Special Report - The Folly of Growth: Economy v. Ecology

All you can do is try to get people's attention by seeding it.  They have to do some of the work themselves.

Great seed by the way.

Unfortunately no Mr Obama seems to be sold on the Keynesian economic model. This will fail the UDS at this time, primarily because of the low wages paid in the USA. This system is based on the false assumption that there is no problem with the market, ie. if you make it some one will buy it, or the market for goods is limitless. 

We all know that this is not true and there is a problem with the market. So implementing a Kenyesian style system, which has served much of the western world so well up until now wont work, in the US the Keynesian economic model, is usually called, " Leftist Socialist European totalitarianism" but we call it The center right. 

America did have a good idea at the beginning of this century to create new kinds of value systems, like intellectual property, but it failed because of the American mind set that is heavily focused on the individual and money (greed) failed to take into account collective and cultural property, so this is now a non starter. 

In Marx's Kapital Vol 3 he devotes a lot of time to agriculture, and how the capitalist system will ultimately bring about its own ruin by the destruction of the soil. 

... leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. (1803-1873) Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds—even in some cases thousands—of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed.

As per my theme above, I was a bit startled to see the whole argument of growth reduced to a formula and linked to global warming.

How ethically simplified!

Its quite clear that environmental community has long lost its way.  I forget how long ago it was, but fairly recently, a rain forrest tribe threatened to all commit suicide if an unnamed oil company refused to stop with its plans to start operations on their lands.

For them, we were destroying their way of life, while for us it just means that we can continue raping the Earth a bit longer.

When I saw the recent presentation by a peak oil professor from the northeast that the country's entire population had been brainwashed by sophisticated advertising tactics, I nodded in agreement.  But then he went further and pointed out that the corporate con artists had tapped into our subconcious "Feast or Famine" system and have made it now all but impossible to use ethical arguments with Americans, it dawned on me that this is why an ever growing number of consumers now hate environmentalists.

We are threatening their "Feast or Famine" addiction patterns.

How dare we suggest that they put on a sweater etc. etc.

By putting on that sweater, we are inferring that next we might move them back into a cave or worse, turn off the TV.

Along what Neering said above about the drop in the price of oil, I would say that we are looking at a very brief moment where those of us who are aware of what is coming should be looking for communities to get into before the real storm hits, especially if we don't see the promised shift away from oil that Obama made.

The only piece of news that really floored me the week they bailed out Detroit was the fact that the IEA finally acknowledged that peak oil was a real phenomena for the first time ever and that we might have at most 10 years.

Kind of late in the game for them to finally come around.

I'd say that the present moment is kind of like the moment where the beast recognizes that it might actually be mortal for the first time.  We saw the whole global sustainability push that passed the US by completely after Rio in 92.  Will there be an attempt to reopen the conversation here?

In the book Beyond Oil, the scientists who did that book and focussed mostly on the agricultural impacts of peak, stated that it took over 10 years before it was clear the US was clearly in decline. 

There is much to be pessimistic about the coming Obama admin. Having spent the evening with a bunch of very smart folks, there wasn't a person in the room that wasn't very upset with Obama's various picks.

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.”

Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, its result is:

(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

(2) that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer.

This definitely depends on what culture or country you are living in.

In a society like America, where social values have been chucked for greed, so called redistribution of wealth is all but a fantasy, unless one is talking about redistribution upward to the wealthiest few. 

Corporations are almost exclusively anti-democratic. Very few actually treat workers as equal partners with an equal say.  You do what you're told or leave.

There are the 3rd world poor and there are those who have been trapped at the bottom of western culture.  The west's long term agenda is to steal the lands of indigenous people who once were self sufficient and trap them into labor structures that leave them helpless, powerless and without recourse to counter the power of the system. Many of the largest 3rd world cities are turning into super ghettos that have become breeding grounds for new virulent and untreatable virus' etc.

These ghettos represent the most dangerous growth patterns on the planet. Growing numbers of people in the 3rd world have lost their traditional connections to the earth.

Cheap labor pools are being exploited like never before.  This is the core problem. Will cheap labor be used to make products for the wealthy or will we shift this vicious cycle and start helping these communities stabilize their population.

Male domininated culture is at the heart of the problem where women are used almost like cattle in breeding cycles.

Energy net. This is also known as accumulation by dispossession. It is happening all over the world. China is probably the worst at present. But to remain focuses on the USA it is also happening there, in a new form. The Sub-prime crisis is a financial Katrina. If you look at the distribution of forclosures and then over lay the ethno-geographical maps, yu will see it is almost exclusively happening in poor black neighborhoods. 

So the banks are accumulating these assets, ie property, by dispossessing the local inhabitants. Its a new take on an old game. 

“They would much prefer working ten hours for less wages, but that they had no choice; that so many were out of employment (so many spinners getting very low wages by having to work as piecers, being unable to do better), that if they refused to work the longer time, others would immediately get their places, so that it was a question with them of agreeing to work the longer time, or of being thrown out of employment altogether.” 

The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the Ten Hours’ Act came into force May 1st, 1848. But meanwhile the fiasco of the Chartist party whose leaders were imprisoned, and whose organisation was dismembered, had shaken the confidence of the English working-class in its own strength. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and its bloody suppression united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society. The working-class was everywhere proclaimed, placed under a ban, under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need any longer to restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt not only against the Ten Hours’ Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power. It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper because the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his “hands.”

I liked this attempt an envisionment.

There used to be a lot of this back at the peak of the anti-nuclear movement in the 70's and early 80's.  There's a famous poster that kind of placed all of the major iconic ideas of the moment into that map.  Many of those ideas like community gardens, recycling, renewables, living close to where one works were all enshrined way back when.

The simple living movement a few years ago was a modern version of some of these themes.

Some friends of mine that retired onto an intentional living community in New Zealand were able to work just a few years in urban SF to make enough money to retire for the rest of their life.

Their house cost them $2,000 to build, while the community shared many of things that considered a requisite for each family unit in this country. The entire community ate together, meaning that no single home needed a kitchen.  The plus was that most members in the community only had to do cooking duties a couple of times a month unless they enjoyed preparing food. Entertainment was also broken down in larger and smaller segments of the community, thus private living areas also didn't require the common "Living Rooms" that are routine.

Thus some of the community projects that I saw included the ability to make small private units for individuals or couples at a fraction of the cost of homes today.  In Northern California, one community was making such dwellings, complete with passive and active solar resources 30 years ago for less than $10,000.

Imagine what that does to the resources the individual can put elsewhere?

How quickly can a community with shared resources meet many of their shared needs and do so in a way to reduce redundant behavior like having to drive to work long distances away or streamlining food needs and the amount of energy needed.

Many places in certain areas of the country could quickly become fullys sustainable foodwise, if localizing economies were made a priority that brought 20-50 adults and their extended families into closer relationships than what the current system allows for. Note that modified versions of this model allow for quite a broad range of private to non-private groupings.

This is has nothing to do with the forced collective farming strategies of the Soviet era.  Highly successful models exist around the world today from Kibbutz cultures in Israel to more advanced communities in Spain.