There's
an interesting article
by Elizabeth Kolbert in this week's New Yorker on vegetarianism,
and specifically on the disconnect between our adoration of pets and
our tolerance for the horrific, lifelong suffering of the animals we
eat. It's really about human nature, Kolbert argues, and specifically
that we just don't want to know about atrocities and suffering we don't
feel we have any control over.
This was the subject of JM Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello,
that I reviewed six years ago. Here's an excerpt from the book:
Seven
o'clock, the sun just rising, and John [animal welfare activist
Elizabeth Costello's son] and
his mother are on the way to the airport.
'I'm sorry about my wife', he says. 'She has been under a lot of
strain. I don't think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one
could say the same for me. It's been such a short visit, and I haven't
had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about this
animal
business.'
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. 'A better explanation',
she says, is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I
think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken
into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'
'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'
'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly
easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is
it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime
of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet
every day I see the evidence. The very people I suspect produce the
evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses
that they have bought for money. It's as if I were to visit friends,and
to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and
they were to say "Yes it's nice isn't it? Human skin it's made of, we
find that's best, the skins of young virgins." And then I go to the
bathroom and the soap wrapper says "100% human stearate". Am I
dreaming, I say to myself. What kind of house is this? Yet I'm not
dreaming. I look into your eyes, into your wife's, into the children's,
and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you
are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else
comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want,
he thinks? Does
she want me to answer her question for her?
In my review of the book, I asked:
Is
there a point in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up
to the horror of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, factory farms,
chemical weaponry, mental illness, sexual assault and torture,
bullying, spousal and child abuse, animal testing laboratories,
political interrogations, what happens behind prison walls, the agony
of those in continuous pain not allowed to die and without access to
relief, the children whose entire lives are consumed in deprivation and
brutality, the suffering of crack babies?
Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals,
the book that prompted Kolbert's article, draws obvious
parallels between the way we treat farmed animals and the way prisoners
were treated in the second world war by the Axis powers. Kolbert
explains:
Foer’s
position is that all such arguments [those justifying 'humane' eating
of animals put forth by Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin et al.] are,
finally, bogus. We eat meat because we like to, and we devise
justifications afterward. “Almost always, when I told someone
I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they
assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a
case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a
telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry
into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know
that to be the case.”
What we know about eating animals is that we
don’t want to know.
Although he never explicitly equates “concentrated animal
feeding operations” with the Final Solution, the German model
of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s
thinking. The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust
survivor.
Reading the article, I thought about the program of practices I have
designed for myself once I retire in a couple of months, whose purpose
in part is to reconnect me with my instincts, my emotions, my senses
and all-life-on-Earth. When I discuss this with people who don't know
me well, they tend to ask me either "How and why do you think you
became disconnected?"
or "Why would you want to subject yourself to
that anguish?". These are both questions born, I think, out of
subconscious grief
-- the first is a denial that the life most of us live is in any way
emotionally suppressed, tacitly cruel or unnatural, while the second is
dismay that we
could ever hope to handle that much terrible reality.
It intrigues me that the people who sign up for courses and workshops
on emotional reconnection (judging by the research I have done, and on
the Joanna Macy workshop videos I've watched) seem to be overwhelmingly
female and over 30. Why is that adult women are more willing than
males, or young people, to "let their hearts be broken"?
This is important, because one of the tenets of social democracy, and
activism, is that if a majority of people feel strongly about some
facet of the status quo, that this will inevitably produce change. The
ending of slavery, women's rights, and other instances are offered as
justifications for political awareness, discourse and activism being
necessary and sufficient preconditions for bringing about important
change.
But are they? As Foer says, the majority already know that factory
farming is an ugly business. But they don't want to know. They quietly
ignore it, turn away from it, satisfy themselves somehow that it's not
that bad or that nothing can change it anyway -- it's an inevitable
part of civilization. It's "natural". The rationalizations of Pollan
and Grandin are music to their ears.
The same is true for what we're doing to the Earth, and to the
struggling nations of the Earth. We know it's awful, unsustainable,
just not right. But we don't want to know. We rationalize that it's not
really that bad (hence the popularity of the wing-nut Lomborgian
climate change deniers, and corporatists who assert that struggling
nations benefit from globalization and that "a rising tide lifts all
boats"). We tell ourselves we can't do anything anyway, we do what we
can, it's up to the experts and politicians.
The problem is, these rationalizations are just untrue, and like the
nonsense of technophiles in groups like WorldChanging, the religious
loonies who believe in the Rapture, and the "humanist" cults that
preach about a coming "global human consciousness raising" it is
magical thinking, stuff that we tell ourselves because we really, really don't
want to know the truth.
Regular readers are probably tired of me reciting Pollard's Law of
human behaviour, but until it has been effectively refuted I'll keep
saying it: We
do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun.
We have no time or energy left to do what's merely right. It is not in
our nature.
Let's look at slavery. Of course the social movements against slavery
were important. But I would argue they were not enough. The US civil
war was not fought over slavery, it was fought over the right of one
region to declare independence (this is the cause of many wars, which
are almost always about power, money, control, and land). Slavery of
both blacks and whites (called "indentured servitude") was legal for
many years throughout the US because it was the only way to make
passage of workers economically feasible. They did what they had to.
Later as travel costs fell, most people could afford their own passage
to the "new world", and slavery was then only essential to agriculture,
particularly labour-intensive tobacco, cotton and sugar beet farming.
Technology (like the cotton gin) increased manufacturing productivity
and hence actually increased
the need for more slaves on the farms to feed the new post-harvest
automation. Slave owners acknowledged that slavery was (in the
words of Robert E Lee) "a moral evil" but rationalized that the slaves
were "better off here than in Africa". You know, like how Aghanis and
Iraqis are better off now than they were under the Taliban and Saddam.
After the civil war, slavery was abolished, but, after the brief but
disastrous Reconstruction and a severe economic depression, white
supremacy was restored in the former slave states in the Compromise of
1877 as Union forces finally withdrew and left the former slave states
to sort things out for themselves. Slavery was replaced by
sharecropping, blacks were re-disenfranchised, and for most of
the following century suffered under brutal, overtly
racist, repressive white-controlled governments. Slavery was
allowed for prisoners, judicial and police systems treated blacks no
differently than they had during the slave era, and segregation of all
institutions meant that life for most African-Americans was only
marginally better than it had been.
What changed, finally? The decline in the importance of agriculture
overall in the US. Access to cheap foreign labour. The Industrial
Revolution. As a result, social slavery was no longer necessary.
Economic slavery was just as useful, without the blatant "moral evil"
that characterized social slavery. Slavery ended ultimately not
because of social activism (though that was absolutely necessary), but because it was easier
to automate harvesting, import foreign workers (or offshore the whole
process to countries unconcerned with "moral evils"), or use the land
for something more profitable and less labour-intensive.
Has all this social activism brought an end to racism? Not on your
life. Wait until the economic debt crisis hits in the next decade or so
and you'll see that nothing's changed. Has it really brought an end to
slavery? Talk to the Mexican workers in the American fields, or the
children working in the blood diamond mines in Africa, or chained to
machines in the factories in China, and you'll get your answer. But we
don't want to know.
I could make an analogous argument for what has happened with women's
rights, but you get the idea. It was easy and profitable to get women
into the workforce, for low wages, caught in the Two
Income Trap, buying all those
things a two-worker family needs that a one-worker family didn't. And
giving women the right to vote didn't cost anyone anything, nor did it
produce any significant power shifts. It was easy.
Did women have to fight hard for it anyway, and should we salute them
for doing so? Of course. Do women in most of the world still face
horrific prejudice and oppression? Damned right. Will they too, with
enough decades and centuries of struggle, achieve some reasonable
equality in their societies? As long as it's easy, and doesn't cost
anyone anything, sure.
Now apply this to factory farming. Ending it is not easy.
It cannot be made easy. Like combatting the causes of climate change,
or coping with the End of Oil and the End of Water, it is a hugely
complex problem. The necessary change would be staggeringly expensive,
and massively unpopular. Do we need activists to do the "holding
actions" to mitigate some of the damage and to increase public
awareness and affect public opinion on the need for change in these
areas? Absolutely. Will that work, in and of itself, bring about
sufficient change in these hugely difficult areas? Not a chance.
We will change when there is absolutely no choice (we do what we must)
or when it is dead easy to change. Give us compact fluorescent
lightbulbs that cost the same per kilowatt-hour as incandescents and
reduce energy consumption by 2/3, and it's easy -- you can then make
incandescents illegal and no one will care. Same thing happened with
getting rid of the CFCs in refrigerants. No problem.
But reducing CO2
emissions to zero in two decades (necessary to get us down to 350ppm
and avert climate catastrophe) will never be easy. Reducing oil and
petrochemical consumption by 90% in three decades (necessary to avert
The Long Emergency) is unfathomably difficult, if not impossible.
Drastically reducing debts, waste, and consumption (necessary to avert
a ghastly depression that will make the Great Depression look mild) is
unimaginable, even with magical thinking -- the cure might be as bad as
the disease. And likewise an end to factory farming would require the
nationalization and breakup of industrial agriculture, an end to the
$150B annual agriculture subsidies to some mighty powerful oligopoly
lobbies, and a total, mostly involuntary, change to the way we eat,
that would make food much more expensive and its preparation much more
time-consuming. This is the antithesis
of easy.
These are wicked problems because it will never be easy to solve them.
So no politician is going to impose change on the voters, because it
would be political suicide. These problems will be solved politically
or socially only when there is no other choice. And by then, as every
previous civilization has discovered, it will be too late.
Is there a technology fix? The magical thinkers are hard at work.
They're planning on blasting $30B of tiny reflective metal into the
stratosphere to deflect the sun's rays, to combat global warming. It's
called geoengineering.
They have no idea what they're doing, but when things get desperate
enough they'll do it anyway. After all, it's easy. Oh, and they're also
going to put all the carbon dioxide back into the Earth in a way that
it won't leak out again. That's called carbon
sequestration, and the
technology doesn't exist (the engineers I've spoken to say it never
will), but, hey, when you're magical thinking, go for it. Obama's
giving them millions to invent it. Just make it easy for us, please.
Whatever the problems, we just don't want to know.
And the magical thinkers are going to give us high-efficiency wind and
solar and geothermal and biomass and "clean coal" and "safe nuclear" to
get us off our addiction to oil. No matter that even all of these
together barely scratch the surface of what we would need just to keep
consuming at current levels (China's energy use is growing 20%/year and
they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four days). Hey,
what happened to cold fusion? In the meantime, we'll stave off the
problem for 4-5 years by turning an area of Alberta the size of Florida
into a lunar landscape peppered with thousands of massive toxic tailing
ponds. The kids will forgive us, right? We don't want to know.
The magical thinkers haven't even put their minds to dealing with the
coming economic collapse, or the obscenity of factory farming, because
they're not even acknowledged as problems, let alone wicked ones. We
don't want to know.
Well, I
want to know. And apparently
a few others, mostly adult women, want to know too. Even if it means
letting my heart be broken. Even if it means looking at a photo like
the one above, which is offensive. I've been inside a slaughterhouse.
I'm a vegetarian, but still not a vegan, so I'm complicit in what goes
on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. I drive a car and fly too
often, so I'm complicit in the Alberta Tar Sands holocaust. I know
better, or at least I should. What's the matter with me, with us?
What's the matter is that we're human. These things that don't change
don't hit close enough. They're not personal enough. Slaughterhouses
and factory farms and Tar Sands developments are private property, and
they don't want you to know what goes on there. And what would you do,
anyway?
Well, perhaps you'd do whatever it took to shut them down. And perhaps,
if you got together with enough other people with the same intention,
you might come up with some ingenious ways to shut them down. Maybe
even as ingenious as the ideas that got these "innovations" started in
the first place.
Do we really want to know the truth? I don't know. We're a curious
species, we humans. If something can reasonably be done to make
something better, or less awful, a lot of us seem to want to know what
the problem is, and how we might do that.
All I know is that, after a lifetime of turning away, of not wanting to
know, I've now reached the point where I can't help knowing, and I
can't turn away, and I have to do something more than the very worthy
and necessary but insufficient things that activists do so valiantly
and often at great personal risk and sacrifice.
I have to stop these things. How? Don't know yet. Work with me, and
we'll figure it out.
Last words to Ms Kolbert, a much better writer than I:
“Eating
Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a
holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is
Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what
we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without.
Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable
pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask
this of us.
But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society
imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human
species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy
lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you
may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in
them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on
other organisms without being sickened.
And if we're sickened, then what?
----------
(For those who
tried my 'Words to the Wise' puzzle yesterday, here are the answers: 1.
stripper, 2. stag, 3. feud, 4. Noah, 5. tithes, 6. insole, 7. antler,
8. EKG, 9. rioted, 10. Emir, 11. URLs, 12. Mac, 13. italic, 14.
baskets, 15. dognap, 16. ethers, 17. den, 18. diet, 19. y'all, 20.
coasts, 21. starboard, 22. tenure, 23. ice rink, 24. pooltable, 25.
triplets, 26. ham radio, 27. tag-team, 28. Magi)
BLOG Links and Tweets of
the Week: October 31, 2009 (Scary Hallowe'en Edition)
PREPARING
FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE
Here
Comes the End of Debt:
Stoneleigh from Automatic Earth, in an interview with The Oil Drum
Europe, argues that we're in for an unprecedented and prolonged
deflationary period, and that while wages will plunge, so will prices
of everything, even oil and gold as demand falls faster than supply:
Credit
bubbles [see chart above] are inherently self-limiting, proceeding
until the debt they generate can no longer be supported. We have
already passed that point and we are now two years into a contraction
phase that is about to accelerate. As the aftermath of a credit bubble
is typically proportional to the scale of the excesses that preceded
it, we
should be in for the largest economic contraction for at least several
hundred years, and it will be global.
Real estate, which is a major focus of the mania, should do
particularly badly in the coming years (in fact the coming decades or
longer)...
As demand falls, and with it prices, investment in the energy sector is
likely to dry up. Many projects will be uneconomic at much lower
prices, meaning that the projects which might have cushioned the
downslope of Hubbert’s curve (and the much steeper net energy
curve), are unlikely to be developed. In this way a demand collapse
sets the stage for a supply collapse that could place a hard ceiling on
any prospect of economic recovery. That is a recipe for extremely high
energy prices in the future…
The scale of the problem has been temporarily concealed by a market
rally and the shovelling of tens of trillions of dollars of
taxpayer’s money into a giant black hole of credit
destruction. This has done nothing to reignite lending, but the
temporary (and entirely irrational) resurgence of confidence has
restored a measure of liquidity. As that confidence evaporates with the
end of the rally, that liquidity will also disappear.
Deflation is ultimately psychological. Without trust we will see
hoarding of the cash which will be very scarce in the absence of the
credit that currently comprises the vast majority of the effective
money supply. The combination of scarce cash and a very low velocity of
money will be toxic.
Money is the lubricant in the economic engine and without enough of it
that engine will seize up as it did in the 1930s, when farmers dumped
milk they couldn’t sell into ditches while others were
starving for want of the money to buy food. There was plenty of
everything except money, and without money, one cannot connect buyers
and sellers…
The
Copenhagen targets are basically completely
illusory. There's no way to hit those targets and it would be
very silly to think that we can...
The world does not have the scale, time frame or economics to
devote to the complete eradication of carbon emissions from sources of
fuel within the next four decades...
Nuclear doesn't have the flexibility to be a suitable option...
Globally [renewables] will be too small to make a real dent in the
targets...
Just wait for one catastrophe and that will be the end of nuclear. And
who really thinks biofuels will really work in the long run? You can't
have food as an energy source.
Civil
Liberties Watch: The Civil
Liberties Defense Center (boy those Americans spell funny!) fights to overturn laws that
outrageously restrict personal freedoms,
such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (making it illegal to
protest animal cruelty), aggressive use of tasers by police, and an
Oregon law that made it illegal to protest old-growth forest
destruction (they just succeeded in getting that ruled unconstitutional
-- yay)! Thanks to Tree
for the link.
Why do you love
animals called pets, and eat animals called dinner?
Be nice to America, or
we'll bring democracy to your country.
(perfect one for a
bicycle or car, for different reasons) This Too Shall Pass
From Lydia Davis (in last week's New Yorker):
HEAD, HEART
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth
will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.
As
my retirement looms closer, I've been giving some more thought about
exactly what I'll be doing with my days when I retire. In my previous
post Intention
to Practice I summarized the
nine steps that I am following (and urging others to follow, in their
own way) to make the world a better place, illustrated in the graphic
above.
To implement these practically into my new life, once I've moved, I
have organized my day into three blocks of time: 10am to 1pm for
reconnection practices, 2pm to 6pm for learning, facilitating action
and model-creating practices, and 8pm to 12pm for reflection and
writing practices. Starting with these three blocks of time, I
developed the chart below
that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that
"stretch toward" those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions
(exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term
practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above,
and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my 'scorecard' and shows
how much work I have to do on each.
Long-Term
Intention
Long-Term
Practices
Short-Term
Intentions (Exercises & Projects)
Hrs/day
now
Hrs/day
intended
A.
Reconnecting
with All Life on Earth, Instincts & Emotions
Appreciation
(1) Presence/Paying
Attention (2) Heart-Opening/Letting
Go (3)
2pm-6pm:
facilitating action:
- Open Space: Stopping the Tar Sands
- Open Space: Ending Factory Farms
0
1.5
D.
Creating
Models of a Better Way
to Live and Make a Living
Model-Building
(8)
2pm-6pm:
creating:
- novel: The Only Life We Know
- film: Earth 2200: A Travelogue
- workbook: Finding Your Sweet Spot
- unschooling: personal practice guide
I'm now starting to drill down into what I'm going to do, especially to
move from "red" to "green" in steps 1, 2 and 7. Here are some of the
exercises I'm intending to do:
Reconnecting
Exercises (preferably, but
not always, in company with others):
Listening and talking
with other creatures during forest/ocean walks -- paying attention to
their songs and sounds, to try to understand, viscerally and
intuitively, what they are saying, and 'talking back' to them in
something like their own voice
Spell of the Sensuous
exercises -- those described in David
Abram's book, connecting time
past and future back into the present
Sleeping in the wild
Acknowledging my grief
for Gaia, letting my heart be broken, and showing my broken heart to
the word -- with others, using some of Joanna Macy's exercises like the
truth mandella (taking turns speaking of these feelings of grief,
anger, fear, pain and dread), and confessing sorrows to each other,
drawing on Joanna's Six Principles:
This world, in which
we are born, and take our being, is alive.
Our true nature is
more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit
and modern society.
Our experience of
pain for the world springs from our interconnectedness with all beings,
from which springs also our powers to act on their behalf.
Unblocking occurs
when our pain for the world is not only validated, but experienced
(i.e. it is not enough to listen to the bad news in the media).
When we reconnect
with all-life-on-Earth, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind
retrieves its natural clarity (or as Derrick Jensen puts it "When you
listen, really listen to the land, you will know just what to do.")
The experience of
reconnection with all-life-on-Earth arouses desire and intention to act
on its behalf. Conversely, as long as we remain disconnected, we will
remain unmotivated, helpless, part of the problem.
Trust walks with
others (taking turns blindfolded, guided by a partner, and sensing
without seeing)
Meditation in
wilderness, especially guided meditations on the theme of affirmation
and gratitude
Intentional exercises
(like this article, except done in groups)
Artistic expression
exercises -- drawing, painting, dance, composing
music, sculpture -- including collaborative work
Facilitating
Action (organizing and
enabling groups to design and take actions that will undermine the
worst and most destructive facets of industrial civilization, with the
goal of ultimately dismantling it):
My belief is that this work must be collaborative, creative, and
self-critical. It must achieve measurable results effectively i.e.
without hurting others and hence creating martyrs of the supporters of
our unsustainable systems, and without getting ourselves arrested. The
results it achieves have to be more than public attention, even if that
achieves some change in understanding, beliefs and behaviours. My two
"starter" projects are to bring an end to factory farming (at least in
Canada), and to halt the Alberta Tar Sands.
We have to be more creative than chaining ourselves to tractors and
"liberating" farmed animals. These are PR stunts and they don't achieve
the results we seek: less (and eventually no) factory farming, and less
(and eventually no) Tar Sands operations. We cannot rely on changing
people's buying behaviour (I've learned what battery caged hens hellish
life is, but even I still eat food with eggs from unknown sources of
supply -- it's just too difficult under the current industrial
agriculture system to bring about real change through consumer
movements alone). We cannot rely on politicians or lawyers or changes
to laws and regulations and enforcement. These are the clowns that have
got us into this mess, and they are fully invested in keeping it going.
We are not going to be able to embarrass corporations to behave better
-- ExxonMobil is at once the world's worst polluter and the most
profitable company in the history of civilization. We need to find
better, more effective ways to bring these horrific practices to an end.
What we need to do, I think, is bring together a lot of creative minds,
with a great breadth of knowledge, experience, and deep understanding
of how the Tar Sands and factory farms currently operate. And then we
have to be methodical in identifying all the vulnerabilities of these
systems and how they can be exploited. To that end, I think a good
place to start is with Open Space as a methodology to enable a large
group of invitees to self-organize to develop understanding and action
plans, coupled with Donella Meadows' 12 Places
to Intervene in a System, which
can focus our attention on actions that will achieve maximum results.
So, for example, how could we deprive tar sands and factory farm
operators of critical sources of supply? How could we deprive them of
funds? How could we disrupt production? How could we prevent them
getting their 'product' to market? How could we reduce their market?
How could we change the purpose of the energy sector from increasing
supply of non-renewable energy, to reducing global carbon output to
zero through sequestration etc.? How could we change the purpose of the
farming industry from producing the maximum amount of food at the
lowest price, to producing a healthy diet for everyone with minimal
production and zero waste? How can we enable local energy and food
coops to spring up and meet the needs of their communities so they have
no need at all for the products of the tar sands or factory farms?
I don't have the answers, but between us, with effort and shared
knowledge and creativity, we
do. There is a better way to live. We just need to seize the
opportunity and power to create it, demonstrate it, and at the same
time bring down the corrupt, cruel, wasteful, toxic, unnatural,
irresponsible, unsustainable operations that the lawyers and
politicians and corporations and educators and media have brainwashed
us into believing is the only way to live. My job is to facilitate
making that happen, and also to apply what I do uniquely well
(imagining possibilities, and writing) to provoke the thinking that
will bring these essential changes to fruition.
That's some of what I intend to do, anyway.
BLOG Links and Tweets of
the Week: October 24, 2009
PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE
Why
Demonstrations Aren't (Nearly) Enough:
Keith Farnish, who made the 'alternative' 350ppm logo above, argues
that if
we really think that participating in a 350.org event is going to
achieve anything, we're delusional.
"If an international grassroots movement holds our leaders accountable
to the latest climate science, we can start the global transformation
we so desperately need," trumpets 350.org. Keith's reply: "If you are
planning to go to a 350.org event, then please go, but don’t
go expecting the group’s aims to change anything: go with a
view to helping people understand that only by rejecting the system
that the group’s organisers are still pandering to, can the
atmospheric carbon levels go below 350 parts per million. Either that,
or the Earth will reject humanity." Exactly.
The
solutions we aren't allowed
to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax;
repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate
personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the
military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some
"public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of
credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in
the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil
addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel).
Our
economic, financial,
capital, and credit system is done and gone. What you're looking at
today is a corpse propped-up by the promise of future tax revenues from
millions upon rapidly increasing millions of homeless and jobless
Americans.
Unfortunately, that's just the beginning.
Because the financial system has been allowed to infiltrate the
political system to the degree in which it has (a full-scale
take-over), America's political system is as bankrupt as its financial
system is. It will take a long and hard time to replace.
Hacking
Industrial Civilization:
There are three ways to make the world
a better place: (1) Creating new working models of a better way to live
and make a living (so we can opt out of industrial civilization's
models); (2) Increasing our capacities and competencies (so we're less
dependent on industrial civilization and more aware of its dangers);
and
(3) Acting to undermine and ultimately dismantle industrial
civilization (without hurting anyone or getting arrested). We have to
do all three, but for many, the third one is the hardest and scariest,
and the one we least feel comfortable knowing what to do. The Yes Men
show
us the way with their brilliant
punking of the shameful US Chamber of Commerce,
Dow Chemical and others. In the same vein, Keith Farnish suggests 100
ways to hack industrial civilization
(my favourite: print up stickers that say "energy waster", "made in
sweatshops" etc. and stick them on appropriate products in stores --
I'm also going to make stickers that say "harmful to your
health",
"environmental hazard", "not locally made". and "there are green
alternatives to this product").
LIVING
BETTER
What
If You'd Been Born Someone Else?:
A new educational tool lets you virtually
'live' the life of someone in Pakistan,
or Uganda, or Rio, one year at a time, with life events based on the
historical likelihood of that happening in real life. Thanks to Sue Braiden
for the link.
The
Digital Evolution of the Book:
Utne describes some innovations
in online reading and e-publishing
that go far beyond transferring content to a new flat medium. The
article mentions CellStories,
daily fiction you can read while you sip your morning coffee (and which
will probably inform you better than the daily paper). I've always
thought digital media would help us to read
in more natural ways (the way we
see, not the way books are commercially required to be laid out).
Thanks to Paul Heft
for the link.
A
Depression Diary: If we can't
learn the lessons of history from textbooks, perhaps we can learn from
stories. A new unedited diary
of a man struggling through the Great Depression
tells us a lot that the economics textbooks leave out. Thanks to Paul Kedrosky
for the link.
The amazing Chris Pureka singing Burning
Bridges. Modern torch song with
brilliant lyrics. "You can't choose who you love."
Another heartbreaker by Sarah Bettens (K's Choice), 20,000
Seconds.
THOUGHTS
OF THE WEEK
photo 'Under the Highway'
by Dave
Bonta.
thump-thump.
From
the late Kurt Vonnegut:
Many
people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much
as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most
people do not care about them. You are not alone.'
It's
been forty years since I graduated from high school, and I've spent
most of that forty years in the business world. Now I'm about to retire
and I'm thinking back on what I've learned that will be useful as I
begin my nine
intentional practices that I
hope will really make a difference in the world.
I think the most important thing I've learned is captured in Charles Barsotti's
cartoon above: Nobody knows anything.
Because of our horrific
overpopulation and exhaustion of our planet and its resources, we have
entered into a period of chronic, massive, global stress, and it's made
us all crazy, like rats in a lab fighting over the last few scraps of
food. We've stopped listening to ourselves and started looking for
saviours -- 'leaders' and 'experts' to show us and tell us what to do.
The so-called 'leaders' and 'experts' I've met are mostly very
intelligent people, but they haven't a clue. They're buoyed by their
own press and by sycophants fighting their way up from the
bottom or desperate to believe that someone
is in charge, in control, and knows what needs to be done. These
'leaders' hang out with other people just like themselves, and their
groupthink persuades them that they're right, they're important, that
what they say and do and decide really matters.
But it's all fraud, papered with self-delusion,
self-aggrandization and hubris. What gets done in large organizations
(corporations, non-profits, governments) is the sum of what everyone in
those organizations does. The people at the top generally have no more
real impact, and no more useful knowledge with which to make decisions,
than the people at the bottom. The 'leaders' are responsible neither
for the organization's successes, nor its failures -- a few people just
don't make that much difference, except when they make some hugely
expensive, incompetent decision or rip the company off so it goes
bankrupt.
Almost all mergers and acquisitions actually destroy value -- their
only real purpose is to eliminate competition. The "competitive
advantage" and "economies of scale" that big organizations lay claim to
are a fiction. Their success is really mostly due to massive, incessant
propaganda aimed at dumbed-down customers, subsidies, discounts and
favours bought with political donations, the crushing of competition
and innovation through legal intimidation and offshoring, cornering and
squandering precious natural resources and treating the natural
environment as a free dumping ground.
Economists, financial 'experts', psychologists, consultants, pundits,
celebrities, policy wonks, advisors, barons of industry, doctors --
none of these people really know what they're doing. They want you to believe
they know what they're doing, so that they can justify what they're
taking out of the system in salaries, bonuses, perks, commissions and
fees. But they're making it up as they go along. They have come to
expect bailouts when they fail financially, and indemnity from
prosecution when they screw up, or get caught breaking the law. And
they get away with it.
It's all veneer.
Beneath each $2000 suit, behind all the swagger, from the boardroom to
the office of the commander in chief, there's an insecure, terrified
little boy pretending to be in charge, faking it, and easily swept away
by the first pretty young adoring intern who will go down on her knees
before him.
We would be much better off looking to the crowds for wisdom. The
collective knowledge of employees, customers, community
members, while far from perfect knowledge for decision-making,
would at least be better than the staggering ignorance of megalomanic
'leaders' making decisions in their echo chambers and information
vacuums.
No
one is in control. Obama
isn't getting anything done, despite being the most powerful person on
the planet, because he can't.
The 'leaders' aren't going to deal with climate change or peak oil or
pandemic disease or unsustainable debts, because no one has the power
or authority to do anything, and because it would be political suicide
to admit that the only solutions that might work will be radical,
painful, and require a lot of sacrifice from everyone. So all you get
is posturing, and it's just going to get worse.
This is what unsustainable
means.
We have destroyed this planet for future generations and for
all-life-on-Earth, and the worst culprits are still doing it, while we
sit around stupidly watching them, wondering what to do, waiting for
someone, anyone, to save us from us.
We need to stop listening to these know-nothing, cowardly 'leaders'. We
need to stop paying them. We need to stop working for them. We need to
stop investing in them. We need to stop trusting them, and stop
believing the nonsense they are telling us. We need to stop voting for
them, and paying taxes to finance their backroom deals. We need to stop
buying overpriced crap from their fat, mismanaged organizations. We
need to send some of them to jail for criminal fraud and the rest out
to pasture, and take back our society, our economy, our Earth
from these thieves, these self-deluded con men. No more leaders.
We could start, one community at a time, to know, again, what it means
to live responsibly, meaningfully, modestly, sufficiently, sustainably.
But we will not. We have become disconnected from all-life-on-Earth,
and forgotten the simple knowledge of how to live as part of it. And
we're too busy to think about what that means for our grim
future, as
the dark and gathering sameness of the world
rolls over us, like an impenetrable fog.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I've met f2f]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs