The Great Change

Elaborating eCOOLnomics

2012-01-22T17:08:00.000-06:00

"Voluntary simplicity must be extolled for the ineffable quality of life it bestows, to the point where it becomes a viral meme that infects teenagers and sticks with them for life."

Humorist historian SarahVowell, in her book on the rise and fall of Hawaii, UnfamiliarFishes, writes that “expectingcapitalists to refrain from gobbling up the Earth is like blaming PacMan forgulping down PacDots.” She hastily adds that the experience with implementing theMarxist vision at a continental scale didn’t work out all that well either.With presidential politics polarizing the US electorate between laissez faire libertariansand lean-to-the-point-of-mean social welfare conservatives, the issue over rawversus moderated capitalism would seem joined. Only capitalism goesunchallenged.

Naomi Klein, in a piece for TheNationand separatelyin an interview with New York Times’ AndrewRevkin last month in Durban, hung some inconvenient climate truths aroundthe neck of capitalists.

She urged the Left to embrace a reality identified by nutcase climateskeptics — that a meaningful response to global warming would be a fatal blowto free markets and capitalism. This is the trench line the United States hasplowed through the UN climate talks and is using to machine gun well-meaningEuropeans, small island states, developing world juggernauts and others whoseem to think that modest changes in shopping habits can decarbonize orde-crowd a planet on the verge of systemic disintegration and lead us to abright new green economy. Klein told Revkin:

“If you really do believe thatfreedom means governments getting out of the way of corporations and that anyregulation leads us down Hayek’s road to serfdom, then climate science is goingto be kryptonite to you. After all, the reality that humans are causing theclimate to warm, with potentially catastrophic results, really does demandradical government intervention in the market, as well as collective action onan unprecedented scale.”

Revkin challenged Klein’s hypothesis that the only strategythat can work is “radical government intervention,” saying that more modestapproaches like incentives and disincentives might tip the playing field. Kleinreplied that Revkin sounded just like the Big Environmental Groups and marginalizedNGOs at the Durban talks, taking whatever crumbs of reform fall from the capitalisttable. Light bulbs and hybrid cars won’t get us to 350, she argued. Liberalsneed to confront the reality that an 80 percent reduction — which is all thatstands between green Earth and the landscape of Mars — really is a deathblow tocapitalism. The stark choice is between aggressive regulation/refashioning of consumerculture or rushing straight over the cliff’s edge.

Are we as buffalo being stampeded by herd instinct — in thiscase our consumerist DNA? Or are we as monkeys with our paws caught in a trapfashioned by our reptilian brain, unwilling to let go of all the goodies wehave so recently latched onto? Or, do we have yet some freedom of movementhere? Can we, as Klein suggests, refashion the whole setup from somethingglaringly dysfunctional to something offering a scintilla of hope that survivalof mammalian bipeds with outsized cerebral cortices might yet have a place inthe greater scheme of things?

If we are getting back to those basic assumptions that needto be refashioned, we might start with one of the favorite keywords on Occupystreet placards — capitalism.

Capitalism is, like money, a relatively recent globalphenomenon. It arrived with the comfortable climate following the MedievalMaximum (which we now suspect to have been driven, at least in part, by themonumental city states of the Americas and their carbon-intensive land-use policies)and the trade empires that needed large dollops of up-front cash to back riskysea voyages. A few florins risked on a tall ship’s captain might be lost in thenearest local public house, or on an uncharted reef, or it might return ahundredfold in profits. The system paid off often enough to put an end tofeudalism.

Feudalism had its own variety of JudeoChristian/Moslem/Hindu/Buddhistsocialism; pledge allegiance to a hereditary lord’s flag and your basic needs(land, water, protection) can be met. No money need change hands. Amongst thebroad population of serfs, social strata was minimal, and life happened.Amongst the sparser noble born, there was always someone higher up who had it alittle better, but your life was reassuringly always better than the serfs, andso the game played on. Having gold coins, land or other hoardable forms ofwealth raised your stakes.

The feudal system had to assume a minimal level of socialwelfare for the serfs or there would be neither food on the manor table norsoldiers at the manor’s ramparts. A foolish libertarian nobleman who thoughtthat cutting away at the “waste” of benefits for the serfs to feather his bed couldfind himself soon starving.

At the edges and interstices of this system was theocracy,which set up hierarchies of priests, monks and acolytes that lived off whatevercould be squeezed from the wealth of the lords’ economy. Within the theocraticmatrix was yet another form of economic organization, after the style ofJesus’s twelve apostles — “All who believed were together and had everything incommon, sold property and possessions to give to each as they had need.” (Acts2:44-45).

Communism was the foundational economic system not just ofChristian monastics, but of the early Mormons under Joseph Smith and BrighamYoung, the youthful sanghas circled around Gautama Buddha, and in the ashramsof India, China and Japan. Curiously, communism finds scant history in Islam.Why is that? Apparently, unlike Jesus and Buddha, Mohammed believed inseparation of church and purse. “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel,”as they say.

InIslam, good works towards needy neighbors are a duty of the faithful, but theidea of a shared purse extends only to a small tithe to the mosque or community.While compounding interest is forbidden by the Holy Koran — the foundersof arithmetic understood why — free enterprise is extolled and, as in all theother religions, the founding texts assume there will always be rich and poor.The question of whether who is rich and who is poor is to be decided by fate orby moxie is finessed. To followers of Ayn Rand, including all the current Republican contenders, its never about fate.

Timur Kuran observes:

“In a technologically primitive andstatic world, where family background determines one's career, where one plantsand sells crops in the ways of one's grandparents, where one has little tospend on nonsubsistence goods, and where markets offer little variety,economics may be vital to physical survival but economic decision making doesnot absorb much attention. By contrast, in a technologically advanced world,where job choices have to be made, where women pursue and interrupt careersoutside the home, where investment choices require monitoring, and wheremarkets offer abundant choice, economic decision making absorbs considerabletime.”

The Genesis of IslamicEconomics: A Chapter in the Politics of Muslim Identity, Social Research, Vol. 64, no. 2 (Summer 1997)

This tension between capitalism, socialism, and theocracy isbound to be heightened in the coming years, because fates — whetherclimate, energy resources, or ticking cultural time bombs — will nowconspire to reset the game to the start and at the same time absorb much moreattention. Great! At the start of the game all strategies are possible. So whatfuture economic strategy optimizes our prospects?

First and foremost, it needs to be something that bothmitigates and adapts to climate change. For many years we have been talkingabout carbon-negative ecovillage designs that heat and cool our buildings whilebuilding soil fertility and drought resistance. Our concept of eCOOLnomicsseeks to nurture an appropriate reward and punishment system to drive that.

Second, while showing mercy and giving opportunity to thepoor and dispossessed, it needs to cool down consumerist expectations,including power-hungry electronic varieties that are so greatly appreciatedtoday. Voluntary simplicity must be extolled for the ineffable quality of lifeit bestows, to the point where it becomes a viral meme that infects teenagersand sticks with them for life.

Thirdly, trade and commerce have to fall into step with thenew world order of decroissance. Sailpowered transport, bike-to-rail, and market relocalization are all ascendant.

Since we published our FinancialCollapse Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (Amazon Kindle: 2007), a spate ofserious treatises have hit print and should be considered important resourcesfor eCOOLnomists. Here are some of our favorites.

PeakEverything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines and End of Growth by Richard Heinberg.We have loved everything Heinberg has written, and among a cacophony ofprophetic voices, his predictions stand the test of time. These books putplateau dates and decline curves to a host of natural resources — arableland, coal production, uranium, water withdrawals, grain production, fishcatch, and more — but are remarkable for (in keeping with our nagging themehere) also asking whether there might yet be somegood things that are not going to peak. He suggests community, personalautonomy, satisfaction from honest work well done, intergenerationalsolidarity, cooperation, leisure time, happiness, ingenuity, artistry, andbeauty of the built environment. Buy long and invest in all of that.

ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). In1972 a group of young idealists colonized a derelict slate quarry on the edgeof Snowdonia National Park in Wales. Inspired by the notion of creating acommunity to test alternatives to mainstream technology, they aimed toresearch, develop and implement new approaches to sustainable technologies andlifestyles. Today, the Centre receives 70,000 visitors each year, has a worldclass research division and offers a master’s degree program. This book showshow the island of Great Britain could meet all its food, water, energy, housingand transportation needs on a completely renewable basis, with an affordable pricetag even in a Depression, by 2030.

The Long Descent and Wealth of Nature by John MichaelGreer. The Archdruid has become celebrated in collapsnik circles for describinga new shape to the civilizational decline curve — stair-step, or what he terms,“catabolic collapse.” Rather than the sudden plunge that Heinberg, Lundberg andothers have been intimating, Greer sees built-in feedback loops in the globaleconomy that will dampen and extend the crash so that it evolves over decadesor centuries, although still be impossible to reverse. Greer is another writer who is hard to putdown once he has you in his fold. Even if you disagree with some of hisconclusions, his logic is impeccable and his grasp of the human historic sweepenthralling.

OccupyWorld Street by Ross Jackson.Jackson provides a much needed nuts and bolts approach to all of these issuesthrough an insider’s knowledge of the government and corporate power circles inEurope and North America. Dennis Meadows, who wrote the computer programs forthe Club of Rome that produced the seminal Limits to Growth study, callsJackson’s strategy “the first plausible,constructive scenario I have seen; an excellent text, even amazing.” We don’tfind it all that amazing, but then we have been in active partnership with theauthor for the past two decades. Any formula will have to involve some kind ofcollaboration between communities and governments with the goal of promotingdiversity, localism, and sustainable development. The questions are, what isthe vehicle for that collaboration and how does it come into being. Jacksonproposes a Gaian Resource Board, sort of like the Texas Railroad Commission forthe world’s non-renewable resources. In progressive countries like Denmark,where Canadian-born Jackson lives, government structures like this arewholesome and clever. Whole islands are now off-grid and thriving on their ownmicroeconomies. Can the same kind of transformation come to the Russiankleptocracy or Sarah Palen’s back yard? One wonders. Still, it is nice to havea map when you are lost and trying to get some bearings.

The End of Money and the Future ofCivilization by Thomas H.Greco. Seeing a revolution at the horizon, Greco puts our choices at thiscritical moment in direct terms. We have to shift from elite, national “commandand control” hierarchies backed by military brute force to something far moredecentralized and local. This will happen on its own, driven by Hubbert’sCurve, but the devil is in the details. In a succession of books over the pastdecade, Greco has moved from incremental changes through policy steps to a radical(meaning “back to the root”) reversal of global power; top down to bottom up. The End of Money urges bottomdwellers to“reclaim the credit commons,” by simply withdrawing from national andcontinental currencies and changing the ways their transactions are mediated. Tous, this seems to have a better shot in the current street scene than Jackson’snew world regulatory authorities. The problem is interest-glomming Big Money, whichis an impossibly unsustainable Ponzi scheme when one considers we live on a finiteplanet. Greco’s proposal is for local credit clearing unions and, if those areshut down, then local voucher systems, which could be entirely digital andpersonally encrypted, to rapidly suck the air out of Big Money. If we can steeraway from our past pattern of corrupting every successful revolution, what liesbeyond the Great Change is more inclusive, participatory, just, harmonious and ecologicallysustainable.

The Web of Debt by EllenHodgson Brown. Ellen Brown is a fine speaker and storyteller and her book takesyou through a history of “money for dummies” using the Wizard of Oz as arecurrent theme. Describing Benjamin Franklin’s handiwork in creating thecolonial dollar, she noted that Franklin’s press took away the power of theBritish bankers’ gold, which could be hoarded, manipulated and lent only atusurious interest rates. It gave the colonial government the power to financeessential services and functions without taxing anyone. Indeed, the wholerationale for taxation, once governments began printing paper money, is awealth-leveling one. That seems not to have escaped the notice of Republicans,who would get rid of government (along with the essential services andfunctions) for that very reason. The best quote in the book, however, goes toHjalmar Schacht, head of the German central bank in the early 1930s. Told by aWall Street banker “Dr. Schacht, you should come to America. We’ve lots ofmoney and that’s real banking,” Schacht replied, “You should come to Berlin. Wedon’t have money. That’s realbanking.”

Songs of Petroleum by Jan Lundberg. This very personal narrativetakes you along in the life story of Culture Change founder and activist JanLundberg as he leaves behind his petrochemical industrial insider status andfortune to pursue a vision of what the world can still be if we can be of likemind. Thomas Hardy said, “If a path to the better there be, it begins with a fulllook at the worst.” Lundberg is unflinching. But then he delivers a path to thebetter, and it starts with permaculture, holistic health care, sail power,local economy, and unstinting hope.

eCOOLnomics

2012-01-16T17:07:00.000-06:00

"The drivers of climate change are embedded in our global culture. No amount of haggling will address these real problems without deep and dramatic cultural change. That change can be positive, however, and eCOOLnomics explores the potential transition paths and modalities."

A few years ago we were speaking at a peak oil conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan and our assigned topic was ecovillages, although at that time, having published The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society, 2006), we were well equipped to provide advice across a range of topics. Then the conference management threw a curveball at us.

“Could you do the breakout session on finance?” they asked. They had bought the hype about our being some kind of polymath. But we do teach permaculture, and understanding how systems and patterns function, including the financial system, is part of that curriculum.

In the permaculture certificate course we usually let that financial story be rendered by Andrew Goodheart Brown, an Appalachian storyteller, who weaves a spell about an island culture where dried fish starts just needing better storage and winds up getting commoditized into paper, then warrants, and eventually collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and other secondary and tertiary derivatives. The point, often reiterated in the 72-hour Design Course, is that the map is not the territory. You can eat fish but you can’t eat paper.

We gave the talk and illustrated some of the major points — that currency is a relatively new invention in human affairs and that money equals debt, or an obligation against something or by someone — showing clips like The Goldsmith’s Tale from the documentary Money As Debt by Paul Grignon, and talking about fractional reserve banking and interest rate manipulation.

The thing is, we don’t usually spend a lot of time talking about economics precisely because it is so derivative. We prefer teaching people how to store rainwater, build a perennial food supply in unforgiving terrain, and enjoy life in ways that improve the future for our children. The first rule of money, we remind students, is not to think about it. Just do it — money will come.

Alan Watts, in his lecture series on The Nature of Consciousness, said “Being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers, you put, as it were, two lives together at once, one representing the other. The symbols represent the reality, the money representing the wealth, and if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary, it doesn't have the same value. People go to the supermarket, and they get a whole cartload of goodies and they drive it through, then the clerk [punches] up the counter and this long tape comes out, and he'll say '$30, please,' and everybody feels depressed, because they give away $30 worth of paper, but they've got a cartload of goodies. They don't think about that, they think they've just lost $30. But you've got the real wealth in the cart, all you've parted with is the paper. Because the paper in our system has become more valuable than the wealth. It represents power, potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think oh well, that's just necessary; you've got to eat. That's to be really mixed up. So then, if you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but FEEL yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.”

Understood this way, the financial crisis begins to take shape as just another misallocation of our limited attention. Watts, in a separate talk said that the Great Depression was caused by a shortage of dollars, not by a shortage of labor or natural resources. It was like carpenters arriving at a construction site and being told that even though there was plenty of wood and nails, there was a shortage of inches. Until more inches could be manufactured, work had to cease.

Today’s so-called crisis is another shortage of inches. Inflation (an excess of money in relation to available goods, which raises the prices of goods) is less of a near-term threat because, being a representation of debt — what we call “money” — it is rapidly going out of existence as governments and banking institutions fail and their obligations are liquidated at a small fraction of previously assigned worth.

Deflation (a shortage of money in relation to available goods, which lowers the price of goods) is held in check only by the shrinking availability of goods and services — because the limits to growth on a finite planet have been reached and exceeded and a retreat, not to say rout, is underway. We would need three or four planets to honor the debt obligations that back the global quadrillion-dollar financial bubble. That the system is flat bankrupt is squarely the fault of classical economics, and those trained in it, that neglected to insert a part about living on a finite planet and assumed that demand would always create supply. For them we have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Once you have a grasp of this equation: money equals debt; nature is making a margin call — the era of growth is over; notions that we are in a transitory recession are insane; and the reckoning includes meltdowns like Fukushima, cascading climate catastrophes, regional famines and population collapse — then you can begin to once more think and plan clearly for your own future and the future of your friends, family and community. You can give up notions of missions to Mars, an Aquarian awakening, or some other Deus ex Machina. Just do what you need to do to prepare.

For the past several years we have been pondering the way forward that kills and maims the least number of people, repairs the damage to the fabric of the natural world that we will desparately need to sustain our grandchildren, and might even return the prospect of hope for a better future. False solutions are unhelpful and need to be out-ed and discarded. Anything that assuages political guilt but doesn’t stop a runaway greenhouse effect or de-nuclearize our future needs to be discarded. Any scheme that diminishes soil, fresh water, phosphate, potassium, whales, coral or rainforests needs to be discarded. Flagrant abuses of human rights, torture, and usurpation of tyrannical power need to be not only prohibited but punished.

Rant Alert. Obama-fans cover your ears.

Yes, you Mr. Obama. We are talking to you. Consider the 1,717 and 2,680 individuals whose lives you have taken with your expanded, unmanned predator drone program that has more operators in the field than the entire employment roster of the Central Intelligence Agency. Consider just the young life of Tariq Aziz, age 16, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile. Malia Obama is turning 14 this year, her sister Sasha will be 11. Do they ever look up at the sky and wonder what might be up there, looking back at them? How do you define terrorism, Mr. Obama?

Rant Alert All Clear. Obama-fans you can uncover your ears.

So, thinking about solutions, we need to address finance, climate change, renewable energy and human security. What can move us in that direction most rapidly, as a whole global society?

What we came up with was eCOOL.

The design science of eCOOLnomics combines the Ecovillage and Transition Towns movements (seeking changes in patterns of land use and creating local resilience with community food systems, green incubators and carbon-negative micro-enterprise) with permaculture, carbon farming and popular culture to seed culture change multipliers.

The eCOOL meme draws upon cool hunting, viral propagation and creative volunteerism to accomplish what so far has eluded the UN climate, population, food security and sustainable development negotiations: a way down from overblown expectations, gracefully; a way back from the precipice; a way forward into a steady-state future that is ecologically sustainable.

We can imagine eCOOLnomics driving the launch of carbon-minus rural and urban eCOOLvillages and transitional eCOOLtowns on six continents. We think this idea has the potential to infect the world with a viral meme — that living in a sustainable way is way eCOOL. It is also more fun than any of the alternatives.

The scientific consensus of climate change is unequivocal. We must cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 80 to 90 percent within the next decade in order to avoid catastrophic warming.

The drivers of climate change are embedded in our global culture — population expansion, which depends on carbon-producing buildings, transportation and workplaces; broadscale industrial agriculture that generates greenhouse gases (both by transforming fossil energy into food, and by emissions from land use change, irrigation and the plow); deforestation and desertification (that removes the light-and-carbon-absorbing capacity of forests and vegetation); and addiction to energy-intensive production and consumption patterns (particularly in the North). No amount of haggling will address these real problems without deep and dramatic cultural change. That change can be positive, however, and eCOOLnomics explores the potential transition paths and modalities.

The Global Ecovillage Network has been pointing the way in this direction for the past 20 years. Launched formally at the UN Habitat-II conference in Istanbul in 1995, GEN existed as an informal network for some years earlier, with at least one of its member ecovillages having been around for 75 years, and other founding members for 40 years or more.

The idea of an ecovillage is that people who share a vision of living lightly on the Earth come together to found settlements that embody a whole-systems approach. Renewable energy, natural building, organic no-till and biodynamic agriculture, holistic medicine, egalitarian governance, gender, ethnic and race neutrality, consensus and conflict-transformation, and progressive education all come together in the ecovillage living matrix. The challenge then becomes, how can we make all this also carbon-negative? How can we sequester more — by our lifestyles and cultural choices — than we emit? How can we better preserve biodiversity in the oceans, reseed great rainforests, and protect the fragile Arctic while meeting our human needs?

Fortunately there are recent examples that show us the way. Take the Satoyama restoration movement in Japan. Forty percent of the land area of Japan is called satoyama, the area between human habitat, fields and wilderness. It is a mosaic of minimal intervention, where farmers, foragers, hunters, and others foray, take a little out, then leave it alone to regrow. Literally, satoyama translates as “Secondary Nature.” It is a management practice that has been around since the beginning of the 17th century.

The satoyama model is promoted by the UN Satoyama Initiative as a model of sustainable living that is increasingly under threat from urbanization, industrialization, and aging of rural populations. Their disappearance leads to increasing poverty of linguistic and cultural diversity as well as biodiversity.

But in 2009, the Hozu Farmers Co-op came up with a new idea.

In the 1990s, global agri-business and forestry conglomerates undercut local markets. In rural Japan, farming families dropped from 9.7 million in 1970 to 2.85 million in 2000 (a 69% decrease). The chances that a given rural mountain community will vanish in the next ten years are 83.2%.

Working with Kameoka City Groceries, Hozu Farmers Co-op started growing cabbages in biochar made from satoyama bamboo and branding "cool vegetables."

No Chemicals + Biochar = Cool Food

The Kameoka Carbon Minus Project said that if biochar was applied at 2.5t/ha over the entire area of Kameoka’s agricultural land (2,100 ha), the carbon equivalent of 154,000 tons of CO2 emissions could be sequestered. That offsets a third of the yearly CO2 emissions from Kameoka. In the process, 570 million yen ($6.2 million) could be gained through the sale of carbon credits (roughly 3,700 yen or $40 per ton CO2).

COOL Vegetables were a great success! People liked the idea of buying healthy food that cooled the planet!

The origin of the cool foods revolution was not in the bamboo forests of Japan, however, but rather from the practices of soil management discovered more than 8000 years earlier, as described in our book, The Biochar Solution. In pre-Columbian times, American peoples took the refuse from their kitchens — fish and animal bones, broken pottery, nut husks, turtle and oyster shells, and cinders from their fires — and built dark earths. Millennia later, those soils provide triple soil productivity over “parent” soils only meters away. So powerful is the soil fertility effect that when the populations of the Americas were decimated by Spanish contact in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, their fields and fine cities returned to forest and vine, pulling so much carbon from the atmosphere that Europe literally froze!

For nearly 300 years, soil scientists — following the work of Bettendorff, Hartt, Katzer, Sombroek, Glazer, Neves, Steiner, Lehmann and many others — have known that the Amazonian dark earths were man-made. With the discovery of biochar, it finally became possible to duplicate the process. In addition to soil fertility, biochar’s benefits include waste recycling, reduced fertilizer use, nutrient capture, water retention, capture of nitrates, lead, and radionuclides, reduced N2O and methane emissions, job creation, and rural economic development. Part of the secret lies in the micropores that are formed in cellular plant structures when they are burned in the absence of oxygen. Those pores become habitat for soil microbes much the same way a coral reef provides beneficial coastal habitat. A strong soil food web builds fertile soils, rapidly.

If you add in a mix of good carbon farming practices — composting, manuring, microbial teas and seed microfauna, organic no-till, holistic pasture management, keyline water management, and selective agro-forestry — you can build meter-deep soils in a decade or less. The effects are most dramatic in areas with the poorest soils, such as regions on the verge of desertification.

Burning without oxygen can also mean burning without smoke, which leads to the idea of replacing home heating and cooking stoves with pyrolizing kilns that provide the same functions but are clean-burning, inexpensive and easy to use, and instead of generating smoke and ash, make biochar for farming, gardening, and reforestation.

Replacing "three stone" stoves with pyrolytic stoves provides a health dividend equal the eradication of malaria & AIDs combined.

That is precisely what is being done by WorldStove.com, whose small biochar stove manufacturing enterprises are now springing up all over Africa, and by the Toledo Cacao Growers Coop in Punta Gorda, Belize, thanks to a grant from Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black's, and Kraft industries. Watch for cool charcolate bars in your neighborhood store in the future! They will have been grown in biochar-enhanced cacao groves, sustainably grown and harvested by Fair Trade cooperatives. While you eat your chocolate, you are locking carbon into the soil for a thousand years. That’s eCOOL!

eCOOLnomics is about building a carbon-negative economy. It requires integration of cultural and scientific goals through a holistic, eCOOL branding approach; rebalancing global eco-stasis by ecoagroforestry, permaculture, pyrolytic energy, ecovillages and cool living. As ecovillages around the world are already demonstrating, it is possible to derive your energy, grow your food, build your buildings, and provide for all your other needs — communication, transportation, governance, etc. — while steadily removing carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and putting it into the soil. We could be annually switching 10 gigatons of carbon from labile forms (carbon-dioxide and methane — rotating through the atmosphere on decadal time-scales) to carbon in recalcitrant forms (biochar — rotating through on millennial time scales). eCOOLnomics is how we can get back to 350 parts per million carbon concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere this century, while at the same time living better, not worse, than we are right now. eCOOLnomics could buy Mother Nature the time she needs to heal.

Building sustainability into human economic systems requires us to construct overlapping and complementary spheres of action — construction, agriculture, manufacture, inhabitation, commerce — that together change the operating instructions for human civilization.

One new financial system for this might be something suggested by the late Richard Douthwaite: soil credit finance. An international fund could be established to deposit and lend soil-carbon based currency. The basis for its grants and loans would be soil fertility. If a nation improves its soil carbon quality (measured by both remote sensing and ground surveys), it would receive credit at the Soil Bank. If a nation degraded soil carbon quality by misguided land use practices or other shenanigans, it would lose credit or even be fined. Another extension, proposed by Herman Daly, would be to implement carbon-like trading for all of Earth’s non-renewable stores. If an industry like agribusiness wrecks the nitrogen cycle and pollutes waterways, it must pay into the fund. Those payments can then be employed to make the switch away from agribusiness and into sustainable agriculture. Likewise for cement manufacturing, fracking the tar sands, or overfishing the oceans. Price non-renewables by the unsustainability of their depletion rates and charge accordingly.

The tipping point — why eCOOL will be more successful than negotiating international regulatory frameworks (although that would help too) — is the stickiness of the idea and allure of the meme: cool living. For individuals, is all carrot, no stick. What are needed now are a combination of grassroots demonstrations — proof of concept — pop celebrity endorsements, and the viral power of the internet.

We recently made a proposal to the BRAC for a pilot program to transform existing ecovillages — one in the North, one in the South — in to eCOOLvillages. BRAC is a development organization dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor to bring about change in their own lives. It was founded in Bangladesh by Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972. BRAC now operates in ten countries in Asia and Africa, with offices in the U.S. and the U.K. If adopted, our program would bring BRAC into Latin America for the first time.

You, dear reader, can help support this proposal by going to the Facebook BRAC page and scrolling down to our proposal, then hitting the LIKE icon. The ten most liked proposals by the end of this month advance to the finals.

Granted, spinning out a new, world-changing meme and hoping it gains traction is a long-shot. Fail, and we continue on a path to ecological catastrophe combining climate change, drought, floods, famine, epidemics, financial collapse, mass migration of the desperate, and resource wars for food and water in a world armed with weapons of mass destruction. Succeed, and we have the opportunity to enter a new golden age, rebalancing Mother Nature’s cycles. eCOOLnomics describes the elements of that transition path.

Muddling Towards Theocracy

2012-01-07T13:25:00.000-06:00

"The logic that prevents legislators from dealing with economically suicidal problems like overpopulation, consumer addiction, climate change, peak oil, and the Federal Reserve is the selection of convenient myth, usually religious, over provable fact,"

“In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.” 

— James Madison

“A firehouse is more useful than a church.” 

— Benjamin Franklin

Julian Assange at Occupy London (mic check):

What is happening here today
CROWD: What is happening here today

is a culmination of dreams
CROWD: is a culmination of dreams

that many people all over the world
CROWD: that many people all over the world

have worked towards:
CROWD: have worked towards:

the (unintelligible) of London.
CROWD: the (mumble) of London.

What we face today
CROWD: What we face today

is the systematized destruction
CROWD: is the systematized destruction

of the rule of law.
CROWD: of the rule of law.

When we first listened to this, casually from a podcast while we were distracted with other things, what grabbed our ear was “… is epistemization of the rule of law,” which struck us as brilliant. Did he just say that? Then we rewound and heard the actual statement. Sigh. We liked “epistemization” better and suspect it would have worked well for Assange, who is known for elevating the discussion by deft — albeit oblique — parry, in the style of Bob Dylan or John Lennon.

Epistemology is the study of how we know if we know what we think we know.

To an epistemologist, the construction of the rule of law might be a worthy undertaking. It would begin by asking some deeper questions.

Going back to Socrates, we can posit that “knowledge is an evidence-justified belief.” In order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the proposition, but one must also have a good reasons supporting that belief. Made-up reasons don’t count. Faith-derived reasons don’t count.

Do you know that “knowledge is an evidence-justified belief.” No. Do you think you could find evidence to justify it?

Question authority. This causes a nearly infinite loop for epistemologists, because whether reasons are made up or self-evidently true regresses back to the core of your beliefs and how they were formed. The more we learn about neuroscience and inherited responses to our environment the more we have to question how, when and by what means our core beliefs are derived.

The process that produces law, be it national or local, is flawed in that it derives from a very thin and suspect consensus about the nature of reality. There is scant scientific or logical basis for punishing people who are following the instincts of their reptilian brains as informed by whatever socialization processes might have been thrown at them when they were children. We now have nearly 2 million people behind bars in the United States, the majority for victimless or “status” crimes. At least 10 million are imprisoned worldwide. What an enormous waste of resource!

“Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the biggest lesson of history.”

— Aldous Huxley

The global prison gulag only dates back 200 years, to William Penn, who abolished the Duke of York’s criminal code in the Pennsylvania colony after having been imprisoned for his Quaker beliefs. Under the old system, jails were usually just holding tanks while awaiting sentence, although a rare sentence might be imprisonment in a dungeon. Under Penn’s system crimes like "defiling the marriage bed" were punished by public whipping plus a one-year sentence for the first offense, life imprisonment for the second. Mercifully, the death penalty was lifted from denying "the true God" (a charge used against Quakers) and homosexuality. Under later revisions by Benjamin Franklin, Jeremy Bentham and others, dungeons became monastic cells and prisoners received useful trade instruction in workshops. This notion of criminal or psychological rehabilitation is now only practiced in a few smaller countries. The largest gulags are strictly punitive and torture, especially sensory deprivation, is undergoing a revival.

Rationally, there is no reason to punish gay people by making them hide their sexuality or denying them marriage benefits, any more than there is reason to apply the same to people of color, or to short people. But we hear presidential candidates saying:

“They can get married. They can marry a man if they’re a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they’re a man.” 

— Michele Bachmann

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. [Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.”

 — Rick Santorum

“The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is. A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.” 

— Herman Cain

Why does the President of the United States seek the death penalty for Time’s Man of the Year Bradley Manning, who should be getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom for risking his life to uphold the Code of Military Conduct and the U.S. Constitution (which he had sworn an oath to preserve and obey when he enlisted)? Perhaps he should get the Nobel Peace Prize for having revealed war crimes and high misdemeanors that precipitated the Arab Spring and Occupy movements around the globe. Answer: because Manning (as surrogate for Assange), broke the faith that keeps Black Ops operating in the light of day — under color of law. He pulled the veil on the Wizard of Oz.

There is no logic that informs a decision to send teenage first offenders off to prison for most of their adult lives because they possess or sell spiritual medicines. There is no benefit to the offender by doing that. The premises of the elected representatives of the offended society — that such punishments deter, that those individuals need to be kept segregated from “normal” people, from the potential for further crime, or that society must punish such activity or suffer moral decline — are all nonsense by any rational empirical test.

Ten Commandments of the Energy Ethic for Survival of Man in Nature

1. Thou shall not waste potential energy. 

2. Thou shall know what is right by its part in survival of thy system. 

3. Thou shall do unto others as best benefits the energy flows of thy system.

 4. Thou shall revel in thy systems work rejoicing in happiness that only finds thee in this good service. 

5. Thou shall treasure the other life of thy natural system as thine own, for only together shall thee all survive. 

6. Thou shall judge value by the energies spent, the energies stored, and the energy flow which is possible, turning not to the incomplete measure of money. 

7. Thou shall not unnecessarily cultivate high power, for error, destruction, noise, and excess vigilence are its evil wastes. 

8. Thou shall not take from man or nature without returning service of equal value, for only then are thee one.

 9. Thou shall treasure thy heritage of information, and in the uniqueness of thy good works and complex roles will thy system reap that which is new and immortal in thee. 

10. Thou must find in thy religion, stability over growth, organization over competition, diversity over uniformity, system over self, and survival process over individual peace.

Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (1971) 244.

The logic that prevents legislators from dealing with economically suicidal problems like overpopulation, consumer addiction, climate change, peak oil, and the Federal Reserve is the same logic that pushes them to enact impossible voter ID requirements, ban imports from Cuba, support Israel’s indefensible outrages against Palestinians, or shut down birth control funding to the United Nations. It is the selection of convenient myth, usually religious, over provable fact, as the foundation of most, if not all, of our body of law. It might be the terminal disease of our civilization, and our species, although there are many other viable candidates for that position.

“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” 

— Newt Gingrich

Canadian physician Gabor Maté says that we are systematically destroying children by the faith-based systems we have enshrined in our laws and culture. He describes the impact of 'adverse childhood experiences' or ACEs (e.g. a child being abused, violence in the family, a jailed parent, extreme stress of poverty, a rancorous divorce, an addict parent, etc.) on how a person lives their lives and their risk of addiction and mental and physical illnesses; as seen in a number of U.S.-based ACE studies. Having a number of ACEs exponentially increases a person's chances of becoming an addict later on e.g. a male child with six ACEs has a 4,600% or 46-fold increase in risk. ACEs also exponentially increase the risk of diseases e.g. cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. and also suicide and early death. Maté explained it to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:

“The human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from an evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads to house our large forebrains, and to walk on two legs we developed a narrow pelvis. That means — large head, narrow pelvis — we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise we’d never get born. The head is the biggest part of the body.

“Now the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years. That means that much of our brain development, that for other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. Which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on our mental input. When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop they way they ought to. It’s that simple.

“And unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics, rather than on the environment. Which, of course, is a simple explanation that also takes everyone off the hook.

“If people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies. We don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women. We don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families, or that most children in North America now have to be away from their parents from an early age because of economic considerations. And especially in the States, because of welfare laws, women are forced to go find low-paying jobs far away from home, often single women, and not see their kids for most of the day.

“Under those conditions, kids’ brains don’t develop they way they need to. If all that is caused by genetics we don’t have to look at those social policies. We don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, cause them more stress, cause them more pain, set them up for addictions and economic inequalities. If it is all genes, than we are all innocent and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies."

“As a Congressman, I’ve never voted for any budget that includes funding for Planned Parenthood. Instead, I’ve introduced the Taxpayers’ Freedom of Conscience Act to cut off all taxpayer funding of abortions, so-called “family planning” services and international abortionists.” 

— Ron Paul, on Planned Parenthood and the medical services it provides to the poor.

“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”

 — Michele Bachmann

“Yes, but not overnight. As a matter of fact, my program’s the only one that is going to be able to take care of the elderly. I’d like to get the young people out of it, just the younger generation.” 

— Ron Paul, after being asked if he favors abolishing Social Security.

Maté continues:

"The first point is that if people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged on people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we are punishing people for having been abused.

“The second point is that research clearly shows that the biggest driver of addictive relapse and addictive behavior is actually stress. In North America right now, because of the economic crisis, a lot of people are eating junk food because junk foods release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. So stress drives addiction.

“Imagine we were trying to come up with a system that tries to help addicts. Would we come up with a system that stresses them to the max? Who would design a system that ostracizes, marginalizes, impoverishes and insures the disease among the addicts and hopes through that system to rehabilitate large numbers? It can’t be done.

“In other words, the so-called War on Drugs — actually a war on people — actually entrenches addiction deeply. It institutionalizes people in a system where there is no care. We call it a correctional system but it doesn’t correct anything. It is a punitive system. So people suffer more.”

If Assange had actually said what we heard him say, “What we face today… is epistemization of the rule of law,” we would be cheering. THAT is the discussion we need to have.

The 2012 Presidential Election: Fruitcake or War Criminal?

2011-12-28T00:14:00.000-06:00

"Sixty-six percent of voters are “angry” at the media, with 33% “very angry...." Americans’ choice in 2012 seems clear: either arrest the current leadership for torture and other crimes or suffer the torture of your neighbors, friends, family, and yourself in 2012."

We were recently taken to task for Facebook and Twitter comments to the effect that the 2012 U.S. election boiled down to a choice of GOP fruitcakes or our war criminal President. We bemoaned the lack of either a viable third party or a courageous challenger within the Democratic machine. Criticism ran along the expected lines of "Yes, Obama was a disappointment to the left, but considering the odds (and the powers he answers to) what could you expect? Would we have been better off with McCain? Would we be better now with Mitt Romney? Ron Paul?"

We have had to take a moment to pause and think about how to explain our grievances in clearer terms.

Fortunately, Carl Herman has already done it, in fine and orderly detail. Carl is a graduate of UC Berkeley ('83) and Harvard Graduate School of Education ('99). The Executive Director of UNICEF credits his work with microcredit through RESULTS for saving a million children's lives every year. Currently, he's among California's 30,000 laid-off and unemployed teachers. As we have posted here in the past, the unemployed are dangerous.

NDAA 2012 torture of Americans, or arrest the 1%’s criminals: your choice

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Carl Herman

I appreciate my colleagues at Activist Post posting my friend Billy Vegas’ PuppetGov video, Obama and the War Criminals. The video powerfully shows damning testimony of US government “leadership” admitting they can torture any person they dictate as a “terrorist.”

Art and academic/professional documentation synergize for the 99% to declare the “emperor has no clothes” obvious facts of the 1%’s crimes.

NDAA 2012 (National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012) explicitly states dictatorial authority of the US executive branch to order US military to seize any person, including US citizens, for unlimited detention and without rights.

This repeats explicit language in the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

Because US government’s 1% “leadership” has tortured, refused to stop or prosecute torture under “new” “leadership” of Obama, now assassinates American citizens upon the dictation of the president, and repeats legislative language in NDAA 2012 again to “disappear” American citizens, Americans’ choice in 2012 seems clear: either arrest the criminal 1% “leadership” for obvious War Crimes, or suffer the torture of your neighbors, friends, family, and yourself in 2012.

Following is my best attempt to academically and professionally document this obvious crime against the US Constitution; from my 6-part series, Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now:

Let’s briefly consider allegations of US torture to detainees/claimed “unlawful enemy combatants.” Remember, a “detainee” hasn’t been charged with a crime; the person’s habeas corpus right has been destroyed, and the US government currently claims authority to imprison the detainee indefinitely or simply assassinate anyone claimed to be a “terrorist.”

The US applies interrogation techniques to “unlawful enemy combatants/terrorists” that previous case law found were torture. For example, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have both admitted to authorizing “waterboarding,” [13] found by courts to be torture in all previous case law in the US and internationally[14]. When previous US courts are unanimous in their findings, [15] that means the legal definition of an act is absolutely certain. In this case, waterboarding, or more accurately “controlled drowning,” is torture.

The US Constitution expressly forbids torture in the 8th Amendment. United States Federal Law forbids torture under Code 18 section 2340. The US is bound by several treaties to never torture: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (legally defining the meaning of the UN Charter treaty, and the most-translated document in world history), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (an interesting study of the US saying one thing and doing the opposite), the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Convention Against Torture.

Importantly, these laws do not say there are exceptions to allow torture; that is, the torturer cannot use the specious “ticking time bomb” excuse that torture was required to save lives. For example, one US treaty to end torture is the UN Convention Against Torture. It states under Article 2 [16]:

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Convention III of the Geneva Conventions defines torture in Article 3 as, “outrages upon human dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The US refused the UN’s request to inspect the US prison at Guantanamo Bay to evaluate claims of torture. [17] The US refused to release to the press the International Red Cross’ findings of the treatment of detainees. [18]

The US claims under MCA that the US can remove all protections of persons under interrogation: US Constitution, Geneva Convention, and other applicable treaties. This is in Orwellian contradiction to the US Constitution being the definition of American law (and what it means to “defend America”) and in Article 6 that US treaties are the “Supreme Law of the Land.” The word “supreme” means “highest in rank or authority…greatest, utmost…last or final.”

So let’s pause and digest this. It is as simple, I assert, as our baseball analogy of a batter being out at first base by twenty feet, and an umpire/announcer conspiracy trying to get away with the lie of calling the runner safe. Let’s look:

By any and all understanding of professional legal practice, waterboarding is legally defined in the present as torture because it was determined as torture in all previous cases.
The US has legally bound itself in its Constitution, Federal Law, and four treaties to never torture.
Presidents Bush and Obama, along with corresponding leaders, claim that upon their unquestionable word that someone is a “terrorist,” those laws no longer apply.
When government is no longer limited by law, that form of government is no longer a Constitutional Republic. Government based upon what the leader says at any given time is the very definition of dictatorship.
US corporate media does clearly explain the above legal facts. I mean, this has all been news to you, yes?

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are welcome to argue for waterboarding’s reclassification as a legal practice, of course, but the legally-demanded place under a constitutional republic is in a Federal criminal courtroom, not a book tour.

Is this really that clear? Although I’m perfectly free to assert this as a fact, you’re perfectly free to determine the facts, their meaning, and what we should do about it for yourself.

For an expert legal analysis, you might consider Jonathan Turley, voted among the editors of the American Bar Association Journal as having the US’ top legal blog [19]:

“The United States has a clear obligation to prosecute those responsible for our torture program. However, President Obama has promised to block any investigation of torturers and has stopped any investigation of those who ordered the war crime.”

This would be as if the school principal’s son were a student here and would take tests while having notes on his desk with the test’s content and answers. We know that in all previous “case law” that when a student is caught taking a test with notes that contain test content, that is called “cheating.” However, the principal, son, teacher, and local media call it an “enhanced studying technique,” that while controversial, is necessary for school security against terror-tests that might infiltrate the school from people who hate education. They say this with a straight face. You know that if you did what the principal’s son did, it’s cheating and you’re busted.

Let’s consider US corporate media’s “reporting” in more detail. This is essential because if American’s access to accurate information is compromised by government propaganda, then Americans will not have easy access to the facts. This is what the California Framework means when it asks you to guard against propaganda. Doing so requires your real-world critical thinking skills.

“Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media,” a paper published from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that studied the US’ four most-read newspapers, found from the 1930s to 2004 that The New York Times reported waterboarding as torture 82% of the time, and The Los Angeles Times did so 96%. After stories broke that the US was waterboarding “detainees” in current US wars, the papers’ reporting of waterboarding as torture dropped to 1% and 5%, respectfully. In addition, after the US admitted to waterboarding, The Wall Street Journal called it torture in just 1 of 63 articles (2%), and USA Today never called it torture.

We have verified history of official government propaganda having infiltrated corporate media.

The Church Senate Committee hearings had the cooperation of CIA Director William Colby’s testimony that over 400 CIA operatives were controlling US corporate media [20] reporting on specific issues of national interest in what they called Operation Mockingbird. This stunning testimony was then confirmed by Pulitzer Prize reporter Carl Bernstein’s research [21] and reporting. Of course, corporate media refused to publish Bernstein’s article and it became the cover-story for Rolling Stone. For a 13-minute video that includes the President of CBS admitting that their news agency accepted and communicated CIA-generated and planted stories, the CIA Director admitting to the Senate that this is true, examples of widely-reported “news” stories that were total lies from the CIA to foment war support from the US public, watch here. [22]

So which conclusion seems most plausible to you:

US corporate media stopped calling waterboarding “torture” because leading and professional reporters of law somehow forgot or found basic legal definitions based on case law no longer important. I like to characterize this as the “Homer Simpson” or “SpongeBob defense.”
US corporate media were ordered to change their reporting. Professional writers in law are very aware of looking at case law, and independent legal experts they interview affirm this as basic legal analysis especially when case law is unanimous in verdicts. It’s impossible to explain this removal of reporting waterboarding as legally-defined torture unless the corporate media editors made that conscious decision.

Corporate media won’t report the following polling data, but the American public have noticed something is very wrong with their “news”:

Just as only one in five Americans report trust and satisfaction with their government [23] (and here [24]), Americans also perceive corporate media disinformation and are rejecting their “reporting.”

According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center [25], the majority of the American public see the US major media news organizations as politically biased, inaccurate, and uncaring. Among those who use the Internet, two-thirds report that major media news do not care about the people they report on, 59% say the news is inaccurate, 64% see bias, and 53% summarize their view on major media news as, “failing to stand up for America.” In their latest poll [26], “just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate.”

A June 2010 Rasmussen poll [27] found 66% of voters “angry” at the media, with 33% “very angry.” Rasmussen also found 70% “angry” at current federal government policies.

A possible genesis of oligarchic control of American major media was reported in the US Congressional Record in 1917 [28]. US Congressperson Oscar Callaway claimed evidence that J.P. Morgan had purchased editorial control over 25 of the nation’s most influential publications in order to create public support for US entry into World War 1 and his new banking legislative victory: creation of the Federal Reserve system. Mr. Callaway’s colleagues voted down an official investigation.

Related corporate reporting history is summarized and documented in this brief article, “The news media at war” [29].

*****

endnotes:

13. To understand waterboarding, you can watch leading journalist Christopher Hitchens get waterboarded: Watch Christopher Hitchens get waterboarded (Vanity Fair): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58 .

14. This story was opened by ABC News. Sources: top Bush advisors approved ‘enhanced interrogation.’ Greenburg, J.C., Rosenberg, H.L., deVogue, A. April 9, 2008: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256&page=1 and obvious follow-up analysis calling for prosecution (among many in alternative media) from Common Dreams. Arrest Bush: Bush confesses to Waterboarding. Call D.C. cops! Rall, T. April 30, 2008: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/30/8611/ . For more current analysis, consider these entries from Washington’s Blog: Cheney admits to being War Criminal. Feb. 16, 2010: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/02/cheney-admits-to-being-war-criminal.html , Obama team feared revolt if he prosecuted War Crimes. Sept. 12, 2011: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/09/obama-team-feared-revolt-if-he-prosecuted-war-crimes.html , Everything you need to know about torture. March 7, 2011: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/03/everything-you-need-to-know-about-torture.html

15 the link is a nice visual and list from ProCon.org. For legal discussion: Washington Post. Waterboarding used to be a crime. Wallach, E. Nov. 4, 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html , Washington University Law Review. Waterboarding is illegal. Huhn, W. May 10, 2008: http://lawreview.wustl.edu/slip-opinions/waterboarding-is-illegal/

16 For discussion, consider Virginia Law. U.S. may be sidestepping U.N. Convention Against Torture in War on Terror. March 20, 2003: http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2003_spr/torture_ps.htm

17 BBC. US faces prison ship allegations. June 28, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4632087.stm

18 BBC. ICRC raises Guantanamo conditions. Feb. 15, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4267297.stm

19 Jonathan Turley. London mayor tells Bush to stay out of Londontown – will international shunning become prosecution? Nov. 19, 2010: http://jonathanturley.org/2010/11/19/london-mayor-tells-bush-to-stay-out-of-londontown-will-international-shunning-become-prosecution/ Video interview with Keith Olbermann here: Informed comment. Bush could be arrested in Europe: Turley to Olbermann. Nov. 21, 2010: http://www.juancole.com/2010/11/bush-could-be-arrested-in-europe-turley-to-olbermann.html

20 And other documentation of controlled US media: Examiner.com. Protitution “journalism”: Yup, mainstream media is intentional propaganda. Accept the evidence. Herman, C. Nov. 24, 2009.

21 The CIA and the media: How America’s most powerful news media worked hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and why the Church Committee covered it up. Bernstein, C. Oct. 20, 1977.

22 Sibel Edmond’s Boiling Frogs. CIA News: A brief history of media manipulation by U.S. Intelligence. Sept. 30, 2011: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/09/30/the-eyeopener-cia-in-the-news-media-2/

23 Pew Research Center. Distrust, Discontent, Anger, and Partisan Rancor. April 18, 2010.

24 Infowars.com. Dissatisfaction with government reaches all time high. Watson, S. Sept. 26, 2011.

25 Pew Research Center Publications. Internet news audience highly critical of news organizations. Aug. 9, 2007.

26 Pew Research Center. Press accuracy rating hits two decade low. Sept. 13, 2009.

27 Rasmussen reports. 66% of voters are angry at the media. June 15, 2010.

28 Examiner.com. Congressional Record: JP Morgan & Co purchased all major media for propaganda: 1917. And now…? Herman, C. June 6, 2010.

29 Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The news media at war. Hansen, T. June 22, 2010.

Fuke Nuke’s Spooks and Kooks

2011-12-23T13:34:00.000-06:00

"Rather than employing a double-blind, the researchers fixated on their special causal agent — radiation — as being the only possible weapon at the crime scene. Naturally, nuclear power’s proponents could be counted on to seize on the overblown hyperbole of their opponents. It was like going to an old-timey Liar’s Contest at the county fair."

In January 1976, at a meeting at the Washington Sheraton, Ralph Nader introduced us to a spy who had come in from the cold. His name was David Comey and during the Second World War he had worked in OSS, trying to head fake the Third Reich about where the landings would come for the Allied invasion of France. He was a real life spook.

In 1975, the Atomic Industrial Forum had invited David Comey to tell the nuclear industry how it could be more credible with the public. He was a high-priced consultant; not a lobbyist, an historian. Comey gave them his standard answer. To become credible you must tell the truth.

As Comey told us a few months later at this party Nader had thrown, the way the OSS deceived Hitler was by always being accurate in its leaked communications. Sometimes the Allies had to take painful losses in order to gain the Wehrmacht’s trust. But when the final invasion came, on June 6, 1944, it was not at Pas-de-Calais, where Hitler had positioned his SS Panzers, but at Normandy, where his armored divisions were manned by the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Fake out.

Comey had told the nuclear industry’s spokesmen to become credible they must tell the truth: admit that low-level radiation causes cancer and long-term genetic effects; confess that important safety research has never been done, or done improperly; reveal all the hidden and external costs, both present and into the future; acknowledge there is no solution to the waste issue; and perhaps most importantly, "Talk about the ethics of consuming electricity from fission reactors for 50 years and saddling 20,000 future generations with social and environmental problems."

On that day in 1976 when Nader gathered us at that swank hotel in the District, Comey flipped his speech over and gave the same advice to the anti-nuke stalwarts — ourselves, Dana Meadows, Harvey Wasserman, Pat Birney, Kay Drey, Anna Gyorgy, Tony Roisman and others. He warned us that we didn’t need to embellish the truth. It was our strongest ally. Moreover, it was our ally alone, at that moment. He said he was perfectly confidant that the nuclear industry would never follow his advice, would never tell the truth, and would never be credible.

Fast forward 36 years and we see that Comey was absolutely right about one thing. The nuclear industry has never taken his advice.

Unfortunately, neither have some of the opposition.

The Radiation and Public Health Project is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians trying to publicize the links between low-level nuclear radiation and public health. Their programs include The Tooth Fairy Project, which collects baby teeth and charts stored body burden levels by region; the Long-Term Effects Study, that follows the lifetime medical histories of 85,000 tooth donors; and an outreach campaign that involves testimony to state and national regulatory agencies, publications and videos, and commissioned research studies. Their board members include Clinton Department of Energy Undersecretary Robert Alvarez, Reagan speechwriter Karl Grossman, actor Alec Baldwin and Superspokesmodel Christie Brinkley. They are the epitome of a well-greased, inside-the-beltway opposition machine.

They have sponsored 28 scientific studies that have appeared in peer-reviewed medical journals. Most of these are authored by RPHP Executive Director Joseph Mangano. They have made it clear that at least in the USA, the 104 licensed commercial power reactors are not accidents waiting to happen, they are accidents in progress. In November, 2010, they reported cancer incidence rates in the four counties closest to the Indian Point nuclear plant have risen much more rapidly than the U.S. on average, since the early 1990s. “If trends in local rates had equaled U.S. trends, over 20,000 fewer local residents would have been diagnosed with the disease,” the report said.

On December 1st, 2010, a report from the Tooth Fairy Project found a link between atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and cancer deaths in St. Louis. Average Strontium-90 in teeth of Missourians who died of cancer was significantly greater than for controls, which suggests that many thousands of Americans have died or will die of cancer due to exposure to radioactive fallout, far more than previously believed.

Since the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima in March that caused multiple core-meltdowns and radiation releases on a scale not seen since Chernobyl, RPHP has been running on overdrive. In April, Mangano’s team analyzed official EPA data on reactor fallout that drifted to the U.S., and discovered it was 20 times normal background. Levels in Idaho were about 100 times above normal.

The Obama Adminstration responded on May 3^rd by ordering the EPA to stop taking weekly samples, as they did in the aftermath of Chernobyl, and go to quarterly samples, even though the weekly samples showed marked elevations in the preceding month — several hundred times the norm. In June, RPHP published a preliminary report showing rising infant deaths in North American areas hardest hit. Using CDC data, the researchers found a 35% rise in the Pacific Northwest and a 48% rise in Philadelphia.

Fallout map purporting to be by USNRC is an internet hoax

On December 19, RPHP called a press conference to announce the publication in the January 2012 issue of International Journal of Health Services (Volume 42, Number 1, Pages 47–64) of their completed study: “An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: Is There a Correlation?” According to the results, “deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected.”

Actual seawater radiation plume -- not a hoax.

The only problem with this finding is that it does not pass the sniff test. We know from 60 years of human studies — radium dial painters, Navajo uranium miners, Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties, children x-rayed in-utero who later developed leukemia, workers at atomic plants, and the atomic veterans of Cold War human experiments — that radiation induces fatalities by transposing nucleoprotein sequences in living cells. It scrambles our DNA. A cell that is damaged by a small dose is more likely to survive and propagate than a cell that is damaged by a large dose. Hence, devices like airport scanners are more deadly than x-rays or working in a nuclear power plant — the curve of cancers is superlinear at low doses.

To produce a cancer, however, is not a quick process. The damaged cell has to divide, pass along its damaged code, and then divide again. For leukemias, which are produced when bone marrow cells are unable to properly code for the production of white blood cells, it takes 5 years from exposure to see the effect. For most soft-tissue cancers, 15 to 20 years of replication is needed before tumors can emerge that are observable and life-threatening. Since cancer growth is exponential, acceleration is rapid once the growth passes out of the latency period. That is the catch-22 of cancer: you can’t treat it until you can observe it and by then it may be too late.

For birth defects, the timetable is somewhat faster. An embryo is a ball of rapidly dividing cells, going from zygote to fully-sustaining mammal in just 9 months. Any corruption in coding shows up immediately if it involves physical structures, and in many cases those will be fatal, either to the fetus or to the infant. More subtle defects — including thousands of genetically-determined immune disorders, from allergies to pre-disposition to exotic diseases — can manifest gradually over a lifetime, or not at all, but be passed intact to offspring, ad infinitum.

Because fallout is inhaled or ingested and hot particles then become resident internal emitters, exposure is ongoing. This is equally true of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all the nuclear tests of the post-war era, including those being conducted today, openly or in secret. In the case of low-dose, high-impact fallout from Fukushima, we would expect to see:

1. A spike in be spontaneous abortion, premature birth, and neo-natal deaths in the second half of 2011 and continuing at least through 2012 (depending on rates of ongoing emissions from Fukushima and the ocean currents carrying the radioactive slug);

2. A spike in observed birth effects in the second half of 2011 and continuing at least through 2012. Depending on the time of in utero radiation exposure, this might low birth weight, stillbirth, sudden infant death, congenital malformations, or brain damage;

3. A spike in miscarriages in the second half of 2011 and continuing at least through 2012;

4. A spike in leukemias, especially in children, beginning no sooner than mid-2016;

5. Increases in thyroid neoplasms in children, beginning no sooner than mid-2016;

6. Increases in nearly all forms of cancer, beginning around 2026; and

7. Second generation effects, beginning around 2030, when children born with latent genetic damage have children of their own. We have known since the 1930s that fewer than 10% of latent genetic defects are expressed in any single generation.

Contrast this with what RPHP reports: “deaths rose 4.46 percent … after the arrival of Japanese fallout…. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected.”

While it is possible to connect the 822 infant deaths to Fukushima by inference, we would want to know how those infants died. How many were killed in automobile accidents, for instance, or home fires? Of those who died from “crib death,” what were the symptoms? How many had observed birth defects?

As for the 13,161 non-infant deaths, those have to be excluded because of what we know about latency in carcinogenesis. Even if that were not the case, we might want to ask questions like how many of the excess deaths could be attributed to suicide as a result of the global financial crisis, or other causal agents that might be suddenly elevated. So, for instance, 2011 was 10 years after the 9-11 attacks, and 6 to 9 years after the dramatic elevation in radioactive airport scanning.

How did the researchers explain the physical mechanisms that could explain such sudden deaths? They said, “Patterns of deaths among persons of all ages strongly reflect patterns among the elderly, who account for over two-thirds of all deaths. For the older population, explanations for excess deaths must be considered after exposure to higher levels of radioactive fallout. If cancer in some patients becomes active again, it may mean they already have cells carrying all but one of the three to four requisite mutations to express cancer. Exposure to radiation (or a toxic chemical) can provide the one final mutation to reactivate a quiescent tumor. Also vulnerable are those elderly with depressed immune status, made worse by exposure to radiation.”

To us, having a very long history with this subject, that seems a pretty weak argument. Threadbare, really. Rather than employing a double-blind, the researchers are fixated on their special causal agent — radiation — as being the only possible weapon at the crime scene.

Naturally, nuclear power’s proponents could be counted on to seize a propaganda victory from the overblown hyperbole of their opponents. It was like going to an old-timey Liar’s Contest at the county fair. No less an esteemed source than Scientific American weighed in to challenge the champion liar. In their December 20 blog, Scientific American’s Michael Moyer called the Fuke mortality study “sloppy, agenda-driven work.” Rather than agreeing with Mangano that EPA was negligent, not to say nefarious, in halting the monitoring of incoming fallout, Moyer chastised the researchers for relying instead on data from radioactivity in milk, water and air in the weeks right after the Fuke meltdown up until the Obama Administration suspended monitoring. Rather than agreeing with Mangano and lamenting that detailed death certificates won’t be publically available for another 2 years, necessitating resort to less precise raw mortality data from the National Centers for Disease Control, Scientific American chastised the researchers for their entire methodology, which, while thin, is not without some value.

On December 21 the Big Health blogosphere jumped into the Fuke fray. Barbara Feder Ostrov, blogging from the University of California (which has its own sorry history of human radiation experiments gone awry), lauded Scientific American’s trashing of Mangano and RPHP. Ostrov demanded the Journal of International Health Services, which published the Fuke mortality study, respond to the criticism. The journal’s editor-in-chief Vicente Navarro, professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote her back:

In reply to your questions, this quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal and the paper was reviewed by 2 outstanding scholars in the subject being discussed. We trust our referees’ judgment. We do not publish letters to the editors, but when we receive criticisms we believe merit attention, we publish them asking the authors of the original article to reply if they so wish, publishing the exchange in the same issue and let the readers judge. This is how academic debates should be handled.

We have invited Mr. Moyer to submit his criticisms published in the Scientific American blog to the IJHS in its entirety as a reprint or in a modified form and we very much hope he will agree. If he does, the IJHS will publish it in one of the next issues with a reply from the authors if they so wish, which I suspect they will.

Navarro’s solicitation to openly debate was quashed by Michael Moyer, who wrote back:

In short: I'm a journalist, not a scientist. My post is the property of Scientific American, so there's rights issues. My post also argued against both the paper and the claims made by the authors in their press release. And since the authors' strategy seems to be to gain legitimacy for their public claims by the simple fact of appearing in a peer reviewed journal, I didn't want to give them another opportunity to trumpet their success.

In other words, we (Scientific American) are not scientists. We are just bloggers, really. All this scientificy stuff, well, y’all discuss what you want. We have our opinions.

Bottom line: Was the anti-nuke RPHP study and press package over the top? Yes. One simply cannot assume, as Mangano did, that CDC’s observed excess deaths after March 20 are due to Fukushima, and not just a statistical aberration with other possible explanations.

Was the response from the pro-nuke Big Science lobby equally lame? Yes. Mangano acknowledged he was awaiting better data and in the meantime couched his research in cautious, preliminary terms, saying that if the effect of Fuke is as bad as it might well be, we are seeing what you would expect to see now.

Swirling all around this debate we have the spectacle, in science, as we’ve seen before in politics, of blame-games and posturing substituting for earnest discussion of very serious issues. It supplies still more momentum to the march off the cliff and our own extinction.

More nuclear power plants are being built even as we write this. Nuclear power plants are little more than disguised bomb factories. They kill with impunity while they amass their stockpiles of deadly armaments and even deadlier poisons. Genetically, we could be poisoning future generations with immune impairments that will render them unable to survive in the toxic environments they are being bequeathed.

In the United States it is a huge industry, and it buys plenty of votes. It lies, it kills, it destroys economies, but it is seldom being publicly exposed. Indeed, the routine security screening involving x-raying broad swaths of the population as they pass though airports and government buildings will, as surely as night follows day, cause a huge spike in radiation-related disease and death in pulses of 5 years, 15 years, 30 years and beyond.

And, as the RPHP authors point out, all life is sensitive to nuclear radiation exposure, including plants, fungi, insects spiders, birds, fish, and other animals. This is fair game for science and a legitimate subject for policy debate. To obscure that discussion with parlor tricks and unscrupulous advocacy is tragic.

David Comey must be turning in his grave.

Closing the Ambition Gap

2011-12-11T14:29:00.000-06:00

"The heavy rainstorms that blocked view of the full moon over Durban gave way to sunrise as the delegates wended their weary way back from the final plenary this morning. A mere 24-hours earlier it had seemed most probable that COP-17 would be a total bust. Now, with the rays of the sun, came fresh rays of hope. There is no legally binding regime in place yet, but the resolve has been taken to create that, and to raise the global level of ambition."

“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is dispatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Connie Hedegaard, EU Head of Delegation, by Rogan Ward/Reuters

By now no veteran delegate to the UN climate talks would be so foolish as to book a flight home before the first Monday afterwards, knowing that the reason these Conferences of the Parties (COPs) are always scheduled to end on Fridays is so that they can continue working through the weekend to salvage a last-minute deal and avert utter shame. Those veterans with the most experience — Christina Figueres (UNFCCC), Connie Hedegaard (EU) or Todd Stern (USA), for instance — begin, by the end of the second week, to physically resemble zombies, the walking dead. And well they should! They have only two raw cravings: to kick the can a little farther down the road, and for no-one to shoot them in the head.

Marcin Korolec had one of the toughest sleep deprivations. Only three weeks before COP-17 began, Poland ascended to the 6-month rotating presidency of the EU and he had gone from being named, in quick succession, Environmental Minister of Poland to being named EU Council Environmental Minister and a representative for the 27 member countries to the Durban climate talks. Some 90 per cent of Poland’s electricity is generated from coal. Being Environmental Minister of Poland was hard enough.

The EU Council is beset by a string of crises, to which Korolec will be flying back after Durban. While he was away an emergency EU meeting failed to summon more than a few weeks’ funding for failing banks, putting the Eurozone banking system at the edge of collapse. At the end of the 8-9 December EU summit in Brussels, only 17 of the 27 EU countries were ready to participate in a new fiscal compact. EU’s major lenders have themselves begun to run out of assets. Even bedrock German banks are now showing stark deterioration in their core capital ratios. Banks and sovereigns are having fire sales of assets, including gold, but even if they could raise €1 trillion of funding it would only meet the needs of averting Italian and Spanish defaults. After Italy and Spain, there are 25 more dominoes to fall. Is it any wonder that banks are using bailout money to buy credit default swaps against the sovereigns who are bailing them out?

Todd Stern, USA, with Chinese Head of Delegation,
Xie Zhenhua, vice director of China's National
Development and Reform Commission

The monster the Eurozone is dueling is the exponential function, which was driven up on cheap, abundant high-quality energy, and is now declining, just as those supplies are. Peak Money may have been hit in mid-2007. Total bank holdings worldwide are around 10 to 11 trillion, down from 31 trillion in that year. The lending power of banks is halving about every 3 years now.

The total face value of world money — including over-the-counter derivatives, like hedge funds and credit default swaps, is about $708 trillion. The U.S. has total debt and liabilities of over $116 trillion, although much is hidden, so these numbers are very sketchy. What we know of amounts to $1 million per taxpayer. Marked to market, guessing who will get haircuts and who will be paid, those claims are probably worth less than $20 trillion, or about $175,000 per taxpayer. Compared to the Eurozone, which will have to issue $16 trillion in bonds to bridge its current crisis, the US looks like a safe haven.

Familiarity with the exponential function served Korolec well in his COP-17 role. Consumption of fossil fuels and concentrations of greenhouse gases have tracked an exponential curve over the past 150 years. CO2 is responsible for 7 of the 33 degrees of the greenhouse effect that keeps Earth habitable for life. Burning half of all mined hydrocarbons caused a 40 percent increase in CO2 (from 280 ppm to 390 ppm). Burning the other half, drawn from inhospitable places like the tar sands, oil shales, deep water and Arctic basins would increase the temperature by well over 9°F, even without cascading tipping points like permafrost and methane clathrates. That’s well beyond a margin that could shelter most terrestrial life-forms, to say nothing of warm-blooded mammals such as ourselves.

While it is by no means certain that Korolec gets this yet, the connections between the collapse of the global financial system and the collapse of the global ecological system may dawn on him sooner than most. The tone in Durban was existential. The lack of ambition in the EU agenda was criticized by Bolivia, Venezuela and others in terms that resonated like a funeral dirge for humankind.

The bright spot in Durban was an array of fresh faces of youth, from all over the world, who, miraculously by the standards of most international governmental fora, were welcomed as full Civil Society participants with delegate badges and the opportunity to make a presentation at the meeting of ministers. It came as no surprise that in her address, Youth’s representative, Anjali Appadurai from Coquitlam, BC and The College of the Atlantic, brought the house down, not the least because when she finished a very moving and well-delivered speech to the assembled nations and was receiving a standing ovation, she called “Mic Check” and received a further standing reply from her colleagues and others so moved, in which she led chants of “We’re running out of time!” and “Get it done!”

Ironically, some things Ms. Appadurai said in her address showed in sharp relief the fault lines running through the talks and why no deal had yet been reached to steer the world away from its head-long lurch to oblivion. “Common but differentiated and historical responsibility are not up for debate,” she said.

Breaking that down from the UN-speak that infects such meetings, “common but differentiated” responsibility derives from the wording of the original Kyoto treaty, which effected a compromise between South and North, the developing versus industrially developed stakeholders.

Indian Delegate Jayanthi Natarajan

For the North, who had to own up to “historic responsibility” of purchasing century-long industrialization at the expense of the atmospheric commons (not to mention soil and mineral degradation, exhaustion of fossil fuels, ruinous destruction of habitat and biodiversity, and the socially devastating effects of capitalism and globalization), emissions reductions were a hair-shirt, worn to atone for their sins.

Under the Kyoto regime, each “developed” nation was prescribed a target percentage reduction of its greenhouse gas pollution based on its 1995 emissions level and its capacity to effect reductions. “Developing” nations were essentially given a pass. Since they were not responsible for the problem to begin with, they pleaded with the growth junkies at the UN that they required the methamphetamine-like injections of pure stuff – coal, gas and oil – to “catch up” with Europe and the USA in consumer culture and its spendthrift, glamorous lifestyles as seen on TV. Their “common but differentiated” burden would be a free pass to pollute. Instead of having targets of reducing their actual emissions, they would have targets based on percentages of what their emissions might one day become, were they as wasteful as say, the United States, Australia or Canada.

This nukespeak has developed its own set of code-words, like the atmospheric parking lot analogy, used so fondly by India. In the parking lot analogy, there are a fixed set of spaces in the sky for us to park smoke. India reckons we have 75% of the spaces taken and 25% remain. This is of course, utter nonsense, because if the atmospheric garage were not already oversmoked by 150 to 200%, we would not be losing so much ice in the Arctic and experiencing such extreme weather everywhere else. But, under India’s rationale, the question is who gets to use the last 25% and can we not agree to apportion that added pollution more fairly, such as by population size or GDP, for instance? In UN-speak, this is called “equity.”

The crippled Kyoto treaty, which is what Ms. Appadurai was so passionate about saving, would only reduce emissions by developed countries by 12-17% in a best-case scenario. Even under the rosiest scientific scenarios the world needs immediate 25 to 30% reductions and 80% by mid-century to have a chance to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century. That’s crucial because beyond 2 degrees we very likely would pass tipping points to 3 degrees and at 3 degrees pass more tipping points leading us to 4 degrees, and so on, all irreversible, all totally catastrophic. Kyoto, as it was structured with common but differentiated and historical responsibilities, gives a free pass to developing countries, including rapidly industrializing Brazil, South Africa, India and China (the BASIC group), to continue enlarging emissions, which, as we have seen in the past few years, quickly wipes out all gains in the developed world and jams yet more smoke into the crammed atmospheric parking lot, every year.

As the final days’ showdown approached, most observers said that Durban would be a bust. We were already labeling it the COP-out of COPs. The EU insisted on a legally binding treaty to follow a brief renewal of Kyoto — one that would bind both North and South to reductions. India and its allies insisted on including the “equity” issue; more passes to pollute. China was ready to concede it had become an industrial country, but it rightly pointed to all the other developed countries and asked, poignantly, which of them had done as much to go green in its development planning? Which of them had found as many new ways to reduce their own carbon footprints as China had?

Venezuela's Claudia Solerno stands on a table to be heard

Friday’s closing sessions gave way to an all-night session, which gave way to meetings throughout the day on Saturday. The South African airline announced it would add more flights on Sunday afternoon to accommodate rebookings, taking away the excuses of those who said they had to leave. As evening approached on Saturday, statements by delegates became more passionate. Claudia Salerno of Venezuela, one of the most eloquent speakers at the conference, stood on a table and waved at the chair to be heard. She spoke in defense of extending Kyoto.

For readers who did not follow our blow-by-blow posts from Copenhagen and Cancún, the background of this is that the United States under George W. Bush had wanted to get rid of Al Gore’s Kyoto climate treaty entirely and did whatever it could to subvert UN efforts to strengthen or extend it. In Copenhagen, President Obama succeeded where Bush had failed, getting COP-15 to sign off on a one-page voluntary pledge system in lieu of legally binding caps. Hillary Clinton had sweetened the deal a week earlier by going to Copenhagen with a promise of $100 billion in public and private money to promote “green” development in the two-thirds world. This bought off a lot of the opposition.

This is actually standard diplomatic procedure for the United States going back to at least the Second World War. Pay any price to get what you want. Money is not the problem.

Norway pointed out that Ethopia would develop without CO2

In Cancún the extortion was formalized into the Green Climate Fund, to be initially managed by the Global Environmental Facility, an arm of the World Bank, which is very experienced at extorting whole countries, just ask Argentina. One of the tasks for Durban, which was never resolved but was kicked down the road, was how to fund the Green Climate Fund and who would succeed GEF as manager. In principle, the Fund is a great idea, because it takes away the rationale for “common but differentiated” passes to pollute. Ethiopia, for example, has said it will effect its development entirely without benefit of fossil fuels. Such a fund could pay for that to happen everywhere. The problem is that GEF is not perceived as a neutral manager, and what Ms. Solerno said seemed to confirm that.

Speaking with stern resolve, tinged with angry indignation, Ms. Solerno said that outside the plenary chamber, during a break, she had been threatened by someone who had told her she needed to abandon support of Kyoto or Venezuela would lose any access to the Green Climate Fund. She did not say who had made this threat, but she said, “Mr. Chairman, I will be heard. I am not less party than parties that are not parties to some issues.” The United States is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, never having ratified the treaty.

“Mr .Chairman, we are a peaceful country but we do not like threats. We do not like threats from countries that have shown to the world that they are not ready to do anything or to anything else but give money. In the corridor I have received two threats. One, that if Venezuela does not adopt the text, they will not give us the second commitment period. Mr. Chairman, the second commitment period is not for Venezuela, it is for the world. It is to preserve and sustain the rule system. If they threaten me with this fake trade — that we need to actually adopt a weaker regime for the world — they are actually not threatening me, but the world.

“Secondly, and the most pathetic, and the most lowest threat, if we don’t give them their comfort zone, with no rules, flexible, in which they’re going to do whatever they want, when they want — to take us to four degrees — we are not going to have the Green Climate Fund….

“Mr. Chairman, the issue on your text is how do we see the future. My country has made all these efforts to resist this merchantilist vision that pretends to save us, putting a price on the most sacred, which is our future, and the future of our children, and the future of our world. And I believe that future as many think, some believe it costs $100 billion dollars. Here we are not selling Kyoto for $100 billion dollars. The fate of this world is not worth it. $100 billion dollars…. The ethical position and the integrity of the completely flooded Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is not going to be sold for $100 billion dollars. We need to stop this farce, this lack of shame by some delegates.”

In the evening, hoping to salvage some deal from the year-long negotiations, President of COP-17 Maite Nkoana-Mashabane convened an informal “listening session.” “It is your choice what history you want to make,” she said.

Huddle in final Indaba

She reminded delegates of the ways that the Zulu people came together in a spirit of Ubuntu, compromise for the betterment of the whole, in sessions called indaba, gatherings with the purpose of debating a matter of grave importance in an attempt to find common mind or a common story that all the participants can take home with them. After hours of statements from delegates, ranging from impassioned pleas from island countries to outrage over equity issues by India’s Jayanthi Natarajan, at 2:40 AM on Sunday, she asked for a 10-minute “huddle” to permit delegates who seemed the farthest apart to meet and attempt to resolve their differences. That huddle continued for close to an hour, but then, remarkably, it did produce results. India, which had vowed to block consensus, was persuaded to rejoin by a change of wording from “a legal outcome” to “an agreed outcome with legal force.” Venezuela was given both a renewal of the Kyoto Protocol and the Green Climate Fund. The US, hoping desperately to kick the can past the current election year, was saddled with a new framework that would eventually, by no later than 2020, bind both it and China to a common reduction regimen.

As she gaveled the COP to a close, Nkoana-Mashabane said “Climate change is the common problem which affects all of us and the Durban Platform is the story we will take home with us. Our intention with indaba was to restore trust in the multilateral system and to enshrine transparency and facility within our party-driven process. The decisions we have taken here are truly historical and include the following: amendments to the Kyoto Protocol, decisions on the LCA, the Green Climate Fund and the future of the climate change regime…. At the outset we asked you to show leadership in action and to think beyond your national position. You have clearly demonstrated your commitment and resolve to achieve the broad and balanced result that we can all be proud of…. We have once again saved tomorrow today.”

Whether tomorrow was really saved today or whether that was mere rhetorical flourish is a judgment we can leave to historians. Among the accomplishments however, was creation of a process to address the “ambition gap.” This is UN-speak for the willingness of the major polluters to take halfway measures — the United States is sticking to the 3% reduction goal by 2020 over 1990 levels Mr. Obama proposed in Copenhagen — while lacking the spine to raise ambitions higher. Lots of side events, meetings and studies have outlined abundant economic and social benefits waiting for those who devote the final hours of their dwindling fossil sunlight to making the transition to 100% renewables, but few outside China, Iceland and Denmark are really displaying any such ambition. The critique most heard of the Kyoto renewal was that it locked in this “ambition gap” for at least another 5 years.

So it was that the most remarkable document emerging from Durban was FCCC/CP/2011/l.10-GE.11-71657, Establishment of an Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action.

The Conference of the Parties,

Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, and acknowledging that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, with a view to accelerating the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,

Noting with grave concern the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with having a likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C or 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels,

Recognizing that fulfilling the ultimate objective of the Convention will require strengthening the multilateral, rules-based regime under the Convention,

***

Further decides that the process shall raise the level of ambition and shall be informed, inter alia, by the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the outcomes of the 2013–2015 review and the work of the subsidiary bodies;

Decides to launch a workplan on enhancing mitigation ambition to identify and to explore options for a range of actions that can close the ambition gap with a view to ensuring the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties;

Requests Parties and observer organizations to submit by 28 February 2012 their views on options and ways for further increasing the level of ambition and decides to hold an in-session workshop at the first negotiating session in 2012 to consider options and ways for increasing ambition and possible further actions.

The heavy rainstorms that blocked view of the full moon over Durban gave way to sunrise as the delegates wended their weary way back from the final plenary this morning. A mere 24-hours earlier it had seemed most probable that COP-17 would be a total bust. Whether the can could be kicked down the road for even another year was in considerable doubt, because with an impending failure of resolve, even the multilateral process itself was threatened. Now, with the rays of the sun, came fresh rays of hope. There is no legally binding regime in place yet, but the resolve has been taken to create that, and to raise the global level of ambition.

“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer for Union of Concerned Scientists, who only a day earlier had been forecasting a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”

That is something for Marcin Korolec to think about on his flight back to Poland this afternoon. So far, the EU has been plagued with half-measures that lack the ambition of a debt jubilee, cap and share, local currencies backed by carbon credits, or even serious regulation of multinational vulture banksters that exploit vulnerabilities in the system to feather their own nests. Might it be possible to get all the stakeholders into an indaba, huddle up, and with the spirit of Ubuntu, raise the EU Council’s level of ambition?

Nelson Mandela once explained Ubuntu this way: “A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?”

------ Remarks of Anjali Appadura, Youth Delegate ------

“I speak for more than half the world’s population. We are the silent majority. You’ve giving us a seat in this hall but our interests are not on the table. What is it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbies, corporate influence, money?

You’ve been negotiating all my life. In that time you failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before.

We’re in Africa, home to communities on the front line of climate change. The world’s poor’s countries need funding for adaptation NOW. The horn of Africa and those nearby in India needed it YESTERDAY. But as 2012 comes the green climate fund remains empty.

The International Energy Agency tells us we have five years until the window to avoid irreversible climate change closes. The science tells us that we have 5 years maximum. You’re saying: ‘give us ten’. We must stop betrayal of your generation’s responsibility to ours. It’s that you call this: ambition. Where is the courage in these rooms?

Now is not the time for incremental action. In the long run these will be seen as the defining moments of an era in which narrow self-interest prevailed over science, reason and common compassion.

There is real ambition in this room. But it’s being dismissed as radical, deemed not ‘politically possible’. Stand with Africa. Long-term thinking is not radical. What’s radical is to completely alter the planet climate to betray the future of my generation and to condemn millions to death by climate change. What’s radical is to write off the fact that change is within our reach.

2011 was the year in which the silent majority found their voice. The year when the bottom shook the top. 2011 was the year when the radical became reality. Common but differentiated and historical responsibility are not up for debate.

Respect the foundational principles of this convention. Respect the integral values of humanity. Respect the future of your descendants.

Mandela said: ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done’. So, distinguished delegates, and governments around the world, governments of the developed world: Deep cuts now!!

GET IT DONE!!

Durban Dollars: TckTckTck Money

2011-12-06T09:16:00.000-06:00

"Money is only a means, not an end. Once we endow it with special characteristics, such as the power over your child’s life or death at the entrance to the hospital’s Emergency Room, or all that stands between you and your next meal, it becomes something far more sinister."

“A century from now social analysts will look back with angry astonishment at the extent our generation accepted the economists’ fantasy — happiness requires perpetual economic growth. This may have been true once; definitely now it is false.”
— Dennis Meadows, preface to Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies

In the classic novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn opined, through a telepathic ape in the title role, that our descent from paradise began when they locked up the food. This week finds us back in the Yucatec Mayan world, where Ishmael’s premise seems self-evident. Food has not yet been locked up, nor, by and large, is it stored. People live simply, quite by intention. They do not preserve, neither do they hoard. Three to five generations live together in compounds of thatched houses with dirt floors. Their roofs last 5 to 10 years, depending on tropical storm intensity in those years. The softwood walls last perhaps 20, and if there are doors and windows, they are typically from tropical hardwoods, maybe centuries old already, and will be reused whenever the rest of the building is renewed.

Most families have neither refrigerators nor root cellars. A ham or a rack of fish may hang, slowly smoking, in the rafters, but that day’s chicken or turkey is pecking the ground just outside, next month’s pig is rooting in a nearby mud wallow, and some chocolate is in the cacao nib stage, drying on some pieces of tin in the sun, probably next to some corn that will become masa flour. Less than an hour’s time spent in the forest or on the river yields a rich meal for the whole family for that day. When evening falls, they will climb into their hammocks and sleep while the smoke from the fire keeps mosquitoes at bay.

This is a non-monetary economy. Fractional reserve banking, currency exchanges and debt are alien concepts. Of course in today’s world those things are not entirely avoidable. Mayan family men might earn something taking tourists into the bromeliad corchal in a canoe, mother will weave baskets to sell in the market, and the children will help carry her corn and woven jewelry to trade for some cooking oil, salt, and other supplies. They will be paid in government money, and that they may store and hoard, although seldom more than a month’s worth. Granted, this affords them the opportunity to buy televisions, cars, and home appliances, but they have rejected that path, observing that it leads to a world they would not want for their children.

In Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies (New Society Publishers 2011), Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Bernard Lietaer point out that it was not very long ago that most of the world operated this way. The example they use is the !Kung people of Botswana, made famous by their depiction in The Gods Must Be Crazy! In their example, !Kung society gave way to the lure of consumerism, modifying ancient social practices to the modern monetary exchange system. The !Kung went from a sharing people to a hoarding people.

Choices made by any society enable members to attain well-being or to be cast into misery. The choice is always that of an individual, but the social norms and guiding philosophy can conduce towards one result or the other.

For the rural Maya, the community being considered was not merely a single group of humans denoted by geography and culture, but rather the ecological community of all life forms, and generations still to come. What sane economic system would even consider forgetting these, a Mayan might ask. An economist might call what the Mayans are acquiring social, cultural, and ecological capital. To these people, and many others in the intentionally pre-industrial world, they are just good sense.

At the recent Local Future conference in Michigan, Australian economist Steve Keen was asked by the audience, “What should individuals be doing with their savings to build local resilience?” Keen began by giving similar advice to another panelist, Nicole Foss, namely, hold cash, use opportunities to buy distressed assets, and worry more about deflation — “debt deleveraging” — than inflation. He then went on to say that while that might be the best strategy for individuals, it was totally counterproductive for communities, which should be investing in innovation and local green businesses with an eye towards a future of changed circumstances. Individuals taking their money out of circulation and hoarding cash makes a bad situation worse for the greater community. To square those two opposing views, he suggested local currencies.

Jubilee and Currency Change

Steve Keen told the assembly, “When local currency is formed, what you’ve then got is a form of circulation that can supplant the collapse in the credit-based system.”

…
“At an overall social level, you are in a debt crisis caused by the finance sector convincing you that being in debt is a good thing. It isn’t really individual fault in taking on too much debt, it’s the finance sector convincing us that debt’s a good idea. Economic theory played a huge role in that. So, I’d see two things as being very useful to do at a social level. One is to organize a modern jubilee, abolishing the debt. [The other, not discussed here, is to Occupy Economics Departments – Ed.].
…
“There are two ways to go about abolishing debt. One is to actually write it off and say 80% shouldn’t have been lent, we’re writing off 80% of the debt and force the banks to a restructuring and reorganization. It would be quite a bloody process.

“The other is … to give everyone a million dollars, or a large amount of money, and say, ‘If you are in debt, you have to pay your debt down using this million. If you’re not in debt you can hang onto it.’ … Now what that would mean is the banks don’t lose any assets because what goes down in loans goes up in their reserves, so the banks’ solvency wouldn’t necessarily be destroyed. What would happen is their liquidity would drop drastically because they rely on large amounts of debt to get their revenue. So if you suddenly give them money instead of debt, their cash flows will decline dramatically.
…
“The old way of doing a jubilee used to be behead the money lender and free the slaves. We can’t quite do that any more, as tempting as it might be… Economists really caused this crisis.”
[This whole talk is available online in episode 284 of the C-realm podcast ]

Replacing Debt-based Money

Hallsmith and Lietaer say, “We don’t really need money. We need the things that money can buy. We don’t need financial capital for its own sake if we can obtain the things it buys. The exchange capacity of money is now, and hopefully in the future, one of the key reasons we need it. Money helps us exchange things that are of value to us—like our time and labor —for things that are of value to someone else.”

The problem that both Keen and Hallsmith/Lietaer put their fingers on is that debt-based money has only very marginal utility — for building hydroelectric dams, photovoltaic cell factories, or some other very large, long-term project, for instance. When debt becomes the medium of exchange, however, it takes on a life of its own and infuses every aspect of our lives. It becomes a monster — a juggernaut of cruel mathematics.

Money is, after all, only a means, not an end. Once we endow it with special characteristics, such as the power over your child’s life or death at the entrance to the hospital’s Emergency Room, what you have to have to pay taxes or tuition, or all that stands between you and your next meal, it becomes something far more sinister. When you add in the necessity for growth to offset the arithmetic of debt service, and you tie national currencies to the interest-and-inflation bandwagon and everyone who handles money finds themselves owing their soul to the company store. Whole nations — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Iceland to take the most recent examples — find themselves enslaved to debts as ridiculous and unforgiving as subprime mortgages or student loans.

Durban Dollars

Right now, it is illegal in the United States for any individual, group or government to issue any currency that would compete with Federal Reserve notes. So-called “complimentary currencies,” the community money systems invented by Lietaer decades ago, are forced to fly under the radar by disguising themselves to look like something other than currency: PayPal; airline frequent flyer miles; discount coupons; Time Banks; Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS); and similar non-threatening exchange media.

The easiest way for the Federal (and/or State) government to force people out of these systems or otherwise maintain its lock on the food has been to require taxes to be paid in dollars. But therein lies a great opening for the change we all want to see.

What if taxes were required to be paid in, say, carbon credits, not dollars?

Well, the first thing that would happen is that people and institutions (airlines, manufacturers, mine-operators, garbage collectors, hospitals) would have to scramble around in search of carbon credits to meet their tax obligations. Those who could not acquire them by reducing actual emissions would have to purchase the surplus emission reductions of others on a carbon exchange. The value of credits would likely appreciate, considerably. It would quickly become much easier to find additional reductions than to have to purchase credits.

Not to be too severe or to price carbon credits out of the reach of most, the program could be phased in, say by 10 percent per year for 10 years. Bank accounts could be allowed to store carbon credits and to electronically pay them to the government each quarter, which would turn around and issue more, awarding them to anyone who can demonstrate greenhouse gas reductions. Tree planting or other land use changes that sequester carbon — organic no-till, holistic management, biochar, etc. — could also qualify to receive fresh government issue.

Hallsmith and Lietaer, while not going quite this far, propose backing national currencies with voluntary carbon reductions. They are sort of like Obama in Copenhagen, except taking another step. In their plan, consumers could make purchases from participating green businesses and receive electronic credits for anything that contributes to verifiable carbon drops. They can either keep their credits (for later tax payment purchases, or as an investment) or sell their credits to the carbon market and pocket the profit. Participating businesses that sell carbon-reducing goods or services gather the necessary data — the amount of carbon reduction achieved with each purchase— to be stored in a national data bank.

“For example, a consumer could earn a CCU when they take a bus to work in the morning instead of driving their car. They would pay for the trip in dollars, and would swipe their CCU debit card for the carbon currency credit. The transit company would have a standard carbon value for bus riders.”

Whatever the variation, the common elements are these: retire fractional reserve (debt based) Federal currency; open the floodgates to local currencies in all their shades and colors; require taxes to be paid in that which we most wish to encourage; and reconsider what constitutes real wealth. Is it what you see advertised in the corporate media, or is it what most rural Maya just call good sense?

Come to Belize

2011-11-28T13:59:00.000-06:00

Travel far south; to the back of beyond; to a remote
valley accessible only by dugout canoe. Study
permaculture surrounded by a lush, productive
forest of edibles, medicinals and tropical
hardwoods. Eat organic food, sleep in dorms
powered by renewable energy, bathe in a sparkling
pure river....

in 2012, in the heart of the Mayan world, where the Crystal Skull was found...

Permaculture Design Certificate Course

Instructors: Albert Bates, Andrew Leslie Phillips, Cliff Davis, Chris Nesbitt and special guests
Dates Feb 20 to Mar 2, 2012
Place: Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Belize

For Details, or to register, please contact Christopher.

Ven a Belice...

20 Febrero de 2 Marzo 2012
Curso de Diseño en Permacultura
Montaña Maya Research Farm

Our certificate course (USD $1250), with an all-star cast, tracks the standard 72 hour curriculum, and is followed by an Advanced Design Course in eco-agriculture with Jono Neiger and Eric Toensmeier March 4-10 for an additional USD $700. The venue is one of Central America's oldest permaculture farms, a lush tropical food forest. Our solar-powered dormitories and campsites limit admission to the first 40 applicants. Please register early to assure a place.

A Thanksgiving Prayer

2011-11-24T14:37:00.001-06:00

"We confer on our outsized, outmoded lifestyle an absolute, inviolate authoritativeness. 'The American way of life,' George H.W. Bush whorishly opined, 'is not up for negotiation.'"

“In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis.”

— Science Daily

At Thanksgiving in the USA everyone gets a few days vacation from work to celebrate the colonial beachhead from Europe on the North American continent, landing at Plymouth, and the near-starvation and loss of the entire first colony, but for their rescue by generous albeit naive natives. The tale is seldom continued in its telling that the colonists afterwards conspired to slaughter the natives and steal their lands, or that what had been revealed to them as a land of plenty, seemingly empty and naturally bounteous, was in actuality a meticulously cultivated ecosystem with human inhabitants, nutrient cycles and carrying capacity in delicate balance.

In addition to exterminating the natives, the Pilgrims and their successors hunted to extinction the Heath Hen, Eastern Elk, Sea Mink, Passenger Pigeon, and Carolina Parakeet. The American bison, now only a DNA remnant in a popular cattle breed, suffered a range reduction that makes it effectively extinct.

We don’t tell ourselves these stories, choosing instead a more heroic myth of rugged individualists breaking free of tyranny, overcoming adversity, and taming a savage land. It plays well with children, especially young boys.

Original Buffalo Range

Harvested Buffalo Skulls


Current Remnant Herds

Albert Bates and KMO on the road.
Not shown: the lovely Olga K.

Back from a long road trip up the BosWash Corridor, to the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA); the Keystone XL Pipeline ring-around-the-White-House; Occupy DC; Occupy Wall Street; and then west by northwest to the Local Future International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change in Michigan, we are imbued with a sense of the public sentiment at this historic Thanksgiving. Ours was not a scientific expedition. We gathered very little new information. All told, we merely confirmed our extant hypotheses.

Or did we?

KMO and Albert Bates, ASPO book table

The ASPO meeting was a star-studded affair: William Catton, author of Overshoot; Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over, Peak Everything, and End of Growth; Wes Jackson of The Land Institute; Chris Martenson, creator of The Crash Course; financial analysts Charles Maxwell, Andy Buckingham and Jeff Rubin; energy predictors David Murphy, Robert Hirsch and Roger Bedzek; oil-patch experts Chris Skrebowski, Kjell Aleklett, Arthur Berman, and Jean Laherrère; and popular collapsenik writers and bloggers Nicole (Stoneleigh) Foss, Sharon Astyk, Dmitry Orlov, John Michael Greer, Kurt Cobb, Gail Tverberg, Tom Whipple, Aaron Newton and Guy Dauncey.

Oil Addiction slide by Wes Jackson

ASPO’s Beltway audience was even more interesting — former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman, Limits to Growth author Dennis Meadows, EROIE creator Charles A.S. Hall, Songs of Petroleum author Jan Lundberg, and congressional committee investigator John Darnell. The gab in the corridors and over meals was almost as interesting as what went on in the main hall.

With all this brainpower one might expect new flashes of insight to beam like a mirrored ball in the grasp of colored spotlights. Actually, the 7th Annual Meeting was little improved from the 6th, or 5th, or any of the others of its ilk — ASPO International, Petrocollapse, or, for that matter, Local Future in Michigan. Rapid collapse, and soon, seems to have more adherents now than gradual collapse, some unspecified distance out. What we found ourselves rotating around was our own confirmatory bias.

Granted, there were bits and pieces we had not known before. Who knew before the after-dinner presentations by Anthony Ingraffea, Rob Jackson, Robert Howarth, and Amy Mall that natural gas, the new darling of America’s Energy Independence and lately subject of much hyped-up advertising by oil companies, is currently responsible for 44 percent of US greenhouse impact? Factoring in the 20:1 advantage of methane over carbon dioxide as a heat-stroking molecule, fracking shale gas already contributes about 11 percent — 677 Tg CO2-equivalent, according to EPA — of the climate chaos we are endowing to future generations, and is growing far faster than coal.

Who knew?

Who knew that while petroleum may have spared the sperm whale for a century, the climate change it brought may have doomed not just marine mammals but all ocean life?

Keystone Protests Ring the White House

Or that increasing technological efficiency brings more energy use, not less? Energy efficiency now allows every man, woman and child in the United States to use 100 times more energy than is required to live happily. Indeed, as Herman Daly is fond of reminding us, once we pass a threshold of sufficiency, each ounce of added wealth diminishes our happiness and well-being.

Or that 4.5 billion of Earth’s present human inhabitants owe their food supply, antibiotics and prescriptions — their longevity and fecundity — nearly entirely to petrochemical processes that are about to become unavailable at an affordable price?

Secret Service Eye-View of Protesters

Or that governments and international agencies have treasonously conspired for half a century to obscure and conceal vital facts that would allow populations and markets to prepare for a very different future, one based on daily solar income, rather than an overdrawn savings account of ancient sunlight?

Well, actually we have, here and in our books, articles, lectures and interviews. For 40 years, more or less. Sorry to nag.

So why don’t more people seek shelter from the coming storm? Why don’t election year debates get real? Two reasons: confirmation bias and normalcy bias.

Jan Lundberg at Zucotti Park library,
shortly before it was destroyed by NYPD

In the case of the former, we sentient bipeds with tripartite brains actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms our views of the world — views we mostly formed as children as we “aped” our parents and teachers or our inspiring leaders and celebrities. Our fondness towards normalcy lets us box out things that make us feel uncomfortable and allows us to focus on ways to blend into the crowd. If the crowd thinks peak oil, climate change, JFK’s assassination or the inside job at the World Trade Center are just weird conspiracy theories by crazies at the fringe of our society, we ape the crowd. That’s just Sapiens’ Social Software.

“Paranoia? Of course not. It’s alternative scholarship. What’s wrong with teaching alternative theories in our schools? What are liberals so afraid of? … Why this dictatorial approach to learning anyway? What gives teachers the right to say what things are? Who’s to say that flat-earthers are wrong? Or that the Church was wrong to silence Galileo, with his absurd theory (actually written by his proctologist) that the earth moves around the sun. Citing ‘evidence’ is so snobbish and élitist. I think we all know what lawyers can do with evidence.”

— Eric Idle, Who Wrote Shakespeare

Complexity

In Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma, (New York: Springer, 2012) Joseph Tainter and Tad Patzek describe the lifestyle of a wealthy family in ancient Rome. Work, such as it was, ended by mid-day and afternoons were spent at the baths, evenings in social banquets. The diet was well-balanced, children well-educated, and all of it was accomplished with about 6 slaves per family. The Tawantinsuyu (Inca) were even more efficient, their whole pre-Columbian society spending about 65 days per year to meet basic needs. Slavery, while not unknown in the Andes, played a much smaller — principally military — role.

Occupy DC

Our “norm” now is to use 400 energy slaves per USAnian family, or 200 in Europe and 40 in China. Moreover, those slaves are actually much more reliable than human slaves ever were. They work 24/7, never get sick, don’t get married and have children or entanglements, and require almost no space for housing. Right now they cost much less to acquire and maintain than human slaves ever did.

So, if the Tawantinsuyu could get by with almost no domestic slaves, the Romans with only a handful per wealthy family, how is it that we need 36 billion of them in the United States to take our kids to soccer practice and pop popcorn? Tainter and Patzek say it in a single word: complexity.

We have become inured to complexity. Today we can barely fathom getting around in a strange city without a smart phone. We think nothing of flying a thousand miles for a business meeting or a week at the beach. This energy-enslaved world is our insular cocoon, the norm that we have been socialized into, and with confirmatory bias and normalcy bias we defend it from any “abnormal” opinion that it is immoral, wrongheaded, or doomed. Like an advertisement for cigarettes or one-ton automobiles, we do not imagine our slaves could make us unhappy or unhealthy. Quite the opposite. We confer on our outsized, outmoded, profligate lifestyle an absolute, inviolate authoritativeness. “The American way of life,” George H.W. Bush whorishly opined, “is not up for negotiation.” The War on Terror, Donald Rumsfeld told us, is to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life.

This is the reflex that keeps the majority of us frozen in the headlights as collapse rushes at us from all sides — militarily, environmentally, financially, and socially. We are Romans with the barbarians at the gates — we just keep sending our slaves out to pick more fruit and bring us wine.

Protesters Return to Zuccotti Park

Those of us who read the tea leaves and deduce the inevitable are better prepared, but even collapseniks are trapped in confirmatory bias — subscribing to RSS feeds or podcasts from favored web news sources; reading the latest books from Lundberg, Heinberg, Kunstler, Astyk and Orlov; or attending conferences like ASPO and Local Future. If the crash and plunge that was predicted for 2006 did not appear, maybe it will have arrived by 2010. If not then, then perhaps 2012, or 2015. We are waiting for Godot, are we not? Ah, but the conversation is good.

Let us stop looking for confirmation of our views or trying to conform to “normal,” whatever that is. This Thanksgiving let us give thanks that what we have been bequeathed by generations before us — less the avaricious colonists than the generous natives, less the hybrid buffalo than the ecology of the forest, less our myths than the hard realities — have brought us benefit beyond measure. Let us resolve to squander it no more. Gaia grant us clear eyes and ears to see through the fog of our own self-deceptions.

On this day let us resolve not just to thank the natives but to free our slaves. Addiction to slavery is the same as any other addiction. First it feels good, then it destroys you. Just ask a wealthy Roman.

Occupy Wall Street and FDR’s Four Freedoms

2011-11-13T15:05:00.002-06:00

"Occupy Wall Street is blessed with the Quaker tools now refined by waves of protest movements: the Suffragettes, Satyagraha, Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, No-Nukes Affinity Groups, and Battle in Seattle. What doesn’t work? Violence. Power Trips. Hierarchies. What works? Good facilitation, timekeeping, note-taking, hand-signs, open agenda, global café, conflict transformation, consensus. "

At the beginning of November, when it was getting colder, we had the opportunity to visit Zucotti Park and sit in with the Occupy Wall Street crowds. We had been concerned that colder weather might dampen spirits but those fears proved unfounded, and our patriots’ spirits now are much higher than at Valley Forge.

Our citizens have learned a great deal about democracy in 235 years, and it shows. One of the chants taken up as they march on Bank of America, City Hall, a reception for Henry Kissinger, or wherever they might be going that day, is “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!”

The loose agglomeration that meets in daily General Assembly (GA) is really good at framing and hardly needed advice from George Lakoff, although he was thoughtful enough to provide some. Don’t make specific demands, he said, be a moral focus. Be patriotic. Be the public, standing up. Be citizens. Make it about rights, not privilege. He didn’t need to give that advice, but it was good to put it out there. These people at the GA already have it in their DNA.

The difference between this group and the framers meeting in Continental Congress is more than the two centuries of experience gained and prophesies fulfilled (Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others expressly warned of political parties and bankers). It is also a difference in method. The colonists, intoxicated with the idea of popular democracy but sobered by a fear of power usurpers, were stuck with Robert’s Rules of Order.

The GA, and the break-out groups that meet in the Atrium at 60 Wall Street are blessed with the Quaker tools now refined by waves of protest movements: the Suffragettes, Satyagraha, Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, No-nukes Affinity Groups, and Battle in Seattle. What doesn’t work? Violence. Power Trips. Hierarchies. What works? Good facilitation, timekeeping, note-taking, hand-signs, open agenda, global café, conflict transformation, consensus. What came out of the conventions at the turn of the 18th to 19th Century was protection of slavery, disenfranchisement of women, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the preservation of an elite ruling class, especially the banksters. What will emerge from this process may also be flawed when seen in hindsight centuries hence, but it will be progressively less so.

At the Atrium sessions, weeks and months of meeting on Vision and Goals, sometimes with the same people, or sometimes with nearly all new people, had so far only gotten as far as a draft preliminary vision statement. Two versions were offered at the meeting we attended with about a dozen people, including an elderly bearded rabbi and a First Nations pipe-bearer from Canada. The first was a single page that had already been read aloud in the GA, the other a much longer document that gathered in many more threads that had been woven together in the breakout group. In this meeting, 10 minutes was allocated to the former and 30 to the latter. Those who had taken on responsibility for a redraft would listen to the voices of this group on this night and take that back to revise the next draft for the next night. Only when the document fully expressed the wishes of the whole ad hoc committee, by consensus, would it be returned to the GA for re-reading and offered for consensus there.

These committee meetings allow themselves only about 2 hours per day, so the agenda had to be condensed and consensed quickly at the start of each session. New offers to present, in writing or verbally, were received and voted upon. Six final choices were narrowed to 3 agenda items with pre-assigned duration times. In this way the meetings went smoothly, and people remained fresh and eager to meet again the next day. Democracy is not quick. There is a learning curve for many activists who have conceived such polities but never had to practice them. It may take a while to come to appreciate the skills of “unelected” facilitators and the liberty of time.

Where did the Atrium space come from, one might ask. The Atrium is public space that was guaranteed by the real estate developer to be open for public use, in exchange for New York City raising their height restriction and rental occupancy limits. There are more than 500 such places in New York City, including Zucotti Park, although the 1% Press has been carefully obscuring this point and making the occupation seem like trespass, and the developers have been pressuring the 1% Mayor to evict. Confronted by a court ordering him to allow the protesters to remain in the public spaces they were given by law, the Mayor has relented and provided port-a-potties, food vendor access, and other accommodations to basic needs. Rumor has it he will even be providing some heated tents soon.

From what we saw, the Occupiers in New York are in no hurry, have really good process and facilitation, and their Open Space format allows all ideas to come in and be heard. They have plenty of donations for needed supplies. Of course there are the usual crazies and street people who also occupy the space and the juice, but the Zucotti camp itself is not threatened by cold weather, rain, snow, or disinterest. Their biggest challenge is coping with their own numbers, which are growing every day. They may soon have to add another park, so watch for that.

The longer vision draft document contained a passage worth repeating here.

“The question of freedom must be posed afresh — in its most profound sense — so that it might be retrieved. For in the answer to that question alone resides the secret of the revolution. The cry of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! still rings through the ages, but it has fallen on deaf ears. Humanity must be awakened from its comatose state, its long ahistorical torpor, so that freedom can at last be realized.

“By ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ is understood at least the following:

Freedom from oppression
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Freedom from war (Kant’s ‘perpetual peace;’ faedus pacificum)
Freedom from disease
Freedom from ignorance
Freedom from apathy (the anomie described by Darkheim)
Freedom from boredom (the colorless tedium of daily life, Baudelarian ennui)
Freedom from imposed necessity
Freedom without borders (liberté sans frontiers)"

These ten points draw into focus both the intellectual strength of the Occupy movement and its naiveté. Perhaps the rigor of the process will shave off some of the rough edges before it is complete, but as it stands, the document takes a giant step beyond Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms:

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.” (Address to Congress, January 6, 1941)

Roosevelt’s freedoms, which did not reach for impossible social goals like freedom from boredom (although, in truth, that should be afforded prisoners as a fundamental right), were really bedrock needs. Its amazing to us today how broadly they were accepted in 1941. They were used as set pieces for Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. After the war, they were incorporated into the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But can you imagine Obama calling for a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor? Or hearing it from any of the Republican candidates for President?

The gap between the Roosevelt four freedoms and the Occupy ten freedoms is one of realities versus perceptions. While it is realistic to ask for societies to so organize themselves that the least of us is protected from hunger and fear, it may not be reasonable to expect that a population of 7 billion can be liberated from ignorance and apathy, or that a free liberal arts college education or high-tech extensions of life for the terminally ill should be guaranteed. We are at peak extraction, peak energy and peak population, and beyond this point lies a Great Change.

In our view, if the Occupy Wall Street GA just got the United States back to championing Roosevelt’s four freedoms, that would be significant.

What Occupy Wall Street can learn from the Singing Revolution

2011-10-20T13:22:00.000-05:00

"There is already a term in Estonian for permaculture. It is the onomatopoeia, 'Permakultuur.' But our translators came up with a new word that more expressed the essence of permaculture, instead of its English-sound. It was Jåtkuloomine – literally, evolving nature; continuing creation. The example sentence the translators offered was “The key for the survival of Estonia is creation of the continuous creation.” "

In lower Manhattan, they have been out there in the street for more than a month and winter is starting to approach. Last night it was 48°F (8°C) and drizzling. Surely it must warm some of those huddled under grimy blankets to hear they have been adopted by the President, the Tea Party, Baby Boomers and Birchers, but whether tepid and self-serving endorsements, or grueling vigils, can sustain their movement a year from now is still anyone’s guess.

Drawing strength from the rage of the masses is not a formula for longevity, especially in a consumer culture, where rage shifts seasonally.

Tom Hayden and Mark Rudd in 2007

Just ask the veterans of the great uprisings of 1968. We still wonder, what became of our revolution? Rather than being adopted by everyone, it unified the opposition, and while it made some milestones, especially in the popular culture, it missed its political mark by a wide mile. Some of the heroes of the Strawberry Rebellion went on to become politicians and pundits, and while they could lay claim to some modest, incremental gains, the dragon they tilted against grew exponentially more horrific, and now looms over us like a scene from Revelations.

In a recent piece for CounterPunch, Mark Rudd wrote:

While reading I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle, University of California Press, 1995), I realized that much of what we had practiced in SDS was derived from SNCC and this developmental organizing tradition, up to and including the vision of “participatory democracy,” which was incorporated in the 1962 SDS founding document, “The Port Huron Statement.” Columbia SDS’s work was patient, strategic, base-building, using both confrontation and education. I myself had been nurtured and developed into a leadership position through years of close friendship with older organizers.

However, my clique’s downfall came post-1968, when, under the spell of the illusion of revolution, we abandoned organizing, first for militant confrontation (Weatherman and the Days of Rage, Oct. 1969) and then armed urban guerilla warfare (the Weather Underground, 1970-1976). We had, in effect, moved backwards from organizing to self-expression, believing, ridiculously, that that would build the movement. At the moment when more organizing was needed, in order to build a permanent anti-imperialist mass movement, we abandoned organizing.

This is the story I tell in my book, Underground. It’s about good organizing (Columbia), leading to worse (Weatherman), leading to horrible (the Weather Underground). I hope it’s useful to contemporary organizers as they contemplate how to build the coming mass movement(s).

We came across Rudd’s retrospective in the midst of teaching a Permaculture Design Course in Estonia last week and it occurred to us that Rudd’s lessons were well grasped in important — though perhaps least expected — places. An October 13th AP interview with Poland's former President and Nobel laureate, shipyard striker Lech Walesa, touched on some of those lessons learned. If political communism could be toppled by strategic protest, is capitalism immune? "We need to change, reform the capitalist system," he said, because we need "more justice, more people's interests, and less money for money's sake." Walesa said he supported the Occupy Wall Street movement and intended to join the protesters.

Lech Walesa

Walesa, looking today like a cross between Captain Kangaroo and the Monopoly oligarch, founded the Solidarnosc labor party in 1980, inflicting fatal wounds upon both the Soviet Empire and on communism as a political system. He found himself thrust onto the world stage but was smart and humble enough to recognize that it was the moment, not him personally, that was the pivot point for the brewing revolution.

As we described in our post of May, 2010, White Nights and Chicken Skin, the Estonians seized on Solidarnosc’s momentum in 1991, with The Singing Revolution. As Soviet tanks attempted to roll back Estonian progress towards independence, the Estonian Supreme Soviet together with the Congress of Estonia proclaimed the restoration of the independent state of Estonia and repudiated Soviet anti-freedom legislation. Surrounding the Parliament building in Tallinn, Estonians of all walks, using the social networking tools of the day, spontaneously dropped their activities and converged, linked arms, sang and forced the hardliners out. By serving as human shields to protect radio and TV stations from the Russian tanks, these singing revolutionaries brought Estonia its independence without bloodshed. A counter-coup attempt failed amid mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow.

Teaching permaculture at a newly formed ecovillage outside Tallinn, one cannot help but be struck by how creative and fully engaged Estonian young people are now. In one session we related to them how the Wall Street protesters had circumvented the New York City police ban on loudspeakers to keep an open dialog going between thousands of people engaged in reinventing civilization. Henrick Hertzberg, writing for The New Yorker, described the process:

[T]he General Assembly [is] a daily mass meeting, open to all, which is the closest thing OWES has to a governing body. Because any kind of amplified sound in forbidden, bullhorns included, the meetings are conducted in an ingenious way. A speaker says a few words, then pauses; the audience repeats them, loudly and in unison; the speaker says a few more; the chorus repeats; and so on. If the group is unusually large, the repetitions radiate out, like a mountain echo. The listeners register their reactions silently, with their hands. Four fingers up, palms outward: Yay! Four fingers down, palms inward: Boo! Both hands rolling: Wrap it up! Clench fists crossed at the wrists: No way, José! There is something oddly moving about a crowd of smart-phone-addicted, computer-savvy people coöperating to create such an utterly low-tech, strikingly human, curiously tribal means of amplification—a literal loudspeaker.

Something equally creative happened amongst our hip translators who were struggling to keep up with the unusual words our teaching cadre was using. There is already a term in Estonian for permaculture. It is the onomatopoeia, 'Permakultuur.' That didn’t really cut it for these inventive youth. They came up with a new word that more expressed the essence, instead of the English-sound. It was Jåtkuloomine – literally, evolving nature; continuing creation. The example sentence the translators offered was “The key for the survival of Estonia is creation of the continuous creation.”

Other words they coined to capture deeper meanings:

Toidusalu — food forest; literally, a more beautiful forest. Example: My table is abundant and it is provided for by my food forest, that does not feel hurt by my pruning.

Metsaviljelus – agroforestry; literally: a cultivated forest – holistic forest farming.

Lohmu — swale, but not just a contour ditch. Literally: hollow-bump; empty and fill; scoop and mound. Example: Its cool to pick the strawberries on the hollow-bump and listen to the frogs singing.

Åkk — humanure, literally: “the good stuff;” pure organic. Example: The most convenient way to dig out the åkk is with a pillkopp, but alas! it is missing from the toolkit of continuous creation! Perhaps this is an Estonian contribution to Jåtkuloomine (a pillkopp is a bucket used to clean outhouses, having a 2 meter handle, sometimes with a rope)!

To the stalwarts in Zucotti Park and around the world, the Singing Revolution, and the veterans of other freedom movements, might provide this advice:

Have a vision of a positive, compelling, realistic future.
Work towards cultural sustainability, resilience, and regeneration. The politics will follow.
Educate others, especially your oppressors, in the need for fundamental change in the face of peak energy, climate chaos, environmental degradation, overpopulation and the economic upheaval and restructuring that is merely a symptom of all those converging crises. It ain’t about the rising cost of tuition, or your rent or groceries. It’s much deeper that that.
Tell the stories of your vision, and your willing sacrifices, to anyone who will listen, and do it colorfully, with poetry, art and music.
Motivate, inspire, organize, and network among all the youth, using open space technology, social media, and any other tools you can muster or invent.

Above all, choose peace and non-violence and let the world be your witness. The key for the survival of not only Estonia, but Jeffersonian democracy, is creation of the continuous creation.

Getting to 350 with a $2 Pocket Knife

2011-10-14T03:25:00.000-05:00

"Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration is a cheap and rapid method of re-vegetating deserts and restoring climate balance to below 350 ppm. Vast areas of cleared agricultural land in arid lands retain an “underground forest” of living stumps and roots. By simply changing agricultural practices, this underground forest can re-sprout, at little cost, very rapidly and with great beneficial impact. In other words, in many instances the costly, time consuming and inefficient methods of raising seedlings, planting them out and protecting them is not even necessary for successful reforestation."

In September we attended the Tenth International Permaculture Conference in Amman, Jordan, and met a fellow who became one of the surprise hits at the event. His name is Tony Rinaudo and he works for World Vision in some of the most impoverished parts of the world. Had we known about Tony and what he has been doing when we wrote The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change, he would have gotten a full chapter to himself. His work is that remarkable.

His full talk at the conference was captured to HD video by Craig Mackintosh and is available for free viewing at the Permaculture Research Institute's website. His method is very simple, mostly involving walking through arid landscapes while looking down at his feet. In most places he finds small remnant stubbles of tree stumps with living roots, nibbled away by goats but still alive. Bending down with his pocket knife, he clears the area immediately around, prunes the dead material away, creates a water pocket and exposes the green wood. Voila! Protected from goats, the old tree sprouts new growth — no nursery stock and watering systems required. FMNR has now spread to over 5,000,000 hectares with an estimated 200 million fully revived trees in Niger, at the edge of the Sahara Desert, and it has recently been introduced into Senegal, Mali, Chad, Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia and Myanmar. Here is the description of his method, written by Tony himself in 2008.

The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration

by Tony Rinaudo,
Natural Resource Management Advisor, Integration Team,
World Vision Australia. Originally published on Leisa

Children helping to source firewood
Photo: Author

Conventional methods of reforestation in Africa have often failed. Even community-based projects with individual or community nurseries struggle to keep up the momentum once project funding ends. The obstacles working against reforestation are enormous. But a new method of reforestation called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) could change this situation. It has already done so in the Republic of Niger, one of the world’s poorest nations, where more than 3 million hectares have been re-vegetated using this method. Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration involves selecting and pruning stems regenerating from stumps of previously felled, but still living trees. Sustainability is a key feature of the programme which requires very little investment by either government or NGOs to keep it going. The story in Niger can offer valuable insights and lessons for other nations.

The situation in Niger

The almost total destruction of trees and shrubs in the agricultural zone of Niger between the 1950s and 1980s had devastating consequences. Deforestation worsened the adverse effects of recurring drought, strong winds, high temperatures, infertile soils and pests and diseases on crops and livestock. Combined with rapid population growth and poverty, these problems contributed to chronic hunger and periodic acute famine. Back in 1981, the whole country was in a state of severe environmental degradation, an already harsh land turning to desert, and a people under stress. More and more time was spent gathering poorer and poorer quality firewood and building materials. Women had to walk for miles for fuel such as small sticks and millet stalks. Cooking fuel was so scarce that cattle and even goat manure was used. This further reduced the amount of fodder available for livestock and manure being returned to the land. Under cover of dark, people would even dig up the roots of the few remaining protected trees. Without protection from trees, crops were hit by 60 – 70 km/hour winds, and were stressed by higher temperatures and lower humidity. Sand blasting and burial during wind storms damaged crops. Farmers often had to replant crops up to eight times in a single season. Insect attack on crops was extreme. Natural pest predators such as insect eating birds, reptiles, amphibians and beneficial insects had disappeared along with the trees.

Conventional approaches

The severe famine of the mid 1970s led to a global response. Stopping desertification became a top priority. Conventional methods of raising exotic tree species in nurseries were used: planting out, watering, protecting and weeding. However, despite investing millions of dollars and thousands of hours labour, there was little overall impact. Conventional approaches to reforestation faced insurmountable problems, being costly and labour intensive. Even in the nursery, frogs, locusts, termites and birds destroyed seedlings. Once planted out, drought, sand blasting, pests, competition from weeds and destruction by people and animals negated efforts. Low levels of community ownership and the lack of individual or village level replicability meant that no spontaneous, indigenous re-vegetation movement arose out of these intense efforts. Meanwhile, established indigenous trees continued to disappear at an alarming rate. National forestry laws took tree ownership and responsibility for care of trees out of the hands of the people. Even though ineffective and uneconomic, reforestation through conventional tree planting seemed to be the only way to address desertification at the time.

Discovering Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration

In 1983, the typical rural landscapes in the Maradi Department in the south of Niger, were still windswept and with few trees. It was apparent that even if the Maradi Integrated Development Project, which I managed, had a large budget, plenty of staff and time, the methods being employed would not make a significant impact on this problem. Then one day I understood that what appeared to be desert shrubs were actually trees which were re-sprouting from tree stumps, felled during land clearing. In that moment of inspiration I realised that there was a vast, underground forest present all along and that it was unnecessary to plant trees at all. All that was needed was to convince farmers to change the way they prepared their fields. The method of reforestation that developed is called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). Each year, live tree stumps sprout multiple shoots. In practising FMNR the farmer selects the stumps she wants to leave and decides how many shoots are wanted per stump. Excess shoots are then cut and side branches trimmed to half way up the stems. A good farmer will return regularly for touch up prunings and thereby stimulate faster growth rates.

The method is not new, it is simply a form of coppicing and pollarding, which has a history of over 1000 years in Europe. It was new, however, to many farmers in Niger who traditionally viewed trees on farmland as “weeds” which needed to be eliminated because they compete with food crops. There is no set system or hard and fast rules. Farmers are given guidelines but are free to choose the number of shoots per stump and the number of stumps per hectare that they leave, the time span between subsequent pruning and harvest of stems, and the method of pruning.

FMNR in practice

1. FMNR depends on the existence of living tree stumps in the fields to be re-vegetated. New stems which can be selected and pruned for improved growth sprout from these stumps. Standard practice has been for farmers to slash this valuable re-growth each year in preparation for planting crops.

2. With a little attention, this growth can be turned into a valuable resource, without jeopardizing, but in fact, enhancing crop yields. Here, all stalks except one have been cut from the stump. Side branches have been pruned half way up the stem. This single stem will be left to grow into a valuable pole. The problem with this system is that when the stem is harvested, the land will have no tree cover and there will be no wood to harvest for some time.

3. Much more can be gained by selecting and pruning the best five or so stems and removing the remaining unwanted ones. In this way, when a farmer wants wood she can cut the stem(s) she wants and leave the rest to continue growing. These remaining stems will increase in size and value each year, and will continue to protect the environment and provide other useful materials and services such as fodder, humus, habitat for useful pest predators, and protection from the wind and shade. Each time one stem is harvested, a younger stem is selected to replace it.

Species used in this practice in Niger include: Strychnos spinosa, Balanites aegyptiaca, Boscia senegalensis, Ziziphus spp., Annona senegalensis, Poupartia birrea and Faidherbia albida. However, the important determinants of which species to use will be: whatever species are locally available with the ability to re-sprout after cutting, and the value local people place on those species.

Acceptance of this method was slow at first. A few people tried it but were ridiculed. Wood was a scarce and valuable commodity so their trees were stolen. A breakthrough came in 1984, when radio coverage of an international conference on deforestation in Maradi helped to increase awareness of the link between deforestation and the climate. This was followed by a Niger-wide severe drought and famine which reinforced this link in peoples’ minds. Through a “Food for Work” programme in Maradi Department, people in 95 villages were encouraged to give the method a try. For the first time ever, people in a whole district were leaving trees on their farms. Many were surprised that their crops grew better amongst the trees. All benefited from having extra wood for home use and for sale. Sadly, once the programme ended, over two thirds of the 500 000 trees protected in 1984 – 1985 were chopped down! However, district-wide exposure to the benefits of FMNR over a 12-month period was sufficient to introduce the concept and put to rest some fears about growing trees with crops. Gradually more and more farmers started protecting trees, and word spread from farmer to farmer until it became a standard practice. Over a twenty-year period, this new approach spread largely by word of mouth, until today three million hectares across Niger’s agricultural zone have been re-vegetated. This is a significant achievement by the people of Niger. The fact that this happened in one of the world’s poorest countries, with little investment in the forestry sector by either the government or NGOs, makes it doubly significant for countries facing similar problems.

Reasons for the rapid spread

Aside from simplicity, early returns and low cost, other factors contributed to the rapid spread of FMNR. Introducing the method on a district-wide basis with a “Food for Work” programme eliminated much of the peer pressure that early innovators would normally have to endure. As villagers experimented, project staff who lived in the villages were supportive, teaching, encouraging and standing alongside farmers when disputes or theft of trees occurred. This support was crucial, particularly in the early days when there was much opposition to FMNR. As trees began to colonise the land again, excited government forestry agents nominated lead farmers and even project staff for regional and national awards. Often these nominees won prizes, lifting the profile of FMNR. As news began to spread, national and international NGOs, church and mission groups received training and began promoting the method across Niger.

During the development of farmer-managed natural regeneration, farmers did not own the trees on their own land. There was no incentive to protect trees and much of the destruction of that era was linked to this policy. After discussions with the head of the Maradi Forestry Department, project staff were able to give assurances that if farmers cared for the trees on their land they would be allowed to benefit without fear of being fined. These laws were only changed in 2004 after much negotiation by entities such as USAID. Farmers began to access markets without undue hassle. And as trees on farms switched from being nuisance weeds to becoming a cash crop in their own right, this was good motivation for farmers to cultivate them. Over time, locally agreed upon codes and rules with support from village and district chiefs were established. Without this consensus and support for the protection of private property, it is unlikely that FMNR could have spread as fast as it did.

The benefits of FMNR quickly became apparent and farmers themselves became the chief proponents as they talked amongst themselves. FMNR can directly alleviate poverty, rural migration, chronic hunger and even famine in a wide range of rural settings. FMNR contributes to stress reduction and nutrition of livestock, and contributes directly and indirectly to both the availability and quality of fodder. Crops benefit directly through modification of microclimate (greater organic matter build up, reduced wind speed, lower temperatures, higher humidity, and greater water infiltration into the soil), and indirectly through manuring by livestock which spend greater time in treed fields during the dry season. The environment in general benefits as bio-diversity increases and natural processes begin to function again. With appropriate promotion, FMNR can reduce tensions between competing interests for landbased resources. For example, as natural regeneration increases fodder availability (tree pods and leaves), farmers are in a better position to leave crop residues on their fields and are less likely to take offence when nomadic herders want to graze their livestock in the dry season.

Harvesting millet amongst the naturally
regenerated trees in Niger
Photo: Author

Since 2000, World Vision has been promoting this method in a number of other African countries. Malatin André, a Chadian farmer practising it for just two years reported: “Thanks to the new technique our life has changed. Food production has doubled and many people who were laughing at us, have also adopted the techniques for soil regeneration. As a result, there is always good production, the soil is protected from erosion and heat, and women can still get firewood. We have been using the same plot for more than 30 years and without such natural fertilizing possibility, we would soon stop getting food from it”. Khadidja Gangan, a 35 year old Chadian mother of six said: “This year is very exceptional for me because I have been able to get enough sorghum. I cultivated one hectare and harvested 15 bags of sorghum. Generally, I could get three to five bags when working this land in the past. This would have been impossible if I was not taught the new technique of land management”.

Conditions for success and future challenges

There are, however, still many gaps in our knowledge of natural regeneration. Farmers adapt it to their own personal needs and have different reasons for practising it. Further investigation is needed into various technical aspects, such as the most beneficial spacing, species mix, age to harvest, or type of harvesting, for specific purposes. In addition, legal and cultural considerations and historical relations between stakeholders need to be taken into account. For example, the major difficulties faced in Niger included:

The tradition of free access to trees on anybody’s property and a code of silence protecting those who cut down trees. It was considered anti-social to expose anybody who had felled trees. This tradition was hard to break and those who left trees were often discouraged when their trees were taken by others. This situation was successfully addresses through advocacy, creation of local by-laws and support from village and district chiefs in administering justice. Gradually, people accepted that there was no difference between stealing from someone’s farm and stealing from within someone’s house.
Fear that trees in fields would reduce yields of food crops. Field results put these fears to rest over time.
Inappropriate government laws – if the farmer does not have the right to harvest the trees she has protected, there will be little incentive for her to do so. Farmers feared that they would be fined for harvesting their own trees. By collaborating with the forestry service, we were able to stop this from happening.

Other factors also affected the spread of the technique, for example, where language may reflect deeply held attitudes. In Hausa the word for tree (itce) is the same as the word for firewood, and therefore trees were seen to have little value of their own, apart from for firewood. Cultural factors may also work against adoption. Traditionally, Fulani cattle herders saw their lifestyle as the best in the world. Initially they found it humiliating to consider harvesting and selling wood, the way sedentary farmers did.

In addition, the practice of FMNR depends on having living tree stumps in the fields to start with. However, in many cases, farmers can successfully broadcast seeds of desirable species which, once established, become the basis of a FMNR system. The number of trees to be left in a field will depend on the number of stumps present and the farmer’s preferences. Some left over 200 trees per hectare, others not even the recommended 40. The “correct” number of trees to be left will be a balance between farmers’ needs for wood and other products, optimal environmental protection and minimal negative effect on crop yields. In areas of low rainfall, growth rates will be slower, and harvest or cutting regime should be reduced accordingly. Also, in low rainfall areas, establishment of direct sown seeds will take longer and be more difficult than in higher rainfall areas.

In areas where existing species are predominately thorny, or they compete heavily with crop plants, farmers may have second thoughts about FMNR. Where existing tree species are palatable to livestock, the increased effort required to herd animals or protect trees is beyond the reach of many farmers. In many cases however, the species are not palatable and there is no need to exclude animals from the field during the dry season.

Conclusion

What most entities working in reforestation have failed to recognise is that vast areas of cleared agricultural land in Africa retain an “underground forest” of living stumps and roots. By simply changing agricultural practices, this underground forest can re-sprout, at little cost, very rapidly and with great beneficial impact. In other words, in many instances the costly, time consuming and inefficient methods of raising seedlings, planting them out and protecting them is not even necessary for successful reforestation. Presumably, the same principle would apply anywhere in the world where tree and shrub species have the ability to re-sprout after being harvested.

Farmer managed natural regeneration is a cheap and rapid method of re-vegetation, which can be applied over large areas of land and can be adapted to a range of land use systems. It is simple and can be adapted to each individual farmer’s unique requirements, providing multiple benefits to people, livestock, crops and the environment, including physical, economic and social benefits to humans. Through managing natural regeneration, farmers can control their own resources without depending on externally funded projects or needing to buy expensive inputs (seed, fertilizers, nursery supplies) from suppliers. Its beauty lies in its simplicity and accessibility to even the poorest farmers, and once it has been accepted, it takes on a life of its own, spreading from farmer to farmer, by word of mouth.

Tony Rinaudo. Natural Resource Management Specialist, World Vision Australia. G.P.O. Box 399C, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia. E-mail: tonyrinaudo@worldvision.com.au

Posting from the Road

2011-10-12T00:22:00.001-05:00

We're in Estonia, teaching a permaculture design course with a backyard mushroom growing seminar thrown in, and before that we were in Spain teaching an introduction to ecovillage design, and before that in Jordan, Palestine and Israel touring permaculture conferences and projects, and so now it has been more than a month since we last posted and apparently Blogger has bolted our entry door to the site. So we are sending in this post by email and hoping it finds its way up onto The Great Change. If you can read this we were successful.

On Oct 11, 2011, at 11:14 AM, Rick Ingrasci M.D. wrote:

Here's a great collection of photos to give you a sense of what's going on across the country.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-spreads-beyond-nyc/100165/?source=patrick.net

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On Oct 11, 2011, at 12:12 AM, Tom Atlee wrote:

Three excellent articles on Occupy Wall Street - the last one is greatly inspiring.

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Occupying Wall Street: What Went Right?

By J.A. Myerson:

Truthout | News Analysis

"Of all the criticisms being hurled at Occupy Wall Street, the most substantively interesting is the issue of scale. How large can the living-society portion of the occupation grow, dependent as it is on a reasonably small living space and an inspiringly simple if limited amplification system? Questions like this are worth pondering, and I'll be taking some of them up here at Truthout in the coming weeks, but let us pause for a moment to consider how astonishing it is that this is a concern at all."

rest of the article....

http://www.truth-out.org/occupying-wall-street-what-went-right/1318173044

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Where the 99 Percent Get their Power

By Sarah van Gelder

Executive Editor, Yes! Magazine

"Powerful movements build not on a laundry list of policy demands, but on principles and values.... Powerful movements create their own spaces where they can shift the debate, and the culture, to one that better serves. That's why showing up in person at the occupy sites is so critical to this movement's success. In hundreds of communities around North America, people are showing up to make a statement and to listen to each other. They are also teaching one another to facilitate meetings, to take nonviolent direct action, to make their own media. They are taking care of each other, gathering food supplies, blankets, and clothes that can allow people to remain outdoors even as the weather gets wetter and colder."

rest of the article.....

http://www.nationofchange.org/where-99-percent-get-their-power-1318173459

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Ambiguous UpSparkles From the Heart of the Park (Mic Check/Occupy Wall Street)

By Eve Ensler

Author of 'I Am An Emotional Creature" and "The Vagina Monologues," Founder of V-Day

I have been watching and listening to all kinds of views and takes on Occupy Wall Street. Some say it's backed by the Democratic Party. Some say it's the emergence of a third party. Some say the protesters have no goals, no demands, no stated call. Some say it's too broad, taking on too much. Some say it is the Left's version of the Tea Party. Some say its Communist, some say it's class warfare. Some say it will burn out and add up to nothing. Some say it's just a bunch of crazy hippies who may get violent.

rest of article....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/ambiguous-upsparkles-from_b_1003908.html

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Even more if you want....

On Oct 10, 2011, at 12:24 PM, Rick Ingrasci M.D. wrote:

Panic of the Plutocrats

New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America's direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important - namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called "economic royalists," not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police - confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction - but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced "mobs" and "the pitting of Americans against Americans." The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging "class warfare," while Herman Cain calls them "anti-American." My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don't deserve to have them.

rest of article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html

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Why the Elite are in Trouble

By Chris Hedges

Truthdig | Op-Ed

Published: October 9, 2011

Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars' worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.

The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave * to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.

rest of article...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_elites_are_in_trouble_20111009/

Theater-States and the Long Count

2011-08-28T13:20:00.000-05:00

"We tend to characterize every civilization in terms of “preclassic, classic, and postclassic,” but we might do better to think of it as “stable and expanding,” “unstable,” and “shrinking and reconsolidating.” Preclassic Maya agriculture was exceedingly diverse, with agroforestry, household garden plots, rotational field crops, chinampas and aquaponic systems, and perhaps also novel farming techniques we have yet to learn about. So was the postclassic."

Here in the Mexican colonial city of Mérida, the Society for Ecological Restoration is having its Fourth World Conference. We find that a useful title, because in common parlance the Fourth World represents the indigenous peoples — those who have, so far, survived colonial genocide. Cities like this one were the military and cultural spaceport from which attacks by futuristic alien occupiers against ‘primitive’ populations were launched. — The Conquistadors’ final campaign against the Itza Maya island capital of Tayasal, near Tikal, was launched from here in 1696. As the vine and mildew-covered grand colonades with flaking plaster attest, this is also the way the spoils of war travelled their way back to Europe.

Understanding how the Maya survived and are still populous in this part of the world, speaking the same ancient languages, carries some important lessons for both ecological restorationists and collapseologists.

One reason the Maya survived, of course, is that they kept very strong ties to the natural world, never drifting very far from their farming roots and shamanic religions. Another is that even when engaged in urban professions and lifestyles, Mayan descendants are in a comfort zone that is bolstered by strong family ties and a 3000-year history, much of it involving city living.

The collapse of the Classic period, around 900 CE, is an active academic field, with many conflicting theories and a mountain of literature. While traveling here we absorbed the writings of Arthur Demarest, of Vanderbilt University, and his narrative easily lends itself for comparison to our current global situation.*

One of the terms Demarest uses to describe the Classic Maya period is a “theater-state.” The ruling elite, known as the K’uhul Ajaw, or Holy Lords, were relatively hands-off with respect to economics, social welfare and trade but devoted lots of resources to legitimizing their political and religious authority through monumental architecture, art, pageant, sports spectacles and warfare. This resource misallocation – taking away from the real needs of the populace, especially in times of stress – led to swelling of the elite class, enormous diversions to unproductive types of labor, depredations from unnecessary wars, resentment from disenfranchised youth who were relegated to mere javelin–fodder, and, of course, ecological decay — as previously elegant eco-agriculture microsystems (using 400-500 species of plants) were consolidated into monocultures and overproduced.

Sound familiar?

A basic question Demarest probes is why, in so many areas, Mayan leaders did not respond with effective corrective measures for the stresses generated by internal and external pressures they could not have failed to notice. We generally think of complex societies as problem-solving organizations, in which elaborate chains of central command and control “wire” a nation to meet its goals. Yet beginning around the Eighth Century, the Holy Lords were apparently out to lunch.

Demarest thinks the problem was structural. Since the elites of the most classic Maya kingdoms did not farm or manage production of goods, the “real” economy was decentralized to local community or family. The role of the Holy Lords was to manage a “false” economy that was derivative, its only marginal utility being that it gave their Kingdoms some sort of patriotic zeal or sense of exceptionalism. When these derivatives eventually began to unravel, the Holy Lords, like mechanics with a limited set of wrenches, did what they knew best — they intensified ritual activities, built taller and more ornate temples and expensive stages, props, and costumes, and scheduled more performance rituals, wars, and feasting. Contrary to earlier results, however, these measures only prolonged or intensified the problems, led to further disenchantment, which eventually brought about whatever cataclysm dethroned them.

Successive rounds of quantitative easing had diminishing returns. The “real” economy was suffering a century-long drought punctuated by severe droughts in CE 810, 860 and 910. The “false” economy tottered from a hefty reality dose.

Today the theater state is shown in high definition and 3-D, and it resembles in its own way the grand Berlin pageants of Albert Speer as much as the scenes from Apocalypto. Mad-Men have refined the manufacture of consent, to use Chomsky's phrase, to a fine science, and as in Classic Maya times, military recruitment is viewed as a fortunate outlet for the unemployed. Recruiters have never had it so easy. And the recent riots in London are a reminder of what can happen when a country brings its boys home too soon.

However, a “classic” period, signifying the peak of empire and also a peak in energy, productivity, and population in most cases, is never sustainable, because it is inherently unbalanced.

Demarest’s insight here is that we tend to characterize every civilization in terms of “preclassic, classic, and postclassic,” but we might do better to think of it as “stable and expanding,” “unstable,” and “shrinking and reconsolidating.” Preclassic Maya agriculture was exceedingly diverse, with agroforestry, household garden plots, rotational field crops, chinampas and aquaponic systems, and perhaps also novel farming techniques we have yet to learn about. So was the postclassic. We have only just recently begun to appreciate that the “slash and burn” found in many parts of the tropics was once a highly productive and ecologically sustainable biochar amendment system when practiced in the ancient ways.

The Mayan preclassic food system was only marginally regional. While trade and tribute brought in salt, chocolate, hardwoods, hard stone, luxuries, textiles, and non-perishable goods, transportation of corn or other staples was largely prohibitive from an energy efficiency standpoint. Moving corn on the back of a man 25 km requires the consumption of 16% of the caloric value of the load. Transport from 100 km would have cost a third of the load in expended caloric energy. Demarest wrote, “Such high transport costs might have been maintained by a few Mayan cities at their peak, but more generally Mayan subsistence economies and markets were probably based on an area of about 20 to 30 km — a day of travel from the major center and its periodic markets.”

Joseph Tainter’s famous 1988 analysis of civilizational collapses argues that what generally occurs when a civilization over-extends is not a complete disappearance but a rapid decline in complexity. Axiomatically, it can be said that the instability experienced at the peak of a culture is a function of over-complexity.

While this might be true of the Maya in some ways, in other respects that analysis fails to satisfy. While the theater state of the Holy Lords reached a peak complexity and then declined, a different type of state followed that increased in complexity over what had existed in the classic period. The end of the theater state led to the cessation of monumental architecture and the disappearance of high status exotic goods and ornaments, but good riddance.

At the same time, although at different times and speeds in different regions, there was a flowering and transformation to the new order. Extensive ecological, archaeological, and settlement pattern studies have found a resurgence of complex agricultural regimes that were well adapted to population levels with no indications of nutritional stress. When the curtains were drawn on the theater state, the health and welfare of the people improved. With the loss of simple monoculture and central authority and the diffusion of complex microfarming diversity and decentralized councils, the new order recaptured stability.

What followed in the postclassic period were a diffusion of distinctive new variants of the classic culture, with strange costumes, long hairstyles, experimentation with new legitimating ideologies, and unusual features in buildings, sculpture and ceramics (e.g.: ubiquitous serpents, brightly colored murals, and the psychedelic temple complex of Tulum).

The Maya that flourish in the Guatemalan highlands and Yucatán today are as populous and even more vigorous economically than they were in the classic theater state, but they do not generate anything like the art and architecture of their predecessors from 1000 years ago. They don’t need to.

Demarest observed, “For at least 6000 years, the hallmarks of the Western tradition have been linear concepts of time, monocultural agricultural systems, overproduction and exchange of surplus in full-market economies, technology-driven development, a long history of attempts to separate religious and political authority, and judgmental Gods concerned with individual, personal moral conduct. As we learn from the Maya, none of these traits is universal, none of them was characteristic of classic Maya civilization, and none of them is critical to the fluorescence of high civilization.”

For the restoration ecologists here in Mérida, there is much to be seen and learned. The pre- and postclassic system of mimicking the diversity and dispersion of the forest allowed the Maya to maintain populations in the millions in the Yucatán for over 1500 years without destroying a rich but fragile tropical environment and biodiversity. They are still here —still engaged in that work. That offers hope for us all.

* Ancient Maya: the rise and fall of the rainforest civilization by Arthur Demarest, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

44 Years of Slow Collapse

2011-08-04T13:17:00.001-05:00

"You can go to the countryside, get yourself a farm, learn how to milk cows, sew your own clothes, put up canned goods at harvest, and midwife your own babies, but it won’t save you from the spread of the deserts, bubbling clathrates, or zombie hordes fleeing starving cities."

Watching the Tea Party make hostages of the other crime families is better than anything this season from Showtime, HBO or AMC.

With the collapse of the Murdoch Crime Family, other crime families are scrambling for position. The Bush Crime Family was feeling pretty good about skating away from its crime scene Scott-free, counting on the incoming Obama gang as a covert asset. The feel-good feelings that came in with Obama, primarily hope that the Bush-Cheney bungling and transparent evil would be gone, were entirely manufactured, something akin to the “Neo” program The Architect built into The Matrix. But there is a random element built into the program that can make it very interesting, or at least rife for sequels.

Hostage-taking as a political strategy caught the Bush-Obama family by surprise. Within a few months of getting their freshmen to Washington, the Tea family went straight for the jewels, like young Vito Corleone knocking off the biggest crime boss in Brooklyn. It used to be enough just to shut down the federal government for a few days. But with the debt ceiling drama, the global economy was kidnapped and held in a dark chamber for 4 months, and the ransom paid in the end reached straight into the breadbasket of the old order. The dons are not happy about that. Michelle Bachmann and Eric Cantor should avoid small private planes and room service.

Lets face it, it had to be paid, and the US had to come to the same kind of reckoning as Iceland, Spain or Greece. How a country gets there is less important, but in a fantasyland of mythical populism, created whole cloth from Murdoch’s media, a populist scam seems more plausible than, say, a report from Bush-Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. We are in new territory now, and as the warring gangs fight blood feuds in the ruins of the crashing empire, the smart money is getting out while the airlines are still flying. Given the latest hostages – the FAA controllers – that window may not be open long.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a model called the five stages of grieving, based on her interviews with more than 500 terminally ill patients. Kübler-Ross was dealing with people who were experiencing profound, catastrophic loss — their own lives — and were trying to cope, somehow. She emphasized that while these 5 stages are not complete, exclusive or chronological, they seemed typical.

The five stages, sometimes known by the acronym DABDA, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

In some consistent but amorphous way, shape or form, we have been writing of the looming collapse of planetary ecosystems and the human civilization they support since about 1967. Over the span of the last 44 years our emotional state has risen and fallen, sometimes resuscitated by good news, other times deflated by confirmation that, indeed, collapse and mass extinction is inevitable. We described one of these deflating moments a few years ago as our Houston Moment. Houston, because that is where we were when we realized just how close Earth is now to profound, catastrophic, irredeemable collapse.

In 44 years you get to see a lot of people arriving to this point of understanding and, like Kübler-Ross, we observe some patterns. Much has already been written comparing peak oil and climate change to the five stages of grief. The similarity may only be in the flexibility, because not everyone shows all the signs, and there is inconsistent order. Lately we’ve noticed we’re getting more buy-in to the notion of collapse from people in the financial sector. Many of these, Chris Martenson and Paul Gilding for example, have made major contributions to encapsulating the big picture.

Over the years we’ve also lost some beacons who saw the way we are headed and made herculean efforts to shine their beams towards realistic, alternative routes of escape. Here we are thinking of Bob Swann, Scott and Helen Nearing, R. Buckminster Fuller, Barry Commoner, and most recently, Peter Berg, who passed away this past week.

Peter Berg was a San Francisco beatnik who was fond of turtleneck sweaters and free public art. He became one of the architects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and later coined the word, “bioregionalism” to describe the only possible non-catastrophic way forward.

One memorable Berg installation was a wooden yellow square he called the “Frame of Reference” that he, the Diggers, and the Mime Troupe erected at the corner of Haight and Masonic on October 31, 1966. After warming up the crowd with two 8-foot-tall puppets in “Any Fool on The Street,” an improv play about what is inside or outside reality, Berg invited the crowd to dance with the puppets inside and outside of the yellow Frame and to disregard their normal frames of reference, such as the sidewalk. As individuals and groups, led by Berg, formed geometrical shapes in the street, traffic came to a halt until 5 squad cars and a paddy wagon threaded their way to the corner to make arrests. Seeing the Frame and the puppets, an officer approached and told a puppet he was creating a disturbance. The conversation was recorded by the Berkeley Barb:

Cop: “We warn you that if you don't remove yourselves from the area you'll be arrested for blocking a public thoroughfare.”

Puppet: “Who is the public?”

Cop: “I couldn't care less; I'll take you in. Now get a move on.”

Puppet: “I declare myself public—I am a public. The streets are public. The streets are free.”

The police swarmed the Frame, grabbed the puppets and the operators within, and shoved them all into the paddy wagon. The crowd surrounded the wagon, chanting “Frame-up! Frame-up!” The prisoners responded with “Pub-lic! Pub-lic!”

What strikes us as a newcomers’ pattern is that, arriving on this corner scene in 2011, and noticing the yellow Frame of Reference and people in the street, the newcomers aren’t quite ready to fully associate themselves. Having shattered their way through denial, anger, and depression, they are still bargaining. We shouldn’t cast aspersions, really, because after 45 years we do it too. In climatespeak its called mitigation and adaptation. We do not go gentle into that good night. We quest for solutions. Without the quest there is no hope, and without the hope, life is a drag. Dark humor is no substitute for even the smallest glimmer of hope.

Recent converts include billionaire fund manager Jeremy Grantham, oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, and HSBC chief economist Stephen King. What seems to fuel their realizations is not the financial meltdown but the recognition of game-changing resource constraints, something they should have absorbed by reading Limits to Growth in 1972. Is it possible to have been old enough to read in 1972 and missed that? Grantham calls the “new era” of resource constraint the Great Paradigm Shift, without reference to Korten’s Great Turning, Gilding's Great Disruption or our own Great Change. He says: “If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

No kidding? As Richard Heinberg says in The End of Growth, with the global economy and ecosystem both burdened by unmanageable debt, effective global default is only a matter of time. It isn’t if, but when.

When we see bankers and stockbrokers moving out of the Hamptons or South Beach and buying farms up some remote country hollow, we know that’s why. Of course, they could do better than to try to go it alone or with paid servants (a risky proposition). They could discover the benefits of ecovillage. Who knows? In pursuit of happiness, they might even accidentally turn the trend around.

And that’s the summary of 44 years watching this slow-moving juggernaut. It isn’t if, but when. You can go to the countryside, get yourself a farm, learn how to milk cows, sew your own clothes, put up canned goods at harvest, and midwife your own babies, but it won’t save you from the spread of the deserts, bubbling clathrates, or zombie hordes fleeing starving cities. The realization, acceptance, in Kübler-Ross’s terms, is not that you can buy time or bargain, but that a change in your Frame of Reference is available.

You can have a reasonably good life for little longer, maybe long enough to play with your grandchildren, if you are lucky. Chances are pretty darn slim, however, that they will have the same luxury. The future is not what it once was. Whether the end comes slowly or quickly matters only slightly. The Tea family seems to favor making it quick and painful. Tony Soprano couldn’t have planned it any better.

Fracking Culture

2011-06-30T10:36:00.000-05:00

"We are right at that spaghetti junction where all the lines converge with population and resources, food supply, energy, water and the rest. We’re at that point right now, in exactly the decade The Club of Rome predicted we would arrive here. We have to somehow get through this collapsing passageway and into the next paradigm."

This past week, before leaving to attend the gathering of the Ecovillage Network of Canada at La Cité Écologique in Quebec, we were asked to speak at a forum hosted by Nashville Peace and Justice Center concerning hydrofracking, mountaintop removal, and nuclear power in Tennessee. This is a rough transcript of those remarks.

First I want to start with setting a context, because usually you begin with a problem statement. A lot of what we address at the Ecovillage Training Center and in our curricula for trainings and workshops are methodologies for a switch — a massive transition — from the past paradigm that is failing us now to something entirely new that has the potential for success — to make us successful as a species in partnership with all the other species on the planet.

To do that, you have to understand the need for a realistic framework to get us from where we are to where we are going, and to, in some sense, reverse engineer it, seeing where we want to be and then backcasting to see what steps are necessary to get us where we want to be within a reasonable time frame.

Phasing out of emissions from coal, oil and natural gas — particularly methane — is an enormous challenge. To change over the entire fossil fuel paradigm to a post-petroleum paradigm is an enormous challenge. You have to think about how such a transition is even possible. The current administration’s plan — the Obama/Boehner/Bachmann drill baby drill menu — is all about Canadian tar sands, a pipeline from Canada, the Marcella Shale, the Bakkan and various other plays, offshore deep wells and ways to accelerate the fossil end game. If that succeeds, it is essentially game over. There is no way we are going to take all that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere in the timeframe that we need to. We’re going to get runaway warming, the methane clathrates bubbling up from the bottom of the oceans, and various other nightmare scenarios.

Nuclear power has been held out as a carbon-free alternative source of energy, but that is the same PR bull we have been handed since Our Friend The Atom was foisted upon innocent schoolchildren, and was also given to the Japanese schoolchildren, by the way. If you look at the entire nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear is black carbon dirtier than natural gas and not quite as dirty as coal. Coal is more radioactive than natural gas but not as radioactive as nuclear. All of them kill people in order to do what? Boil water. They kill unborn children in future generations, and expose them to horrible birth defects and cancers in order to brew coffee and dry hair.

We are all the victims of TVA’s efforts to feather its own nest at our expense. This goes back a century to the battle between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison for control of the electricity market in New York City. Westinghouse won, and what we got was energy that was ever more expensive every year, non-renewable, and unsafe at every turn. Those are the people who built the Fukushima nuclear plants, as well as the reactor that is getting flooded in Nebraska now. They are the mountaintop removal cabal.

The grid was created to suit itself, not the people it was supposed to serve. Edison wanted to charge people by the number of lights they had. Instead, George Westinghouse charged people by the kilowatt-hour and sold them the most inefficient lightbulbs he could make. And so it went for 100 years – they encouraged people to add more and more gadgets to their homes, and to buy appliances with planned obsolescence, and to then make you need a bigger house to store all that stuff. It was a sales campaign dressed up as labor saving, or civilized living. What we got was an unhappy, disastrously wasteful and soon-to-be-extinct culture. Coal, gas, and nuclear — they are part of that same paradigm. It is a huge conspiracy being foisted on us by the best government corporations could buy. It is all suicidally insane. TVA is clinically insane. What do you call someone who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never proving what they claim they are doing, getting the exact opposite result, but telling you this time the result will be different? I mean, other than a Republican? Clinically insane. That’s clinically insane.

And so, if you look at where are we now, we are right where Dennis and Dana Meadows said back in 1972 we would be in the Limits to Growth study. We are right at that spaghetti junction where all the lines converge with population and resources, food supply, energy, water and the rest. We’re at that point right now, in exactly the decade they predicted we would arrive here.

We have to somehow get through this collapsing passageway and into the next paradigm. And so what we do at the Ecovillage Training Center — what ecovillages around the world are all trying to do — is to provide models, transition pathways, to get us to that next step, to get us to where we are going. And some of that is food supply, some of that is energy, some is building materials and how we get our buildings, some of that is microeconomics, like complimentary currencies. Some of that is new methods of social networking and alternative education and midwifery and alternative health care and doing things in ways that we have known for hundreds of thousands of years and we need to get back to.

Show of hands: how many people here either saw the sunrise this morning or were up at that time? (some laughter, about 20% raise their hands). That’s pretty good. Your average audience – none. But in point of fact, that’s when the light came on. And you could get up and do chores and it was still cool for several hours. And we’re going to be here until after that light goes out tonight. We’ll be here after dark, and we will spend coal energy getting home, feeding our family, putting ourselves to bed, whatever, which we could do without all that dirty power if we just got up earlier.

So ecovillages are about that. They are trying to find ways that are relatively painless, in comparison to the kind of pain that civilization is about to experience — to lead the way, so that people can jump into these new models and start doing it for themselves and avoid the shock that comes of collapse. Because that is where this previous paradigm is heading us, and taking along a lot of other species, too.

Tea Baggers Tickle the Dragon’s Tail

2011-06-11T16:41:00.001-05:00

" A point that we are all coming to realize is that the global economic body is delicately interconnected, and hungry, but there is no brain."

Outside the Fukushima plant and for some distance at night, can be seen the intermittently sparkling blue glow of re-criticality, as the melted fuel from four reactors, moderated by fresh water pumped from fire trucks, puts on a light show of ionized air over the coast of Japan. This is a requiem display, a salute of fireworks, because Japan, mortally wounded, is dying the same way the Soviet Union did, killed by the nuclear dragon it thought it had tamed.

Louis Slotin's Los Alamos ID

This same light show was once observed in 1946, with fatal consequences, by physics students working in Los Alamos on advancements to the atomic bomb. Louis Slotin, their 35-year-old Canadian instructor, had been the criticality math whiz of the Manhattan Project and had personally assembled the core of the Trinity device. His method of establishing critical mass values was very bold, not to say reckless. Slotin would push fissile masses together slowly until they displayed early onset signs of criticality to clickity-clacking Geiger meters. On May 21, 1946, Sloton demonstrated his technique, which Richard Feynmann had by then coined “tickling the dragon’s tail,” to the six star-struck students in his lab.

Using his bare hands, Sloton slowly moved a screwdriver out from between two beryllium half-spheres lined with uranium reflecting neutrons back to a 3.5-inch-diameter (89 mm) plutonium core. At exactly 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell. The room flashed iridescent blue and Slotin, reacting heroically, used his other hand to knock the spheres apart. He died horribly, nine days later, from the exposure, but he saved the rest of the people in the room, not to mention everyone within a 5 mile radius of Los Alamos.

The Idiotcracy that staged a palace coup in the US Congress last fall is now tickling the dragon’s tail of the full faith and credit of the United States. Refusing to give up tax breaks for the rich and powerful, the Exxons, BPs and Haliburtons, the tea baggers and their millionaire Republican allies are demanding elimination of medicare, privatization of Social Security, and a blather of deep social welfare cuts that any impartial accountant (the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, or the Office of Management and Budget,for instance) recognize as not only ineffective (pushing the USA into far greater, and more expensive, problems down the road), but purely political gamesmanship. The goal of that game, for millionaire Republicans, is to get as close to the brink as possible, elicit as many concessions for the wealthy as possible by beggaring the poor, and then to pass a new debt ceiling and repeat the process.

The goal of the Tea Baggers, for whom nuance and strategy are not strong suits, is to play to the cheers of the Colosseum as they give thumbs down to federalism and separation of powers and toss the Moorish President to the lions.

The US is now officially without a fiscal budget, living on holdover spending, mere wax and string that runs out on August 2^nd. The millionaire Republicans want to strike a deal on August 1^st and ham it up for the cameras until then. The Tea Baggers want to strike a deal on August 3^rd, if then, to give both the Democrats and Republicans a taste of the lash. Neither have any idea of what kind of dragon the tail they are tickling belongs to.

The US Treasury is limited by Congress to borrowing up to a debt limit, originally established in 1939. Since Congress originates all federal activities requiring funding, such as insanely expensive foreign war adventures or sending rockets up into space, Congress has to annually increase the debt limit to keep up. The last increase was in February, 2010, to $14.294 trillion. George W. Bush increased it 8 times, moving it from 57% of GDP to 84% of GDP. Under Obama, it has risen to 97% of GDP.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that Congress does not have the power to void a government bond, so if any loans come due, it is obligated to pay them or default. Here is what happens if the Tea Baggers’ screwdriver slips:

There would be widespread banking collapse, not just in the US, but everywhere dollars are traded as the currency of choice for oil and other commodities. If economic transactions are halted, then trade and supply-chains break. The longer goods are stalled in the pipeline the more consumables and perishables decay in transit and storage or are consumed by present holders or returned to sender. Pipelines and machines rust, factories close, unemployment and starvation turns to riot.

The longer the down time and the wider the scale, the harder the re-boot once the idiots see what they have done. The dollar ceases once and forever to be the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, instead of getting everything in the global economy at a discount, the US pays top dollar to buy, say, Swiss Francs, so it can pay for its addictions.

FEASTA’s David Korowicz, writing last month on large-scale risk management, said, “The wonder of our globalized economy is that in all this globalized integration and complexity there is no one in control…. So, while national economies may have an individual character, they have no autonomous existence in anything like their present form outside the globalized economy, just as an arm, lung or heart cannot declare independence from the human body.” Korowicz was underscoring the point that we are all coming to realize: the global economic body is delicately interconnected, and hungry, but there is no brain.

In the US, a Zombie Congress is dragging itself through the angry streets in search of fresh blood. It may, in the end, have to settle for consuming its own. This dragon does not like to be tickled.

Spain’s Irish Spring

2011-05-28T10:13:00.000-05:00

"Spain is now as forked as Ireland. It not only has all the problems of a crumbling paradigm — the religion of endless growth — but it has elevated the high priests of that paradigm to its seats of power."

Twenty-one and a half years ago we wrote:

“What will it be like when this world food crisis arrives? We can make some educated guesses. The decline in living standards will be felt everywhere. At the lowest level of poverty, the price of food will rise above the power to purchase. There will be food riots in major cities…. At the upper levels of wealth, the pain will be felt, but it will be less acute…. Inevitably, such stark differences in purchasing power will deepen animosities and elevate world tension.”

— Bates, Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (Book Publishing Co, 1990).

This past week we were sitting in a sidewalk restaurant with the leftist candidate for mayor of a city in Spain on the night before the election. As he got up to leave, we wished him well.

“Suerte,” we said (“good luck!”). He turned and looked at us with cow’s eyes. “Graçias,” he said, but he had a tone of sorrow, more than hope.

On May 15, a few activists had gathered in Puerta del Sol, a large public plaza in the center of Madrid, to protest the coming election and to register their general dissatisfaction with the situation in their country. Last year unemployment rose from 20.5% in August to 20.8% in September, the highest rate in the European Union, and probably in the developed world. Food and fuel prices had crossed a tipping point for many, where it was no longer other things that were being given up to pay for food, it was now food that was being given up.

Spain is a microcosm of the collapse phase Global Civilization finds itself in and the protest camps in many cities are an example of the bankruptcy of political ideology — it is adrift and uncomprehending. Neither the right nor the left are remotely proposing the degree of change that is needed (essentially, an end to oil addiction and a epoch of ecosystemic healing). The street protests have nothing further to offer — they are reactionary, but not revolutionary.

Spain elected a socialist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2004 (and last month he announced he will not stand for re-election in 2012). Zapatero instituted liberal reforms, such as the withdrawal of Spanish troops from the Bush wars; legalization of both same-sex marriage and abortion; numerous gender equality laws; peace negotiation with the rebel ETA; unpopular tobacco restrictions; recognition of regional autonomy, particularly for the Statute of Catalonia; and the idea of an Alliance of Civilizations, co-sponsored by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. What was not anticipated by Zapatero, however, was the housing meltdown; the financial crash of 2008; euro deflation along with food and energy price escalation; and all of it against a background of Spain slowly obtaining the climate (and some of the population) of Northern Africa.

For many years, Zapatero’s government ran a current accounts deficit of 10% GDP, forcing Spain to borrow 7 to 8 billion euros every month, until, by 2010, the value of Spanish government paper debt had sunk so low that lenders simply stopped lending. Zapatero had inherited the same banking crisis Obama had, and it came to a head in the burst bubble of the housing sector. The Spanish economy had been hooked on household and corporate debt steroids with not just sub-prime but negative interest rates from early 2002 until mid-2006, causing "massive overheating" in the Spanish economy, which sucked 5 million immigrant workers from Africa in 8 years. But, just as in Iceland, Ireland and the USA, chickens invariably do come home to roost.

As the EU, IMF and Spain’s lenders started to pick up the pieces of their shredded balloon, severe austerity imposed by the Banksters put 5 million young Spaniards out of work and on the streets. As in Ireland, Spain responded by moderating its social programs (entitlements), cutting welfare spending, raising the age of retirement, and chipping public pension benefits by 20%. And, as in Ireland, discontent swelled.

The medicine had some effect because the ‘Bikini Graph’ that Zapatero’s emergency measures produced ran deeper and somewhat ahead of Obama’s.

Spain's 'Bikini Graph' showing its rebound in GDP (before IMF austerity controls take effect).

The problem is that both Ireland and Spain are trying to make major corrections to their economies while participating in a monetary union. Neither has a currency to devalue, or a central bank with capacity to print money and issue or recall bonds. Instead, both must achieve “internal devaluation” by cutting wages and prices until its accounts are back in line with its Eurozone partners.

On May 16, people wandered into Puerta del Sol to see what was going on with the protestors of the preceding day and were arrested for “illegal protest.” In response, the protests grew, and extended to rallies in central plazas of other Spanish cities. People came and camped. The police stopped evicting. It became Spain’s Tunisian Spring. Thousands are now camped out in central Madrid along with 60 other sites nationwide, creating temporary cities of the dispossessed. The mainstream media in Britain and the West have chosen to largely ignore this phenomenon,

On May 22, Spain held its regional and local elections and our acquaintence, the mayor, lost, as he may have expected to. Even though the Socialists had made real progress in setting Spain back on track, half the population stayed away from the polls and over a million ballots were turned in blank. The elections were a landslide victory for the conservative People's Party (PP) which took control of all of Spain's largest cities, including Barcelona, a Socialist base since 1979.

Interest rates on Spanish Debt

This is what had already happened in Ireland, with a left-leaning, green coalition alienated its base with austerity measures while being unable to control the on-barreling peak oil and climate change freight trains, so whomever was in office caught the blame for everything that was wrong — both the disease and the medicine.

While the young, unemployed protesters camped out in Puerta del Sol demanded “Democracy Real Ya” (“real democracy now”), right-wingers, some of them previously under indictment for corruption, swept the democratic vote.

Spain is now as forked as Ireland. It not only has all the problems of a crumbling paradigm — the religion of endless growth — but it has elevated the high priests of that paradigm to its seats of power.

Will the protests grow? Yes. Will they spread to other countries? Probably. Do the protesters have an achievable goal, some realistic strategy to get their countries out of this huge bind? No.

So, good luck with all that.

Pour Evian on Your Radishes

2011-04-10T14:43:00.000-05:00

"It is also slowly dawning on the Japanese that radioactivity is not something that can be scrubbed away with soapy water. It has a Midas touch. Everything it contacts becomes fiendishly toxic. So every drop of water, concrete, foam, rubber glove, fire hose, or anything else that comes into Fukushima's arc becomes a lethal assassin."

Evian is making a killing in Japan. With bottled water in scarce supply (rationed to 2 liters per person when it is available at all), it's seller's market. And yet, one of the best uses of Evian in northeast Japan might be pouring it into the dirt.

When we were contacted by the Permaculture Institute of Japan about what they should do regarding Fukushima radioactivity, we had a number of immediate suggestions, and over the weeks more have trickled in from our extended permaculture family. GE's Japanese Nuclear Disaster still has the attention of the world. It is like the BP Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, a slow-moving monster, chewing up rich, diverse, biological ecosystems and leaving a toxic cancer on the landscape that will fester for decades, if not centuries.

It was with a sad shake of our head that we read George Monbiot's and David Strahan's recent posts in defense of nuclear electricity. They have so imbibed the British atomic KoolAid that they actually seem to believe that burning the genes of future children to power PlayStations today is a better idea than, say, teaching our children how to build windmills. They have been duped even on the underlying premise, that nuclear power is carbon-free.

Hardly.

Studies in 2005 and 2007 by J.W. Storm van Leeuwen's group in the Netherlands still provide the best look at the carbon cost of the nuke lifecycle. Storm van Leeuwen looked at every single subcomponent of the fuel cycle from uranium mine to waste disposal and estimated 112-166 gCO2/kWh. (Storm van Leeuwen, J.W., Smith, P., 2007. Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance). In 2008, Benjamin Sovacool screened 103 lifecycle studies of greenhouse gas-equivalent emissions for nuclear facilities to identify a subset of the most current, original, and transparent studies (see: Sovacool, B.K., 2008. Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power: A critical survey, Energy Policy 36:2940-2953). Not surprisingly, most of the studies had to be discarded. Thirty-nine percent of lifecycle studies reviewed were more than 10 years old. Nine percent, while cited in the literature, were inaccessible. Thirty-four percent did not explain their research methodology, relied completely on secondary sources, or were not explicit about the distribution of carbon-equivalent emissions over the different stages of the fuel cycle. All in all, 81% of studies had methodological shortcomings. Storm van Leeuwen's group's studies stood up to Sovacool's rigor.

What Sovacool found was that estimates of nuclear's carbon footprint varied widely, from 1.4 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kWh (gCO2e/kWh) to 288 gCO2e/kWh, but that the high estimates took the most into account. The low estimates were a product of reducing the scope of the footprint to be studied.

Obviously, there are problems in estimating lifecycle impacts, especially using data limited to a single reactor or component, or historical data that may or may not represent future trends. So, for instance, every time uranium ore grade declines by a factor of ten, energy inputs to mining and milling must increase by at least a factor of ten. Storm van Leeuwen pointed out that this can greatly skew estimates, as uranium of 10% U3O8 has emissions for mining and milling at just 0.04 g CO2/kWh, whereas uranium at 0.013% grade has associated CO2 emissions more than 1500 times greater. The same trend is true for the emissions associated with uranium mine land reclamation. As Amory Lovins said in reference to estimating nuclear fuel cycle emissions in 1974, an error by a factor of 2 (half or double) at each stage of a 20-stage process can produce a million-fold error.

That said, rigorous lifecycle analyses for 15 separate distributed generation and renewable energy technologies found that all emitted less CO2 than the mean reported for nuclear plants.

While nuclear power may produce less CO2e than fossil fuels, it produces considerably more than most renewables, and at a considerably higher price per either kWh or installed Watt. Why Monbiot and Strahan, both skilled reporters, fail to grasp this is puzzling.

Now, in light of the ongoing events in Japan, I want to just take a minute to talk about nuclear power. Right now, America gets about one-fifth of our electricity from nuclear energy. And it's important to recognize that nuclear energy doesn't emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So those of us who are concerned about climate change, we've got to recognize that nuclear power, if it's safe, can make a significant contribution to the climate change question.

- President Barack Obama, Georgetown Univ., March 30, 2011.

The Fukushima complex is now exceeding allowable limits for effluent discharge by millions of times. The “accident” is far from over, and the worst parts of it continue to worsen. Fukushima may be for Japan what Chernobyl was for Russia - a complete economic game-changer and a transgenerational gigadeath event - but awareness of that is only slowly dawning. “The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan's largest-ever crisis,” the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, told his Parliament last week. Viewed centuries hence, that will be regarded as a cruel understatement.

We predicted this, going back more than 40 years, but it is small consolation. Is there a remedy? No, there is not. When speaking of man-made elements like plutonium, the damage is essentially forever. We are diminished. The world of our children will always be less safe and more sad than it was for our parents. That is on us.

It is also slowly dawning on the Japanese that radioactivity is not something that can be scrubbed away with soapy water. It has a Midas touch. Everything it contacts becomes fiendishly toxic. So every drop of water, concrete, foam, rubber glove, fire hose, or anything else that comes into Fukushima's arc becomes a lethal assassin.

With water gushing into the sea and steam droplets and soot dropping for hundreds of miles around, Fukushima's hot touch is spreading. Already, more than 50 municipalities are contaminated. Shoppers are being told to peel the outer layers off of cabbage and celery.

After the cores decay to just one percent of their original temperature, they will still be giving off enough heat to evaporate 200 tons of water a day. Everything contaminated transforms into an agent of contamination, and so the virus spreads. This will go on for nonconsensual generations.

Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes to America's energy predicament, the President has been woefully misinformed. Mr. Obama pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost every one of these ideas is inconsistent with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents some kind of magical thinking. What they have in common is that they're ideas the public wants to hear, whether they are truthful or not, because we don't want to change the way we live.

- James Howard Kunstler

Making lemonade out of sour lemons is no easy trick, but we try. We recommended to PIJ, which is close to Tokyo but outside the immediate danger zone, that they build hoophouses, bring in safe soil, and monitor everything that goes in an out of their food production space for radioactivity - including water and people. That is how they will make food. It is not sustainable to rely on canned goods. We recommend using bottled water to help the plants grow if local tap water is found to be radioactive. Hence the Evian on the dirt, or for rinsing jars of sprouts. Forget eating local fish. That's done, unless they are grown in tanks of Evian.

Helping poisoned soil regain its health will be a very long process. Mycologist Paul Stamets recommends creation of a Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone. There have been some studies on forest processes in controlled exposure areas at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Los Alamos in New Mexico and a mixed oak-pine forest near Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, but they are more cautionary than encouraging. At Oak Ridge, for instance, pine needles still contain radioactive elements in significant quantities 40 years after exposure.

That is actually the good news. By collecting and deep burying radioactive pine needles and fallen trees, we can gradually cleanse the contaminated soil a Nuclear Forest is rooted in. We have to handle byproducts carefully, and also bury our gloves and tools along with the wood products, but this is the technique.

Radioactivity doesn't go away except by the process of radioactive decay. For each element there is a particular rate of decay, or half-life, and there is nothing that can hasten that process. By bombarding radioactive material with neutrons (such as in a reactor) we can change one radioactive element into different fission products or isotopes of itself, and some of those will have shorter half-lives, but some will not. That process is expensive and also like sending King Midas back into the lab to do the cleanup.

Stamets recommends planting native deciduous and conifer trees, along with hyper-accumulating mycorrhizal mushrooms, particularly Gomphidius glutinosus, Craterellus tubaeformis, and Laccaria amethystina (all native to pines). G. glutinosus has been reported to absorb - via the mycelium - and concentrate radioactive Cesium 137 more than 10,000-fold over ambient background levels. Many other mycorrhizal mushroom species also hyper-accumulate. That speeds up the accumulation by radioactive pine cones and other forest materials and when the mushrooms form you can also harvest those under radioactive HAZMAT protocols.

At Oak Ridge they have also demonstrated ways to reduce waste volume by using a closed venturi incinerator with HEPA filters to dispose of flammable radioactive waste (i.e.: pine needles, Hazmat suits, used HEPA filters). We can only hope the Japanese government will be more scrupulous in regulating their incinerators than US and Tennessee regulators have been. The Oak Ridge incinerator, today the site of annual protest marches that you will never see on television, has contaminated a wide area around itself that is a long-neglected SuperFund site, championed and then abandoned by successive administrations. Also neglected is the facility that vitrifies the ash into glass and ceramic forms for long-term disposal. And so will be most of Oak Ridge, eventually.

Paul Stamets asks, “How long would this remediation effort take? I have no clear idea but suggest this may require decades. However, a forested national park could emerge -The Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone - and eventually benefit future generations with its many ecological and cultural attributes.”

That may be a bit optimistic. While tourism is now being permitted in Chernobyl, the long-term damage to animals there, the soil food web, and especially the fungi has yet to be fully assayed. What has been observed - listless woodchucks, punch-drunk badgers - is disturbing.

And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love`s bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

- Jackson Browne, Before the Deluge

Cleaning contaminated bodies of water can be done in much the same manner, by building artificial wetlands, harvesting grasses, reeds and hyacinths, and deep-burying the biomass, either before or after secure incineration. Wetlands are the fastest growing media for aquatic and semi-aquatic plants, and those plants have rapid life cycles so the throughput times are dramatic.

However, there is no free lunch when it comes to radioactivity. After gathering and burying reeds and hyacinths, you still have to bury your Hazmat suit and scrub.

It is possible, though untested to our knowledge, that vermiculture could accelerate bioremedation of damaged soils and might be a way to work at a smaller scale, such as in hoophouses or with indoor container plants. Worms plow through soil and run everything through their bacterially-rich gut, depositing castings in their wake. It might be worth examining how much radioactivity bioaccumulates in the worms, as opposed to their castings. If it is significant, a worm farmer can continuously harvest, destroy, and geosequester his herd.

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of the fury in the final hour.

- Jackson Browne, Before the Deluge

If this entire discussion gives you a queasy feeling, that's good. You are still human. It is now worth saying again that none of this kind of thing happens with wind, solar, or tidal energy, and there is, and has been, more of those kinds of energy sources available to Japan, and everyone else, at a cheaper price, since the beginning of the nuclear age. What we are witnessing is the (partial) meltdown of a massive public relations lie that began right after Hiroshima and serves solely the economic interests of companies like Westinghouse, General Electric, Halliburton and Bechtel.

It bears repeating. We are diminished.