About a year ago, I made my first public commitment to stop just talking about How to Save the World, and actually do something about it. Here's my progress report:
My Commitment: Clear Actions
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My Subsequent Action
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My Score
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Move to a more energy and space-efficient house
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Did an Energy Audit on our house, and have reduced energy by 20% (target is an additional 30% by Dec./05).
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C
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Become a vegan
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I'm about 80% of the way to vegetarian (target is vegan by Dec./05)
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D
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Become active in organizations advocating 'Maybe One' family size reduction encouragement programs.
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No progress, other than continuing to write about it. On my 'Getting Things Done' to do list.
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F
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Reduce our Ecological Footprint by 80% by Dec./05
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Housing
component of EF down 20% due to energy conservation & elimination
of lawn chemicals; other components down 50% (buying less, buying local, buying more durable, recycling & reusing, less garbage)
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B
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Produce Boycott List and stop buying from socially and environmentally irresponsible companies.
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Boycott List done. Not buying from any companies on the list.
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A
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Lobby
Canadian government for a shift in tax laws from income and employment
to resource consumption, pollution, waste, and excessive wealth
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Written letters. Activism through professional institutions I belong to not started, on my 'Getting Things Done' to do list.
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C
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Quit job with multinational organization that facilitates corporatism, and set up my own Natural Enterprise.
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Quit my job. New business Meeting of Minds set up but not yet financially viable. Wrote the book on Natural Enterprise.
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A
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Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even
if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn't be enough. As
the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on
the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens
and consumers, our continued theft of our children's and
grandchildren's heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies,
the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last
month's US elections all showed, we're losing ground fast. We need to
be doing much more.
So while I'm still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers' stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my 'to do' list, to publicly commit to do more.
Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called 'Plan B',
a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and
political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new
technological innovation simply aren't going to be enough to save the
world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:
- We need to end the 'growth' economy quickly, putting a stop to the
increased destruction of our environment and increased consumption of
scarce resources. To reach a sustainable level and stave off collapse,
we must achieve an 80-85% reduction in resource consumption, through
a combination of conservation and population reduction. Today this
consumption is doubling every forty years. The longer we wait, the
greater the challenge to achieve sustainability.
- <>We
need to drastically cut the disparity of wealth and power
between rich
and poor, so that the means of control of our future would return to
all of us. Globally the Gini index (the difference between the percent
of income or wealth of the richest and poorest 20% of the population)
stands at an astronomical 80 (81% owned and earned by the richest 20%,
<1% owned and earned by the poorest 20%, with a sizeable proportion
of that 81% owned by the world's richest 0.1%); it should be close to
that of civilized nations like Denmark and Japan, which have Gini
indices of 25 (35% of wealth owned by the richest 20%, 10% by the
poorest 20%). Economic power and wealth often trumps (or buys) votes,
making democratic political and economic change impossible.
- <>We need to increase our self-sufficiency, resiliency and
readiness to make the rapid transition to a new and radically different
human culture. Individuals and communities are currently helpless in
the face of centrally controlled infrastructure and total dependence
on government and foreign markets. Communities and individuals are
currently enslaved and imprisoned by political, social and economic
systems they simply can't walk away from without dying.
I believe it is now time for Plan B. Like the rest of nature, humans only change their behaviour (adapt) when they must
-- there is a little minority serendipitous experimentation with
changes occurring all the time as an inherent part of evolution, but
for the most part that is merely fine-tuning and diversification to
protect the gene pool. The vast majority of the world's people support
the Kyoto Accord and even more radical action to protect the
environment, and appreciate that the world is overpopulated, but in the
face of opposition by the rich and wealthy elite and of religious
leaders, they're not about to rise up and overthrow the intransigent
governments, stop having children, disband the churches and revoke the
charters of polluters. They would only do that when they know beyond
reasonable doubt that they must do it -- when there is no other choice.
By the time we reach that point it will be too late. Persuasion has
almost never brought about radical change in human culture. There must
be a 'burning platform' -- either you jump or you perish. Radical
change occurs when there is no choice: Change or die.
Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let's take
fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing
alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning
platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the
vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and
reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first
getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies,
and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major
sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was
any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and
environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the
end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more
strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness,
the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant
imperialist wars with oil-rich countries -- anything to forestall the
need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That's human nature.
That's nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must.
For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means
rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market.
That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most
people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the
taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable
energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply
that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of
reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few
month's supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the
development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative
energy (corporations won't pay for it). All of these options are
anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature
and won't dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy
years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market
will fix everything automatically.
So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can't do this by
changing human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce
consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering
with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage),
precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and
supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or
avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The
third of these options is not available because those with wealth and
power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations
that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both
politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern
'maximize short-term profit at all costs' corporate mantra, and hence
would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and
dismissal from their posts.
We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to
quadruple prices (that's what many OPEC members believe is a fair price
for their product now, but they're unwilling to risk an invasion by the
West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren't in their
short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I'm sure
awareness of this is what's behind the recent crude price volatility).
Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for
$160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is
military threats from the West.
If OPEC doesn't have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge
fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems
to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and
transportation systems, done in a way that doesn't cause human or
environmental injury -- preventing the supply from getting to the
market. We need a lot of
individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably
pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling
platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes).
At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in
the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil -- arms flowing out
to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow
of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and
slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor
countries
to rich.
This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but
non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious,
enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we
need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities
are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum
effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am
confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be
put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it.
The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to
the point where both consumers and producers say 'uncle' and start to
change their behaviour because they have no other choice.
I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog
is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually
be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to
avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get
addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We
are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern
economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment
the only way we know will work. If we're going to save the planet, we
all need to consume less, and we're doing our part to make that happen.
So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.
- Establish a loose network of individuals who are committed to
researching, sharing knowledge, and then acting upon ways to
selectively sabotage the most socially and environmentally destructive
elements of the modern economy without causing physical harm or
suffering to people or the environment, and in a coordinated way. A
million cells of one caring individual each. No formal organization, no
hierarchy, no command and control. No name.
- Develop and share significant research on the
vulnerabilities of the energy, mineral, forestry, water, food, and
other natural resource production and distribution industries, and
means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to disrupt supply, to dampen
demand by undermining public trust in and reliability of their
products, and to begin to force communities to look at ways of
increasing their resource self-sufficiency.
- Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability
of the major media, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to
jam, hack and occupy broadcast facilities in order to educate the
public about the threats to our planet and how they can help solve
them, to communicate clearly our network's purpose and carefully
selected actions, and to recruit new individuals.
- Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability
of the world's financial systems, and means of exploiting those
vulnerabilities (such as short-selling currencies) to undermine
confidence in the fiscal and monetary systems through which the rich
and irresponsible wield power, and to disrupt the flow of money that supports socially and environmentally damaging activities.
- Educate the public about how to reduce consumption and
debt without causing hardship, since excessive consumption and debt are
the fuel that enables massive disparity of wealth and power to
accumulate, and the continued enslavement of the people to a
corporatist economy and agenda.
- Develop and share significant research on ways in which
human fertility can be reduced and population growth rate reversed,
including both voluntary (innovative new birth control, abortion and
suicide technologies) and involuntary (airborne, waterborne or food
supply-borne agents, provided they have no effect on other creatures,
cause no human suffering, and take effect across the entire human
population without discrimination and therefore cannot be used in any
eugenic way).
- Create one or more spaces where like-minded activists can
share knowledge and ideas, coordinate activities, and collaborate, to
find less disruptive, more positive ways to save the world.
Not your average set of New Year's resolutions, I'll admit.
It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great
care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm.
Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could
exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule
us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we
are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal
is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet,
so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
