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 Unthinkable-Who Survivies...

Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. A riveting page turner for those of us curious about how people behave when the shit hits the fan. Lots of stories from survivors of the Twin Towers, hotel fires, stampedes in Jerusalem, school shootings and plane crashes. Interviews with brain specialists, professionals and heroes even those who could do nothing, but offer a human face of compassion.

The message of the book is that people are cooperative and willing, they just need guidance and information. Authorities and professionals don't trust regular people with enough instruction or tools to help themselves. Author notes suggestion by British House of Commons that airports should allow people a chance to use emergency equipment in a mock-up cabin where people wait at the gate instead of just having them sit there watching CNN. Aviation people wouldn't even consider it.

Authorities fear that people will panic at the very idea of an emergency, not to mention how it would impact business. In Katrina the mayor held off on the announcement to evacuate because his lawyers feared lawsuits from businesses. By now they have figured out that government is immune to that kind of lawsuit. Thai officials had same fear of backlash before tsunami.

Humans are motivated by both human psychology and cultural memory. Thus training would go a long way to helping a culture get it. And it helps if people are told why they should do things, ie: we all know we should put on the oxygen mask on ourselves before assisting a child, but I never knew why. It's because you would black out in 5 to 10 seconds without oxygen and then where would your kid be?

A note to activists and apocalypse mongers. There is a fine line between getting people's attention about a possible emergency situation and loosing them to a sense of futility. Thus give a scenario that is manageable, but not overwhelming recommends one professional.

Author divides the book into the three phases of human psychological response to a crisis, denial, deliberation and action. In the denial phase people will carry on partying on a sinking ship without questioning why the boat is lurching so. Or they will mosey about gathering up stuff rather than evacuate immediately. (Carry-on luggage is a particular hazard in airline crashes.) Thus first responders in charge must shout their orders aggressively.

Once a denial is overcome fear kicks in, but in interesting ways. As the heart rate goes up the brain focuses better (which is probably why my ADD clients boast that they are really good in a crisis. All their distractiveness is overridden). People perform best when their heartbeat is between 115 and 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is 75 beats per minute). Over 145 and their abilities deteriorate. Fear can bring extrasensory ability for survival, but takes away other normal skills. People might experience temporary blindness, for instance, or pee their pants.

People also stick to their normal relationships and assume the roles they play in everyday life, but they will cooperate and think as a group. Relationships with people and their status matter, but even strangers will form relationships with strangers because the crisis itself will bond them. This is the heartwarming part. She devotes an entire chapter to groupthink. Crisis creates people eager to follow. This cries out for trained leadership. Resiliance can become encultured in a group which is exactly what the peak oil localizaton movement is all about. The example given here is of a town with a culture of evacuation in the face of hurricanes.

Resiliance in individuals, the author notes has three components, the belief that one can influence life events, find meaningful purpose in the turmoil and can learn from both positive and negative experiences.

Interesting analysis of panic as in stampedes. It's mostly a matter of physics. People can't see and are moving according to pressure on their space. Panic is the psychological choice of feeling trapped, but not knowing for certain that you are trapped, plus a feeling of helplessness and when compounded by the same reaction in others this leads to a profound sense of isolation. Panic is not nearly as common a response as people think, she says.

The book ends with an affirming blow by blow account of the Morgan Stanley evacuation of the towers led by Rick Rescorla. A case study of a meaningful emergency plan and a well prepared hero.

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.

Stuffed & Starved

Raj Patel is much sought after these days since the rise in the price of food worldwide. In his book he attempts to explain the world food system in the tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Food First and Diet for a Small Planet. I already know quite a bit about the system so there wasn't too much that was new to me in his account. Some explanations stand out. The Hourglass Figure he describes, with accompanying charts, is a good visual image for how money is made in the food system at the point where it is processed by large scale mechanization owned by a few mega corporations like Nestles. These companies process flour for tortillas, beans for coffee, rice when its milled and soybean crushing, for example and cause bottlenecks that jack the price up because only a few players can process food on large scale to meet demand.

He also describes how, historically, the food system was developed to feed those working in the newly industrialized urban areas. The point was to keep this cheap labor from revolting by feeding them cheaply at the expense of the farmers. Our food system technologies came about because of the needs of war, he explains, in that food had to be preserved for transportation under adverse conditions, plus the surplus created by government subsidizing the war effort in food supplies was the beginning of surplus grain being used to manipulate world politics through AID. The whole sociopolitical impact of government policies, AID and trade all play a part in how destructive agribusiness is to life on earth basically. He shows to what lengths Monsanto and company are willing to go to get their way for GMO seeds.

On the other end of the spectrum he talks about how the supermarket was developed to exploit people's impulses to buy. And the inputs in our food that allow it to be transported without damage, but have a huge impact on how crops are used—lecithin for instance. In discussing the obesity epidemic he points out that this is rarely discussed as a symptom of the failures of our food system and poverty, but is blamed on the individual. Obesity patterns in US very similar that of South Africa.

He describes a couple of movements working to change the system including the Landless Rural Movement in Brazil which is a voluntary cooperative system that is democratically run and organized by the farmers trying to occupy land. The details he gives from having visited one of these settlements broadened my understanding of this movement which Noam Chomsky called the world's most important social movement.

He is a fan of the Slow Food movement and farmer's markets, but not organic food in that organic food production as applied to agribusiness is not much different from chemical agribusiness.

In his conclusion he lists 10 ways to change the system

1. Transform our tastes and get away from what commercial food production has taught us to want.
2. Eat locally and seasonally
3. Eat agroecologically meaning eat food produced in harmony with the local environment as developed in Cuba and embraced by Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution in Japan as well as the UN developed sustainable agriculture network.
4. Support locally owned business not supermarkets or big box stores. He points out the flaw in corporate responsibility because it hinges on profit being made.
5. All workers have the right to dignity through unions that are allowed to organize without persecution.
6. Profound and comprehensive rural change such as equitable land distribution, but also including education, healthcare and infrastructure.
7. Living wages for all so poor can access food.
8. Support for sustainable architecture of food. Local markets and CSAs.
9. Snapping the food system's bottleneck. Curb power of monopoles through anti-trust laws.
10. Owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. Forgive debt owed by the Global South to the Global North and start paying back for damage we have done.

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.

Nemesis—The Last Days of the American Republic

The best summation I've read on the political underpinnings of the fall of Rome, the first republic to suffer collapse due to overstretch. I understood the overstretch part, but I did not understand the role that Cesar played in overextending the empire and the role his nephew Cesar Augustus played in transforming the republic, with its checks and balances that insured democracy, to one of a military dictatorship and to the creation of himself as emperor much as George W. is doing today in the ongoing transformation of our democracy into a military dictatorship and perpetual war-making machine.

He fears that this warmongering will eventually bankrupt us and lead to economic collapse, a very real fear especially since no one has any idea how much money the pentagon is actually sucking up, not to mention the CIA, the president's private army. Our defense industry is shoring up the economy as it is. And with China and Japan lending us money we're relying on the kindness of strangers. The Blanche Dubois economy as one wit put it. Chalmers does not mention that the dollar is used to buy oil, said to be another reason countries honor our worthless dollar.

I was amused to learn in his chapter on space weapons that garbage in space is our chief worry because a piece of junk could knock out all sorts of communications satellites causing misunderstandings about who might have been attacking who by blowing up said satelite. Lot of satellite politics I didn't know about that demonstrate that we really should be devoting ourselves to world cooperation via treaties, as others are doing, rather than world domination with more high tech toys.

Explains how our nefarious activities regarding outsourcing of torture and CIA activity is watched by amateur plane spotters and witnesses in international airports pooling information. This does not endear us to international community.

All this detail did not, however, allow Chalmers to veer from his pet theory that 9/11 was the result of "blowback" from our controlling foreign policies and military colonialism. Despite his bucket-loads of facts, he can give no evidence that Osama Bin Laden did any of the things he is accused of. He simply leaps to conclusions without even bothering to state that he is speculating. He does give ofher evidence of "false flag" operations for the purpose of increasing the military budget.

(Using his facts I was able to feed my own pet theories of the impact of American presence in Thailand. For instance American anti-communist sentiment, he confirms, was expressed in the form of cash gifts (foreign aid) to any country willing to declare that they were carrying out anti-communist projects. Thus I can conclude that the Thai military government received money as a result of establishing policies to encourage the cutting down of the teak forest to "deter" communist insurgents hiding in the jungle. The resulting subsistence farming led to the exodus of farmer's sons to Bangkok to work in construction and their daughters to work in the sex trade (and sometimes visa versa). American service men in Thailand, during the Vietnam War, the existing sex trade grew by four times. (Said sex trade was originally created by the Japanese occupation during WWII.) Since foreign aid from the US is one of the most powerful tools used to manipulate the activities of developing countries, it wouldn't be difficult for the US to put a stop to the sex trade, drug trade, illegal logging, harsh prison conditions for American citizens overseas or any other activity US citizens might wish to put a stop to, but no, we are policing the world for non-humanitarian reasons.)

As Chalmers tells it, the US is interested mostly in establishing US military bases all over the planet in order to control the emergence of any potential super power as has been the agenda of the neo-cons since Reagan. The entire book was very illuminating on this need for relentless control. It is so infuriating to be part of this Darth Vader psychology, much of which has been manifested in policies implemented by the Bush Administration. We are indeed a changed country.

He notes that the number of large and medium size bases (38 in 2005) is just about the number of colonies the British had during the height of the British Empire and is close to the number of bases the Roman Empire had at its height. The US negotiates with the host country to make sure it is not held accountable for anything it or its servicemen do there to local citizens or the environment. This is the source of much contention in the example he gives of Japan, now a crucial base from which to control China. He recommends that the US dismantle the empire as the British did.

Exposed, The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products...

The main treatise of this book is not so much about what's poisoning us in our everyday lives, although that is mentioned, it is that the US no longer controls industry standards because the EU has taken the lead in banishing toxins from multiple industries including electronics, cosmetics, and children's toys as well as banning genetically engineered foods. It has also led the way in demanding that manufacturers take back products at the end of its lifecycle. All this is significant because the EU is also influencing China and India and other emerging economies. This sidestepping of the Bush administration's resistance to change has caused us to remain the guinea pigs for not only our own industry, but also serving as a dumping ground for products that cannot be sold in the EU and other regulated countries.

The book describes the historical precedence that has laid the way for this parting of the ways with the EU. The US chose to monitor dangerous products by allowing citizens to sue for damages when they are hurt by products. This litigious climate of consumer protection is a process that industry has, of course, worked to erode. Meanwhile in Europe, lawsuits were not much tolerated and settlements were small, but citizens had a political climate that demanded that the government protect them from dangerous products in the first place, thus was born the precautionary principle. The difference between the two is that, with the cautionary principle, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to prove that their product is safe while our approach puts the burden of proof on the consumer to prove that a product is unsafe. In other words our brand of capitalism allowed business to flourish at the risk of consumers while their democracy put citizen safety first and let industry operate within those parameters. (In reality they fight over this just as much as we do, but the base from which they begin is different.)

I also took note that the generic brands are the most likely to fall to the bottom of the regulations heirarchy since the "white box" stores that sell these products always seek the path of least resistance, ie cheapest, easiest to make and least likely to object customer. This is politically interesting because activists are always going after the name brands, but nothing is ever done about the off off off Broadway brands.

The most interesting implication of this shift in power towards the EU is that it has reversed the "race to the bottom" that globalization forced upon us and has used it to leverage up the lax standards of US industry. If this writer had used more inflammatory language such as "race to the bottom" this book would have been much more exciting to read instead of the dry as dust slog it was. I might also add that the implications of this shift points to how free market capitalism is trumped by heavily regulated capitalism (formally socialized democracy). So there.