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.

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.

Planet of Slums

Nobody should have any delusions about the global economy raising all boats, after reading this. Fascinating details, thoroughly researched and footnoted. Has a Dante's Inferno quality to it as the author describes the conditions and peels back the myths about the poor and the neo-liberal free market solutions that have been bestowed on them.

This thesis exposes the fallout of the International Monetary Fund policies as it works its way through each third world country for the benefit of those fleecing the world for every last penny. Though I already knew about IMF policies wreaking havoc on local economies, agriculture and the environment, I had no idea that exploiting the poor could be so profitable, but because there are so increasingly many of them congregating in such concentrated areas, they are a large market for all the things that the IMF forced the host country to take away ie, housing, food, power and water.

One of the slums mentioned a number of times is Klong Toey which is within walking distance of my house in Bangkok. I never ventured into it, only drove past.

His parenthetical references to his sources breaks up the narrative a bit and he assumes that one should know where all these cities are. Quick where is Kinshassa, Dakar and Port-au-Prince? Being a British publication, the author may have assumed a higher level of education of his reader, but I appreciated the global sweep of his coverage.

The final analysis by the Pentagon is as revealing as their report on Global Warming was. Something here for everyone whether you fear economic collapse, terrorism or bird flu. A much needed perspective for anyone wanting to fathom solutions for planetary problems. Luckily he is working on another book about how the poor are resisting. After all, after the Inferno comes Purgatory. Would be nice to have a Paradisio too.

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?