Earth Democracy

Justice, Sustainability, And Peace. Vandana Shiva believes that peasants should be able to make a living based on access to land, rivers, forests and oceans and that governments must protect the health of these commons for the good of all. This makes her a radical. She also makes complete sense and answers many of my questions about the inequity of the poor.

Much of this book is a discussion of the commons and the enclosure laws in England in the 16th century that allowed the commons to be privatized. Critics of Vandana Shiva claim that she is asking for a return to feudalism, but they are not hearing her out. (And besides feudalism guaranteed that the peasants would eat, while privatization guarantees that those without money will starve while taking away access to the land that originally provided them with a livelihood.) Much of the battle of the enclosure laws is waged with words. By claiming that an area of land is a wasteland and is not being used by anyone, this somehow gives private companies the right to buy the land or contract to use it for development purposes.

She ferrets out the flaws in the arguments of the opposition ie Richard Epstein in his book "Takings—Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain". Their position is that government cannot protect natural resources like beaches, streams and other property because it would be a "taking" and therefore the owners must be compensated. This argument, she says, ignores the original taking of these public lands during colonialism, but it also confuses public trust with eminent domain which is virtually the opposite. And finally the public is redefined as a collection of individuals thus the loss of property is calculated based on its higher value to one individual vs each member of the public. Here she has not only explained how things have changed, but what kinds of arguments have influenced far reaching policies and how we have been manipulated into buying into the ideology of privatization over public interests. This is an important concept because it is a cultural battle of words that over time has eliminated the very notion of a public trust. If it were not still going on, this book would just be a historical treatise, but with water rights and clean air and the earth's atmosphere at stake, her arguments serve as the ground floor of resistance.

She also debunks the argument that having a commons doesn't work because everyone will abuse it. Not so, she says, as long as everyone can subsist off the land and be self-reliant, the community will work together to insure that no one party takes advantage. Assumptions are being made by free market advocates that have messed with our minds, but her examples show a different picture.

She points out the correlation between economic livelihood and the attraction of fundamentalism both here and abroad. When people no longer have a livelihood to identify with and globalization forces upon them a cultural sameness, they are attracted to religion and will vote for issues relating to cultural identity rather than economic identity. This explains why Gay Marriage has the ridiculous political status as a hot button issue when there is so much else at stake.

She claims that when enclosure laws allow people a living only by selling their labor (and their bodies I would add) then that encourages a population increase as families feel they need to have more children to bring in more income or to insure that at least one survives to care for them in old age since more die.

Her discussion includes the enclosure of intellectual and biological property with Monsanto trying to patent seed species. While governments pass laws that forbid farmers from participating in trade as they have always done, ie: saving their own seeds to sell to other farmers. She explains how governments help out large companies by passing laws inappropriate to small producers, for whom complying to these laws, would put them out of business, ie food packaging laws under the guise of safety. Thus her alliance with Slow Food Nation (she is Vice President) to support local foods and small producers.

She talks about how the sustenance economy is not valued on the market because it does not involve paid labor ie;, women's work, home economics, child rearing. Yet such work is how the recognized market can exist. She warns that the market is bent on the exploitation of resources that support the sustenance economy such as clean water, air and land and comments that the only sustainable economy is the sustenance economy because of its built-in feed back loops and community. The market however tends to solve problems by providing solutions of increasing complexity involving more exploitation of resources and more privatization as seen with privatization of water.

Getting inside Vandana Shiva's worldview stretches my head, but I really think she gets to the root of global issues and successfully relates how economic justice is the road to democracy and in turn to peace. She is apparently a huge threat to advocates of individualistic wealth building systems, thus the caustic negative reviews of her work as extremely leftist. The rich don't like being told that their success comes at great cost to the poor rather than out of their own smarts. But If we could embrace what she is saying, solving our most destructive planetary problems may look a lot simpler.

The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

Another present from the Energy Bulletin for pre-publication review. I've been reading John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report for a few months now and I thought his book would be pretty esoteric, but it's actually brilliant in its simplicity and a much-needed wise and reasonable voice for the peak oil community. He covers all the usual information about what peak oil is and how it will impact society and create a descent into a pre-industrial state of affairs, but here he departs from the brethren to discuss why the peak oil community is failing to lead society towards helpful approaches to dealing with this predicament (emphasis on predicament as opposed to problem to be solved implying with technology.)

This collective failure of the imagination he attributes to Western society having provided only two stories—The Myth of Progress and The Myth of the Apocalypse. And these stories run deep. The Myth of Progress came out of the Enlightenment and sold everyone on the idea that if we simply acted rationally in our own interest the world would progress linearly to a golden age of everything. The other is the Myth of the Apocalypse, which says that we did live a golden age of harmony with each other and the planet, but we took a wrong turn and it's been one blind alley of misguided depravity after another. Classic Greek tragedy vs. comedy looks like.

The brilliance of Greer is that he takes the trouble to explain these social mindsets from the beginning so by the end of it you are like "yeah how obvious". What actually made the myth of progress work was abundant cheap energy making possible all these fabulous visions of opulence for all and now that it's not going to continue we are all like doomsday is coming, we bad. This was popular thinking in the '70s too, but then we cut back on oil consumption by 15% and the world did not end giving us a new opportunity to continue our myth of progress. Here he explains how short term political policies of the Reagan years and the manipulation of oil prices brought us to where we are now, when we could have done something about it when Carter was telling us to cut back.

He describes various coping strategies these dual myths have prompted, in response to peak oil, including the lone cabin in the woods survival-ism to the creation of lifeboat communities or earnestly campaigning for a political leader who will install policies that will save us, (but no one in their right mind would vote for because it interferes with our myth of progress). He then proceeds to describe very basic skills that we would do well to cultivate having to do with growing food, making things for ourselves, low energy transportation and reviving community governance and self reliance. He points out that it doesn't have to be all back to pioneer living and using hand tools, we can use advanced technology too if we set it up beforehand to cover basic tasks and not attempt to float this bloated high energy lifestyle that we think of as normal, because we just aren't going to have time or enough fuel to do that. That normal was an aberration of having stumbled on the energy dense, dead dinosaur deposits of oil. We had that opportunity to transit more slowly, but just because we missed it doesn't mean instant catastrophe. Due to adjustment factors he describes as part of his catabolic collapse theory, this deindustrialization will take several generations. So don't sweat it just get your mind around it and proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest practical skill building class. Quite affirming, I would say, for all us appropriate technology flickerati. I sure hope this book becomes the peak oil spiritual bible, because if Kunstler continues to hold sway it's just going to make it more difficult.

Superpower Syndrome

A psychiatrist sheds light on the thinking behind the need for absolute power. It is the same psychology embodied by Darth Vadar and handily explained, in the final episode of the Star Wars epic, as his fear of the death of his beloved which spurs him to control everything rather than allow uncertainty into his life or let the force take care of things.

This author confirms that fear of death is the underlying psychology of superpower syndrome, but he also offers quite a bit more on the subject that I found helpful. And that was chiefly in his analysis of apocalyptic thinking and how it ties into the tendency, especially in western mythology, to think in terms of good and evil and eradicating the latter. His inclusion of Japanese apocalyptic thinking post-Hiroshima allows him to extend this dualistic story to the East, but he is chiefly focusing on how this plays out in Christian and Islamic mythology. It is a story of purification through destruction especially by fire, but also includes the purification of the race as with the Nazi agenda and other forms of purification either/or thinking. He claims that all religions have this story, but he does not address the religions that embody the yin and yang mix, and the teachings on how to live with ambiguity. (It may be that Western psychology itself is a need to alleviate ambiguity.)

He addresses how apocalyptic technology—giving humans the ability to annihilate the planet—has brought this internal story to planet threatening levels particularly the way the Bush administration has played it out by embracing preemptive war. This change is what makes superpower syndrome so dangerous and has alarmed enough writers to take it on in various books. Yes! magazine did a recent cover story on how to step down from the superpower agenda and join the community of nations through diplomacy. These discussions all mention how the desire to control in the name of absolute security will ultimately lead to the collapse of said superpower, mainly because you can never control it all and the effort to do so will bankrupt us and rob us of domestic infrastructure maintenance.

He gives a blow-by-blow account of what happened on a psychological level to Americans in light of the apocalyptic imagery provided by the 9/11 events. This was helpful as I did not live any of the stages of response he describes as part of being a survivor of a traumatic event. This includes death anxiety, survivor guilt, psychic numbing, suspiciousness, and the resulting search for meaning in this ordeal. (In the Tsunami, it was the Westerners who were focused on "why me, why us, why now" while the Thais were like "shit happens" and how do we make sure the dead don't come back to haunt us. Note: there were absolutely no ghost stories to contend with post 9/11; Karen Kingston, fung shui guru from England, says that those who died in the towers died very clean deaths so maybe that's why. And maybe fire is purifying after all.)

As is the tendency of psychiatrists, this author has taken the patients story at face value and analyses it accordingly without questioning that perhaps the patient's story is in itself pathological. He does not consider that Osama bin Laden may have had nothing to do with 9/11 per the analysis of the Osama video claiming the 9/11 deed, having now been shown to be a fake. What then would be the psychological underpinnings of that fabrication? This would have been a much more interesting story if he had brought in the need for American apocalyptic storytelling to invent al Qaeda as the enemy as reported by the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. More interesting still, if he had analyzed the Bush administration in light of MIHOP or LIHOP theories (Made It Happen On Purpose or Let It Happen On Purpose). I would have been interested in what goes on in the minds of leaders who kill their own people to create false flag events. He did not even analyse the psychological need for survivors to invent conspiracy theories. I had to refer to Wickipedia re: 9/11 to assure myself that all facets of reality were still being addressed by the democracy of content providers. It is possible that the inability of psychiatrists to consider more than one story is part of the dualistic, black and white apocalyptic think mode that he is warning us against.

Though the book annoyed me on these many levels, I found it helpful in showing me how my own recent thoughts of economic collapse in the US was a version of apocalyptic thinking. And having recently learned that it took Rome 300 years to fall and the Mayans who did it quick, a 100 years, I feel much more relaxed about it now. Even though we are headed for deep economic doo doo with oil prices spiked again, it will still take a while for societal collapse. And with nothing to do people will have more time to think about things.

The Collapse of Complex Societies

Published in 1988, this is the grandaddy of collapse literature. A short, but pithy academic treatment of the subject. Tainter starts by analysing all the past attempts at explaining why societies collapse including: resource depletion, new resources overwhelming old systems, catastrophes, insufficient response to circumstances, other complex societies taking over, intruders, conflict contradictions and mismanagement, social dysfunction, mystical explanations, chance concatenation of events and finally the only one he feels is viable—economics.

Because complex societies excel at handling adversity, he accounts for collapse as the logical fallout from diminishing returns on investment of labor and resources, particularly in agriculture, information processing and education, sociopolitical control and specialization and overall economic productivity.

He examines in detail the collapse of Ancient Rome due to over expansion leading to high operational costs. Leaders tried to compensate by debasing the currency, thus shifting the burden to future taxpayers, but the future also faced equivalent crisis. Eventually overly high taxes drained the agriculture sector and the peasantry upon which Rome relied.

He also details the Mayan collapse. The societies herewith were competing in an art race (to intimidate their enemies). He doesn't mention Easter Island, but sounds similar to those big heads. The Mayan elites further imposed an expanded building program on a weakened and undernourished population that could not support the demands and presumably fled or died.

The third society he examines is the Chacoan of the American southwest. This network of communities was challenged by arid land that eventually was not diverse enough to meet the unpredictable production of the land. Communities left the network, preferring to migrate rather than deal with drought. Major construction of food storage facilities drained resources.

Tainter claims that collapse is not likely today because of 1) absorption by larger state or neighbor, 2) economic support by a dominant power or by an international financing agency, 3) payment by the support population of overhead costs to keep the society going. The situation today is unique because all societies are complex; there needs to be a power vacuum to bring on collapse. What we have today are competitive peer polities. It is an arms race situation. Tainter points out that unilateral economic downsizing is as foolhardy as unilateral disarmament, but doesn't say why.

He feels that we will finance diminishing returns well into the future and that collapse will be global. He points out that reliance on stored energy reserves (oil?) demands that we find a new energy subsidy. Lack of a power vacuum and competitive spiral have given the world a reprieve from collapse. Failure to take advantage of the current reprieve will lead to collapse. Competition may also lead to collapse. The appearance of a disastrous situation that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. He urges that we must proceed rationally and make it our highest priority to find new energy source.

Tainter actually comes across as fairly optimistic especially now that global warming is being seriously discussed since complex societies are supposed to be good at solving complex problems like this. His description of complex societies and how they work projects a solution that is based in technological innovation and bureaucratic management. If a society fails to solve problems of insufficient resources or environmental degradation, then he feels that it is not a dysfunction of the complex society, but of the psychological underpinnings of said society.

His thesis gives the impression of inevitability. We will collapse because increasing complexity will overwhelm the resources needed to manage such complexity. He doesn't really leave room for rethinking how we live or creating a new myth to live by. We are trapped in a prison of our own making. Is this merely a patriarchal way of thinking given all the research on matriarchal societies that lived in harmony with the land?

Collapse

Because his previous book "Guns, Germs and Steel" was so long winded, I wasn't going to read "Collapse", but it's the topic of a discussion group next week, with local environmental leaders, so slog through it I did. His message is that since we have the advantage, that no primitive society did, of knowing how societies have collapsed in the past, this means that we have the power to yank ourselves from the vortex of collapse, if we just choose to do so.

What was illuminating were his chapters on societies that did avert eco-disaster like the Tokugawa shoguns of Japan who reversed deforestation and this dictator chap in the Dominican Republic who enforced environmental regulations that saved the forest from further logging. These examples do rather contradict his premise that we have an advantage over early societies because we know so much about how they collapsed. What we do need to know is how close we are to using up our resources. The Japanese had every tree catalogued and a schedule drawn up for when each could be logged and for what purpose. We could barcode every tree from sea to shining sea with our technology, but that would just reveal that the government was giving away the store.

These early examples of reforestation also imply that democracy is too damned slow and ineffective, but Diamond is not going to be the man who points this out. He shines the way on a path through bottom up, grassroots change and this is exactly why he's so popular with environmental movements.

What I did find useful in reading this 500 page tome, was gleaned from his criticism of Joseph Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies". (I've been trying to get this book for over a year now, but it's not in any public library, just at Stanford University to which I have no direct access and it's not cheap to buy.) Tainter's book informs the peak-oil community and is the basis of their discussions, thus I can now make a distinction between the environmental movement and the peak oil movement.

Diamond thinks that Tainter didn't get it about environmental degradation, but Diamond refuses to get Tainter's point about the economic forces of complex societies, which is, if I might simplify, that the solutions necessary to make our complex society sustainable, will require even more complexity and use of resources. Readers of both authors can decide which leads to sustainability—Diamonds path to regulate and restrict industry or Tainter's path to work towards dismantling and simplifying our complex society. One is politically plausible; the other may be politically impossible.

Dominion

Interesting perspective in the eco-disaster genre from 1995. Establishes that humans are the only species to have separated from local ecosystems through culture, defined as the ability to use our brains to make tools and to leverage the odds of our survival by taking control of our food supply thus separating us from the limits of biology and the ecosystem. Having made this separation we then went on to create stories about how glorious we were and how God told us we were to have dominion over the earth. Asks the question "can nature and culture co-exist?"

Presents the conclusion that we will not escape the limitations of the ecosystem, it's just not going to be a local catastrophe, but a global one. Due to the global nature of our economic system we have to exploit all the corners of the earth before we will know that there's nothing left to feed us.

Joins the chorus of authors urging us to tell new stories of cooperation with nature and stewardship of the earth. Is this a job for the bigger brain?