. Peace on Earth requires peace with Earth. The exploitation of all of nature must cease. This explicitly means that we must quit providing the legitimacy for the stories, religious and otherwise, that exploit, abuse, and stifle our own inner nature.

According to the thousands of scientists who study catastrophic anthropogenic climate destabilization, we're quickly running out of time. According to geophysicists and biologists, we're running out of natural resources and the biodiversity needed to keep the food chain from collapsing. No food chain, no food. It doesn't get much simpler than that. We have to quit being afraid to say this is exactly what's happening just because it might alarm or upset or challenge deeply cherished worldviews.

I mean, since America already ranks next to last out of 150 countries on the UN's happiness scale, when 50% of the American population requires at least one prescription drug per day, when our lifespans, our incomes and our sovereignty are steadily decreasing, what have we got to lose by being honest with people, with forthright truth telling? We actually are capable of handling it. The myth that insists otherwise does nothing but support the status quo, so be very wary of those who repeat it.

The concept of relocalization, as manifested by transition initiatives, is a path toward sustainability. It's a different way of doing things based on the four natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity, and the values we tend to share that emerge from these principles. These values are perhaps best expressed by the four pillars of the Earth Charter--respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, nonviolence and peace. The Earth Charter is an internationally recognized and widely adopted and endorsed soft-law document for sustainable development that has already undergone a decade long vetting process. We don't have to reinvent any wheels, nor are we alone here. In fact, we're actually the majority.

And the thing is, reconnecting and relocalizing, undertaking this Great Turning, this shift in consciousness, can't do any actual harm to anything except a story. Well, and to bankers and insurance companies. But it doesn't require anyone to sacrifice themselves... or their pet goat. Instead of burning energy, renewable or otherwise, for continuous industrial growth, let's shift our focus and priorities toward the development of our human potential and start measuring wealth by the quality and quantity of the mutually supportive relationships one can develop and maintain. Let's fully engage in the entire transition process. Let's rebuild community through safe and healthy neighborhoods that are energy efficient and ecologically benign. Let's create local steady-state living economies that are vibrant and resilient. Let's start to think and act the way nature works. Let's embody peace.

When one truly understands sustainability and all it entails--the interconnectedness of all beings--it makes one more afraid of hating than of dying. And I can't think of a better foundation for an effective and lasting peace movement than that.

Alternative Energy Ignores the Problem

2010-02-06T13:38:00.005-07:00

Gillian Caldwell, Campaign Director for 1Sky, recently had the chance for a quick chat with President Obama, which she blogged about here:
http://www.1sky.org/blog/2010/02/my-chat-with-president-obama-dont-be-stubborn-or-we-will-be
and to which I replied:

Hi Gillian... I think you and the Prez are both missing another, and much more fundamental, problem. We won't be getting all of our energy from wind and solar, either now or in twenty years, if the assumption is that we need to keep things going along their current trajectory, meaning a continued increase in energy demand.

The arguing over "clean" coal and nukes is a distraction to keep people from waking up to the fact that economic growth, and its role in industrialism, is a failed paradigm. Planned obsolescence, the throw-away society in general, and the substitution of materialism for psychological and spiritual health and well-being is a mistake--and a rather deadly one. The simple fact is that we could kick our coal habit today because all coal is doing is powering our waste and excess.

Plus, the Industrial Growth Society is only possible with the embedded energy of fossil fuels, which are post-peak and what's left of them is so environmentally destructive to obtain that only a society that has completely lost its way would attempt doing so. Even 100% LEED building standards, hybrid vehicles (or any other proposal that thinks we can "green" consumption and continued growth) can't overcome that basic ecological fact.

And since there is a viable alternative that would improve quality of life, that systemically replaces the diseased root of fear-based ranking hierarchies of domination instead of allowing itself to be satisfied with the occasional compromised clipping of branches, why are nationally recognized and rightfully respected organizations such as 1Sky reluctant to advocate fundamental systemic change? 1Sky's masthead states "America wants bold action," so why ask for minor reform on the fringes?

The bold, but thoroughly pragmatic, alternative to the status quo includes powering down, relocalizing, reconnecting to the natural world and each other, and giving ourselves the gift of time for what really matters. This alternative uses steady-state economies that focus on becoming qualitatively better instead of quantitatively bigger; it requires no new technologies and works with who we are right now--not after some shift to a higher state of consciousness or evolutionary adaptation; it can begin restoring all aspects of the natural world, which of course includes ourselves and our communities; it doesn't require mortgaging our future by bailing out industries thought to be too big to fail.

We could move toward true sustainability (which can be both ecologically and legally defined) and become a role model for the rest of the world that our grandchildren would be proud of--instead of our current sorry, disconnected path in which we won't have grandchildren.

We're supposed to be rational creatures. I think it is past time we started demonstrating it, and face the fact that it is not a technological problem that we're dealing with nor one that has a market solution. Thinking that we need more of what got us into this mess is not a rational response.

The Copenhagen Accord: how COP15 became a COPout

2010-01-14T10:05:00.004-07:00

The conclusion of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate talks--known as COP15 for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change--is perhaps best summarized by the headline in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. "President Obama salvaged a nonbinding agreement that sets neither a target for cutting emissions nor a deadline for one."

It is quite telling that what emerged as the Copenhagen Accords is seen as a meaningful deal by mainstream environmental organizations such as the League of Conservation Voters. Global warming is seen as little more than an impetus for what is being called clean energy reform, which is the continuation of economic growth powered by just about anything other than fossil fuels. So-called "clean" coal, nukes, and a handful of other techno fantasies that totally ignore the larger system they would have to exist within. Pretty much the entire two weeks in Copenhagen became an ongoing argument over the economics of how to best profit from cap and trade and offsets.

Stella Semino from Grupo de Reflexion Rural (Argentina) stated: "If these new proposals are agreed upon we will see a massive boost for crop and tree plantations alike which, in the name of `climate change mitigation', will speed up the destruction of forests and other vital ecosystems, the spread of industrial agriculture, and land-grabbing against small-farmers, indigenous peoples and forest communities. Industrial monocultures are already a major cause of climate change and their expansion will make it worse."

The Copenhagen Accord (hammered out WTO style in a back room between six countries, the US, Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Japan) stipulates that global warming must not exceed two degrees centigrade, but with no mechanisms or even guidelines as to how this might be achieved, nor does it set any actual CO2 or other GHG targets, goals, or timelines. An early analysis of the non-binding pledges that were offered showed they would lead to about a 3oC temperature rise, which would spell the end of the Amazon rainforests. While the Accord does state that overdeveloped nations should financially help those nations still trying to catch up to the levels of overconsumption, pollution, and general exploitation of life exhibited by the Global North (although not in those exact words), it provides no guidelines as to how this should be accomplished either. So, the COP15 managed to come up with a COPout. Is anyone really surprised?

The rhetoric in Copenhagen was all so phenomenally childish. The major posturing boiled down to, "I'm not going to do it unless so and so does it first. After all, we might lose a percent or two of market share." Never mind that there will be no markets on a dead planet. The final deal in Copenhagen came down to the world's largest polluters agreeing, in the analysis of Naomi Klein, to pretend that the other was doing something about global warming if the favor is reciprocated. But even that is non-binding. And poorer nations are forced to sign on the dotted line if they want any funds to help them adapt to a problem they haven't contributed to but which is affecting them the worst.

It's instructive to look at the recent historical record of global warming mitigation. Before the Kyoto Protocol, global emissions were increasing at 1.5%/yr. After Kyoto the rate of emissions increased to 3%/yr. Some countries, such as Japan, bought off their increases by investing in offsets. Some European countries decreased their national emissions by moving production and pollution to developing countries. Products were then flown back to Europe, because the fuel isn't taxed, and the even greater impact on global warming by aircraft emissions is ignored.

What we should do is leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Barring common sense, climate scientist James Hansen says that fossil fuels should be simply taxed at the point of origin, either at the wellhead or mine, or at the port of entry. No exceptions, no exemptions, no loopholes.

The strategy Hansen and many economists argue for is known as fee and dividend (harder to game and almost immune to speculation) and is being advanced as an alternative to cap and trade (which is basically privatization of the atmosphere). When you take the total amount of coal, oil, and natural gas used in the US, and put a price of $115/ton on carbon, fee and dividend would generate $670 billion dollars, which is about $7,500 to $9,000 dollars per family. This could then be used for energy retrofits, efficiency improvements, and buying locally grown food when it becomes too expensive to fly it half way around the world. This would all help families adjust their lifestyles to a lower carbon footprint.

Most importantly, we must accept that the target of 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 as the absolute safe upper limit must become the mantra for policy decisions. This is as much a moral position as it is a scientific one. Catastrophic climate destabilization is not an issue that can be compromised on. We can't say we're just going to do a little bit, but we're not going to solve the problem. Our one and only life support system is in a very real danger of passing some tipping points. Whether or not the current cycle of global warming is human caused or not (and there's really very little disagreement among reputable climate scientists that it is) at the very least it is extremely aggravated by human actions.

Perhaps the most difficult realization behind 350 is that the concept of growth in the economic and material realms must be forever cast aside. It's the first step in the realization that for true sustainability to occur we actually need to be heading back toward pre-industrial levels of about 250-275 ppm. And with a sustainable human population size, zero waste clean technologies, and shifting our production focus to quality instead of quantity this is an achievable goal without donning hair shirts and moving back to the cave.

The only real uncertainty is the time frame as we can't know which tipping points will be surpassed due to the carbon loading and ecosystem inertia from the 30 year time lag between greenhouse gas emission and biospheric effect. The climate effects currently occurring (with less than one degree C warming) are a response to the GHG emissions from 30 years ago, and we've done nothing but continuously increase those emissions over the past thirty years. In some cases we've slowed the rate of increase, but in no cases, despite the evidence of the urgency for doing so, have emissions gone negative.

So, there's our current challenge, and how our current crop of leaders are responding to it. In order to meet what is perhaps the greatest ethical, moral, and spiritual challenge of our times (because it's not a question of technology as much as its equitable distribution), I'd suggest that it's time to start making different choices.

A Response to: Ask President Obama to Stop Global Warming

2009-08-15T16:05:00.004-07:00

I wrote the following in response to an e-mail alert from Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, but I'm sending it out and posting it on the Natural Systems blog as an open letter to the progressive and environmental movement.

On 15 Aug 2009 at 9:49, Bob Fertik (Democrats.com) wrote:

> Ask President Obama to Stop Global Warming

Hello Bob... if the goal truly is to pass comprehensive legislation that will stand up to the best scientific evidence and analysis, then it should start with being honest with ourselves. After all, life on Earth and the future of Western industrial civilization is at stake. Although the latter must be seen as much less important than the former.

First, the targets. We must reduce all greenhouse gas emissions (not just CO2) from human sources by 90% below 1990 levels by 2030. And continue down to zero from there post haste. And instead of just rolling your eyes in bemusement at naive idealism, realize that this actually is an obtainable goal if we change our tactics. Scientifically, technologically, and psychologically doable. There is a systemic alternative available that is viable and pragmatic; that works with who we are as living organisms instead of being constantly at odds with natural systems principles. Thus its tendency is to deliver on the always withheld promise of industrialism--to improve quality of life.

We must give up the idea that the world will come to an end--or at the very least our lives will lose all meaning--if our efforts toward the first goal should impact the profits of the industries who are at the root of the crises. The beneficiaries of this paradigm is such an infinitesimally small percentage of the population they can safely be ignored. Yes, they own all the big scary weapons, but they have neither the knowledge nor the skill to push the buttons--we do.

Just about the last thing we should do is focus inordinate amounts of time or energy in putting people back to work (in America or anywhere else on the globe) stamping out plastic parts for stuff that will be in a landfill in six months, shuffling papers for an insurance company, or working in a call center.

Let's start by taking a hard look at who we are, or think we are, as a technologically advanced civilization made up of people who exhibit the qualities we tend to refer to as intelligence and rationality. This begins by realizing and deeply admitting that our planet is our life support system and that due to the interconnected nature of reality, what we do to the Earth in the form of pollution, toxins, and resource depletion we do to ourselves which ultimately degrades any possibility of reaching our potential either as individuals or as a society. This vastly overrides any supposed benefits derived from the industrial system and its methodologies as it stands today. Industrialism and economic cannibalism... err, I mean growth, is making things worse, not better.

An interesting and highly relevant factoid is that it only requires one-third of the global population to produce everything the entire global population consumes. This means we should all be working two-thirds less with full global employment. We also make a whole lot of stuff we don't need, and the rest is either so poorly constructed it has to be replaced frequently or it's been built to not be repairable. Properly addressing this and decentralizing the grid would lower our energy requirements to what's available with off-the-shelf renewables. No clean coal. No nukes. No tithing... um, I mean carbon offsets and similar nonsense.

This also supports the conclusion that the last thing we should be worrying about is putting people back to work, but should instead concentrate on ensuring their needs are met and they have the time to do what really matters. You know, more quality leisure time instead of spending one billion working hours per year to buy more leisure wear.

This would all also go a long way in lowering birth rates and help bring global population down to a sustainable level over the next few generations, especially if we coupled it all with education on family planning, and provided pre-natal care and disease prevention as an intimate aspect of foreign aid. Then we could start providing people with a means of right livelihood that would include work on helping the Earth regenerate and replenish all the ecosystems we've been busy destroying and consuming in our ignorance and greed.

The alternative I mentioned above is known as relocalization. This is a process to create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom, economic equity, social justice, and participatory democracy. One framework starting to seep into the social consciousness for implementing this process are the Transition Initiatives being undertaken in cities and regions around the globe.

The underlying paradigm which gives this movement such a high chance of success is its adherence to natural systems principles from which emerges the prime activity of living organisms--the tendency to self-organize into mutually supportive relationships. This process has been occurring quite successfully for billions of years. A question we must ask ourselves as a society is why have we created, and continue to allow to exist, an entire industry (marketing/advertising/PR, i.e. industrial propaganda) whose goal is to fight against it--when not busy denying it even exists or that basic ecological laws such as carrying capacity must be taken into account?

There are numerous studies in the social, psychological, and biological sciences that support the idea that we could raise awareness and change course rather quickly should we choose to. As Charles Darwin pointed out, survival goes not the the strongest or fastest, but to the ones most adaptable to change.

The Cultural Creatives study by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson shows we could count on the support of over one quarter of the populations of Europe and North America. The democracy and justice movement in the Global South indicates an even higher level of support there. It is congruent with quantum physics. The math is supplied by chaos and complexity theory. Ancient wisdom traditions that understood the Earth, in one way or another, is a partner in our lives and evolution provide other necessary aspects of support for our psychological and spiritual health and well-being.

Applied ecopsychology/Natural Attraction Ecology provide a scientifically validated process to intellectually and sensuously reconnect, and experience first hand our nurturing bonds to the natural world, each other, and our communities. Other philosophically aligned hands on models and design tools that are currently being implemented include bioregionalism, permaculture, local currencies, integrative holistic health care, and voluntary simplicity.

There is absolutely no need, except to protect other's profits, to waste our time on compromise or incrementalism. The window of opportunity we have left to us negates either of those questionable strategies anyway.

So, why don't we all start advocating and supporting change we actually can believe in?

Awareness of Reality Seen as Doomsaying

2009-08-11T12:13:00.003-07:00

A rational people would look at the title of this short essay and think it's a sci-fi piece describing an alternate bizarro universe.

A rational people would examine the facts--the assembled evidence and the veracity of the people presenting it--and use that as a basis for both determining appropriate action and the timeframe necessary to implement said action.

Because time is running out and things are getting worse. It should be obvious the manner in which we're going about our attempts to institute change isn't working, so we should re-evaluate proposed action plans.

Instead, we have somehow fooled ourselves into thinking that we will cause irreparable damage to tender, fragile psyches by pointing out that someone's actions will either not deliver the intended results, or will actually cause more harm. We have what resembles the attitude of too many modern parents, "Oh, isn't that cute, he's trying so hard" as the toddler destroys instead of saying "No" and taking the hammer away.

It appears that what may be happening is that the possible loss of a few modern "conveniences" as we run up against peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak money and peak life is being equated with doom and gloom, as we glibly ignore the actual negative consequences of these conveniences. Or we spend inordinate amounts of time and energy attempting to find loopholes to continue the status quo instead of figuring out other ways to meet our needs or even seriously analyze whether those are real or manufactured needs in the first place. We want the economy to return to normal, when "normal" is what has caused the myriad global crises we face. We rationalize and excuse inaction, inappropriate action or compromise as we steadfastly ignore the improvements to quality of life from proposed alternatives that systemically challenge the fundamentals of the status quo such as reconnecting with nature and relocalizing our lifestyles, organizations, and communities. What this all mainly demonstrates to me is a lack of imagination. The main "convenience" we seem to be protecting is not having to think too hard about any of this.

It's like the oil company executives who say we won't actually hit peak oil until we run out of technology. Forget about climate and/or exploitation of people and nature and/or the known laws of physics and/or true human nature when freed from the shackles of dominator hierarchies.

The liberal, NewAge mindset that every view is equally valid is actually a sign of moral decay. It is a sign of a society that has lost its way; that has abandoned its soul because it has disconnected it from its sustaining and nurturing source. Spending a weekend at a grief workshop while pretending to be a nature spirit isn't going to overcome this. In fact, the likelihood of doing so seems to be inversely proportional to the number of books published on the subject.

Now, I fully understand that people who are working hard, for noble purposes, on "change" don't want to hear that cash-for-clunkers, ACES, and the public option for disease care are just reshuffling deck chairs; that sustainability initiatives that enable continued growth on an overdeveloped planet are anything but sustainable; that the natural world imposes real limits on both population and resource extraction that we ignore to our--and all other forms of life--peril.

But, there it is. And until you figure out a way to connect with a parallel universe, you're going to have to deal with it in a manner that is more effective than telling people to shut up when they point out the Emperor (regardless of ethnic background or which wing of the Corporate War Party he or she represents) has no clothes.

Until someone can explain to me the advantages of compromising with evil (that which doesn't support life) I will continue to hold moral actors accountable for their actions based on the way that natural systems principles contribute to healthy, vibrant and resilient--that is, sustainable--ecosystems. Which we are perfectly capable of duplicating. Right now.

Transition Industries Announcement

2009-07-28T18:25:00.004-07:00

Hello All... you may have noticed I've been rather quiet on the blog and with other postings recently. The main reason for this is that it was time to put our talk into action.

The concepts of relocalization and steady-state local living economies can be rather abstract, especially without functional examples to draw from. So, Natural Systems Solutions, in conjunction with Transition Pima, has created Transition Industries.

The main purpose of Transition Industries is to serve as an example and demonstration model of ways to create small-scale light manufacturing and other "industrial" type endeavors at the neighborhood level that don't get caught in the trap of continuing support for either Industrialism or growth for the sake of growth. This can become a first step for communities to strengthen local economies, build healthy relationships, provide means of right livelihood, build skills and rekindle pride in craftsmanship, and create some of the necessary resiliency for rapidly changing times. The secondary purpose of Transition Industries is to provide a small revenue stream to support the non-profit Attraction Retreat and its major projects such as Natural Systems Solutions.

The idea is to create items that meet people's needs, adhere to the definition of sustainability, make use of used and/or recycled materials, and either use less energy or contribute to a higher quality of life that doesn't require manufactured energy. It's time to learn new skills (and relearn some that are quickly disappearing) for a new economy -- and door-greeter at a big-box, hamburger flipper for the harried, insurance sales, banker, and Pentagon planner aren't among them.

Our first product is a line of bicycle trailers, and we'll also be building low cost but efficient solar ovens. We'll also provide support for others desiring to explicitly address the need for right livelihood in an energy constrained, increasingly toxic, and warming world. And as you can see, you don't need a big fancy garage or workshop to get started on producing quality items.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Rant on ACES

2009-06-26T07:33:00.005-07:00

Most of you have probably seen the video Al Gore is sending around, urging you to urge your congresscritters to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Perhaps you've received a similar appeal from any number of mainstream environmental (a notable exception being the Center for Biological Diversity) or Democratic party affiliated "grassroots" organizations peddling the same basic message.

While watching the clip and reading the pleas, the following came to mind.

Passing this bill will demonstrate leadership? What planet is Gore talking about? The do-nothing compromise ACES bill is a sham and should simply be rejected out of hand. Proposed "strengthening" amendments define putting lipstick on a pig.

Its long-term target of reducing emissions 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 has been known for five years to be inadequate. The reductions demanded by science are 90% below 1990 levels by 2030... and Gore knows it.

Further, if these reductions aren't coupled with demand destruction of one type or another in other resources (fisheries, forests, water, minerals, soil, etc), as well s with serious, coordinated environmental remediation and restoration efforts, all we'll be doing is buying enough time to let our kids deal with it.

Maybe.

One way or the other, alternative energy sources aren't going to power a "green" return to economic growth. Get over it. They will, however, allow us to transition to a sustainable future.

The prevailing mindset that the ACES bill is better than nothing simply must cease. The standard progressive copout "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" should come with a mandatory prison sentence for anyone so enamored with the status quo to have the audacity to utter it in public.

Does anyone really believe we still have the luxury of doing the absolute minimum necessary to perhaps put off the worst of the climate chaos predictions when those are beginning to come to pass decades before they were supposed to from the greenhouse gases we passed out of our tailpipes (cultural as well as automotive) thirty years ago? The major change since then is that things are worse.

Urge your congresscritters to pass stem cell research immediately so they can grow a spine. I suppose a brain would be nice too.

Distractions from Reality

2009-06-10T15:21:00.003-07:00

A question posed by David Roberts of Grist in his article "Will health care eclipse climate in Congress this year?" was whether a climate bill has a chance of passing while the left's attention has been diverted to health care. This question has, I think, a rather direct answer.

Of course a realistic carbon reduction bill won't get passed with the focus shifted. The majority of the left isn't even willing to admit the "health care" plan being offered by Obusha doesn't actually change anything from the dysfunctional system we currently have. All it does is provide a few more victims for it at taxpayer expense. The profiteers continue to get their cut.

The Kleptocracy...Monetocracy...whatever term you prefer for the dominator elite who will do everything they can to protect the class hierarchy and their position at the top of it...have thrown the left YetAnotherDistraction which the left, as always, went for because the left is just as afraid of the necessary change as those who continue to profit from not changing.

The controlling mythology is that capitalism, profit, and economic growth in general must be protected at all costs. And we're about to find out what "at all costs" really entails.

Pentagon planners, Wall Street financiers, etc. know exactly where our current rate of collapse from catastrophic climate destabilization, resource depletion, and overall biospheric toxicity from Industrialism is taking us. But they think there's still more profit that can be squeezed out of the system, and refuse to let themselves admit that once collapse occurs all their money won't mean a thing. The sad truth, the one that is too awful to face, is it's the only game plan they have. As has been pointed out by many others, there is no Plan B.

And they've developed such mastery at offering distractions. Health care is such an emotional issue. Our Mad Max future if we don't change direction is still more ephemeral than asthma, cancer and all the other negative by-products of industrialism. We can't see ecosystems collapsing, but we can see hospital emergency rooms filling up. And of course corporate media ensures we all remain as confused as possible. Torture memos. FBI... err, I mean terrorist... plots to blow up America. Which silicon enhanced starlet is carrying who's baby. Etc ad nauseum.

So, I guess the bottom line is we (the Left) really are as stupid as the elites assume us to be. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that the health care issue will be the foot in the door (the red pill) we've been looking for to wake people up to what they really should be concerned about.

Neither energy nor greenhouse gases will be addressed realistically as long as the left continues to allow themselves to be so blatantly manipulated. The so-called partisanship in Congress is just another convenient distraction that helps us not have to face reality. We have Republican obstructionism to blame inaction on.

If, on the other hand, we were to adopt sustainability as our overarching goal, we could simultaneously address health, the environment, and turn democracy around from the fantasy role it currently occupies.

An open letter to liberal/left issue advocates

2009-01-01T09:48:00.004-07:00

While the following was written in response to an e-mail from TrueMajority titled "Our plan for 2009" it is not just directed to TrueMajority; I'm not intending to pick on them (they're actually my personal favorite out of the bunch), because the following is also addressed to MoveOn, Codepink, Democracy for America, Progressive Democrats of America, and the dozens of others who believe that a little "progressive" reform around the edges, taken in slow and easy incremental steps, with heaping helpings of compromise with a system that is anathema to life itself constantly added to the mix, will be sufficient to stave off the collapse and chaos we're heading toward--which is being brought on by clinging to and legitimizing this mindset. Thus, this critique also fully applies to the mainstream environmental groups such as Sierra Club, WWF, NRDC, etc.

Sorry to be so blunt, but until the whole lot of you find the backbone to be honest about the blatant destruction caused by your corporate benefactors, and help dispel the myth that economic growth is necessary for prosperity and progress, your progressive and environmental ideals will remain unfulfilled.

On 29 Dec 2008 at 9:48, Matt Holland, TrueMajority wrote:

> Dear Dave,
>
> What a whirlwind year. In the past twelve months we celebrated
> the election of a new progressive President and witnessed an
> economic collapse brought about by a failed right wing ideology.

Dear Matt,

It would be a whole lot easier for me to support TrueMajority (or any of the other liberal/left issue advocate organizations--please don't feel like I'm singling you out) if it felt like any of you either understood the issues or were willing to support a realistic and viable alternative to their root cause.

Let's take the latest TrueMajority e-mail that triggered my response as a case study. First, Obama is not progressive. He is solidly middle of the road. He wouldn't have been vetted by the DLC for his presidential bid were he otherwise. Second, the economic collapse is the only logical outcome of the Ponzi scheme known as free-market capitalism; right-wing ideology merely hurried the collapse along by exposing its faults to the light of day in a manner that is hard to either ignore or deny. But blaming our current economic situation on the right or thinking that we can "green" economic growth merely shows that stupidity knows no political allegiance.

You almost always take the proper "progressive" stand on issues, but without ever acknowledging that each of these issues is a symptom of a failed cultural paradigm. It is a paradigm of domination; of hierarchies of control that function through power over an other that's assumed inferior. New issues will continue to emerge from this paradigm as long as the inherently faulty analysis of liberalism is being applied. While the left may be more compassionate than the right (speaking only of the political ideology, not the real people who get swept up in it), the fact that compassion continues to be necessary on such a wide-spread scale is proof that a fundamental problem remains--unexamined and thus unresolved.

There is at least one recognized but as yet not well known path to a sustainable future that is based on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy. As a further incentive in requesting your support to help publicize the alternative I advocate, a sustainable future based on these values will create a culture of peace, something both the political right and left insist they desire.

One core aspect of the process to blaze this path is known as relocalization. It includes the decentralization of vibrant and resilient local steady-state economies that exist in harmony with their bioregional ecosystems. Relocalized communities don't require growth in consumption or energy use to be considered healthy, i.e. they are powered down and prepared for the energy descent the world will be experiencing as the reality of Peak Oil settles in.

The other core aspect of creating a truly sustainable culture is overcoming our separation from the natural world--which includes each other. This entails reconnecting the human spirit and all the rest of our dozens of natural senses to their roots in both the creation and to the creative tendency of life itself to build and nurture relationships of mutual support that are conducive to life in its ever increasing diversity.

While this systemic alternative won't, indeed can't, support infinite economic growth or consolidation of power, it will create the foundation for the quality of life people all over the world say they want. Evidence for this claim can be found in the global acceptance of the values espoused by the Earth Charter. This systemic alternative is also the only rational response to catastrophic climate destabilization and the poisoning of the biosphere by industrialism that I'm aware of. If any of you should know of another, please quit keeping it a secret.

The alternative of reconnecting and relocalizing can create more opportunities to reach the potential the natural bounty a life-affirming planet assures any species that stays within its ecosystem's carrying capacity. This includes the opportunity we have to participate in the creation of sustainable lifestyles, organizations, and communities based on the natural systems principles from which sustainable ecosystems emerge. It presents a new way of being that is resonate with the natural creatures we actually are, instead of putting us in constant reaction mode to the toxic symptoms the status quo keeps handing us.

Doesn't it make more sense for a national organization such as TrueMajority to live up to its name and champion a different way of being that supports and provides for the majority?

Decision Time: Change or Collapse?

2008-12-11T18:48:00.006-07:00

I wrote the following as an Op-ed piece for the NY Times. They declined to print it. Hmm, why am I not surprised? Don't want people thinking that their advertisers don't actually have anything worth buying? Or becoming aware that there might be an alternative to economic cannibalism that will not only improve their lot in life, but act as an effective response to global environmental crises? Or that it points out that our new Emperor has no clothes either? Or am I just not up to the Times' writing standards? Anyway...

Decision Time: Change or Collapse?

A recent editorial in the NY Times
"Save the Economy, and the Planet" rightly points out that the financial crisis is not a sufficient excuse to put off taking the necessary steps to deal with the global warming crisis. Indeed, putting it off will greatly aggravate both the financial and planetary crises, as national-level reports from around the world are showing.

However, President-elect Barack Obama seems content for his proposals to apply little pressure to either of these crises while primarily ensuring the protection of business as usual. His grand proposal to institute change consists of doing, according to the Times, "the minimum necessary to...avoid the worst consequences of global warming."

This is leadership?

Don't put any more effort into what many are calling the greatest crisis to ever face humanity and civilization (sometimes someone will bother mentioning the planet in an off-hand kind of way as well) than we absolutely have to, and let's just suck it up and learn to tolerate all the intermediate negative consequences. That is, only if this "plan" of action even comes close to delivering the expected results.

This isn't even change.

The increasingly common political goal of 80% greenhouse gas reductions by 2050, while well-intentioned and heading in the proper direction, is based on evidence that is at least 5 years out of date. It assumes the planet can handle 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentrations, when the effects of the 385 ppm that we already have today is not only pushing the environment into irreversible tipping points, but these are occurring many times faster than the climate models have been predicting.

This is the difference between modeling and reality. And clearly points out why the denialists should be cautious in using this in the attempt to substantiate their claims about a so-called global warming "agenda" or in their attempts to create an atmosphere of public doubt over the existence of a crisis due to modeling inaccuracy or errors. The only thing that truly matters in the case of global warming is the reality we're actually experiencing.

The actual minimum reduction thought to be required is 90% below 1990 levels by 2030. It's not expected that even this will keep us from all the tipping points -- the uncertainty is over which one will be first. Things are going to change, but these aren't going to be the changes we heard mentioned on the campaign trail by about anyone other than the Green Party's Cynthia McKinney. The Obama plan is to get the US back to 1990 levels by 2020, and this after we've experienced a rise of 14 percent since 1990. This simply won't be sufficient. Anthropogenic global warming was well underway before 1990. Do the math; it's elementary school level.

If Obama really wants to pursue a comprehensive approach, which he says he does, he must find the courage to start addressing the root causes of the global warming crisis. These causes are directly tied to the unsustainability of industrial and financial growth; the fetishization of these concepts in the creation of what can most kindly be called shallow social status; and the belief that we can treat our only planet -- our sole life support system -- as if it is both an infinite supply of resources and a bottomless pit for waste.

It can, however, be quite easily shown, from a number of different perspectives, that neither materialism nor growth actually increase quality of life beyond a certain level, and even then only for a segment of the population. These concepts are inherently unsustainable and often unfulfilling even in the short-term. And this is even in spite of Industrial culture spending much time and energy trying to convince people that increasing their material standard of living is an acceptable substitute for the lives they really do want and are so desperately missing.

This brings us directly and inescapably to what must become the fundamental question for our times: Which is more important, profit and power, or people and planet? If after deep soul searching and, just as importantly, rational analysis, you find yourself answering in the affirmative for the latter, it's time to start directing President-elect Obama toward evaluating a systemic alternative to business as usual instead of irrationally trying to protect it.

From a sustainability standpoint, protecting the growth status quo will prove to be a futile attempt anyway. We're way too far into the realm of ecological overshoot. Fisheries depletion, deforestation, top soil loss, diminishing freshwater, dwindling energy supplies, and increasing overall biospheric toxicity and its effects on declining ecosystem and species health are all measurable manifestations of this fact.

One well-researched alternative that is beginning to be put into practice in communities around the world is relocalization, which the popular Transition Towns movement in the UK is based upon. Relocalization is a systemic process to create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy. It seeks to move production of food, energy and goods closer to the point of consumption, and create thriving local economies that exhibit many of the principles of steady-state economics as developed by former World Bank senior economist Herman Daly -- basically, better instead of bigger.

A fundamental aspect of this process entails reconnecting our lives to the natural world, which includes to each other and our communities. This entails developing lifestyles, organizations, and communities from the models and metaphors provided by the natural systems principles which increase diversity and the opportunities for the mutually supportive relationships any sustainable ecosystem requires to be healthy, vibrant and -- most importantly in crafting the urgent response necessary to today's looming crises -- resilient.

It really just depends on making new choices, based on a new understanding of the human role within the web of life. This is the change we need to both see from our elected representatives and participate in ourselves.

Planning the Future

2008-12-06T19:11:00.003-07:00

There's been a recent back and forth between the blogs of John Michael Greer, "The Archdruid Report" and Rob Hopkins, "Transition Culture".

One of Greer's critiques of the Transition initiative, based more on a single conference presentation by overly enthusiastic proponents rather than a thorough understanding of the Transition Towns movement, is that deliberate planning for a better future is both "impossible and counterproductive."

This critique of Hopkins' (and company) Transition Initiative might be more about semantics than anything else. Postcarbon cities and transition towns aren't planning the future. As Greer rightly points out, doing so in the literal sense is impossible, although the attempt is not necessarily counterproductive. We are, however, participants in the future and our actions have consequences. We can examine these consequences and make choices. For the moment, let's not argue about the percentage of time Western culture actually spends doing this. Or the percentage of time an elite subclass spends doing pretty much exactly that to the detriment of all other.

We can rationally examine, and sensually experience, that the Industrial Growth Society is causing much harm and is about to collapse through self-cannibalization by clinging to mistakes in foundational assumptions that are adhered to and defended with religious fervor. The clearest indication of this tendency is that industrial civilization is pretty much diametrically opposed to the sustainability of life, living organisms, and the natural world they depend on.

So, since humans tend to do things, let's do things differently. In a manner that not only honors life, but that models the creative and sustainable processes that underlie it. Since we obviously have to start doing things differently due to global warming, peak oil, and the loss of sovereignty to corporatism and the dominator hierarchies which support it let's start by stating what we do want. If we wish to switch from a culture of death to a culture of life, we need to start by picking a new set of values as a base. And the future we all seem to agree on is a sustainable one based on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy (which are goals unto themselves as well).

But this isn't planning the future. This is making intelligent choices based on an honest assessment of what the world is currently facing, and what has caused it. This is just common sense based on a different paradigm that rejects the old assumptions. While proponents of post-carbon cities and transition towns may not know exactly how it will look, there's a whole buncha stuff we know we don't want to do again. Certain options, which mainly revolve around selfish greed and exploitation, have been taken off the table.

Relocalization is a dynamic process based on the natural systems principles from which emerge ecosystems that are vibrant, healthy, and resilient, i.e. sustainable. It's based on a model that's been working for billions of years. It's a model we're intimately familiar with, even if it's been repressed and unexpressed under Western civilization.

There are certain things we do know about the proposed process to create a sustainable future. Permaculture and the relocalization process Transition Towns are based on don't contribute to resource depletion, toxicity, waste, or economic growth. Thus, it doesn't contribute to war. Carrying capacity of both the environment and the economy becomes the prime factor in its calculations of success.

Now, no one is saying that the world is going to majically revert back to a pristine state, or even that this will keep collapse entirely at bay considering how far into the ecological overshoot range we are. But it is a way to start effecting the negative feedback loop of restoration and regeneration instead of feeding the positive feedback loop of destruction.

So, I do see reason for being optimistic about taking the initial steps toward a way that works; that is about being more rather than having more; that just plain feels better. A way where we start thinking and acting the way that nature works. Where we shift the priorities from domination, aggression, competition, separation, and destruction to partnership, compassion, cooperation, connection, and creation. New choices based on giving priority to a different set of values.

And, ya know, at the very least, relocalization sure sounds like a whole helluva lot better plan than the current one to grab whatever you can before someone beats you to it. The reason social change from the imperialism of industrial civilization hasn't worked before is that we've never thrown out, or even seriously examined, the underlying assumptions and replaced them with ones perfectly in keeping with human nature. As Greer points out, follow through is necessary (and Transition Towns help inspire that), but we must also make sure the business as usual plan is dismantled and its harms mitigated.

Dealing with petrocollapse can take other forms than the two Greer says are the only options--finding a replacement for fossil fuel to continue powering industrialism, or replacing the energy dependent parts of modern society. Most people who are looking at the bigger picture throw overpopulation into the mix, and overconsumption is a perennial favorite. Greer is correct in pointing out that little would be left of modern society if we rid ourselves of the energy dependent parts.

In spite of Greer's claim to the contrary, however, the parts for a low-energy society are indeed sitting on the shelf, and there are many who are pointing out the quality of life benefits. The changes that are required socially are even pretty much spelled out in detail in the Earth Charter. Nitpicking energy descent seems like a distraction, unless the real goal is to attempt to keep the economic growth necessary for industrialism chugging along.

Currently, we know how to build things to last, and to be easily repairable. We know how to make them more energy efficient, and less toxic. We know we could quit fetishizing shallow status symbols. The only thing any of this threatens is economic growth and financial empires--which are the drivers of peak oil, global warming and inequity, as well as the major hindrance to democracy.

The choices for where we want to go, and what to stay away from, should be pretty clear. And it sounds like a plan to me.

The Financial Market Distraction

2008-09-28T11:35:00.002-07:00

In the Weapons of Mass Distraction category, let's look at one area our gaze is being diverted from. US taxpayers are being asked to bail out a failed sub-prime/derivatives/debt insurance Ponzi scheme to the tune of $700 billion, with no actual supporting evidence that it will do any good, or even more good than eventual harm, to a faltering and inherently unsustainable industrial growth economy.

When compared to the grossly inflated value of the entirely ephemeral derivatives market, which is well over $400 trillion worldwide, the bailout is hardly even a drop in the bucket -- but it will fill some golden parachutes even if they're not directly deposited into CEO accounts. It will be interesting, in a very morbid way, to see what sleight-of-hand they use to do this.

In the meantime, catastrophic climate destabilization (global warming) is increasing faster than predicted in even the dire reports. According to the international consortium of scientists, Global Carbon Project, in 2007 carbon released from burning fossil fuels and producing cement increased 2.9 percent over that released in 2006 -- up to 8.47 gigatons. This puts the world on track to see 11 degrees F warming by century's end, when it is pretty well acknowledged that 4 degrees F will put us over the edge of environmental tipping points.

While some industrialized nations have almost levelled out on greenhouse gas emissions (no decrease, though) the developing world has doubled theirs (we gotta get those shiny consumer trinkets from somewhere). Add to this the fact that the world's natural carbon sinks, the oceans and forests, dropped another 3% this decade in the amount of carbon they could absorb, i.e. they're full.

In a September 22, 2008 report, Britain’s Climate Trust suggests companies could drop a total worth of $7 trillion in value if they don't address climate change-related risks. Thats an order of magnitude more financial risk than the current Ponzi crisis.

So, let's see... where should we invest our money? Into doing everything we can to thwart and mitigate sea level rise and species extinction (including our own), or to bailing out the crooks and liars who are propping up the paradigm that's causing the destruction?

Beam me up, Scotty.

Cancer and Industrialism: My Findings and Therapy

2008-09-18T15:45:00.003-07:00

Well, I've recently been diagnosed with cancer, to become the latest in a long line of victims of industrialism. I've long known I was psychologically allergic to industrialism and its attendant stressors, and it seems I'm physically allergic to it as well. In fact, my current thinking, based on my long-held belief that cancer is an industrial disease--it is not per se a lifestyle or hereditary disease--is that the increase in cancers and other widely spreading diseases are allergic reactions to industrialism. Modern medicine then focuses on dealing with these symptoms, while doing little to nothing to advocate for the cessation of their root causes.

Before I go any further here, let me clarify what I mean by cancer today being an industrial as opposed to a genetic disease. It's true that cancer has been around far longer than industrialism has. In fact, every person has cancer cells in their body. Well, this is a bit of a misnomer. They're actually pre-cancerous, or have a higher potential to turn cancerous. As part of the normal cell process of producing energy from oxygen, free-radicals are produced which can cause damage to a cell which may then turn cancerous. Other factors are then involved in whether that cell continues to live, infect other cells, and spread. In a healthy organism, processes exist to neutralize free-radicals and kill cancer cells, and remove them as waste.

So, to use the bit of blame-shifting favored by the pharmaceutical industry that says cancer has a hereditary or genetic basis is a bit disingenuous, since merely being human creates the possibility to develop cancer. One's lifestyle can create a situation conducive to cancer cells taking hold and spreading, but in the toxic world industrialism has created, those situations have been magnified by a few orders of magnitude. Let's look at just a few of the industrial and industrial lifestyle factors.

Poor oxygenation can lead normal cells to turn cancerous. When cells can't get enough oxygen, they turn to fermenting sugars for their energy, and this is the prime difference between a healthy cell and a cancerous cell. Factors that cause poor oxygenation are buildup of toxins and lack of exercise. A lack of the essential fatty acids needed in cell walls also blocks oxygen exchange. As cancer cells ferment energy they produce excess lactic acid which is toxic, and tends to prevent the transport of oxygen into neighboring normal cells. So the cancer spreads if not destroyed by the immune system. The treatments of choice today, chemo and radiation therapy, do kill cancer cells. However, they also damage respiratory enzymes in healthy cells and overload them with toxins--increasing the chances they become cancerous.

In light of the above, let's just think for a moment about industrial farming and food processing, which not only don't provide the nutrients necessary for good health, but also puts more toxins into the body, and/or contribute large amounts of what cancer cells love and thrive on most--refined white sugar. Let's think about the foods we eat that aren't even food, like American cheese and Twinkies. Let's think about sedentary industrial lifestyles of affluence. Let's think about the air and water that industrialism has turned toxic, and the toxic materials in the buildings where we live and work. And then there's plastics...

There are tens of thousands of man-made chemicals floating, flowing, and buried within the thin sliver of biosphere that humans and the other species that make up the web of life can exist within. 20,000 of them are known carcinogens. These chemicals can't exist naturally, and living organisms haven't developed defenses against them. These chemicals tend to be bio-accumulative, are environmentally persistent (their half-lives are ten to fifty thousand years), and are lipophilic (they travel rapidly up the food chain). The vast majority of these chemicals are toxins, neurotoxins, mutagens, or carcinogens whose toxicity and effects are studied in isolation, not in the combinations that actually occur in our bodies and the environment.

Properly fed, exercised, and enveloped in a healthy environment of mutually supportive relationships, the human immune system can handle most things nature can throw at it, but not those of man. I hope I also don't have to explain why I'm sticking to using the male gender in this regard.

The details on my own case are that I went to the emergency room on Aug. 10 with severe abdominal pain and an apparent intestinal blockage (the symptoms pretty much just suddenly flared up in an otherwise healthy body), was diagnosed with colon cancer on Aug. 11, and had my descending colon removed on Aug. 13 by the trauma surgery team at University Medical Center here in Tucson. The pathology report on the section of colon and mass of tissue removed with and around the tumor said the margins were clear (no cancer on either end of the section of colon removed), out of the total of 34 nodes removed only three in the tumor vicinity tested positive, and although the tumor had grown through the wall of the colon it hadn't spread to any other tissue or organs. So, overall the prognosis is good. For those of you familiar with cancer stages, I had a Stage III cancerous tumor: t-3, n-1, m-0.

I finally got to meet with the oncologist on Sept. 11, and like all good cancer docs, he explained the situation, added up the scientifically measurable parameters, and said the only recommended treatment is chemotherapy. If adding up the "markers" had produced a smaller number chemo wouldn't have been called for. A larger number, or if other existing tumors had been seen in the CT scans, and radiation therapy would be added. No other variables are considered, nor thought to be warranted for consideration, such as diet changes, other cancer fighting, immune boosting or detoxifying agents that are not manufactured by BigPharma, or doing a Body Burden test to see if there might be a link to industrialism that has bioaccumulated in the body and might need to be dealt with.

There's no accurate test to see if there's actually any cancer left in the body after surgical tumor removal. The theory is that there might be some cancer cells floating through the bloodstream that are just looking for a place to attach and grow into a mass large enough to detect, which could take up to 5 years. But, that's basically the case for everyone, whether they've had a tumor detected or not.

The statistics for my type and severity of colon cancer are that 60% will have another tumor in 3-5 years if no course of treatment is followed, and that drops to 34-40% (depending on which combination of toxic drugs and side-effects you're willing to tolerate) with chemo. There seems to be a remarkable absence of information (from allopathic medicine) on the 40% who don't experience tumor recurrence within 5 years.

Further muddying the waters is the difference allopathic medicine tries to make between "complementary" and "alternative" treatments. In fact, we were warned by a social worker at the UMC Cancer Center to use the former term rather than the latter when we met with the oncologist--if we didn't want a negative reaction from him. Complementary to them seems to means the status quo--chemo--remains the treatment modality of choice, and they're willing to hear about you tacking on a few extras, like vitamins. However, they just can't accept that you just might be looking for something that really is a true alternative--meaning giving yourself an option to heal without making yourself sicker. The healthy immune system that is so necessary to health and healing is taken to the point of not functioning at all by chemo/radiation therapy in the hope that since the cancer cells are weaker, they'll die before the healthy cells do, and that you don't come down with something else fatal while your immune system has been intentionally compromised. Only a disease care model of medicine could come up with this one.

But the fact of the matter is that certain natural substances support the body's natural defense system, and have certain properties that help fight cancer cells, provide support to the immune system, and clear the body of toxins. Pharmaceutical drugs merely attempt to copy these processes, but because they're not natural, they have a number of unpleasant and/or potentially fatal side effects.

Let's take the "nutritional supplement" coenzyme Q10 (a compound that is made naturally in the body known as ubiquinone, which decreases as we age), which is sold as CoQ10, and compare it to the cancer drug fluorouricil, called 5-FU. They both kill cancer cells by triggering apoptosis, or cell death. This natural cell mechanism gets turned off in cancer cells.

However, because CoQ 10 isn't a toxic synthetic, it won't hurt healthy cells or cause major reactions in the body. Also, it's sold over the counter, isn't based on fossil fuels, or subject to corporate patent and profit. This latter point is extremely important to keep in mind. We're getting more and more doctors who have gone to med school on drug company scholarships, and BigPharms's influence, due to their affluence, on medical research is well known. Industrial Pharma has spent and continues to spend billions on lobbyists and legislators to ensure the status quo remains near impossible to change and that no challengers can arise.

The one commonality I keep running across as I research all these things, though, is that whether the treatment regimen decided upon is allopathic or natural, the largest determinant in treatment success is attitude. And, you know, it just seems to make more sense to me that keeping a good attitude is going to be one whole helluva lot easier if I don't put more of industrialism's toxic products into my body while it's busy getting healthy again with natural supplements, supported by the loving energy of so many others and the natural world itself.

So, the cancer treatment I've decided on includes the following.

Killing the cancer cells: Therapeutic doses (200 mg twice daily) of CoQ10 to kill cancer cells and support oxygenation. Starving the cancer cells by eliminating refined sugar from my diet. Regular exercise--the most natural way to oxygenate cells. Selenium (2-3 Brazil nuts daily). Some studies show selenium to be as effective as current chemotherapies, but it can be toxic in very high doses so don't over do it.

Immune system support: Pycnogenol (French Maritime Pine Bark extract) 25 mg twice daily, which is an antioxidant and recycles vitamins C & E in the body. Noni Juice (1 oz twice daily) which is a powerful antioxidant. Essiac tea (burdock root, sheep sorrel, Indian rhubarb, slippery elm bark)--which is also a powerful detoxifier--twice daily. This is the basic Ojibwa recipe, which also seems to be called Medicine Man tea.

Detoxifying and healthy cell support: Alkaline diet (no coffee or alcohol, powdered barley grass juice once a day or so). The Mediterranean Diet is also recommended (switch to olive oil, LOTS of veggies and whole grains, minimal meat). Flaxseed to oxygenate cells (mixed with cottage cheese or added to soy protein drink with green bananas and almond butter). Vitamin D from sunlight (20 minutes/day as naked as you're comfortable being between the hours of 10am-2pm). Primadophilus (5 billion CFU probiotic). Calcium and a B-complex. Whole grains only. And, I'll be adding Oxy-E for oxygenation and cleansing cells of toxins and lactic acid as soon as we can afford a therapeutic dose (2-4 bottles/month).

There are, of course, other things that can be done to naturally support the body which we might be adding (or have started to use occasionally to supplement) as we go along, or that you can look into for your own needs. These include mushrooms (shiitake, reishi, and cordyceps especially if you're undergoing any type of chemotherapy), Fu Zheng, coconut oil, broccoli sprouts, papaya extract, alphalipoic acid (less expensive than pycnogenol), etc.

The main thing you want to do is return to and stay in balance. Industrialism has created an extremely toxic world, and depends on lifestyles that are so stressful that you don't have the time to do what's good for you. You want to kill the cancer cells that are in your body, not create an environment that allows them to grow (refined sugars, simple carbohydrates, overly processed food with unpronounceable ingredients), detoxify your system from the body burden we all carry, and support healthy cells and the immune system so they can resist infection and damage and do their job.

As I mentioned earlier, another extremely important factor in healing (some say the most important factor) is emotional and spiritual health--a healthy and positive attitude. In the same manner as nature has provided the body with means to repair damaged or injured cells, it also provides the means to repair and heal damaged psyches and souls. I'm a big believer in regular reconnecting with nature activities, which is more powerful than meditation alone. Nature can inform you of what you need to know once you remember how to listen.

The above is a description of my approach to keeping the cells that comprise my body healthy and cancer-resistant. I have also been blessed with alternative healers that have so generously shared their gifts we me, including forms of energy healing, massage, reflexology, etc.

The real work, however, begins after the body heals: taking down industrialism. But, that's another article. Actually, it's an excellent two-volume set by Derrick Jensen, "Endgame, Vols. 1 & 2."

A lot of people have also been saying there is a lesson to be learned in my getting sick, and I don't doubt that one bit. I'm not quite sure what it might be, though, but I do have an inkling. I'm sure I'll be writing about it sometime soon.

A Green Status Quo?

2008-07-22T17:11:00.003-07:00

One of the common critiques of Al Gore's July, 17 speech at a Washington, DC energy conference that I've heard -- from those few environmentalists who actually understand ecology -- is that Gore's proposals, first and foremost, are directed to ensure the status quo survives. Of course, Gore adroitly sidesteps any mention of how that status quo is going to continue to improve their standard of living without their servants to prepare their food and dress them, or without an atmosphere and topsoil that can even grow their food, or even that global warming is but one factor calling into serious question the sanity of Western lifestyles predicated on infinite economic growth and financial accumulation that can only artificially confer a status that is superficial at best.

But this critique leads us to a bit of a quandary when looking deeper at what Gore said. It is currently thought to be political suicide to directly tell people the truth that Western civilization is generally at odds with life. The Industrial Growth model in particular is completely at odds with life, and actually helps define the concept of sustainability by providing a perfect example of its complete opposite, or negation.

So, when people who have actually taken the red pill (a small subset of those toying with the idea as possibly being a good thing to do) pick out and focus on statements from Gore's speech such as, "The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," and, "The future of human civilization is at stake," and use those statements to dismiss his entire message based on their beliefs that these outcomes would be beneficial, they might be shooting themselves in the foot. For if these are the only statements of Gore's that we concentrate on, we loose a perfect opportunity to bring up the viable and realistic alternative of powering down, relocalizing, and reconnecting. When looked at from a broader framework, Gore's speech can actually be a jumping off point for what more and more people are coming to realize needs to happen.

The American way of life and our understanding of Western civilization (which Gore incorrectly equates with human civilization) do need to be consigned to the dustbin of history, I won't argue with that. But I do think using that as a starting point is to risk losing a large segment of the population that we should be compassionately reaching out to with an honest awareness raising campaign of what we're really facing and what we must, and can, do.

There's nothing wrong with rightly pointing out that civilization as we know it is what has to go away; that powering a culture that is inherently destructive to life with renewable energy is neither the brightest nor the most rational thing to do. In fact, considering how far into overshoot we are as a species, powering our current Western lifestyles with renewables won't even buy us all that much time before the Earth's ecosystems tip into collapse.

But I don't intend to go into a complete critique of civilization here. Besides, others such as Derrick Jensen have done a very thorough job of that in works such as "The Culture of Makebelieve" and especially "Endgame, Vols. 1 and 2."

What I picked up on, and think we can constructively build on, were statements Gore made, as reported in the New York Times, regarding the "worse confluence of problems facing the country." Think about this for a second. What Gore is doing here is publicly tying energy depletion and high cost, job loss, high taxes on wage earners, and financial meltdown not only together, but with war. Very few political progressives have yet to make this leap.

Some of Gore's other statements, "We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that´s got to change," are great as well -- as far as they go, anyway. He's still shying away from details. He's not being frank with people about what this really means and what must be done. But he is asking people to examine relationships that are normally glossed over at best.

This becomes an opening to talk to people about the fact that our way of life is based on an exploitive power-over structure that confers status and success on accumulation. It is a way of being that is in direct conflict with the principles natural systems use to nurture and sustain healthy, vibrant, and resilient ecosystems. This means it is in direct conflict with who we really are as a species and as individuals. Since it's elementary school math to figure out that on a finite planet, being a "winner" means less for everybody else -- plus the hard upper boundary on material accumulation -- in order to continue this economic game without inequity growing to the point that armed revolution is the only possible outcome requires selling a story of growth in the abstract concept of financial capital in which the commodification of everything, both real and imagined, is necessary.

What is needed, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago, at the very least is to set limits to inequality in wealth and income. Orthodox growth economists insist that growth is a perfect substitute for income equality, for as long as there's growth, there's hope. Thus, the solution for the poor is to let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the future! This system is, of course, a symptom of a deeper malaise, but let's take it one step at a time.

We can help people make the next logical step -- that a system based entirely on economic growth is not only killing the planet, but is anathema to progress and prosperity when looked at from a perspective that includes the whole.

Because the fact of the matter is that Gore is correct. We could get 100% of the energy we actually need from renewables, not in 10 years, but today. As I keep pointing out, all it basically requires is to quit manufacturing the 99% of the stuff we don't need or want, build the rest of it to last and be repairable, decentralize the grid, and quit looking at efficiency from the narrow perspective of what is necessary to increase profit. This is the perspective we must get people to apply, not the assumption everyone immediately jumps to that alternative energy sources must be ramped up to replace what we're using fossil fuels for today.

And then we can go the next step. Start redesigning and rebuilding our communities to be livable instead of auto-centric, start getting population under control (in part by getting rid of excess), etc.

If we can help people connect the dots, and realize that a systemic alternative is available that stands a better than even chance of improving quality of life, they'll come to their own conclusion that civilization as we know it is a bad idea.

Setting the Agenda

2008-06-13T18:16:00.005-07:00

A recent e-mail from On Day One informed me they were co-sponsoring an on-line five-day debate with Grist.org's Gristmill and UN Dispatch to set the agenda for the 44th president. They asked people to send in ideas on energy and climate, with the best ones to be reviewed by their panel of experts. <http://www.ondayone.org/node/add/idea?source=blogad&issue=climate>

Of course, they expect you to do this in 500 characters or less, so that automatically leaves me out -- I couldn't even do it in that few words. But, here's what I wrote to send to them before discovering this limitation.

How can the next President solve our global warming crisis and reduce our dependence on foreign oil? By honestly taking on the special interests behind the growth economy and helping dispel the myth that a continuously rising GDP is necessary for progress and prosperity. By helping people understand that regarding the Earth as both an endless supply of resources and a bottomless pit for wastes is highly irrational to the point of insanity because it defies the laws of physics and the other natural sciences. That addictively increasing consumption of material goods is not an acceptable substitute for psychological and spiritual health and well-being. That despite a rising standard of living (conveniently confused with quality of life) America comes in 149th out of 150 countries on the happiness scale. That despite a doubling of gross domestic spending, people aren't twice as happy as their grandparents.

There are some other basic facts that must be injected into a very necessary national, and global, conversation.

The promise of technology is to provide more leisure time. Instead, Americans spend one billion working hours per year in order to buy more leisure wear.

About half of the electricity we currently produce is lost in long distance transmission. Decentralizing the national grid would greatly reduce the supposed need to find replacement energy sources.

One third of the global population produces everything consumed by the entire world. This means we should have full global employment while working two thirds less.

Further, 99% of all that stuff is in a landfill or gathering dust in a closet within six months. Relearning the benefits and value of sharing would go a long way in both building mutually supportive community relationships and in reducing the energy and resources required to build one each of everything for everyone.

We could start producing stuff to be more efficient, to be built to last, and to be easily repairable instead of expending so much time and energy on making people feel unworthy or that they are a failure as a human being if they don't have the latest model in the current color.

About half of the oil America consumes goes to the military so they can fight wars to secure more oil so they can fight more wars. Maybe if we were to quit stealing other people's resources and exploiting their communities for stuff we don't want and that doesn't make us happy anyway, global terrorism would shrink drastically.

It is finally becoming more widely acknowledged that cancer is an environmental disease. If we quit allowing the chemical companies to turn our water, air, and soil into global Superfund sites simply so they can increase profit margins, not only would less energy be required and expended, but quality of life would improve by an order of magnitude and the medical industry would see its energy needs shrink.

The American standard of living has brought us to the point where infant mortality rates are rising, lifespan is decreasing, and about 50% of the American population requires one prescription drug a day, with 20% requiring 3 or more prescriptions to either make it through their day or to be able to tolerate their day. And this doesn't include alcohol and other self-prescribed recreational drugs. This is not a sign of a healthy society, or a shining example of a society to be emulated by the developing world.

By honestly addressing these inconvenient truths (and dozens of others, such as the shallowness of urban sprawl, our forced addiction to automobiles, and the damage inflicted on the web of life's food chain by paving over massive swaths of it), we would discover that we can meet our actual energy needs with currently available renewable energy technologies. But, none of this protects and supports a growth economy, where profit is taken to be more important than people or planet.

The alternative to this paradigm of destruction and disease, however, does not entail stagnation, nor is it a primitivistic call to return to the cave and start chopping wood and carrying our own water. Just as a healthy ecosystem reaches a point of maturity and then stops growing physically larger, it doesn't stop developing and supporting the natural tendency of each of the organisms within it to self-organize and fully contribute toward the health of the whole.

Relocalization, the process to create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom, social justice and economic equity, provides a systemic alternative to the status quo of domination and exploitation that enriches a very few at the expense of all others. Relocalization addresses food and energy security by embracing steady-state local economies, bioregional governance, and redesign of cities based on permaculture principles, all while adhering to the ecological reality of carrying capacity. It helps us overcome our separation from the natural world, which of course means each other as well. By using the models and metaphors amply supplied by the natural systems principles sustainable ecosystems use to remain healthy, vibrant, and resilient, it also brings out and amplifies those positive aspects of human nature that support the basic life-affirming direction of nature -- compassion, cooperation, creativity, and nurturance.

If the presidential candidates are wanting to be serious about actually doing something to mitigate catastrophic climate destabilization and the steady, and currently inexorable, depletion of polluting fossil fuels, instead of the typical sleight of hand that sounds good while really only ensuring continuing riches to their buddies in industry, then they are most welcome to use the above as a foundation for their campaign platform. Otherwise they should just be honest and admit they're only running for the paycheck and status, ask us to vote for whoever we think is sexiest, and we can all hold hands and watch the world go to hell in a handbasket together.

Perspective...

2008-06-03T12:02:00.003-07:00

I was sent a propaganda piece, without attribution but my quess is that it originated in one of the free-market "think tanks" where thinking is anything but de riqueur, by an ecologist/artist friend, who probably received it from a conservative relative who thinks a growth economy is the only thing keeping us from reverting to barbarism.

As seems to be my lot in life, I felt compelled to reply. Also, it never ceases to amaze me how other articles that have come across my desk in the past few days provided important concepts to weave into this.

Anyway, the original piece is included in its entirety with my comments interspersed.

> Think about it...

Yes, think about it indeed. This nationalistic, jingoistic nonsense could only have originated with a libertarian free-marketer.

However, probably unbeknownst to even him (definitely unintentional), he makes a couple of points that people do need to start examining deeply.

> The OPEC minister may look you in the eye and say:
> "We are at war with you infidels and have been since the embargo in the
> 1970s. You are so arrogant you haven't even recognized it. You have more
> missiles, bombs, and technology; so we are fighting with the best weapon
> we have and extracting on a net basis about $700 billion/year out of your
> economy. We will destroy you! Death to the infidels!" "While I am here I

Quite true that our arrogance isn't widely recognized. Our defense budget is being totally wasted on protecting a way of life that is unsustainable and about to push us over the cliff of extinction. The Earth, of course, will survive. It rebirthed life after the Cambrian extinction, it just took 100 million years to do so. So, don't think your Halliburton stock price windfall from gouging and defrauding the American taxpayer is going be worth much by then.

> would like to thank you for the following: Not developing your 250-300 year
> supply of oil shale and tar sands. We know if you did this, it would create
> thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens, expand your engineering capabilities,
> and keep the wealth in the U.S. instead of sending it to us to finance our
> war against you infidels."

Not only is this reserve estimate off by at least an order of magnitude, it totally ignores the fact that it requires more energy to extract those types of reserves than what they can provide, nor can what they hold ever be totally extracted. Then you can throw in the complete environmental devastation that comes with extracting these types of sources. The only reason to even think about tar sands or oil shale is that it continues an industrial paradigm of profligate waste for no other reason than to increase the holdings of central banks. However, we are distracted from this reality by the story that it is necessary to protect the transportation industry and supply the lifeblood for suburbia -- which has been accurately described as the greatest misallocation of resources in human history.

> "Thanks for limiting defense department purchases
> of oil sands from your neighbors to the north.
> We love it when you confuse your allies."

This is an excellent point, but not for the reason this guy thinks so. (And even if it happened to be a woman who wrote this, it is a totally male dominating mindset that wouldn't naturally arise in anyone whose compassion and nurturing instincts were intact.) What it points to is the total disconnect from reality of US foreign policy.

> "Thanks for over regulating every
> segment of your economy and thus delaying, by decades, the development of
> alternate fuel technologies."

Almost a good point. The reality is that the regulatory environment doesn't regulate industry, it regulates people while it hands out licenses for destruction. Regulations serve to simply rein in the worst excesses and appease people's innate sense of equity, in order to keep total runaway greed and power lust from completely subjugating life.

But it isn't regulation that is keeping us from alternative energy technologies. It is massive government subsidies (for which free-marketeers always look the other way) to big energy, and to protect the fundamental concept of centralization in as many aspects of our lifes as they possibly can.

> "Thanks for limiting drilling off your coasts, in
> Alaska, and anywhere there is an insect, bird, fish, or plant that might be
> inconvenienced. Better that your people suffer. Glad to see our lobbying
> efforts have been so effective."

Another complete disconnect from reality. All those other species that are being "inconvenienced" just happen to create and sustain the web of life that human lives and economies are totally dependent upon.

Let's take a quick look at what the system this extremely shallow puff piece is trying to support has given us:

Anthropogenic global warming is not just cause to worry about greenhouse gases that come from burning fossil fuels -- the industrial growth paradigm is giving us deforestation, desertification, soil salination and topsoil loss, acidic oceans, shrinking aquifers, and New Orleans and parts of Alaska are slowly sliding into the sea. Hypoxia -- loss of oxygen -- is affecting large stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which means these areas are losing the marine life that not only feed millions but which make up the very foundation of the global food chain.

No food chain, no food. You can't get any simpler, or more basic, than that.

> "Corn based Ethanol. Praise Allah for this sham
> program! Perhaps you will destroy yourself from the inside with theses types
> of policies. This is a gift from Allah, praise his name! We never would have
> thought of this one! This is better than when you pay your farmers NOT TO
> GROW FOOD. Have them use more energy to create less energy, and simultaneously
> drive up food prices. Thank you, U.S. Congress!"

This is one of those statements that get thrown into propaganda efforts like this to make people think the rest of the statements also make sense.

> "And finally, we appreciate you
> letting us fleece you without end. You will be glad to know we have been
> accumulating shares in your banks, real estate, and publicly held companies.
> We also finance a good portion of your debt and now manipulate your markets,
> currency, and economies for our benefit." "THANK YOU AMERICA!"

Actually, China and Japan have the most of this, although a few Middle East countries are starting to catch up. The Middle East, however, is much less of a threat in the long run as they have no production capabilities -- all they have are fistfulls of cash which are quickly losing value, and rapidly shrinking supplies of petroleum which we must stop using anyway in order to save at least some aspect of life as we know it. That they are trying to buy into a system where we have all been sold a bill of goods is simply an indication that they have absolutely no idea of what to do either.

One of the things that amazes me about the type of people who write stuff like this is that they also tend to be the people who rant about the UN and the concept of a one-world government that is going to take away everything valuable about democratic principles like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What they fail to realize, or to even acknowledge as the mounting evidence slowly crushes them under its weight, is that we already have a one-world government. This has slowly crept up and overtaken us as multinational corporations became transnational corporations and are now supranational corporations -- those who are above the nations and controlled by an elite managerial group who manipulate global financial networks. They owe no allegiance to any government; they exist everywhere and are specific to nowhere except the industrial world. The institutions they have created like the WTO work to ensure that quant concepts like national sovereignty become a thing of the past, especially if they impose any barriers to maximizing profit. Corporatism has arrived and is on its way to becoming fully entrenched.

Now, we could become the first species to use our intelligence to reverse our direction upon discovering we're going down the wrong path. Instead, we're living out the definition of fanaticism -- doubling our speed after learning we're going the wrong way. This explains the troop surge in Iraq, the push to open up drilling in ANWR, and passing legislation to turn all our productive cropland into agrofuel production.

And, to keep from examining these inconvenient truths, we're wasting our time blaming our problems on the people we're actually forcing to supply our addictions.

Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life on this planet.

More Connecting the Dots - Oil supplies down, prices up

2008-05-22T20:28:00.003-07:00

The Bloomberg article below inadvertently makes clear that orthodox growth economists are now providing some of the best comedy relief available on this beleaguered planet. Despite all the evidence everywhere around them, they still insist on believing that the abstract concept of a market signal (increasing price) can produce a natural resource out of thin air (oil supplies). Now, it can be made to appear as if this were the case while the resource is both plentiful and the capacity to deliver it to the end-user can also be increased. However, neither case exists any longer.

A good friend of mine, with years of experience as an oil field engineer for ARAMCO, points out that we have reached Peak Refining Capacity -- the point at which the building and maintenance of crude refining capacity is limited by available raw materials (iron ore, energy, labor) and transportation and installation of the finished components to the refining site. No one is seriously proposing building more refining capacity anyway, no matter how sky-high the price goes. What Julian Darley pointed out in "End of Suburbia" regarding natural gas holds true for oil as wel; the oil majors all understand, even if their market forecasts for their shareholders don't reflect it, that they'll never recover their investment in additional refining or production capacity.

The two most important factors pertaining to this are the geophysical reality of Peak Oil itself, and the inevitable regulations that will soon curtail fossil hydrocarbon use due to its contribution to anthropogenic global warming. Peak Oil is not, as pundits on both sides of the political divide would have you believe, either an ideological ploy by environmentalists to save the Earth at the expense of humans, or a ploy by energy conglomerates to increase profits -- even though they are taking advantage of the opportunity for price gouging while the distractions are abundant to deflect criticism of their greed. Lack of fossil energy is going to bring the industrial growth economy to an end, but lack of a viable environment is going to destroy the possibility for having any type of economy, even a steady-state one.

It's also necessary to become aware that current political machinations regarding pump price are nothing more than sleight of hand. It takes 3 months to swing crude production by 1 million barrels -- in either direction -- so even if the Saudis can increase their production by the amount they've recently promised the shrub, price at the pump won't be affected until after the summer driving season in America is over anyway. And, there's much reasonable doubt on whether they actually can increase production by any significant amount.

Production at the largest oil field in the world, Ghwar, is down 500,000 barrels per day from it's peak over a year ago. While this is widely taken to be a normal indication of typical reservoir peak, engineers and geologists with actual experience with Middle East oil fields say a more likely explanation is reservoir collapse from overproduction in the 1970s to make up for the oil embargo. This is a geophysical phenomena that occurs when an oil field is drained too quickly. It decreases the overall amount of crude that can be realistically extracted from the reservoir.

This also points to another interesting fact that must be considered when trying to figure out how much oil we actually have left available to create any type of alternative energy infrastructure, regardless of catastrophic climate destabilization concerns. And, let's leave aside for the moment the discussion on whether or not we want, need, or even should create a replacement infrastructure of this magnitude.

One aspect of stated reserves is the (erroneous) assumption used by economists and politicians that extraction is a linear process and that any given oil field can be sucked dry (the geophysics of natural gas reservoirs are different, and not under consideration here). While this assumption isn't true even in the best of cases, when a field has been damaged by the abuse of overuse, even less of what's left after normal peak will ever be available for any use. The full amount of stated reserves (even on the off chance current figures are remotely accurate in the first place) thought to be available in Saudi Arabia (and this is true for all other oil producing regions as well) will never, ever, ever, become available -- they will never see the market and will remain exactly where they are. And this is going to remain true no matter how hard market fundamentalists wave their magic wands of supply and demand -- without quite literally taking a shovel and digging the entire reservoir by hand. Which I suppose might be a good job for these people when they find themselves out of work. I predict that stated global reserve figures are actually off by an order of magnitude in terms of what can actually be put to use, which means we actually have that much less time to figure out a different way of creating living arrangements on this planet.

It's going to take more than prices going to $5-$6 per gallon to reduce demand as mainstream energy analysts are stating, and recession would be the least of our worries at that price point anyway. $7-$10 per gallon is the proper domestic cost right now, not just for fossil fuels but for proposed agrofuels as well, to induce the reduction in North American transportation fuel use so that FOOD IS NOT USED FOR FUEL!

One response to both rising fuel prices and the need to quickly start using less was made by Myron Wlaznak in a recent column published in Bellingham, WA's Whatcom Independent newspaper. He's just quit driving on Tuesdays and Thursdays. While this is more than the purely symbolic gesture of not buying gas on a particular day of the month (an idea that gets forwarded around the Internet about once a year), the approach I'm taking is to reduce my personal fuel use to five gallons per month. This isn't exactly an easy task in a city like Tucson, AZ which has sprawled out to about 20 miles from side to side, and in the summertime 100+ degree heat made worse from the urban heat island effect, you simply can't get from here to there for most things on a bicycle when the sun's out.

Considering the systemic nature of what we're facing, if community leaders and politicians don't start implementing the alternative that relocalization provides to the status quo PDQ, the responsibility for the collapse, chaos, and suffering that will occur will lay entirely, and rightly, on their heads. It's time to drop the excuse of political feasibility to justify inaction (which includes undertaking further studies and other feel-good, high visibility, half measures to make it appear as if they're addressing the problem) and actually start doing things differently.

So, plant your backyard veggie gardens, and change your lightbulbs, but then spend the rest of your time camping out in front of their offices and _demanding_ that they start making the decisions that are necessary instead of those that are convenient for the special interests in order for them to retain a perceived power that is ephemeral at best.

For the Earth...
_dave_(this entire message is composed of recycled electrons)
Natural Systems Solutions
Sustainable lifestyles, organizations, and communities

------- Forwarded message follows -------

Oil Rises Above $133 on U.S. Supply Drop, Bank Price Forecasts
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=atGDWAjDjdx8&refer=home
By Mark Shenk

May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose to a record above $133 a barrel as U.S. stockpiles unexpectedly dropped and banks raised price forecasts because of supply constraints and demand growth.

Inventories fell 5.32 million barrels to 320.4 million last week, the biggest drop in four months, the Energy Department said. Oil for December 2016 delivery rose more than $20 a barrel, or 17 percent, after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on May 16 raised its outlook to $141 a barrel for the second-half of the year.

``What we have here is a situation where essentially higher prices aren't generating any more supply,'' Paul Sankey, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York said in an interview with Bloomberg radio. ``What we have to do is keep pricing the commodity higher until demand starts falling,'' which ``is around $150 a barrel.''

Crude oil for July delivery rose $4.19, or 3.3 percent, to settle at $133.17 a barrel at 2:44 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil touched a record $133.82 today and has more than doubled from a year ago. Futures, up more than 17 percent this month, are heading for the biggest monthly gain since September 2004.

Gasoline and heating-oil futures in New York also climbed to records. Gasoline for June delivery rose 9.21 cents, or 2.8 percent, to settle at $3.3965 a gallon, after reaching a record $3.41. Heating oil for June delivery rose 13.34 cents, or 3.5 percent, to close at $3.9084 a gallon, after touching an all-time high of $3.9304.

Higher Pump Prices

Pump prices are following futures higher. Regular gasoline, averaged nationwide, rose 0.7 cent to a record $3.807 a gallon, AAA, the nation's largest motorist organization, said today on its Web site.

An inventory increase of 300,000 barrels was forecast, according to the median of responses by 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News before the inventory report's release.

The supply decline left stockpiles 0.9 percent below the five-year average for the week, the Energy Department said. Supplies were 0.8 percent above normal a week earlier.

Imports fell 7 percent to 9.24 million barrels a day, the report showed. Imports have averaged 9.86 million barrels a day so far this year, down 0.9 percent from the same period last year, according to department figures.

``In this high-priced environment we are seeing refiners cut back on imports,'' said Antoine Halff, head of energy research at New York-based Newedge USA LLC. ``High prices and credit tightness are making it much harder to build supply.''

Brent crude oil for July settlement rose $4.86, or 3.8 percent, to $132.70 a barrel on London's ICE Futures Europe exchange. The contract touched $133.34 today, the highest since trading began in 1988.

`Well Supplied'

The crude-oil market is ``well supplied,'' Libya's top oil official Shokri Ghanem said today, rejecting calls for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production to curb prices. OPEC, which pumps more than 40 percent of the world's oil, isn't planning to meet before its next scheduled conference in September to review production, he said.

``OPEC is playing with fire,'' said Rick Mueller, director of oil practice at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts. ``While they may be right from a fundamental standpoint about crude supplies, at this time it will take more than words from them to bring prices down. We will need to see more gestures like the Saudis made, to lower prices.''

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi told reporters on May 16 that the kingdom is planning a 300,000 barrel-a-day output increase, to bring June production to 9.45 million barrels a day.

``Once prices hit $150 or $200 like our friends at Goldman are saying, we are looking at $5 or $6 gasoline, which will really hurt demand and cause a recession,'' Mueller said.

Goldman Forecasts

Goldman analyst Arjun N. Murti said in a May 16 report that ``the possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next six-24 months.'' Murti first wrote of a ``super spike'' in March 2005, predicting crude may trade between $50 and $105 a barrel through 2009.

U.S. oil-company executives told Congress oil prices should be between $35 and $90 a barrel. Representatives of the five largest publicly traded oil companies appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on record energy prices. Appearing today were representatives of BP Plc, ConocoPhillips, Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

The price of oil should be ``somewhere between $35 and $65 a barrel,'' John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., the Houston-based subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, said at the hearing today. Other executives said prices should be as much as $90 a barrel.

Strategic Reserve

Congress last week approved legislation to halt deliveries to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to respond to record prices.

Airlines have been hit by higher jet fuel costs. The price of the fuel, the largest expense at many airlines, has climbed 88 percent in the past year and traded at a record $4.0592 a gallon in New York Harbor today.

AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, the world's largest carrier, said it will cut ``thousands'' of jobs as it responds to high fuel prices and slowing demand.

------- End of forwarded message -------

Prelude to "José Can You See? Bush's Trojan Taco"

2008-04-22T13:09:00.003-07:00

I wrote this prelude when forwarding Greg Palast's (excellent as usual) article to most of the lists I'm on to help keep people up to date on what's going on behind the scenes while the Left continues to be distracted by the Punch and Judy show of the Democratic primaries, the anti-war movement continues to be deluded that either defunding or pulling out of Iraq will bring world peace, and as Commercial Totalitarianism continues to tighten the noose of state fascism ensuring that nothing effective will be done to address catastrophic climate destabilization within the rapidly shrinking necessary timeframe.

And yes, there is something we could do about all of this, but too many people today insist on the pathological clinging to the propaganda that there's nothing we can do, it's too big, we can't make a difference, a growth economy is necessary for progress, prosperity and alleviating poverty, and besides it's just human nature to act like sheep and do the bidding of our overlords.

Sigh.

Our overlords are just fellow Bozos on this bus, boys and girls. They put their pants on one leg at a time, and they have grandchildren they care about. Well, except for those very few true sociopaths like Cheney, or those whose higher neural functions have been lost through cocaine abuse and alcoholism like geedubya, of course. The rest of the ruling elite all believe the same propaganda/story, and for basically the same reason -- the dominant OldStory is insidious in not allowing an alternative to be known, or in framing any alternative as inferior.

Creating and telling the NewStory is going to take all of us putting aside our sectarian differences; not succumbing to factionalization; not being led astray by the egos of movement leaders who believe in power-over hierarchies. The goal of a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice, based on globally shared values such as those expressed by the Earth Charter, is an alternative we can choose. This goal can both unite us and build from the strength inherent in our diversity.

Two necessities for creating and living this NewStory are going to be accepting what sustainability actually means (morally, scientifically, and legally), and that humans are actually an intimate and inextricable part of a larger living system that has imbued us with the intelligence, heart, and spirit to actually do so. This NewStory is more in keeping with true human nature. It adheres to the principles of natural systems. It helps us realize that sustainability is not merely an environmental movement; it is a community movement.

Does anyone else feel up to this task, which actually works with the life-nurturing energies that create and support life (that have a successful track record measured in the billions of years, pretty much regardless of which story you believe of their origin), or do you really think that putting band-aids on symptoms (otherwise known as incremental reform), or that separating yourselves from the rest of the world in little eco-village enclaves out in the wilderness as the current system collapses around our ears and we're rounded up by Blackwater mercenaries into the already funded Halliburton built concentration camps is the best path we can choose -- or worse yet, have you succumbed to the disempowering cynical view that this is our fate, and so, like urban growth, we have no choice but to accommodate it to the best of our abilities?

Reconnecting with nature and relocalizing our lifestyles and communities provides a systemic process to create a NewStory we can all joyfully participate in. In fact, we all must. This alternative to the status quo is both realistic and imminently achievable, in no small part because it will unleash the current constraints on human potential and provide increased opportunities to meet our natural expectations of fulfillment.

Which future do you want to choose? Go ahead. Take the red pill. Offer it to your family and neighbors.

Let's party!

Practical Steps Toward Relocalization: Part Three of a Three Part Series

2008-04-04T11:43:00.004-07:00

Among the initial steps toward relocalization is agreeing to the necessity, and desiring the benefits, of this process. Hopefully, it's become clear from the first two installments of this series that reconnection and relocalization go hand-in-hand, and that they provide a blueprint to remedy what's wrong in the world today.

Relocalization provides the concepts and process for making positive changes -- but what about the power? We only lose the power to make new choices if we willingly give up that power or believe the assertion that we don't have it in the first place.

It's also important to realize that the shift to a sustainable future through relocalization can start first thing tomorrow morning. There is absolutely no need to wait for a new technology to become invented or widely available. We don't have to wait ten generations for our consciousness to evolve to a higher plane. All we have to do is remember that whatever we call the wise, nurturing power that created sustainable ecosystems, created us as well. We embody that wisdom and power. It is lying there dormant, just waiting (crying out, even) for us to tap into it.

It's now clear that we will be dealing with catastrophic climate destabilization at the same time Peak Oil impacts our lives. What does this mean for future energy demands? How will this effect the entire concept of industrial production as the means to prosperity? What are the implications for a cultural identity dependent on economic and material growth? Environmental degradation and resource depletion in dozens of other areas also make it clear that even without global warming and Peak Oil, things must drastically change if we're to have any hope of creating a sustainable future.

Things are starting to fall apart at an accelerating pace. But instead of panicking or giving up, let's take a deep breath and look at reality. The fact is, a major part of what's falling apart is a growth economy which isn't real in the first place -- although it worsens other global crises like Peak Oil and global warming. We can produce what is actually needed to live sustainably with current renewable energy technologies and a dramatic reduction in production capacity. We possess the knowledge to produce efficient, high-quality, lasting goods. What is quickly being lost are the skills -- the craftsmanship -- to do so.

Even if everything we think we know about Peak Oil and global warming turns out to be false, if we start changing the way we do business and re-order our relationships to be in harmony with the natural world, the worst outcome is that we'd leave a healthier and more vibrant world for our children.

As mentioned last month, relocalization has some broad agendas. One of these is to empower and prioritize local decisions on land use and natural resource management based on a regional framework of sustainability. We can rebuild groups of neighborhoods to be friendlier to people and the environment than to cars, and reallocate the money now going to more and wider roads (and other sprawl enablers) to meet peoples' needs for right livelihood, community security, and ecological integrity.

Further, we can rely on local investment where returns are measured in increased quality of life instead of merely profits, and wake up to the fact that growth increases everyone's tax burden -- and beyond a certain point actually decreases quality of life indicators.

We can begin this exercise in rethinking community and economic development by connecting some dots and seeing what picture emerges with just the above two aspects of relocalization.

A relocalized, human-friendly desert community that must reduce sprawl will increase the use of bicycles, other human powered and public transportation, water harvesting, greywater systems, and solar energy. These will synergistically work with the need to quit drawing down and begin recharging the aquifer, and to minimize the energy expended to obtain, deliver and recycle water.

Our community can manufacture waterless composting toilets, bicycle frames and trailers, and water cistern systems. This will involve building a manufacturing base requiring skilled jobs in design, production, and installation. We'll need new skills in urban planning, public works and community health; renovation and redesign of the built environment using environmentally friendly products; and research and application advances in clean production and zero waste techniques.

The waterless composting toilet itself 1) provides ancillary jobs in retrofitting existing infrastructure and solar power installations for the toilet fan and heating element; 2) encourages complimentary production of passive solar devices and other cooling, heating, and energy efficiency improvements; 3) decreases wear and tear on public water and sewer systems; and 4) provides finished compost for neighborhood and community gardens to rebuild soil -- since soil is what actually feeds you. Just this one change provides many opportunities for education, training, and employment in numerous and diverse green collar jobs.

As we shift toward a relocalized economy, we will come to realize that meaningful work doesn't require 40-50 hour work weeks. Human ingenuity and existing technology means that no one must work more than 15-20 hours per week (which could be six months of 40 hour weeks). This would allow technology to deliver on one of its promises -- increased leisure time. Instead of time spent exhausted in front of the television, this can become quality leisure time spent being in community, furthering education, engaging in creative pursuits, and reconnecting with the natural world -- inherently sustainable desires expressed by the majority of people once basic needs are met.

Protecting the poor and middle classes from increasing energy and commodity costs and the effects of global warming begins by creating the process to ensure these basic human needs. This necessarily includes the desire to be a responsibly contributing member of one's community. This can be accomplished without increasing energy demand, or increasing industrial productivity and efficiency (widgets produced per unit of time) as the only true measure of prosperity and progress. The only downside to any of this is that if done sustainably, it doesn't protect a growth economy, and helps clarify why reliance on infinite growth is more accurately described as economic cannibalism.

This fits in with a vision of relocalized, sustainable, environmentally integrated cities that are self-reliant, resilient, and vibrant. It is part of the path toward cities that contain greenbelts among and between neighborhoods, smaller and fewer roads built with permeable surfaces, public transit between neighborhoods and regional centers, electric vehicle co-ops, locally produced food, decentralized renewable energy, sustainable (clean, zero waste) manufacturing, fewer work hours, and full employment. This all leads to people wanting to responsibly contribute to their communities because doing so increases their opportunities to maximize their potential. Social stress and alienation decrease because people know they have something to look forward to -- purpose and meaning returns to daily life.

A future built on the principles of ecological wisdom and social justice may sound utopian, but utopia means "no place." What I'm envisioning by using relocalization as the process to become sustainable is a realistic, pragmatic whole systems view that works the same way nature does. Instead of enriching a small minority at the ultimate expense of all other life, it is more in keeping with true human nature and better able to meet people's needs and desires instead of constraining, limiting, and creating addictive substitutes for them.

Relocalization Nuts and Bolts: Part Two of a Three Part Series

2008-04-04T11:21:00.005-07:00

This month’s installment explains what relocalization means and what it offers. Next month I will describe what a relocalized economy might look here in the Southwest desert.

To appreciate the potential of relocalization, it is important to first understand that the status quo is causing our personal, social, and environmental crises. While we know that we’re quickly degrading our life support system with the business as usual approach of economic growth, we can’t say for certain how quickly this is occurring, which adverse impacts will reveal themselves first, or how disastrous these impacts will be. However, there is a large degree of agreement among scientists, and growing agreement among economists, that creating a carbon-cycle neutral economy, and making sure that all human activities and effects are included in evaluating that economy, should be our number one priority.

The real inconvenient truth is that the business as usual approach of infinite and unfettered economic growth has created both catastrophic climate destabilization and Peak Oil. Protecting this system worsens these crises, and attempts to reform a system based on faulty assumptions merely postpones the inevitable collapse. Therefore, we must approach change with a new way of thinking to create an alternative without these liabilities. Relocalization is a whole-systems approach to doing things differently -- a process to achieve sustainability.

Relocalization was developed as a response to global warming and Peak Oil. More than just a band-aid for these symptoms, however, it also seeks to address the environmental, social, political, and economic ramifications at the root of these crises. It includes the concepts that we must rebuild our local economies; recapture our sense of place; reclaim our sovereignty; and restore our community support networks.

From a natural systems perspective, a green economy is a local economy. By meeting the requirements to be sustainable from a bioregional carrying capacity perspective, a relocalized community is “naturally” healthy, vibrant, and resilient.

At its core, relocalization is a strategy to move production of food, goods and energy closer to the point of consumption to reduce dependence on long distance transportation and the whims of distant suppliers. The goal is to increase food and energy security, to empower local decisions in the development of currency, culture, and governance, and to restore ecological integrity and social equity.

If you’re familiar with the mission of anti-globalization activists who use localization to protect local economies and livelihoods from the slow drain of an export economy, relocalization goes a step further with a commitment to reduce consumption and improve environmental and social conditions. It is both antithesis and antidote to the emptiness and inherent inequity of corporate globalization.

Reducing consumption is, of course, directly at odds with a growth economy -- but this is not a call for an austerity program demanding great personal sacrifice and suffering. We can reduce consumption by sharing rarely used items with neighbors. We can reduce consumption by only purchasing items that are built to last and be easily repairable. We can reduce consumption by turning off the TV to decrease its stranglehold on our psyche with its mesmerizing story that popularity and self-worth is dependent on being a walking billboard for this season’s corporate fashion. By removing the need to work longer hours to buy all the stuff that never fulfills its promise to deliver happiness, we will have the time to do all those things that do bring happiness.

The reason all aspects of our society must be included in the task of relocalization is quite pragmatic. The ancient Greek oikonomia is the root of economics. It means the management of a household to increase value to all members over time. It is a systemic view that considers all the relationships -- natural, social, values, language, history -- that contribute to our stay as guests in Mother Earth’s home. Oikonomia looks at the social good, not just the parties to a transaction or claims of ownership of a natural resource.

Relocalization and decentralization are concepts that are feared by the ruling elite because it removes power and control from the hands of those who have become addicted, or think they are somehow entitled by birth, to wield it. This is why you hear about agrofuels and carbon capture, but not relocalization and powering down, on the 6 O’clock News. These latter concepts are ridiculed, marginalized, and said to be unmanageable for a mere “working class” either too stupid to take care of itself or without the capacity to understand how the bigger picture “really” works.

Well, the bigger picture works rather simply by the natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. It works by self-organizing attraction relationships that make everyone’s life better by making the whole better.

This is what life is all about, and relocalization seeks to return us to it.

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More information on relocalization can be found at the Relocalization Network, and you're invited to become involved with Tucson's relocalization group, Campaign For Our Lives.

Relocalizing for a Green Economy: Part One of a Three Part Series

2008-04-04T11:04:00.005-07:00

These next three posts are the full, unedited versions of a series of articles on relocalization I was asked to write for the Tucson Green Magazine. They were edited either because they were too long for the space available, or because they presented concepts the "mainstream" wasn't considered yet ready for. Since I do tend to preach to the choir quite a bit, there's undoubtedly more than a little merit to this critique.

However, if you're reading these here, I'm going to assume you've already taken the red pill, or are at least considering other ways of breaking free of the consensus trance and looking for ways to start doing things differently; to actively participate in creating a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice.

Part One:

No matter how clever we are, our cleverness is wholly dependent on the bounty and health of the Earth and the richness of our relationships.

A growth economy of material goods has an unfortunate outcome for living organisms, and we're told to ignore the connection between constant financial growth and the exploitation of people and degradation of the planet. We're told this is the price of progress. However, we cannot escape the fact that the planet's resources are either finite or have a carrying capacity limit to their rate of regeneration, while money is an abstract concept that knows no bounds, nor has a basis in hard physical reality.

We use money to assign value to a person's status and contribution to community well-being. But this value is not necessarily tied to community equity or fairly earned, as can be seen from lotteries, sweepstakes, and mortgage backed securities. We also let ourselves believe that money can be used to meet all human needs and desires. That this is ludicrous as soon as one stops to think about it is why we're told not to. While money can't buy happiness, it can buy the antidepressants necessary to stand in its stead.

My core belief is that today's financial markets are a major contributing factor to the crises life faces. They are little more than a form of legalized gambling in a highly rigged game. They nurture the fantasy of something for nothing. This has worked well for a select few over the centuries, but we've reached a few global tipping points such as overpopulation causing depletion of fisheries and 50% loss of productive topsoil, and with fossil fueled global warming we're quickly approaching others.

That said, socially responsible investing on a local level could be a leverage point in creating the first steps to a sustainable future. There are models available, such as Solari Circles and steady-state economies, that can help communities regain control of their future and develop sustainably. Today, communities have the impetus and the opportunity to pull together, invest in a future that looks at the bigger picture, and provide true and lasting value for all the species that make up that community.

The main points I think people must begin examining in earnest regard economic growth and accumulation as the only allowable meaningful measures of prosperity and well-being. The pervasive mindset is bigger, shinier, faster, more.

But what is this actually doing to our health and the overall quality of life? What longing are we trying to satisfy that we accept baubles for payoff and a story that allows us to rationalize that this is the best we can hope for? The actual results of this mindset are decreases in every quality of life indicator that actually provide meaning to the human condition -- plus of course all the ones pertinent to other species and the natural world itself. Strictly from a mathematical perspective, a growth economy doesn't work; it is unsustainable. All the evidence points to the conclusion that it's time to seriously consider what we might do differently.

One of the reasons it's so scary to think about the collapse of the current system is that no alternatives to the status quo are allowed to be mentioned without being denigrated and marginalized as unnatural, naively idealistic, or communistic. We remain unaware or won't believe that not only is an alternative available that's not dependent on future technologies, but that both rational reality and spiritual yearnings show to be more in keeping with human nature. The alternative will improve overall conditions because it works with the most powerful force in the universe -- the creation and maintenance of mutually supportive attraction relationships.

This alternative is based on reconnecting our disconnection from nature and each other, and using the process of relocalization to create an explicitly defined sustainable future built on ecological wisdom and social justice. It is an optimistic message that is tempered with an outright admission that if we continue in the direction we're heading, the good news will be the end of Western civilization. The bad news will be passing one too many irreversible environmental tipping points.

Bigger depends on denying and ignoring the drivers of economic cannibalism offered by the Industrial Growth Society. Just one aspect of this is the slow poisoning by the petrochemical industry -- and the pharmaceutical industry attempts to alleviate the symptoms while creating different ones -- and refusal to admit that humans are not immune to being effected by the largest walking chemical experiment in history. This is being allowed, encouraged even, because it contributes to a rising GDP. As recent medical research shows, however, the actual cure for breast cancer is shutting down Dow Chemical, et.al.

Better is about having the time and resources available to concentrate on what really matters. It includes having the opportunities available to develop one's potential, without constant distractions that not only support and enrich a small controlling elite by fantasizing that you can be one too, but to go along with an implicit mandate to subvert those natural desires that contribute to fulfillment, community, and life.

Where's our contingency plan?

2008-04-04T10:51:00.004-07:00

As more community forums are being assembled (especially those sponsored by local daily newspapers, economic development agencies, and local government departments that have tacked sustainability onto their name) to deal with the question of growth and a sustainable future, perhaps the most important core question to ask these local leaders is: What is their contingency plan? What set of facts are being used to inform this plan? Is Peak Oil, global warming, or financial catastrophe factored in? What baseline is being used to assess the local assets available to build from? How many acres of arable land are regionally available, what is the current rate of topsoil loss, how many feet per year is the local aquifer dropping, how much compost can we generate and distribute, and thus how many people can realistically be fed?

The US Energy Information Agency reports that global oil production peaked in May, 2005. Saudi Arabian oil production has been declining at about 1 million barrels per day for almost two years. A more interesting and even more unreported fact is that world oil production per capita peaked in 1979, yet we continue to count population growth as an economic positive. How long will local economies as presently constructed survive a cutoff of conventional fuel supplies and products such as plastic and fertilizer derived from fossil fuels?

Supporters of protecting the status quo like to point to the increase in "non-conventional" liquid fuels, but want to conveniently ignore the negative energy return on these fuels, and the manner in which they contribute to undermining the economy and increasing environmental degradation.

A medical analogy is appropriate here. Tar sands, oil shale, and agrofuels are like the extreme measures used in the intensive care unit to keep a patient's heart beating until the family can get to the hospital to say their final goodbye to their loved one.

For example, how many more people will knowingly be subjected to hardship and deprivation when the Central Arizona Project (CAP) that supplies water from the Colorado River to rapidly growing cities is shutdown due to lack of supply as officials continue to entice people to move to the Southwest desert by approving more housing subdivisions and -- the ultimate manifestation of insanity -- new water parks and golf courses?

The Ogallala Aquifer, the water source for America's "bread-basket," is being drawn down at a rate 150% beyond recharge. How long will existing local food supplies that come from this area (and the rest of the globe) last, and how much is being grown that can't be consumed locally, such as alfalfa grown with CAP water in the Arizona desert for California cattle? What plans are in place to address price hikes in basic commodities or to secure people's right to stay in their homes as global financial markets finish their meltdown? If local officials don't have a contingency plan, or are unwilling to make current discussions public, we should ask them to step down and get a job they can manage.

This might sound harsh, but the scientific consensus is quickly shifting to realizing that we really only have about a two year window left to lay the foundation for an alternative public infrastructure that drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions (90% below 1990 levels by 2030) and begins reversing all aspects of biospheric deterioration. People are remarkably resilient and innovative when they have the full facts at their disposal. More people are becoming aware of the bigger picture and the interdependencies amongst these issues. More people are expressing a desire to regain that which has been lost as we've isolated ourselves in our cars and on our couches -- a fulfilling sense of community. More people are calling for a shift to sustainability as they become aware of the permanent nature of the unfolding global crises and their root causes in centralized dominator control hierarchies and the Industrial Growth Society.

The only systemic response that calls for the best in human capabilities and potential I see on the horizon is the process known as relocalization. Building a local economy that is healthy, vibrant and resilient, that protects and enhances local cultures, must draw on the same natural systems principles that keep an ecosystem sustainable -- mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. We must start measuring progress and defining prosperity in a new way; a way that isn't dependent on merely increasing in size or material accumulation, but on becoming qualitatively better for all members of the community.

The technology is available today to do so. Can we develop the will to do so in time?

Responding to Peak Oil and Global Warming: Beyond Power Hierarchies and Economic Growth

2008-02-15T10:59:00.004-07:00

Another excellent article by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian and posted on his website connects some dots amongst Peak Oil, global warming, and the looming environmental disaster known as biofuel. The reality of these crises are becoming slowly accepted by the mainstream, as a new report by Citibank points out the reality of Peak Oil. Monbiot wonders, since governments won't listen to environmentalists or even geologists, will they also ignore the capitalists?

Well, I think this depends on exactly what the capitalists say, and what they continue to ignore and deny. Fossil fuels are decreasing in availability--this is, after all, what nonrenewable means. A switch, even a relatively small one, to agrofuels make our overall situation in regard to environmental degradation and human suffering even worse. There are, however, short term profits to be sucked out of both--which begs the question of what comes next? What the capitalists simply can't bring themselves to publicly admit, however, is that we can neither maintain an elite run class structure nor keep powering a growth economy. They are unsustainable and a barrier to human progress.

So that leaves it up to us (the vast majority of the global population) to take this inescapable conclusion--what Jan Lundberg of CultureChange.org calls petrocollapse--to the next step, where the only logical response that I can see is to start being honest with ourselves and admit that dominator hierarchies and a sense of superiority over the other was a mistake based on false assumptions, incomplete information, discounted variables, and self-centered individualism. We must get over and then go beyond the idea that a growth economy is necessary for prosperity and well-being, and that reversing or simply doing away with economic growth need necessarily cause panic, disruption, and massive suffering.

We must start making people aware that in fact, we could do something that would have the opposite effects. We could begin moving into a dynamic, holistic integration with the creative processes and energies used by natural systems to be sustainable. This would allow us to tap into natural abundance, including our own creativity, that natural resource carrying capacity constraints actually provide and which should guide the direction of our efforts to develop and improve.

Our reliance on technology is making us less human physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I don't see that as a sign of progress. Our goals should be to do away with cars and auto dependent sprawl and infrastructure, rebuild our cities to be livable and walkable, reduce consumption and material lust, adhere to the precautionary principle, instill quality and craftsmanship into clean zero waste production, provide health and food security while voluntarily lowering birthrates, and reclaim the commons for the foundation of community sovereignty that is an integral part of interdependent networks of consensus based bioregional governance. That the entire world desires this is demonstrated best by the international acceptance of the common values expressed in the Earth Charter principles: respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, nonviolence, and peace.

We must reconnect the human soul to its home in the soul of the Earth. This is the intellectual and spiritual challenge of the 21st Century. This is the promise of relocalization, which also supplies the antidote to corporate globalization and centralized control. That we continue allowing exploitation and destruction of our life support system by pinning the blame on a lack of political courage is both a distraction and a cop-out.

There is no time to abrogate the personal responsibility to begin making new choices, the first of which is to quit legitimizing the status quo. The second is to accept that we actually deserve to enjoy life naturally, and not by depending on antidepressants, stress reducers, pain relievers, and chemotherapy to make living on a despoiled planet of broken relationships tolerable.

Natural Systems Solutions to Global Warming

2008-01-31T17:19:00.000-07:00

Here's the talk I gave at the University of Arizona as part of their Focus the Nation teach-in on global warming.

With the necessary focus of today's Focus the Nation national teach-in being on solutions, let's first be sure we're responding to the right problem. Putting band-aids on symptoms isn't going to slow this train-wreck we call Western industrial civilization down one whit.

Because one of the problems with planning solutions to global warming, which should more accurately be called catastrophic climate destabilization, is that if we believe that it's just about greenhouse gas emissions, our responses will be ineffective or incomplete, but most probably both.

Mainstream media and government leaders like to portray global warming as just a result of burning fossil fuels, or doing so in a way that is inefficient. While releasing millions of years worth of ancient sunlight in the space of a few hundred years is indeed a major aspect of the crisis we face today, we must examine the reason we think we must continue to burn fossil fuels, or find a way to replace fossil energy sources to maintain the status quo of global economic growth. However, it is also imperative that we fully connect the dots amongst a number of other inextricably intertwined phenomena.

There is the small but significant effect known as global dimming that stems from particulate pollution, which is partially masking the full effects of global warming. We have destruction of rainforests for rare woods, for cattle grazing, and for cropland for agrofuels. We're overfishing the oceans, as they simultaneously become more acidic from both warming and pollution which is destroying plankton, the very foundation of the global food chain. We continue to generate mountains of waste and think there is an "away" when we throw things away.

These each would constitute a crisis by themselves, and they are all brought on and exacerbated by overpopulation, overconsumption, and the holy grail of infinite economic growth.

We're constantly being told that any proposed replacement solutions for the growing demand for energy must meet the supposed requirement to not only cause no harm to the economy, but must stimulate further economic growth. We have forgotten that money can't buy happiness, all it can buy is anti-depressants.

Instead of facing up to what must be done, we're being handed science fiction Rube Goldberg schemes to put giant parasols in space to reflect the sun's rays, or other geo-engineering plans for the oceans and atmosphere such as "carbon capture and sequestration" (known as the kitty litter solution -- bury it and fervently pray it doesn't come back up) to allow fossil fuel based industries to continue on their merry way of profit-taking until we've used up the entire world's supply. Of everything. And in the meantime, don't dare put any competition in their way through investments in alternatives such as wind or solar, and definitely don't touch the billions in subsidies that dinosaur industries get. ExxonMobile now has a book value larger than France.

One of the things that brought anthropogenic (meaning human induced) global heating into the clearest perspective for me was the recent evidence that the last time the earth experienced a warming period of the same magnitude (approximately 6 degrees F) that we are currently on course for due to the buildup of greenhouse gases, it took about two thousand years to happen, and the only large land mammal to survive this was the ancestor of the pig. We are on course to pump even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere within about a 200 year timespan. Not much time to adapt.

However, we now have a convergence of crises, with more dots to connect. Burning all these fossil fuels has created global warming, which is exacerbated by the loss of forests due to the needs of an ever growing population. Burning coal to fuel power plants, in addition to the regular greenhouse gases, also emits large amounts of sulfur, which causes acid rain, which kills off more forests, as well as lakes, rivers, and the aquatic life they support. Plus all the easy to get to coal is gone, so mountain top removal is now the extraction method of choice, which devastates more large sections of forests. But, we need more forests in order to suck up at least some of all the excessive carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere from burning all these fossil fuels.

Another factor in the crises is the fact that we've now used up half of all the recoverable liquid fossil fuels, especially petroleum. This is the peak in global oil extraction and production, popularly known as Peak Oil. For the first half of the petroleum growth economy, the oil was easy to get and of high quality--what's known as light sweet crude. For the second half, which unfortunately won't even last the same 100 years, we're stuck with petroleum known as heavy sour crude--more difficult to extract and more expensive to refine--as well as the environmentally devastating tar sands and oil shale.

As a point of reference, in the 1950s for every barrel of oil equivalent in energy, 30 barrels of oil were produced. Today we only get 5 barrels of oil for every barrel of energy put in to the system. When this ratio drops to 1:1 it won't matter if gasoline is selling for $1,000/gal, it will no longer be used for an energy source. The laws of physics and economics will finally coincide.

It's also instructive to bear in mind that many of today's oil reservoirs are being over pumped in order to keep production as close as possible to current levels. This will lead to even earlier collapse of the fields due to geological factors. This is, however, a losing battle. As Dick Cheney pointed out in 1999, global demand for oil is climbing by 3% per year, while global production is falling by 2% per year. This is why most country's strategic petroleum reserves are now close to empty.

This brings us back to the global growth economy that is entirely dependent on increasing supplies of cheap and abundant fossil fuels in order to pay back, with interest, the debts of global corporations and governments to central banks. Things don't look good when the energy to power growth is becoming scarce and increasing in price. This relates directly to the obscene profit taking of the major oil companies today, and America's misadventure of illegally invading a sovereign country to lock up the third largest oil reserves on the planet.

A culture of materialism that has let itself become convinced that constant growth is necessary for prosperity and well-being sees the challenge as "how do we protect the economy?" Forget about the living earth. We're told that life simply won't be worth living if the Industrial Growth Society collapses. The media propaganda is that we've just gotta be able to drive our Hummers to the mall from our 10,000 sq. ft. McMansions in the suburbs to get our Twinkie fix. Twice a day.

Is it any wonder that heroin pushers are so successful? They have the best role models in the known universe to look up to and learn from, as well as being able to operate in a social climate of oppression and repression that is so conducive to their trade.

Let's conveniently ignore the inconvenient truth that the Industrial Growth Society is causing a decrease in every quality of life indicator imaginable. Just ignore increasing global poverty and a widening wealth gap, and definitely don't think about your increasing body burden as industrial toxins and pesticides bioaccumulate. Don't question central banker's right to usury, or that a growth economy requires you getting further in debt. Ignore the fact that about 50% of Americans require at least one prescription drug per day in order to either make it through their day or to be able to tolerate their day. Add in alcohol and other recreational drugs that are self-prescribed, and it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that this is a very sick, and very sad, culture. Modern psychiatry puts all of its effort into trying to make us feel sane about living in an insane world. But, as J. Krishnamurti famously pointed out, it is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

This is what we're trying to preserve? This is why we need to find a replacement energy source for toxic, polluting, and rapidly dwindling fossil fuels? Do any of you really believe that continued industrial activity of exploitation and domination would be just fine as long as the products it marketed were labeled as green?

How about a cultural shift from having more to being more? If one third of the global population can create all the stuff the entire population consumes, why aren't we all working two thirds less with full global employment, so we all could have the time to focus on what really matters? Powering down could very well be the best thing to ever happen to the human species and our poor beleaguered planet.

This is why I really prefer to talk about responses to catastrophic climate destabilization and its interconnected linkages instead of solutions. Solutions tend to make us think that as soon as we solve the problem we can just go back to business as usual.

A natural systems response would be one that is in keeping with the creative energies that have kept life evolving for billions of years. These energies are a natural, innate, intimate even, aspect of who we are as humans.

Natural systems solutions start with an understanding and acceptance of the four core principles that keep ecosystems healthy, vibrant and resilient--in other words, sustainable. These four principles are: mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. They are derived from the simple observation that the prime activity of living organisms is to self-organize for the creation of mutually supportive attraction relationships that support the web of life. Only in this way can an individual have any realistic hope of reaching its potential.

Natural systems principles also provide a foundation from which to develop a definition of sustainability that has environmental, moral, and scientifically measurable aspects.

The definition for sustainability is: integrating our social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain ecosystems rather than degrade or destroy them; a moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; finding, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation where watersheds and bioregions maintain their ability to recharge and regenerate.

This definition provides a framework for making decisions, is legally defensible, and can be used to measure our progress toward a sustainable future that is ecologically wise and socially just.

We can also observe that living organisms grow to a point of maturity, or steady-state, and then stop growing. But they do not become static. They continue to develop and better support their environment; the overall system advances to higher levels of complexity. The only thing that grows without stopping is a cancer cell that only stops when it has consumed its host. Thus, we can see that a growth economy defines the exact opposite of sustainability.

So the question for today becomes how can people easily embody this sustainable way of being? How can we build a culture with social institutions that are sustainable and reverse the trajectory of anthropogenic global heating?

Leading thinkers in the physical and social sciences say that at the root of our global crises today lies our disconnection from the natural world. We see ourselves as separate. We see the Earth as a resource we can control and use for our exclusive benefit, and more narrowly for the primary benefit of a small elite. We see nature as a wilderness to be tamed, and we apply this force-based mindset to subdue our own inner nature in order to become more efficient meat machines.

If the core of the systemic crises is our disconnection, then the most intelligent response would be to reconnect. This is what the field of ecopsychology works toward as it seeks to redefine sanity as if the whole Earth mattered. Nature is known to have numerous benefits for health and healing. It is, after all, the very source of our sustenance. Studies today show surgery patients heal faster if they are in a room that has a window that looks out on a natural area, crime is reduced in inner cities by planting trees along the sidewalks, prison gardens can reduce recidivism, and playtime in natural areas can reduce attention deficit and hyperactivity in children.

But the natural world is more than just a palliative. Going out and reconnecting to the natural world on rational, sensual, and spiritual levels isn't just a form of nature meditation in order to relieve the stress of the artificial industrial world. Nature supplies a source of answers for our questions in the models and metaphors it makes available to humans for their societies to become as sustainable as a climax ecosystem.

As natural systems principles show, it's all about relationships. Reconnecting with nature doesn't just mean the world outside your door, but also to the nature that exists in each person, to our sense of community that has evolved with a natural expectation for fulfillment, and to our own inner nature as well. Healthy relationships start with healing the mind/body/spirit split that dualistic, mechanistic, reductionistic modern science tries to make us think is normal.

The alternatives for what we can do differently become those that have been developed with natural systems as their basis, and this is what the process for becoming sustainable known as relocalization delivers.

The replacement systems for the status quo of infinite economic growth, resource extraction, and labor exploitation are steady-state economies, urban planning based on ecocity and permaculture design, bioregionally produced organic food, non-toxic goods, decentralized renewable energy, and waste management that stay within environmental and economic carrying capacity.

Among the things we can do differently are investing locally in the clean, zero-waste production of sustainable goods (instead of those built to be thrown away), build mutually supportive community relationships, overcome our separation from nature, and remember how to become more self-reliant within our bioregions. Instead of getting bigger, we must concentrate on getting better.

This is the hallmark of sustainable development through relocalization. We can become energy independent, restore ecosystems, and improve our quality of life at the same time as we work on reclaiming our sovereignty, our civil rights, and the commons.

The problem as I see it is what I call the Triumvirate of Collapse: Peak Oil, catastrophic climate destabilization, and corporatism which have their systemic roots in force-based dominator hierarchies. The only systemic, rational response, that also feels right, is to become truly sustainable by relocalizing our lifestyles and our communities, and reconnecting the human soul to its home in the soul of the Earth.

Doing What Comes Naturally: Responses to Systemic Crises

2007-12-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Global warming is becoming the rallying cry of many environmental and social justice organizations. As can be expected, they each insist that solving their particular issue is the best solution, or the best place to start, as we begin work to shift demand to renewable energy sources. None, however, mention reducing demand. Of course, we must also remember that these groups all find themselves firmly enmeshed in triage situations of a system that has become normalized; that we legitimize.

For example, a recent Oxfam e-mail action alert starts out by listing aspects of the dire situation global warming is creating; a particular species going extinct, disappearing ice caps, more destructive storms. Then they say what's missing from the global warming debate is the effect on the world's poor. And to a certain extent, that's very true.

However, it seems that what's really missing from the debate about global warming is questioning what the true underlying cause of this crisis is. Nor are the intimately interconnected aspects of the equally devastating crises of energy depletion, mass extinctions, overpopulation, and biospheric toxicity often mentioned. Of course, we can also throw all the deteriorating quality of life indicators into the mix as well as we contemplate what 'dire' really means.

Might there be some overlooked connections between global warming and poverty that run deeper than coastal flooding?

From nearly every vantage point, when you closely examine any of these crises, you quickly uncover one or more aspects of the excess of economic growth and exploitation, which provide the commonality for these issues through their requirement for a never ending quest for more producers, consumers and natural resources. The crises and their secondary manifestations all lay very close to the diseased root of materialism which encourages usury, celebrity status of financial wealth, and materialism's addictive substitution for psychological and spiritual health and well-being.

It's not just poor people, but the 90-95% of the world's population outside of the power and control structure who will, at least initially, suffer the brunt of any negative changes to the environment and to their livelihoods. Meanwhile, those at the top of the control hierarchy--the ruling elites in our Plutocracy (or more accurately, Kleptocracy)--hold fast to their fantasy of having security in troubled times because their credit rating assures them of acquiring the latest technologies. Technology is thought to meet the economic dictum of perfect substitutability.

We don't need poison free food, air, or water. We don't need fossil fuels for the Industrial Growth Society. Atmospheric carbon can increase to 550 PPM and the planet can warm six degrees... or even more. We've got technology!

I call this the techno-rapture. These are the people who will be the most devastated, by being the least aware of and prepared for, the consequences of business as usual.

Being honest about what the problem really is the necessary first step in formulating responses to these systemic crises that will be both effective and lasting.

Capitalism is a system that has failed--dangerously. Fortunately, there is an alternative that just happens to be both life affirming and capable of improving quality of life. The alternative is relocalized steady-state economies and embracing sustainability, especially its carrying capacity aspect. But this alternative is discounted by the system that is threatened by it. Centralized control and power over have no role in this alternative system. We are told any alternative to the status quo is unrealistic or worse, utopian. If this doesn't work to scare people away, we're warned that it's communist. Therefore, no meaningful discussion can take place, as it would be an idealistic or unpatriotic waste of time.

As the various social change groups lobby for change, they all point out the U.S. is the world's largest polluter. It's this abstract other that is the villain. But... the U.S. is us. You and me with our hybrid cars and our solar powered 10,000 sq. ft McMansions filled with our energy-star rated products that use more energy, like 42" plasma screen TVs, than their predecessors did. But, we assure ourselves that everything's really ok because we switched to compact fluorescents and we reuse our shopping bags. We've allowed the system to convince us that discrete individual actions to redecorate our staterooms as the ship of Western culture continues steaming toward the rocks is the best we can do.

What we must realize is that we can simultaneously work to alleviate the symptoms of dominator hierarchies and the economic cannibalism of unfettered free-markets--symptoms such as poverty, oppression, inequity, privatization (piratization) of the commons, and separation from the natural world, each other and our own inner nature--as we create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice.

Embracing a common goal of sustainability would lay the foundation for a democratic culture of peace. This would be in keeping with the life affirming principles of natural systems. It would, therefore, actually be easier than all the effort we're currently putting into maintaining and enhancing a system at odds with these principles. It wouldn't, however, increase GDP.

So, the first decision we must make as we grapple with what to do about global warming is: Which is more important, profit... or people and planet?

If we decide for the latter, let's see of we can agree on a foundation for a sustainable future.

A first point would be recognizing that a healthy ecosystem is the master of sustainability. It is the best place to examine the principles that create the mutually supportive relationships that keep an ecosystem healthy, vibrant, and resilient. Each organism has an abundance of opportunities to find fulfillment within carrying capacity constraints, which include being part of the food chain.

A second point is recognizing that humans come from the Earth. Whatever created natural systems principles used them to create us as well. We do, after all, have over half of our DNA in common with a banana. (And if this isn't cause for humility, I don't know what is.) We naturally embody the ability to be sustainable, and can look to healthy ecosystems for the models and metaphors we need to create sustainable lifestyles, organizations, and communities.

The best way I've found to express this is to start with the four core principles of natural systems: mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. These combine to keep an ecosystem sustainable. The prime activity of living systems in expressing these principles is to self-organize mutually supportive relationships that create more life. It must also be noted that living systems at all scales grow to maturity, and then continue to develop and contribute to keeping the system healthy and in harmony.

From this we can also develop a legally defensible definition of sustainability that has environmental, moral, and scientific aspects. The defense of this definition and what it means to human societies can be founded on a strong constitutional argument that is based in Supreme Court jurisprudence dating back to the beginning of the U.S. It protects property rights by providing a foundation to base property rights on. The definition I propose is:

Sustainability: integrating our social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain ecosystems rather than degrade or destroy them; a moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; finding, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation where watersheds and bioregions maintain their ability to recharge and regenerate.

If we can agree that the above points are reasonable, we can use them to start analyzing an issue like poverty from a fresh perspective.

We can start by removing the requirement for economic growth in any response developed. We should also take a close look at what human enterprise has made available to us. It's instructive to note that in the overall global economy, 1/3 of the population creates everything that is consumed on the entire planet. What this means is that we should all be working 2/3 less and have full global employment. Then we can start increasing this ratio even more by looking at increasing efficiency, environmental constraints, quality and craftsmanship, and doing away with throw-away consumerism by helping people discover and remember that being more fulfills in a way that having more never can.

We can quit running people off their land and provide the knowledge to plant and harvest a wide diversity of ecosystem adapted crops instead of a single luxury export crop that requires unsustainable inputs. We can make sure basic nutrition and medicine is available and reduce infant mortality and the need for large families. We can provide honest family planning education that is culture sensitive and return elders to their respected mentoring roles as valuable community members. We could very quickly stabilize global population and start allowing it to drop to a sustainable level, estimated by many to be about 2 billion.

None of this is particularly radical, it's all perfectly feasible, and there are functional examples of each aspect we can draw on. We have both the necessary wisdom and the technology available today. This has been the promise of science, technology, and religion all along. People will not turn into layabouts, but will gain the time to find the fulfillment they've been seeking instead of using shopping or sitting captive to mindless entertainment as a substitute.

The above factors would combine to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, decrease demand, increase personal security and satisfaction, and the need for war greatly diminishes or disappears. If people's natural expectations for fulfillment are being met, poverty would no longer be a symptom of a system seriously out of balance.

And of course all of the above is relevant in other contexts. Democracy advocates, some of whom express their goal as being the desire to experience democracy in their own lifetimes, will focus on an issue like campaign finance reform as being the cure. But this is just another symptom whose root is the same paradigm of domination as the other global crises. If activists of various stripes would concentrate on cooperating to change the root, using their prime issue of concern as a guide for their actions, the branches on the co-evolving tree of life would be different instead of coming out diseased in a different location on the trunk.

What this all comes down to is agreeing on a common goal--sustainability; guided by a set of values such as those in the Earth Charter--respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, nonviolence and peace; and developing a willingness, and accepting the responsibility, to become fully human.

It's in our nature to do so. It is a rational choice that also just happens to feel good.

There are numerous tools we can use on the journey to a sustainable future. A few of the effective ones include a process from applied ecopsychology, Dr. Michael Cohen's Natural Systems Thinking Process, that can both empower us and reconnect us to all aspects of nature--personal, social, and environmental. There's a project known as relocalization that provides a new blueprint for our social and economic development. The Green Party provides a political platform that deeply embodies these concepts. And there are a number of social studies that show widespread support is available and growing (Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson's Cultural Creatives), that rapid change is possible (Paulo Freire's work with illiteracy in indigenous tribes and Marian Diamond's work with enriched environments), and that a partnership society is both functional and provides a precedent for balanced cooperation between the natural world and human society (Riane Eisler's Partnership Way).

Let's get busy.

Goodbye Suburbia

2007-11-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

In a short piece on Gristmill, Joseph Romm thinks suburbia has a future, and that $280 a barrel oil won't impact the American way of life because we'll all just switch to plug-in hybrid vehicles so the effect on our pocketbooks will remain constant. In stating why Peak Oil won't destroy suburbia, Romm, and some of the online responses to his piece, displays a peculiar Western trait most often evidenced by K-12 textbook authors--the inability to think systemically; to connect the dots; the tendency to reduce complex sets of relationships to a single issue that is presented as independent and autonomous. Scientific reductionism to the rescue.

Peak Oil spells the end of suburbia because suburbia is entirely dependent on oil. Not just for the cars, but for the sprawl, strip malls, cheap and unnecessary goods, and cheap housing built on farmlands, wetlands, and desert ecologies for the worker bees as they flit back and forth to their low-wage no benefit service sector jobs and other shallow distractions from our near total disconnection from anything meaningful.

Thinking that hybrid vehicles present a solution to global warming ignores the fact that about 50% of the greenhouse gas contribution a vehicle makes during its lifetime occurs during the extraction of the resources and manufacturing for that vehicle. Peak Oil won't make only gasoline more expensive, but everything cheap oil makes possible such as the 1500 mile Caesar Salad grown on lands depleted of nutrients, and then packaged in plastics and smothered in creamy processed foodstuffs based on oil.

When the "green revolution" of agribusiness comes to an end, suburbs and the expressways that lead to them are going to have to return to farmland. A growth economy that is dependent on cheap energy will not continue functioning when oil is at $200-$300/barrel, unless money becomes completely valueless (although a good argument, based on international currency trading and derivatives markets, can be made that it already is).

Global warming (actually, catastrophic climate destabilization) isn't just from gasoline powered internal combustion engines. Another major contributor is loss and degradation of natural carbon sinks from sprawl, excessive consumption, and population overshoot. Driving electric cars to the suburbs will only put off the inevitable. Trying to power all the vehicles we assume we need to maintain the charade of affluence and independence with cellulosic agro-fuels will most likely speed up the overall process of the demise of the American lifestyle.

The rise in the price of oil is a reflection of one thing--it is a finite natural resource that is on the downward slope of its depletion curve. This is the point at which it is very important to become aware of and to understand the difference between environmental economics--the greening of orthodox growth economics where technology can substitute for energy--and ecological economics, which looks at the whole system; its interrelationships and carrying capacity; and ways to continue improving once the steady-state of maturity is reached.

I mean, what we're talking about here is the possible end of life as we know it, or in the more optimistic scenarios, merely the collapse of what is known as Western civilization. Who honestly thinks suburbia is going to survive 1) the imminent collapse of a growth economy that is based on cheap and abundant fossil fuels, 2) a two-thirds human population reduction to the sustainable global limit of about 2 billion, and 3) the mass migration of the majority of that population into habitable areas as changes unfold from catastrophic climate destabilization that are on track to occur even if tomorrow we stop all greenhouse gas emissions, razing the rain forests, and polluting our air and water? When you combine the rational, emotional, and spiritual evidence for the shape we and our planet are in, the worship of material consumption, mammonism, and domination isn't a system that's worth protecting and preserving.

It also must be pointed out that neither "greenness" nor quality of life in the built environment is solely a function of density (you may freely substitute market or production efficiences here). While it may be that big cities such as New York have access to a greater number of natural history museums, zoos and aquariums, teaching about nature is not functionally equivalent to being in nature. We've long known this to be qualitatively true, and it can now be shown to be quantitatively so on a number of indicators as well. The economic principle of perfect substitutability doesn't hold any better here than on thinking that technology can substitute for energy. And of course, there are all the studies of the negative physical, mental, and environmental health effects of overcrowding.

The conversation we all need to be having is the best and quickest way to put an alternative in place that improves quality of life and provides expanded opportunities and support to develop one's potential. A system in which we create the quality goods that we need (not manufactured need or throw-away goods), within carrying capacity limitations (not the myth of infinite abundance), and have the time to enjoy and benefit from them (not working two jobs to pay off credit card debt).

The pieces of this alternative already exist, we don't have to wait for a techno-miracle. They include powering down, relocalizing, and overcoming our disconnection from the natural world, each other, and our own inner nature. It involves shifting our mindset from having more to being more. It involves giving up the unfounded assumption that economic growth is necessary for prosperity and that we can consume the entire planet with no ill effects if we call it "green." It involves working with the creative energies of life in building mutually supportive, responsible relationships.

This is the direction we would head if we were to allow our rationality to be fully informed by our emotions and spirit. We could press our intelligence into service and admit that reverse is the proper gear to select when you're going the wrong way down a narrowing path.

Common roots and a systemic solution

2007-09-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

A recent posting on Gristmill

"Brit's Eye View: Are we too obsessed with climate change?" by Peter Madden concerned the worry that by concentrating on global warming (what I call catastrophic climate destabilization) we risk the danger of ignoring other urgent environmental concerns. By only looking at long-range targets for the year 2030 or 2050, we can overlook what needs to be taken care of today or next week. While global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism, government and big business think that if they just concentrate on going low-carbon, everything will be fine.

An online comment by Fergus Brown to this story made some excellent points as well. There is a tendency in the media to conflate global warming with environmental problems, to think that every environmental problem is due to global warming, and that solving global warming will cure all environmental ills. There is a growing backlash among people tired of hearing every problem being blamed on global warming. This creates a particular problem of global warming denialists being able to simultaneously marginalize or brush-off other environmental problems.

That global warming gets conflated with other environmental problems does make sense, but not for the reasons given. These problems are all the direct outcome of a cultural paradigm that is disconnected; that sees nature as an "other" to be exploited for personal benefit just as the affluent North does with what it considers to be third-world countries. Global warming and all other environmental problems are really a problem with human attitudes; with a lack of restraint in both human population and consumption; with the reliance on addictive substitutes for the natural fulfillments available in abundance for any species that stays within the carrying capacity of its ecosystem; with focusing all of our energy on competition and destruction instead of cooperation and creation. This is a choice for humans, it is not a hard-wired immutable natural principle.

The solutions to global warming and other environmental tragedies are one and the same. Quit overconsuming the Earth's limited resources and quit using the biosphere as a waste receptacle. Remember that the prime activity of all other living organisms is to self-organize in the creation of mutually supportive relationships that support the web of life in creating and sustaining more life. Remember that the same principles that create a sustainable ecosystem are an intimate aspect of who we are, and that if we are to ever have any hope of reaching our potential as individuals and as a species, we had best start acting like it. We must think and act the way nature works.

There is not just a problem with focusing on global warming to the exclusion of other environmental problems. There is a meta-problem with focusing on applying band-aids to symptoms of a culture out of balance--that has disconnected its relationships with the natural world, with each other, and with our own inner nature. As Paul Cienfuego of Democracy Unlimited points out, we must quit clipping branches and start digging up the roots.

This, of course, makes the proponents of growth economies very squeamish. By taking every proposed solution to global warming, other environmental problems, the energy crisis, etc., off the table if the solutions don't, first and foremost, protect economic growth, they ensure that the problems will remain intractable. Proponents of the status quo (the sycophants of free-market capitalism and its practice of economic cannibalism) reverse all the relationships they haven't severed. Profit is put above people and planet. However, nature neither produces waste nor grows beyond maturity. As Edward Abbey said, infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. We have been aware of the implications of what we're doing for a long time, e.g. Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" in 1949, and John Storer's "The Web of Life" in 1953.

Of course, once one reaches these inescapable conclusions, what is the actual process to implement these solutions? What is the alternative to the status quo that we're constantly told either doesn't exist or is utopian and thus unrealistic? The only systemic solution--the one that addresses the common roots of systemic collapse and can improve quality of life as well--that I'm aware of is to relocalize our communities with steady-state economies and reconnect all of our senses to their roots in the natural world.

Economic growth vs. a living planet

2007-08-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of interesting items lit up my screen over the weekend. The first is yet another piece of evidence that the global economy that we all tend to assume will continue providing net benefits to society is a chimera. There is no fundamental reality propping it up. What props it up is fairy dust that manifests itself from central bank controlled printing presses and accounting ledgers.

What this means is that if your life, indeed your entire sense of identity, is dependent on the stage props built by global financial markets, your life could descend into total chaos--become entirely meaningless and without sense of purpose--any day now. A true sense of humanity, however, requires quite a bit more than a growing bank balance, and this is what we must start working on recovering.

Central Banks Add Cash to Avert Crisis of Confidence

10 Aug 2007

"Central banks in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada added about $136 billion to the banking system in an attempt to avert a crisis of confidence in global credit markets.

"The Federal Reserve, in a second day of action in concert with the European Central Bank, provided $38 billion of reserves and pledged more ``as necessary,'' in a statement unprecedented since after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Full Article

Another interesting item from the above article is that American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. this week became the country's second-biggest home lender to file for bankruptcy. The increase in greed fuelled by the sub-prime market is coming home to roost.

The second item provides part of the answer to "How did this all come to be?"

Rachel's Democracy & Health News #919, Aug. 9, 2007

TWO RULES FOR DECISIONS: TRUST IN ECONOMIC GROWTH VS. PRECAUTION

By Joseph H. Guth

Guth, who is a biochemist (PhD) and Legal Director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, points out a very important, but often overlooked or understated assumption in the underlying economic paradigm--that growth is good. The assumption is that economic growth provides net social benefits.

There's only one way this assumption can work, though. Human and environmental damage is discounted, and the unequal distribution of benefits is ignored. If the economic benefits that accrue to a small handful of people can be shown on a spreadsheet to be larger than the costs to a much larger but devalued group, then destruction and degradation of our common life support system is said to fall within the acceptable parameters of a cost benefit analysis. Not only is everything "good," but there is a net benefit to society. If ten million people die, but ten people make a billion dollars each, this is a net benefit to society.

Within the current system, the burden of proof lies on those wanting to show that the costs (which are undervalued) outweigh the benefits (which are overvalued). This makes proof difficult because the equation is unfairly lopsided from the start.

Guth's article doesn't address the inherent inequity of the variables used in the equation, but uses the precautionary principle to present one way in which we can at least begin to rewrite the equation. He also presents a good analysis of what is known as "sound science" and how industry uses it to its advantage in order to game the system.

Taken together, the two articles I've referred to above point to the pressing need to relocalize our economies, and to do so in a manner in which people and planet are valued more highly than profits. This leads directly to the pressing need to return corporations to the role of serving as a tool for creating social good, instead of acting as the arbiters of control and value at the top of a hierarchy of self-described elites.

Once again, it's just a story that we all provide the legitimacy for, and it's up to us to re-write the story.

Dealing with the Plastic Plague

2007-05-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

To respond to a recent post to an ecopsychology list I subscribe to, I wrote the following. I also highly recommend the article the original post is referring to.

> This is a most disturbing link. Sometimes, I just feel hopeless. I
> don't see how we will ever cleanup our disgusting messes on earth.
>
Our oceans are turning into plastic... are we?
>
> any encouraging thoughts out there on this horrible matter?

First, if you'd like more info on this, although the important parts are in this article, search the culturechange.org website for "plastic plague" (the main article to read is Plastics: Your Formidable Enemy) where you'll also find a link to an excellent documentary on this subject the Algalita Foundation put out called "Our Synthetic Sea," as well as some things you can do about it.

As Jan Lundberg of CultureChange says, "The time is over for more research as a substitute for decisive action, and it is everyday citizens who need to carry it out immediately."

Cities like San Francisco are starting to institute plastic bag bans and taxes, and one of the best things to do is to start removing plastic from your life.

But one of the main things to do, in my opinion, is that once you come to the following realization yourself, is to become almost militant (but in a compassionate manner) about spreading the word that the American way of life is an unmitigated catastrophe. Not only is it toxic, but it is shallow and meaningless. Not only is it disconnected from all the things that really matter in order to have a fulfilling life, but it is destroying life and possibilities for the continuation of life.

People don't like to allow themselves to feel this, and can numb the fact that they are living a catastrophe as long as the oil, fast food, entertainment, and Prozac holds out. They don't want to feel this so they keep themselves very busy trying to look good and be materially successful so neither they nor anyone else notices how empty the American way of life actually feels.

So, help awaken people from the consensus trance. Find the unique ingredients for the red pill your family, friends, and neighbors need. We don't need to wait for a catastrophe to occur for a shift in consciousness to gain the mass momentum to create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice; all we have to do is pay attention to see that we are already surrounded by catastrophe.

And once you come to this realization, also realize that since humans have created the current situation, humans are also empowered to do something about it. Do not let yourself fall into despair. Let yourself deeply feel the catastrophe and let this feeling fuel your sense of righteous indignation and motivate your actions. Everything we do and believe in is based on a choice, whether we consciously articulate it or not.

A concrete action people could do is to come together to create a groundswell of support to force government to reclaim its duty to protect the commons and to revoke the corporate charters of companies who aren't serving the public good. And every company who makes products or who depends on materials that destroy our health and the planet we depend on for our sustenance falls into this category.

Spread the memes that the cure for breast cancer is shutting down Dow Chemical. The health of the economy cannot be allowed to take precedence over the health of people and planet. Convenience is not a substitute for life.

Setting Priorities: Preserving Lifestyle Choices or Life?

2007-03-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

A recent e-mail action alert from Environmental Defense focused on cars and global warming, calling for support for a campaign to reduce the contribution to greenhouse gases made by automobiles. This campaign spanned the spectrum from urging car companies to make less polluting vehicles, to personal actions to keep one's car running at peak efficiency, and thus be less polluting.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has jumped on this bandwagon as well. They recently argued in their Earth Action Bulletin that some of the most important considerations for raising fuel economy standards are that they're the least expensive way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and they'll
"giv[e] consumers lasting relief at the pump." This logic is used to support the claim that less financial impact and less pollution will help "break our addiction to oil," when just the opposite is more likely.

There are transition strategies toward a sustainable future that people can, and should, undertake. But we need to be honest about the future we're heading into, and what it's likely to look like. Let's take the case of the automobile. As in so many other cases today, the big concern seems to be how can we make something that is inherently unsustainable appear as if it is, especially without dealing with directly connecting issues, such as overpopulation and our addiction to a doomsday economy.

While we're on this honesty kick, let's also admit that biofuels are nothing more than the methadone for fossil fuel addicts.

Suburban sprawl contributes as much to catastrophic climate destabilization as the automobile does. Loss of farm and forest land are the most obvious effects, but personal loss of time and well-being are also major factors. Even plug in hybrids--let alone fully electric cars--aren't going to be much of a solution if all of the productive farmland that's left is paved over with more and wider roads running between McMansions in the foothills and big box stores and their parking lots.

Cars do make a major contribution to catastrophic climate destabilization, and for the immediate future we're stuck with them for the most part while relocalization efforts start taking place. And we should do things such as keep them properly tuned and the tires properly inflated, cut down on idling time, and start making a very conscious effort to eliminate unnecessary trips. But replacing your car with a new hybrid isn't going to actually do a whole lot, when you realize that about 50% of the contribution to catastrophic climate destabilization a vehicle makes is during the extraction of the raw materials and its manufacture.

We must start creating living patterns that aren't auto dependent. We need to shift from cars to mass transit for the majority of our transportation needs that can't be met by bicycles or on foot, which in a properly designed and built city are going to be pretty minimal. So, instead of putting our efforts into lobbying for a 3% increase in CAFE standards, which does absolutely nothing to challenge or change the status quo, we need to be lobbying for rebuilt urban cores and better mass transit systems.

And, there's no escaping the fact that we must also simultaneously begin the educational efforts required to address the overpopulation issue and the cultural myth that having more is a better path to fulfillment than being more.

If the actual desire is to do something about catastrophic climate destabilization, let's get serious about it, and demand our policymakers do likewise. There's too little time left to continue applying band-aids to symptoms.

The NRDC wants people to believe that techno-fixes and regulatory wizardry will allow us to continue on our merry way "without sacrificing ... lifestyle choices."

I guess sacrificing life is of no concern, as it might not be the least expensive option.

Carbon Caps or Lifestyle Caps?

2007-03-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

A recent editorial in the New York Times talked about the need for mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, pollution taxes, carbon credits, and the search for promising technologies that could mitigate global warming with only minimal harm to the economy at worst. Articles concerning personal changes one can make that meet these goals are showing up with increasing frequency as well.

You know, buy different types of new lightbulbs, a different kind of new car, and buy carbon offsets as a new type of gift.

This ruse of putting the brunt of the blame, and the burden of responsibility, on American consumers for America's 25% contribution to the anthropogenic causes of global warming is also becoming increasingly common.

Yes, Americans are addicted to oil.

But let's not forget that addicts need a pusher. Who are the pushers that feed this addiction to oil that energizes the culture of materialism? Who constantly entice more addicts, starting their dependency campaigns while youth are still in the crib? Who are these pushers who are actually even more addicted themselves to the power (in every sense imaginable) that can be derived from fossil fuels?

The answer to these questions should be obvious. It's industrialists and their immediate masters in the global banking cartels. It's the adherents to the holy grail of a growth economy. How convenient that the mainstream media never mentions the role of these elite sects in either the crisis or their responsibility to deal with it.

Change does need to begin from where we are. Currently people have been hoodwinked into valuing money more than life. So putting a price on pollution, toxicity, radiation, deforestation, greenhouse gas production, etc. and so on is a good place to start for a transition strategy toward a sustainable future. This should cause people to start honestly examining what it is in their lives that is truly valuable and gives their lives meaning and purpose.

If we also start to articulate the viable alternative of relocalization, and its very real possibility of increasing quality of life, we can also inspire and motivate people into helping build this necessary alternative that values those things that really matter. People will discover the increased well-being--and even the status and respect that can be gained--from being a responsibly contributing member of the web of life.

Then we can get to the question the mainstream continues to studiously avoid asking.

Is it really new technologies and market-based schemes that we need, or a new way of relating to and being in the world?

The Systemic Core of Sustainable Change

2006-12-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Not only do we need to understand dominator/taker culture, but its tendrils; how they affect us, and be honest with ourselves about the myriad ways we're complicit without assigning blame or wallowing in guilt; what our true strengths are to oppose it, and the tools at our disposal to undertake the process of change/making new choices; and the benefits that are possible from a partnership/leaver culture we can develop through our abilities and responsibilities as living organisms to self-organize and create, maintain and enhance mutually supportive attraction relationships that work with the cooperative, compassionate, and nurturing energies of the creative life force.

As change agents, we must lay out the roadmap, or framework, for change for all nodes in the web of life, and evaluate decisions and choices on whether or not they are congruent with the natural systems principles that lead to a healthy, vibrant, resilient ecosystem's sustainability.

To achieve this requires agreement on 1) the overall goal, which I submit is sustainabiltiy; 2) the process with which to achieve it, which I submit is relocalization; and 3) the values we share that uphold and quide this vision and mission, which I submit are contained in the Earth Charter--the international people's declaration of interdependence.

Here are the definitions used in the above.

Dominator Paradigm - ranking hierarchies of control based on force, fear, and the threat of force - exploitive, competitive, aggressive, destructive - selfish individualism where the other (nature, people, culture) is inferior and to be used to one's own advantage

Partnership Paradigm - networks of mutuality based on trust - nurturing, cooperative, compassionate, creative - relationships, community, actualization of potentialities through interconnectedness

Natural Systems Principles - mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity

Sustainability - the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation within a systems' rate of regeneration and recharge; holistic integration of society and economics into environment so as to enhance rather than degrade; a moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance to future generations, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations

Relocalization - a return to local autonomy within bioregional self-relience - production and distribution of renewable and non-toxic goods and services as close to point of consumption as possible - global growth economy based on increasing supplies of cheap and abundant fossil fuels will be replaced by steady-state local living economies - interdependent eco-cities not built on automobile dependent sprawl

Earth Charter Values - respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; democracy, nonviolence, and peace

Carbon Trading, Caps, and Offsets--another market driven scam?

2006-12-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

There's a "green" gift suggestion making the rounds this holiday season that's touted to be a way of making a difference. Called carbon offsetting, it's a way of contributing to renewable energy in an amount equal to how much carbon you contribute yearly to global warming.

So, I have a question. Does carbon offsetting actually do anything besides assuage a little guilt about killing the planet? I mean, look at the term they chose for this scheme. Offset, not reduce or stop.

It seems to me to be at best an attempt at payoff, or little more than a financial incentive to continue supporting destruction, but I'm sure there must be something more to it than that, at least from all the hype it's getting from mainstream (large and well-funded) environmental organizations.

One of the better explanations--from the advocacy point of view--of what carbon offsetting or becoming carbon neutral means, as well as some of its promises and rationalizations, comes from the website of someone who's passion and commitment to a healthy environment as well as for social justice is both well known and respected, Dr. David Suzuki.

Let's examine a few of the salient points from www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/What_You_Can_Do/carbon_offsets.asp

"A "carbon offset" is an emission reduction credit from another organization's project that results in less carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than would otherwise occur."

Ok, let's see... Plant A doesn't do something, which allows Plant B to do it instead, there is a transference of money accompanying this agreement, and this is supposed to be an offset of overall harm to the system on which life depends for its support?

"The buyers of the offsets benefit because they can claim that their purchase resulted in new non-polluting energy, which they can use to mitigate their own greenhouse gas emissions. The buyers may also save money as it may be less expensive for them to purchase offsets than to eliminate their own emissions."

Isn't all we're actually accomplishing with this scheme slowing down the overall rate of increase? And once again, money wins out over environment. You can abuse me in any way you want, just give me enough money to make the payments on my hottub and Hummer. And this is supposed to be a "principled" stance for the environmental movement? Did they skip the same ethics class most business majors do?

When are people going to realize that you don't compromise with evil? Less bad is not good. It still leads to systemic collapse, thus is not sustainable, and is the one option that really does need to be removed from the table.

"[S]elling offsets from tree planting projects is particularly problematic for a number of reasons, including their lack of permanence and the fact that these projects do not address our dependence on fossil fuels."

What they also don't address is our underlying addiction to consumer society and blind faith in the myth of infinite growth.

"Significantly, only offsets from energy efficiency and renewable energy projects qualify for the Gold Standard, as these projects encourage a shift away from fossil fuel use and carry inherently low environmental risks. Tree planting projects are explicitly excluded by The Gold Standard."

Translation: We've even invented a standard to ensure you that as little as possible happens to seriously challenge the status quo. The one activity that doesn't generate any income for polluters is excluded

"Gold Standard projects must meet very high additionality criteria to ensure that they contribute to the adoption of additional sustainable energy projects, rather than simply funding existing projects. The Gold Standard also includes social indicators to ensure the offset project contributes to sustainable development goals in the country where the project is based."

Here's a part that actually does make sense, and I think why so many people buy into the rest of the story, and not bother searching for alternatives to the initial creation of whatever harmful product is under consideration.

Net energy use must decrease, and the efficiency of the decreased use must increase. The confounding variables in this equation are excess consumption, excess population, and excess greed--not topics of conversation in polite company, and especially not the incestuous relationships amongst these variables. A techno-fix or accounting sleight-of-hand is much more palatable in maintaining the grand illusion of the consensus trance.

"Finally, all Gold Standard projects have been independently verified by a third party to ensure integrity."

Oh, great... and by someone with the sterling reputation, say, of Arthur Anderson, Inc.?

Ok, in all fairness to our cultural loss of the ability to think systemically, a lot of good people buy into the theory behind carbon trading schemes, and they do so because they truly care about the plight of the planet and a future that is at least livable by humans. It does make sense, in a very limited way, to attempt to curtail our addictions to all the stuff that pumps excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by shifting some of our dollars to industries that don't pollute as much on the assumption these industries wouldn't exist at all without at least this level of support, and the pollution from the old industries at least won't be increasing... or hopefully at least not at the same rate, anyway.

However, let's face it, this is the typical behavior of addicts. We'll get off heroin, just give us the methadone.

I mean... do the math while considering the whole system. With increasing demand, there is no net decrease in either natural destruction and resource depletion, nor to human exploitation. CO2 may (or may not) decrease at a specific site, while methane, nitrogen, and sulphur may increase somewhere else (hopefully in a different country so it's easier to ignore). Regardless, deforestation and oceanic deadzones keep increasing, glaciers keep disappearing, and Prozac profits just keep rolling in.

I think I'm going to add the following to a hot-key sequence, I find myself using it so often anymore: Wakey wakey, boys and girls! It's time to take the red pill and cast off the consensus trance!

You really don't have anything to lose but choking to death on your own vomit.

This might not be the prettiest picture imaginable, but try honestly imagining the alternative of not doing so.

Proponents of the various carbon schemes, which include "cap and trade" (cap but not reduce their "right" to pollute) then respond that no, a carbon offset establishes the fact that there is a cost to carbon pollution. Once it is in place the market will establish a true value to that pollution.

Well, yeah, that's pretty much what I said above. If you have enough money, we're willing to let you destroy the planet in any manner you please. The only factor that warrants consideration is the economic one. This is even reflected in the way proponents phrase it--the value of pollution.

Now, I do understand that we do need to shift investment to clean and renewable energy sources. I just don't see any way of escaping the fact that carbon offsets are a way of attempting to work within an inherently destructive and exploitive system. This is one of those inconvenient truths.

What would make more sense to me is to simply tax carbon out of existence, as well as the advertising that supports materialism, and put the money into quality of life initiatives that meet the goals of a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice.

I think there are many avenues this could take, but first we must come to a social agreement that this is the goal and on how we intend to measure progress toward this goal. This would both tone down the posturing, and more easily illuminate spin.

Are we going to continue pursuing the structural inequity, with nothing but a promise of a better tomorrow, from the Industrial Growth Society, or are we going to power-down and learn to maximize our potential within the biosphere's carrying capacity?

When an activity displays a bias toward harm, do we curtail the activity, or simply decide that paying off the victims still keeps the profit margins at an acceptable level?

While proponents of the carbon schemes will admit the concern about giving polluters an option to merely pay for what they are doing as they keep on polluting is valid, they then try to qualify their support by saying it will take time to make a transition from fossil fuel to renewable resources, and they see the polluters as those who will subsidize this transition.

I don't buy this rationalization at all, however. It's been pretty widely reported that conservation would save about 25-50% of energy use. Decentralizing the national grid would save about 50%. Not producing so much needless crap would save an unimaginable percentage. The only thing the transition scenario supports, knowing or not, is the time to shift elite control structures without losing their grip on power by continuing to propagate the myth that growth is necessary for prosperity and well-being. What they're really trying to protect, however, is the myth that elite control, based on one or another permutation of divine right (like eugenics), is really in the best interests of the "masses."

It seems that the aspects of an equitable and sustainable culture that we should be talking about are restoring community, creating walkable cities, building stuff to last and be repairable, restoring pride in craftsmanship, and shifting status and value to how much one contributes to society instead of how much one can accumulate from it. Plus, as numerous climate and energy experts state, we don't have the luxury of time to create a long transition strategy.

And not to be facetious, but it seems to me that a shift to a sustainable future could be done--it is within the realm of physical possibility and violates no known natural laws--to create this shift today with no harm to anyone but central bankers and insurance brokers.

Of course, when I made this point in a recent on-line conversation, one immediate response was that without central bankers and insurance brokers there is no research and development, no innovation.

To which I replied, more than a little incredulously, who funded the wheel? Pottery and glazing? Agriculture and plant hybridization?

Humans, after all, are creative, if nothing else. Banking actually stifles innovation, because only the innovation that benefits the banks gets funded. If it doesn't further or support the industrial growth paradigm, and provide a decent return on investment, it is neither fundable nor insurable.

This line of argument is similar to stating that if it weren't for the Patent and Trademark Office, none of these technologies would have occurred. This is also like the theory subscribed to by Pentagon planners, who assume aggression and competition are both natural and necessary for innovation, which is then used to justify the existence of a military because there will never be peace if we want to have human advancement. What this all is is patent nonsense.

I was, after all, being facetious--at least a little bit. My point was to bring to light but one of the many layers of social deadwood that have managed to create a story that we provide the legitimacy for.

The argument was also made that it seemed disingenuous to use a technology such as the Internet, which was funded by bankers to promote a shift in society that only harms bankers and insurance brokers.

As opposed, say, to a system that harms everyone else and the planet they depend on? And let's be real. The only harm it is going to do them might be a bit of job retraining and the need to re-evaluate their sense of self-worth.

Please consider, what real goods, necessary for the continuation of life, do bankers and insurance brokers actually provide?

Might the necessity and funding arguments be related to a general confusion in the public between appropriate technologies and appropriate use of technnology?

Rather than relying on the manipulation of fear and scarcity, don't you think we could come up with a better way to meet our needs and evolve our culture? We are, after all, supposed to be intelligent, rational creatures with the freedom of choice.

Of course solar, wind, and other alternative yet to be available on the shelf need investment; many people want to do something; and most of them would rather not have it resemble rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

And I'm of this mindset as well. But I keep thinking that our efforts will be best spent if directed. Stopping global warming is not a direction, it is a response, necessary as it may be.

It seems to me that we (the environmental and social justice movements) find ourselves in the situation common to high school youth, who when bored, say "let's just do something, even if it's wrong."

To have a direction implies a goal. If we were all to simply agree that sustainability is the goal, and use something like the Earth Charter for our common, shared values and to provide a framework for sustainable development, then we have a yardstick by which to measure progress and with which to evaluate proposals as to whether or not they further us along the path to the goal, or whether they're just holding measures that do little to nothing to address the cause of the problem we find ourselves faced with.

I'm of the opinion that we don't have the time for holding measures, and that a viable alternative is available that requires neither a techno-miracle nor a savior. It also happens to increase numerous indicators of what most people consider to be quality of life.

The alternative that can create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom and social justice is the process of relocalization based on the natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. These are the principles that keep an ecosystem healthy, vibrant, and resilient. Since these same principles created us--they are a natural part of who we are--it makes sense to me to apply our intelligence to ways we can benefit from these principles in our lifestyles and communities.

But instead, we exert all this energy going through all these extremely convoluted rationalizations to justify a social system based on greed, aggression, domination, and competition, none of which actually contribute to the creation of life. The best that can be said for any of them is that they may temporarily maintain an individual life, and generally at great cost.

Anyway, that was quite the detour to get back to the various carbon trading schemes, and the need to start a conversation about the fact that the pollution economy is the path to imminent ecocide, we need to knock it off instead of financially rewarding it, and we need to start creating things in a new way--a way that's in balance with natural systems and that honors the intrinsic value of life.

Does economic analysis run your life?

2006-12-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments being used against solar installations on homes and businesses is that from an economic perspective, photovoltaics stink, even when partially subsidized by local utility companies, because the payback period is so long.

If economics were the only thing that really mattered, this argument might hold water, but it ignores what's actually going on in the world today and their interconnections. The global growth economy is a completely fabricated reductionistic fantasy--the only things that are growing are sprawl, destruction, and the printing presses that create the money. It's no longer a question of if it will collapse, but how soon and how spectacularly.

On the energy front, Peak Oil is here today. It will most likely be possible to stretch the plateau out for a bit longer, but this just makes the eventual descent even steeper. There goes our plastic throw-away economy--everything from iPods to the elastic in your underwear.

Catastrophic climate destabilization is also here today. When people finally arouse themselves from the stupor of the consensus trance, coal fired power generation will be a thing of the past. Even if a technological miracle were to occur so coal could be burned "cleanly" and not just be a bit less polluting, the only way to get the quantity of coal at the rate necessary to continue powering the doomsday economy of the Industrial Growth Society is through mountaintop removal, and that is simply not worth the environmental and human suffering it creates.

Nuclear is a chimera. Processing all the concrete necessary for a reactor is energy intensive and polluting, uranium mining is environmentally devastating and toxic to life, core safety and decomissioning are still problematic, and a safe method of handling the waste is still a pipe dream. 50,000 year (or even 500 year) deadzones so people can run their hair dryers? I don't think so.

This leaves solar, wind, and hydro, which all have drawbacks as well, but these drawbacks are mainly related to the fact that our beleaguered planet is vastly overpopulated and much of this population is either already addicted to overconsumption in order to make up for loss of natural fulfillment, or clamoring to get to this point.

But currently available renewables also represent our best hope of creating a sustainable future. They allow people and communities to regain control of their lives, their well-being, and their economic destiny. Being asked to consider an economic payback of 15 years on a solar installation is a total red-herring when basic survival over the next 5 years is what we should be considering. This means a whole lot of rebuilding and retrofitting, combined with redevelopment of city design on a more human scale instead of being totally automobile dependent.

Of course, the vast majority of people still go into full tilt denial mode when asked to consider the bigger picture.

Energy descent will be combined with increased energy efficiency and energy conservation, of that there can be little doubt. One very radical suggestion would be to tax at about a 90% rate the profits of the pollution economy and use that to invest in renewables, efficiency, and sustainable development within relocalized steady-state economies. This would take the onus off the individual and put it square in the realm of the polis--used in the original Greek meaning of the term.

In all the schemes I've evaluated, the only one that continues to make long-term sense, for both the human species and the planet, is one where people generate the majority of their energy needs at the home, business, and neighborhood levels, with a community or regional utility picking up the slack. This also requires a global population about 2/3rds smaller than it is today, with about half of this population involved in some aspect of biointensive organic food production using permaculture techniques. This social and economic system will stay within bioregional carrying capacity limits, as well as be administered by democratic confederations within these same bioregional boundaries.

Or, we'll continue to elect maniacs on the national stage who will continue to promise a better tomorrow just as soon as we exterminate an "other" who is keeping us from this better tomorrow. In the meantime, we'll continue to drive the SUV to MacDonalds on the way to the Mall to buy plastic closet organizers, where the biggest hill that land yacht is ever going to see are the speed-bumps in the parking lot.

As always, it comes down to choices. Which story do we decide to put our faith in? Which one not only feels right to you, but makes the most rational sense? Which one seems to be in alignment with the way natural systems have been self-organizing mutually beneficial attraction relationships that have supported life for billions of years?

Speedbumps on the road to sustainability

2006-12-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

I'm just semi-randomly posting stuff I've written in the past few months to kinda lay a foundation for where I see changes occuring and the evidence I use to come to some of these conclusions. When it has no known basis in fact, I'll try to point this out. Usually.

Yesterday was three articles I'd written immediately after the 2006 mid-term elections. I needed something to fill some space as I was getting the blog setup and seeing how it looked.

I was originally thinking about calling this blog "Goring Sacred Cows: More Inconvenient Truths," but decided it would be way too limiting, as well as not really expressing the positive and creative focus I like to take on where we direct our effort, and on what do we base our choices. But it's going to be a recurring theme as we can't continue making bad decisions, and especially bad decisions that involve little more than making more money. Let's be honest about the sorry state this mindset has gotten us into and what a more rational and sensual alternative might get us.

And then let's just do it. It's all just a story that we believe in, and we can not only choose the interpretation of the story, we can choose an entirely different story as well.

Originally written in October, 2006, here's one in a set of Goring Sacred Cows: More Inconvenient Truths

Speedbumps on the road to sustainability

One of the biggest uphill battles in the quest for sustainability is going to be getting the "progressive" sector of the population to come to grips with their complicity in sustaining the doomsday economy and its voraciously expanding military budget. The denial that runs rampant, not just in the "limousine liberal" set, but with middle-class Democrats and Republicans, is more deep-seated and entrenched than anything you'll find at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

While it's true that you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and that beating people over the head with the coercive emotional forces of fear and guilt will only produce resentment and defensive rigidity, getting help in overcoming one's addictions starts with admitting you have a problem. This entails becoming aware of the consequences, both personal and social, of daily lifestyle choices before healthier alternatives can be evaluated. One reason this admission may be so difficult is because so many Americans interact with daily life through a Prozac haze. The latest figures show that about 50% of Americans take at least one prescription drug daily, and 20% take three or more. When you add in alcohol and other recreational drugs that are self- prescribed, somewhere between 70-80% of Americans desperately need some type of chemical salve to either make it through their day or to be able to tolerate their day.

I once ran an ad for my non-profit's counseling services announcing the creation of a consumer's support group to help overcome the addiction to materialism and actually got a few calls, but no one followed through. It is more of a taboo subject than what gets classified as sexual deviancy. It seems most people would rather talk about why they masturbate than why they continue to drive the mini-van to the mall.

That the materialistic and mechanized mindset of Western Civilization's Industrial Growth Society is a root cause of systemic problems is something that even many social and environmental justice non-profits don't want to deal with. This first became apparent to me about five years ago. Our non-profit was invited to participate in an educational fair. A large regional mall was trying to show how much they cared about the local community by allowing a dozen tables to be setup one day a year for non-profits to interfere with the shopping experience and pass out literature. This basically gave them the justification to chase anyone off during the rest of the year who would dare attempt to awaken people from the consensus trance.

I decided that I'd put a large sign above our table that said, "We can help you overcome your addiction to shopping." The other groups wouldn't let me put the sign up. They didn't want me "causing problems" or distracting from their own messages. They were afraid that the mall management wouldn't invite them back next year. They didn't want to address the fact, or even be reminded, that the whole reason their non-profit group even had a mission was because the mall existed in the first place.

Does human happiness need to be opposed to the needs of the planet? Can satisfaction be found that is harmonious with nature and with people's inner nature? By seeking satisfaction through consumerism, we are doing as much harm to the planet as is caused by overpopulation. Not only does consumerism fail in its promise of happiness, but by decreasing our free time and by keeping us from developing satisfying relationships, consumerism makes us less happy.

Consumerism -- the concept of growth through consumption -- is US economic policy's primary goal. We are 4.5 times richer than our great-grandparents, but are we 4.5 times happier? In the effort to turn consumption into a ritual to deliver happiness and fulfillment, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that material goods can fulfill what are actually social, psychological, and spiritual needs.

Surveys have consistently shown that people have believed for decades that if they only had twice as much money they'd be happy, no matter if their yearly income was $15 thousand or $15 million. But surveys also show that the number of Americans who report they are very happy -- 1/3 -- is the same now as in 1957, despite a doubling of GNP and personal spending since then.

People are unsatisfied, without knowing why. They think they need more of what they have now. But, if what they have now is what makes people unsatisfied, will more of it make them more satisfied or more dissatisfied? Perhaps people are tuning in to the fact that if human desires are infinitely expandable, it is physically impossible for material consumption to provide fulfillment -- a fact either ignored or vigorously denied by orthodox growth economists.

Consumption fails to make us happy, and advertising then cultivates and preys on that unhappiness. Ads make people self-conscious about being human and unique; to be unhappy with whatever they have that doesn't match this year's fashion. The advertising industry then assures people that the corporate gods have the proper synthetic salvation for their falsely created, non-existent problems.

The things that people say make them happy and life rewarding include developing talents, building stronger family and social relationships, appreciation of nature, pursuing education, and having quality leisure time. These are all sustainable and non-consumerist. But the race to keep up with the Joneses is subverting these desires. Instead of having more leisure time, Americans devote one billion working hours per year to buying more leisure wear.

It's time to create a NewStory. The People's Declaration of Interdependence, known as the Earth Charter, points toward a path for doing this based on our common shared values of respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, democracy, nonviolence, and peace. The Earth Charter provides a framework for the NewStory of sustainable development. Remember that the antidote to despair is righteous action. The more we focus on what we don't like, the more it increases. It thrives on that energy. We must focus on what we're for, instead of spending so much time protesting what we're against.

It is also instructive and empowering to realize that we are far from alone in the desire to consciously make new choices that are in balance with natural systems. The voluntary simplicity, Cultural Creative, and relocalization movements toward a post-corporate and post-carbon economy can combine with political progressives to make up about 45% of the electorate. It is estimated that about 90 million people in the U.S. are included in these groups, which makes them about nine times larger than the radical right of Christian fundamentalists, and three times larger than either the current Democratic or Republican Parties.

As the German Greens say, we're neither right nor left--we're in front. Would you like to help lead this parade into a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom, social justice, economic equity, and participatory democracy?

Congrats to the Dems, Part II: Where Next?

2006-12-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

This is the post I actually first tried to write, but all that other stuff just had to come out first. Not so much cathartic, as simply laying an honest foundation for where we are, what we have to work with, and where we need to go.

Because the one thing that should be apparent, above all else, is that America voted for change, although as usual managed in some--perhaps not insignificant--ways to shoot itself in the foot while doing so. Such was the case with the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee; and I can't find enough positive terms to describe my elation that Santorum was beaten, but the anti-abortion, pro-gun Casey was the best the Dems could come up with to do so?

Anyway... whatever... I'll let that go for the time being.

So, in the spirit of bipartisanship being called for, how about building a bipartisan relationship between people and the planet they depend on for their health and well-being, and that provides all of the raw materials for any type of economy. Even a steady-state economy, which more people are finally beginning to realize will be necessary as the growth economy implodes and more natural resources disappear, will depend on the sustainability of a productive, vibrant and non-toxic natural world.

I've been working on an article for the past few weeks now dealing with some of these issues. Hopefully, you should find it more balanced and less ranting than these last couple that I've dashed off in under an hour since the election results. Before I finish that article up, though, let's begin looking at some of the things progressives must do to enlighten their new representatives on the people's desire for change, the direction it should go, and how to best enact it. Wouldn't it be great to expand and extend the rightful and long overdue celebration of the defeat of right-wing extremism and religious fundamentalism?

The new Democratic majority in Congress should take a long, hard, and honest look at what the majority of people in America are clamoring for. The Republicans who survived the election should join them in this inquiry. The Democrat's election win was not a "centrist" call to maintain the status quo.

The war in Iraq must come to an end. Actually, let's continue in the spirit of honesty and admit that the war against Iraq, which was really an illegal and immoral invasion of a sovereign nation, has been won and has been over since pResident select Bush declared "Mission Accomplished." What the U.S. is now engaged in is a brutal occupation for which the U.S. military is ill-equipped and ill-trained to maintain. It's time for serious rebuilding instead of profiteering to begin.

No one of right mind would say that Saddam Hussein didn't need to be removed from power. Allowing the barbaric and self-serving methodology of a neoconservative ideology to hold sway was the mistake that has proven fatal to thousands of U.S. military personnel, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the ecology of the entire Middle East, and to both the U.S. treasury and its standing as a moral beacon on the world stage. Whether or not this standing has actually been earned and is deserved after hundreds of years of imperialist policy to protect corporate interests is another issue that merits serious discussion as we move forward in discovering ways to build a sustainable culture of peace based on ecological wisdom and social justice.

Fighting terrorism, however, must be recognized as the oxymoron that it is. If we're to have any hope for success in becoming secure from terrorist threats, we must remove the reasons for terrorist activities to arise.

These issues cannot be divorced from their relationships with the even more serious threat facing humanity of catastrophic climate destabilization, the threat facing a global growth economy that has the moniker of Peak Oil, and the loss of our sovereignty to corporatism. This is what I call the Triumvirate of Collapse.

The growth economy is how we've come to define reality and is the basis for our modern notions of prosperity and security. Its immanent collapse due to the decreasing availability and increasing cost of fossil fuels, with no _realistic_ replacement on the horizon, could prove catastrophic for humanity if government continues to ignore the issue and does nothing to help people prepare for energy descent and relocalized economies. These issues are all intimately intertwined and must be evaluated in the context of dominator control hierarchies and how they have led the shift from the founding American ideals of a democratic Republic toward the current Plutocracy that is running America. I would say running into the ground, but with so much topsoil disappearing, it's more like a bottomless cesspool of toxic waste.

The typical progressive band-aid approach of regulatory incrementalism, which we're told by the elites that continue to benefit from it is the only realistic response to corporate abuse and exploitation, must be replaced by a systemic approach that effectively deals with root causes. Only by effectively dealing with these root causes can a sustainable future be built.

Sustainability should become the agenda to unite progressives from the peace, justice, environmental, and grass-roots democracy movement. Adhering to a comprehensive definition of sustainability that includes the concept of carrying capacity must be used to help inform the decision making of our newly elected congress. Meeting the goals for a sustainable future will also provide the yardstick to measure the new congress's progress and success.

The question on everyone's mind should be whether the centrists of the Democratic Party will awaken from their consensus trance? To be honest, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for this to happen. What I am hopeful for, however, is that the millions of caring activists, and the tens of millions of caring citizens, that have traditionally identified with and pinned their hopes on the Democratic Party will finally awaken from their own self-imposed consensus trance and realize that their only hope for systemic, sustainable change that is equitable is to join en masse and empower the Green Party. This would transform the landscape of American politics as quickly as Hurricane Katrina transformed the landscape of New Orleans. Our very survival may very shortly depend on it.

The next two years is more than enough time for the current Democratic majority to prove their mettle. Excuses should not be tolerated. If they don't, and in 2008 we are again presented with the typical choice of two appointed party losers who will most likely be McCain and Clinton (and I can't for the life of me decide which of these two is further to the right, and actually trust McCain more as he's closer to a true Republican than Hillary is), the Green Party would be foolish to not seize upon the best opportunity, presented quite literally on a silver platter, they'll likely ever come across.

Outreach and education, passion and compassion in helping people connect the dots between what is actually oppressing them and keeping them from their potential, and what they can actually do about it as the unsustainable system collapses around our feet may be the best chance for electing not only a Green president in 2008, but a solid majority of legislators as well. There is no time like the present to start prepping candidates.

What better gift to the world than providing the Ten Key Values of the Green Party as the foundation for the planet and humanity's future? Because the bottom line is that corporations and their quest for profit and their consolidation of power and control cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged; the planet cannot survive its destructive and self-serving onslaught for too much longer.

The process of relocalization based on the natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity not only adheres to the Ten Key Values, but provides both the path to sustainability and the antidote to corporate globalization. It seems to me to be the real platform that people across the political spectrum are clamoring for.

Congrats to the Dems: Part I

2006-12-07T16:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's been pointed out to me that I should, if not accentuate, at least give due congratulations for what the Democratic Party managed to accomplish yesterday.

Because, on the surface it seems like a good thing. The Republican Kleptocracy was run out of town on a rail, which, of course, is an excellent thing indeed.

But, it sure seems like the only thing the Democrats did was ride the coattails of a popular uprising against a criminal, arrogant, GOPedophile class that the Democratic leaders have pretty much fully backed for six years--except for those times they have publicly stated they could do a better job of it. Bankruptcy bill, cloture, the supremes, Patriot Act, CAFTA, tax breaks for the wealthy, defense spending... all supported by the majority of the Dems. Only one Democratic Senator voted against giving the shrub imperial powers. They did however, thanks to people like Cantwell, keep the oil rigs out of ANWR.

Truth be told, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters and a small handful of others are the only Democrats who are members of the vertebrate class.

It seems everybody's pissed at the shrub for bringing the stark reality of American imperialism into the light of day. After all, Clinton was so much better at keeping it covered up with NAFTA, the WTO, and his criminal sanctions and weekly bombings of Iraq which were responsible for at _least_ 5 times more Iraqi deaths that what the shrub has been able to accomplish so far. But Clinton knew a much better way to distract the masses, as evidenced by Monica's blue dress. I myself could care less about hummers in the oval office, but how many more people knew where that spot on the dress was than where Bosnia was?

Anyway, let's see what the *Democratic Party* actually offered as an opposition party during the 2006 mid-term elections to the vast majority of the American population so desperately crying out for change.

Their platform on catastrophic climate destabilization was... missing in action. They didn't even have one for global warming, except for a very meager cap and trade system that two or three candidates mentioned in passing.

Their energy plan is what? more nukes? It sure doesn't involve telling the people the truth about Peak Oil and what it means for a future of energy-descent, the end of a growth economy, and what will most likely be massive die-off if a plan for relocalization isn't put into place by, oh, let's say tomorrow.

Their plan to abolish corporate personhood is... shhh... don't bring that up. Their re-election coffers will shrink up tighter than a male's scrotum after jumping into a Minnesota lake in January.

Their plan for election reform is... what? It sure doesn't include IRV or making it easier for third parties to get ballot access. They know where the balance of power would shift if the progressive majority in this country could vote in good faith and had more to choose from than the typical two selected losers.

And what exactly is the Democrat's actual plan for Iraq? Last I heard it was to send more troops in order to do the job "properly."

The current Senate and House minority leaders are on record as saying if the Dems took either house, they wouldn't press for impeachment of a presidency that the _entire_ rest of the world knows is criminal and which your average third-grader could successfully prosecute.

Are they afraid they might make their corporate masters angry?

I'm now supposed to somehow feel better about my and my children's future, and the future of this planet, because the colors changed from red to blue? Based on what evidence exactly, is my question.

So, I hearby offer my hearty congratulations to the Democratic Party for successfully pulling the wool over everyone's eyes with the myth that the overall system is now going to change for the better.

Post election musing

2006-12-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

What's this foreboding feeling I have after the elections yesterday?

After seeing the way the candidate voting went (the shift to the Democrats) and the way the proposition voting went here in Arizona (the support for racism and the special interests destroying the world) the main thing that should be apparent--but obviously won't be--is how miserably the American education system has failed the past five generations.

It seems the majority of people who can read have limited comprehension skills and zero skills in critical thinking and analysis. The average voter bought the lies and spin lock, stock, and barrel and seem quite proud of themselves for doing so. Just read a handful of the comments on Tucson's Arizona Daily Star website in regard to the various proposition's outcomes and see if you don't come to this painful conclusion yourself.

So, Arizona retains its image as a racist state of heartless money grubbers willing to lead the race to the bottom as we tax to death current residents to pave (quite literally) the way for those who don't live here (yet) which will maximize the profits of those wanting to bulldoze half the desert to make it easier to drive bigger cars to ticky tacky sprawl and the other half for golf courses kept green with water we don't have.

When the inevitable whining on the left starts--which should start occurring in less than six months (and across the nation, not just in AZ)--it probably won't do any good to remind them that they elected Democrats whose major campaign promise (Giffords being probably the best local example) was that they'd be better Republicans than those currently serving.

All I can say is I hope I'm proven wrong.