Eight principles of uncivilisation
by
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine
‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’
-
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
-
We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
-
We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
-
We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
-
Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
-
We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
-
We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
-
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto
(excerpt)
Walking on lava
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.
‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, but the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.
The remainder of the essay can be read online: Dark Mountain manifesto.
Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. His website is www.paulkingsnorth.net
Dougald writes the blog Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job). He is a former BBC journalist and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines. His website is www.dougald.co.uk <
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barbarian invasions
by
Damien Perrotin
World media did not talk about it, but France was recently shaken by another polemic about the Islamic veil. A woman was caught driving while wearing a veil almost completely hiding her face and fined – rightly so, in my opinion – for dangerous driving. The government, who had just lost the regional elections by the largest margin ever, escalated, threatened to revoke the woman's husband's citizenship because because he had several wives, then, discovering it was not legally possible announced it would vote a law to make it so, retroactively. The whole thing degenerated into political bickering out of which, we can be pretty sure, nothing will come out. This polemic may sound quite absurd, especially in a time when most governments in Europe are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. In many way it is. It highlights, however, an important aspect of the energy descent : migration, culture shift, and the reaction of locals to both.
Many authors have predicted the energy descent will result in mass migrations, leading to large scale population replacement. John Michael Greer has thus stated he considered an Arab conquest of Europe as a distinct possibility, and his e-novel Star' Reach describes the Old World as the place “where the Arabs live now”. There is certainly an American bias here. America certainly experienced a large scale population replacement in the last three centuries, with natives being progressively swamped out by immigrants from the other side of the sea. This hasn't happened in Europe for five millenniums.
Of course, there has been a lot of invasions and culture shifts, but the population has remained the same as it was during the neolithic. In the area I live, people first spoke some kind of pre-indoeuropean language, then shifted to Celtic, then to Latin, then to another brand of Celtic, then to a romance local dialect, then to standard French. They will probably shift to something else at some point of the future. Most of them, however, directly descend from the mesolithic hunter-gatherers who claimed this land after the end of the last ice age.
The invasions which marked the end of the Western Roman Empire have had a surprisingly small impact. Germanic warlords seized political power and set up often short-lived kingdoms but they and their men were too few in number to really influence the genetic make up of the population or do more than introduce a few specialized loanwords in their language. As a rule, immigrants, even high-status sword wielding immigrants, quickly assimilate, not because of a moral obligation to do so but because it is the best way to advance in society. Of course, in the long run, it means forsaking the web of ethnic solidarity which helped them to survive when they first arrived, but most of the time it is pa price worth paying.
There are exceptions, however. Transplanted peasant communities, settling en masse on a relatively virgin land can resist assimilation a very long time, even if they completely surrounded by natives. This is what happened to the Arvanites of Greece or to the, now gone, German speaking populations of Russia or Romania. This has, of course, little relevance in the energy descent age.
The second exception – the English – is, however, far more interesting. Far right ideologues and anti-immigrations activists don't like to talk about it, but the English are the one example in reasonably recent history of an immigrant – not conqueror – group who managed to take over their host country. Indeed, when the Roman Empire left – or was expelled from – Britain in 410, the bulk of the population was Christian and spoke Latin or what would become Welsh, Cornish or Breton. Two centuries later Latin was gone as a spoken language, Celtic tongues and Christianity were restricted to the western highlands while the remainder of the country was held by pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a rather unusual fate, one must say, for a former Roman land.
The traditional interpretation of this rather troublesome turn of event, based upon the contemporary but biased account of Gildas, holds that the soft and decadent Britons were obliged to hire Saxon mercenaries to defend themselves. Those mercenaries revolted, slaughtered the natives and took their lands. This is a very compelling story, one which fits very well the apocalyptic mindset so common in some sections of the Peak Oil movement. The only problem is that it doesn't fit the facts.
To begin with, many early “Anglo-Saxon” rulers wore unmistakably Celtic names. Most of the battle they fought took place, not on the shores, as would have been expected from invaders but on the old tribal borders. It was on these very same tribal borders or around major cities that their earliest settlement were first located. Moreover both British and old English borrowed very little from each other which suggests they had, at least at first, a reasonably equivalent status. Sub-Roman Britons doesn't not seem to have been weak and decadent either : the picture modern archeology reveals is one of powerful tribal militias, fortified hilltops and hundreds of kilometers long defense dikes.
This has led a new generation of searchers, such as Stuart Laycock, to suggest another scenario : after the Romans left, the old British tribes recovered their sovereignty and fought among themselves. Following late Roman practice the imported Germanic mercenaries they settled in strategic locations, not necessarily because they lacked trained manpower, but because hired swords, not being embroiled in local politics are generally more reliable in the short term.
The end result was that the culture and language of the newcomers prevailed, albeit not necessarily their dynasties. After all, the kings of Wessex, who ultimately unified England had an obvious, even if not very much publicized, Celtic ancestry.
What is particularly interesting for the fate of our own society during the energy descent is that the immigrants, despite being relatively few in numbers, assimilated the natives rather than the other way around. Outright military conquest certainly played a role in this process but certainly not everywhere and certainly not in the West Country. My own guess is that mercenaries Germanic war bands were more open than the British aristocracy. Ambitious but low status youth, such as perhaps Cerdic of Wessex had therefore every reason to join them, learn their language and worship their gods – after all, if Paris has been worth a mass, Venta Belgarum and Old Sarum may very well have been worth a sacrifice to Woden.
The result was that when rubbles stopped bouncing and warlordships coalesced into reasonably sized kingdoms, the ruling elite from what had been the core of Roman Britain had become pagan and Anglo-Saxon speaking, even though a significant part of it was probably of British ancestry.
Could such a thing happen in today's Europe ? If present conditions continue to prevail, certainly not. There is absolutely no way an immigrant culture, associated with poverty and marginality can win over the elite or even the middle class. In fact, immigrants have every incentive to abandon it, with the possible exception of religion, provided it is practiced the European way, that is privately.
Peak energy makes things more complex, however. As the net energy available to society decreases, so will its capacity to support complex hierarchies. We can count on the ruling elites to pressure everyone and his dog so as to stay at the top, but ultimately they will fall. In the meantime , however, it will be the lower and middle classes which will hit the hardest. What that means for immigrants is that they will no longer be able, except for a few lucky individuals, to advance in society and will be permanently locked in underclass status. They will then have no reason to abandon the very real advantages of community solidarity for a more and more empty promise of integration.
Impoverished natives may and will then join immigrant culture – or rather what it will have become since it will quickly grow quite different of what it was at home – for protection and some form of advancement. This process is clearly at work in French society, even if it is marginal – racism and scapegoating is still the most common reaction.
As the crisis deepens and the middle class slips into permanent poverty, we may have a rather interesting “culture war” between whatever emerges from urban ghettos and a racism which in France may put on the mask of secularism – those who read French and will have look at this supposedly left wing blog will understand what I mean.
At some point in the process of decline, this is bound to generate a deep fracture in European societies, fracture which may take a territorial form, as it did in Britain, with an immigrant-based cultures prevailing in some areas and more native ones holding on in some others. Islamic polities may very well emerge in some French regions and large parts of Germany may very well become Turkish-speaking after the ultimate collapse of today's European states and of the elites which draw their power from them.
This is not necessarily a bad outcome. These futures societies and polities can become as rich and cultured as England did despite its rather troubled origin. The problem is that this process, probably inevitable at this point, will meet with a lot of resistance from natives, and more specifically from those authorities who will draw their legitimacy from today's polities. Racism and ethnic cleansing are bound to show their ugly head and make the unraveling of our civilization far messier and bloodier than it needs to be.
Ironically, it is the very refusal of the native majority to make place to immigrants and to integrate a part of their culture into their own which make this outcome all the more likely. This means, of course that ethnic regions – the Celtic Fringe for instance, but that is only an example – may be less vulnerable. Whatever polity emerge from them will likely draw its legitimacy from a supposed – even if often more fantasized than real – resistance to the state it is a part today. This may enable them to integrate large section of immigrant culture, as a part of a necessary culture change, without endangering themselves. An emirate of Britanny may exist in the future and, even if I'd prefer a Wiccan democracy, it would be as Breton as today's French region.
Even here, however, it is far from a forgone conclusion. In an atmosphere of nationalist ranting and stigmatization, it seems that the likes of Gildas will have a field day, paving the way for those of Cerdic and Creoda.
It's the end of the world (as we know it)
by
Craig A. Severance
This article concisely summarizes most of what has been discussed in Energy Bulletin over the past few months regarding Peak Oil. Reading all this news, I realized we are now actually facing The End of The World (As We Know It). I struggled for awhile with how to write about this. Despair is not the answer.
- CS
Oil Production Peak Much Sooner Than Expected
A storm is quickly approaching, and the world is not ready for it.
The permanent end of the era of cheap oil is coming as soon as next year, according to a raft of official reports that have made their way into energy media over the last few months. Governments are now beginning to acknowledge the looming crisis. Yet, perhaps because they waited too long to prevent it, leaders are not yet alerting the public.
The entire world economy is built on cheap oil, A permanent oil production shortage will thus lead to The End of The World (As We Know It). What will come on the other side of this -- will it be good or bad?
Public Unaware.
Except for a few stories in financial pages such as London's Financial Times, this earth-shaking news has yet to reach the Mainstream Media. While "Peak Oil" researchers have long warned of approaching oil shortages, the difference now is these dire warnings are being validated by the highest government and oil company officials. Yet, no political leader has had the courage to make a major announcement to prepare the public for what lies ahead.
This public blindness is tantamount to the isolationism that gripped the U.S. in the years preceding WWII. While the highest government leaders did their best to prepare for inevitable war, they were hamstrung by the resistance of a public unable to accept what really lay ahead. Similar to today, some politicians advanced their own careers by feeding on the public's desire to believe no coming storm could ever reach them. Yet, the storm came anyway.
The Limits of Oil.
The looming crisis we now face is often referred to as "Peak Oil" -- a status where global oil production will reach a plateau, then begin its irreversible decline.
Source: Peak Oil Primer
Oil fields follow a production curve where output increases at first, then reaches a plateau or "peak", after which a steep decline occurs. Because existing oil fields decline, oil companies must continually develop major new finds just to maintain existing production. If these new projects do not exceed the decline of existing fields, it becomes impossible to maintain oil production, let alone grow oil output to fuel economic growth.
The problem in recent years is that new oil finds have been smaller, deeper, and in more difficult to reach places. Cheap oil prices simply won't support the investment needed to develop them, so oil companies have not invested heavily enough to keep up with demand. Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute notes that major oil companies, awash in cash, have instead spent billions buying up their own stock, aware their existing reserves will soon increase greatly in value.
Did Global Oil Production Permanently Peak in 2008?
Until 2008, world energy forecasters had always assumed global oil production would keep up with economic growth. According to classic economic theory, as world economies grew they would demand more oil, and oil companies would respond by investing in more exploration and development. "Peak Oil" was considered decades away.
Beginning around 2005, however, world oil production began to hit a brick wall, and by 2008 global oil demand actually exceeded supply. With only a 2% shortfall of supply compared to demand, oil spiked to $147/barrel, and U.S. gasoline prices soared to over $4/gallon.
That same year, the International Energy Agency for the first time published a "bottom-up" oil analysis, evaluating each of the world's major oil fields to see if production actually could continue to increase.
After looking at the oil field data, the IEA revised its forecasts of future oil production downward, yet still took a very optimistic official view, by using rosy projections of as-yet-undiscovered oil fields.
Independent researchers, however, using IEA's same "bottom-up" data, have now stated the IEA was wildly optimistic. The Global Energy Systems Group has concluded the world actually reached Peak Oil in 2008, and global oil production will now begin to decline. Investment alone cannot fix the problem as the decline rates of existing fields are accelerating.
Significantly, though IEA's official forecasts remained rosy, IEA's Chief Economist Dr. Fatih Birol began urgently telling anyone who would listen the era of cheap oil is over, and "we have to leave oil before oil leaves us". If we do not "leave oil" behind us fast enough, economic growth may be choked off as oil prices rise to unaffordable levels.
From "Tin Hat" Theory to "Crikey!"
In the last few months, there has been a sea change in attitudes about global oil supply among top officials. The UK government, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Joint Forces Command, among others, have begun to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.
On March 25th, the French publication LeMonde reported on a semi-private U.S. Department of Energy Roundtable held in April 2009, where top U.S. DOE energy analyst Glen Sweetnam presented the graph below summarizing prospects for world liquid fuel production vs. demand:
Source: Sweetnam, DOE, April 2009
The chart includes all known sources of supply, including undeveloped projects and "unconventional" sources such as tar sands. It politely labels the expected gap as "unidentified projects". The gap occurs very soon (beginning in 2011) and is very large -- roughly 10 million barrels/day by 2016. To put this in perspective, 10 mbd is roughly equivalent to the entire output of Saudi Arabia, and is well over 10% of total world demand. (Recall $147/barrel in 2008 occurred with only a 2% shortfall.)
DOE still avoids any use of the words "Peak Oil", instead talking of an "undulating plateau" of oil prices & production. Shortages will lead to higher prices and more investment, spurring more production and lower prices. However, oil price volatility discourages new investment, so production plateaus. Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute asks "What's the difference?" in "Quacks Like a Duck...".
Whatever you call it, there is now a growing official consensus the world faces serious oil supply shortages beginning in the 2011-2015 time frame and continuing. Rick Monroe of the staff of Energy Bulletin has provided links to the growing list of official warnings here.
Peak oil analyst Jeremy Leggett, who participated in a closed-door UK government summit on oil supply March 22,summarized the recent awakening of official realization: "Government has gone from the BP position – ‘40 years of supply left, the price mechanism works, no need to worry’ – to ‘crikey’."
The End of "As We Know It".
The coming oil descent [en as both a crisis and an opportunity.
The end of cheap oil will be the end of living life "As We Know It". Those who try to continue doing things in the old ways that depend on cheap oil will experience severe hardships.
Yet, there will be opportunities. Those who prepare now will be better able to weather the storm, to see the rainbow on the other side.
The End of...Gas Guzzlers
To win WWII, Americans had to give up buying new cars, as auto factories were converted to weapons production. The opposite will now be true -- we will need to buy different vehicles that use little or no gasoline or diesel.
Think back to 2008. When gas prices hit $4/gallon, families with gas guzzlers suddenly found they were paying $400/month for fuel. Prices for very nice SUV's and heavy trucks plummeted -- you couldn't give them away. Meanwhile, buyers lined up to buy hybrids. The time to unload your gas guzzlers and buy something else is now.
80 mpg motorcycle, 50+ mpg Prius
The End of...Cheap Food?
I love my big burgers, but this too may come to an end if corn-fed beef gets too pricey. To replace a paltry 6% of U.S. gasoline, we already feed 1/3 of the entire U.S. corn crop to the corn ethanol industry, with impacts worldwide on crop prices, conversion of rain forest to cropland, and ocean dead zones from fertilizers. Ethanol corn use is projected to increase to 1/2 of the entire U.S. corn crop by 2015 under Congressional mandates.
If you actually had to raid your refrigerator to fuel your car, you would see the obscenity of feeding food to machines. Yet this is exactly what we are doing. One of the worst decisions ever made was to build the infrastructure to convert food crops to fuel, because we have now directly tied the price of food to the price of fuel. As oil prices rise so will the price of food.
Even if we were not directly feeding our food supply to our machines, our very production of food is heavily dependent on petroleum. There may be hope -- a study just released by Iowa State University shows farmers could be just as productive using half their present fuel use. Yet, lower fuel use depends on crop-rotation away from fuel-intensive corn, a move unlikely to happen if corn prices are tied to skyrocketing oil prices.
It is unlikely Congress will find the sanity to eliminate taxpayer subsidies of ethanol. Therefore, a switch away from gasoline to electric vehicles may be the only way to keep food prices affordable.
My big burger days may soon end -- but at least my waistline could be better for it. Those whose waistlines are already too thin -- the billions of hungry people in the world -- will feel the impact of higher grain prices much more. In 2008, food price riots broke out worldwide the last time oil prices skyrocketed. We must stop feeding food to cars.
The End of...Globalization?
Higher oil prices mean the world is about to get a lot smaller, as the cost of transporting goods halfway around the world will no longer be cheap. Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets,argues "a lot of long-lost jobs are going to be coming home".
Rubin has written a book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. He notes that already in 2008 high oil prices began to make U.S. steel and furniture producers competitive again. Rubin expects China's economic growth to be fueled more by growth in their own consumption.
Walmart may once again carry products labeled "Made in USA".
The End of...Pristine Wilderness?
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (FWS) Avatar promo clip
Millions of us are now viewing once again the movie Avatar -- James Cameron's wonderously beautiful tale of a pristine world. This time, however, we are not magically transported to Pandora in a theater by the magic of 3D. Instead, we may notice ourselves driving a small DVD home from the store in a 3,000 lb. vehicle, to view it on our big-screen TV.
If we truly look at ourselves, we will see that we are the voracious society in search of our own "unobtanium ". Our unobtanium is oil, and shouts of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" have shown there are those among us who are willing to do anything, and destroy anything, to acquire it.
As oil becomes scarce and prices skyrocket, these shouts will grow louder, coupled with skapegoating tactics to lay blame for the oil crisis at the feet of those who wish to preserve our most precious natural areas.
There will once again be pressures to open to drilling Alaska's pristine wilderness, the Arctic National WIldlife Refuge. If this is done, it will not solve the crisis, as EIA projected ANWR would likely reduce oil prices only 30-50 cents per barrel (about a penny per gallon of gasoline). Yet, hunters take note, a wildlife area critical to scores of species of North American migratory birds would be violated.
Despite the British Petroleum oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, expanded offshore oil development in all U.S. coastal waters will likely be approved. Whether another Deepwater Horizon event occurs may be determined by whom we elect -- those most beholden to the oil companies, or those willing to strictly regulate them.
Canada has already begun the rape of its northern forests to exploit tar sands, the surface mining of which results in a landscape of complete devastation. SImilarly, there will be calls to utterly devastate the forests and water resources of Western Colorado to exploit oil shales.
Only a move away from oil as quickly as possible can save these pristine areas from the destructive forces of a desperate society.
Image: We Can Do It
We Can Do It.
Though Americans resisted the recognition that WWII was coming, once it came they rose valiantly to the call to action. A similar can-do spirit is needed now for the transition to a post-oil world.
This crisis is coming soon. It is too late to prevent it, so we simply need to get used to it. Peak Oil is happening.
We will need to adapt -- but we can do that.
We must repeat this to ourselves, as we face the challenging times ahead:
It's The End of the World (As We Know It) -- and I feel fine.
Carolyn
Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
For
most individuals who are aware of and preparing for the collapse of
industrial civilization, the notion of a convergence of crises in the
current milieu-Peak Oil, climate change, economic meltdown, species
extinction, and overpopulation, is not new information. They know that
never before in recorded history has the human race been confronted
with the web of crises it is now facing. What they didn't anticipate,
however, is that when sharing their bursts of enlightenment with
spouses, friends, children, or parents they would increasingly be
perceived by their loved ones as something akin to psychotic alien life
forms. What they had hoped for instead is that their dear ones would be
willing to investigate the same topics they had so carefully researched
and would join them in preparing to navigate a daunting future. These
days, wherever I speak or conduct a public event, and whenever I check
my inbox for email, I hear similar stories of conflict or estrangement
in the lives of courageous men and women who have chosen to dig deeper
into the state of the macrocosm, only vaguely aware of what it might
bring forth within the microcosm of their own lives. Onerous it is to
be preparing for the future-contemplating and acting on the weighty
issues of where to live, how to earn a livelihood, what skills to
learn, and how best to fortify oneself for survival in an unraveling
world, but it is nothing like having loved ones distancing or parting
ways when one wants and needs them now more than ever. Sometimes
it's about fear for the well being of loved ones; sometimes it's about
wanting to share something as momentous as collapse and transition with
our best friend who also happens to be our beloved. Sometimes it's
about wanting to be validated, heard, and seen. Maybe it's just about
wanting help with the extensive, arduous tasks of preparation. But
sadly, perhaps tragically, in countless instances, the kind of joining
for which our hearts desperately yearn cannot happen-for whatever
reason. That doesn't make our loved ones sick, bad, crazy, or stupid,
but it does mean that we have reached a threshold in our relationship
with them that will result in distance, perhaps permanent estrangement. How
do we cope with this? After all, isn't human connection the larger hope
we hold for this transition? Isn't that what's it's all about? Nothing
I could say would make this easy, but perhaps the pain can be tempered
with a larger perspective...
(9
May 2010)
George
Monbiot, the Guardian
Those
who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can
afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more
money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms
of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably. Anyone
who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past
few days has cause to doubt this. The world's richest country decided
not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater
wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled,
drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places. But
we needn't rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians' thesis as
self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and
2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The
nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and
fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own
forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10
times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have
less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees. The
wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The
environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and
Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the
thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven
by the rich world's demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our
hunger for timber and animal feed. The
Guardian's carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly
underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is
that official figures don't count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse
gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets.
Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide,
embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find
that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government
claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment. ...So
the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through
the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that
"capitalism has absorbed the greens". Instead of seeking to protect the
natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that
environmentalists now work on "sustaining human civilisation at the
comfort level which the world's rich people – us – feel is their right". Today's
greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the
planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with
new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even
more of the world's wild places. They have lost their feelings for
nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They've
forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead
they are trying to save industrial civilisation. But
I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem
with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient
than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement's first book, to
be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional
oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal
will do so by 2040. While
I'm prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few
years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as
the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology
that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures
suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal
seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost
the UK's land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more
under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil
fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies
will turn to if the price is right. Like
all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point.
Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don't
believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in
the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn't
reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank
the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the
Dark Mountain people believe will be civilisation's imminent collapse,
without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the
destruction of everything greens are supposed to value. Nor
do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies.
There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the
impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might
spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil
seep into the planet's every pore. And unless environmentalists also
seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilisation – health,
education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who
rightly wish to preserve them, but don't give a stuff about the impacts. We
can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can
embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is
put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This
approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less
ugly than the alternatives...
(10
May 2010)
Anthony
Barnett, Open Democracy
This
week's creation of a Conservative led coalition with the Liberal
Democrats has brought the period associated with Margaret Thatcher
after her election in 1979 to an end. The UK will continue to play its
part in global capitalism but a new kind of domestic politics is on
offer. One way of describing it, uncomfortable as it may be for me to
report, is that the transition from New Labour to a Tory led coalition
promises a distinctly more progressive government in the UK. If indeed
the Coalition agreement is carried out, then the new government will be
to the left of its predecessor by being: This
is relative praise. It remains a Tory government. The new coalition
says it is planning to stuff the House of Lords with 200 cronies to
secure its majority there, who will stay for their lifetimes; it will
not investigate our use of torture; it says it will ask the British
people to decide on how we vote yet, despite language about “grown-up”
politics, it will treat us like infants and not permit us to consider a
proportional system. And, of course there is the famous chasm between
words and deeds. However,
for those of us involved with the Convention on Modern Liberty,
especially my Co-Director Henry Porter who led the way in campaigning
against New Labour’s transforming the British state into an instrument
of hi-tech despotism, the coalition’s programme is a triumph, as he has
rightly claimed. First for what it delivers, in rolling back ID cards,
the National Information Register and the promise of a Great Repeal
Bill. Second, for prevailing not least thanks to the Guardian/Observer,
over the Murdoch press and the BBC - which refused to report on civil
liberties as a serious issue and still doesn’t. Third, in terms of
political culture that the Convention plugged into - the latent energy
of collaboration and constructive discussion of differences, as against
tribalism. The first press conference of Prime Minister Cameron and his
Deputy displayed an embrace of this culture proclaiming it as a
different and better way of doing things. It
is. We will see whether they can continue to embrace it. This be
Britain. Our political class is exceptionally determined and flexible.
Can pluralism really be proclaimed by scions of perhaps the narrowest
and most homogeneous elite in the world? Our liberty may have been
saved for the moment, which is a great achievement. Our so-called
democracy is merely being modernised - and in a fashion designed to
pre-empt the real change the document proclaims. First, liberty had to
be saved and this seems to have happened. Next, liberty needs to be
secured. Which means it needs to be grounded in law-based democracy and
breath in the open air. If it remains in the secretive hands of the UK
state it won't be long before it once again needs life-support. ...Replacing
Thatcherism The
centerpiece of what has happened, however, is the transformation of the
Tory Party. All those cheap and lazy jibes about toffs taking us back
to Thatcher-style polarisation have been shown to be so much vapour. On
the contrary, what Cameron has done is to return Toryism to its
one-nation Whig tradition. He has broken the spell that Thatcherism and
its conviction politics has had over his party since the coup that
ousted her in 1990. And his combining with Nick Clegg could break the
grip of Thatcher’s wider political culture over British politics as a
whole. Her sense of principle and belief in British institutions had
long been eviscerated by New Labour, leaving behind only her legacy of
macho bullying and devious cunning personified by Peter Mandelson and
Alistair Campbell. Now they too have been swept away. In
his magisterial introduction to Britain Since 1918 David Marquand
identifies four shaping traditions in British politics. They are all
forms of democracy. They cut across left and right. Most of the major
political leaders and all the big parties have combined different
strands. They are: whig imperialism, tory nationalism, democratic
collectivism and democratic republicanism. Churchill,
for example, was 'whig imperial': his was a one-nation, consensual,
great-British politics appealing to all classes. It was built upon to
create the welfare state by the 'democratic collectivism' of Attlee’s
post-war government. When the stifling consensus politics that resulted
collapsed in the 1970s, it opened the way for Thatcher. She used ‘Tory
nationalism’ to draw upon Churchillist themes thanks to the Falkland’s
war. But in fact she broke both the wings of the post-1945 settlement:
whig imperialism, scorned as wet and liberal, and democratic centralism
including its trade union base. Her
election in 1979 was thus a true turning point for the UK. After 1997
Blair and Brown proved to be Thatcher’s “sons” as Simon Jenkins
documented. They oversaw many humanizing reforms, and tried to heal the
social wounds of Thatcher's divisiveness, but were unable to offer a
coherent alternative to her Tory nationalism. Instead they sought to
protect their efforts at social improvement by outbidding her search
for national greatness: backing globalisation and finance capital by
giving the City of London an even bigger bang than she did, and
outdoing her belligerence by going to war even more often and doing so
illegally as well. Looking back one can see that the many good things
that have happened since 1997 were achieved despite the core project of
New Labour not because of it. That core project was to climb on board
the neo-liberal engine of global finance and military supremacy to
ensure continuity in office. David
Cameron's stated aim was to carry on this tradition and at the same
time persuade both his party and the country that the Conservatives had
returned to their inclusive whig tradition. In other words to be even
better at providing Thatcherism with a human face than Blair and Brown.
But the still ongoing great financial crash put an end to this
vainglorious ambition. Instead, Cameron has seized the opportunity
offered by a hung parliament to reshape the nature of his party and the
country’s politics. It is a turning point as sharp as 1979. It deposits
New Labour into its Thatcherite dustbin. It demonstrates what
realignment really means...
(10
May 2010)
Very
long article on the implications of the recent UK election and
subsequent coalition agreement between the Tories and the Liberal
Democrats, which has been termed a "game-changer" for UK politics by
many analysts. -KS
Peak
oil, prices, and supplies - May 12
by
Staff
Julia
Harte, solve climate
The
U.S. Department of Energy has long disavowed peak oil theory: the
notion that annual world oil production will peak, plateau, and then
enter a decline. But the agency’s stance appears increasingly at odds
with the future predicted by many world energy analysts, including the
US military.
In
February, the United Kingdom Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy
Security—a group comprised in part by renewable energy
companies—published a report warning that global peak oil would
probably occur within the next decade. And
in March, the U.S. Joint Forces Command released its Joint Operating
Environment 2010 report, a forecast of likely national security
challenges. Drawing on several energy information sources, the report
concluded that "world surplus oil production could disappear by 2012,
and shortages of 10 million barrels per day could be seen as soon as
2015." With
the BP Gulf oil disaster continuing with no resolution in sight and
mounting public concern over the wisdom of offshore drilling, more
pressure is mounting on DOE to justify its optimistic forecasts and its
belief that the nation will be producing millions of more barrels of
oil a day within two decades. Change
in DOE stance?
A
few weeks after the joint force report came out, there was speculation
that the DOE had endorsed peak oil theory after Glen Sweetnam, former
director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of
the DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), told French paper Le
Monde that, "if the investment is not there," world oil production
could enter a "decline" by 2011. Sweetnam
has since left the EIA on a yearlong reassignment: a development
unrelated to the interview he gave Le Monde, according to Lauren Mayne,
a liquid fuels analyst at the agency. Mayne
clarifies that the EIA does not expect oil production to peak in 2011.
When asked if the EIA expects to see oil production ever peak and
diminish, Mayne replied that the agency does not anticipate a peak oil
scenario resulting from supply shortages: “We do not see a peak, if a
peak means a sharp retraction in oil production.” In
fact, Mayne argued, the world’s total projected oil consumption in 2030
"could be met, given current resource estimates." That
claim is backed up, according to Mayne, by the EIA’s country-by-country
estimate of future oil production. "Actual production, of course, will
likely differ somewhat, but we do feel from an analytical basis that
these production estimates are likely to progress in a way that’s
shown" by EIA models, she said. Those
models predict significant production increases in several countries
over the next two decades. In a presentation from a round-table of oil
economists that Sweetnam presided over in April 2009, several graphs
showed estimates of the world’s liquid fuels supply through 2030, and
how production would change in the current top 15 oil-producing
countries. But
all the estimates of project production were based on a "proprietary
database," according to Linda Doman, another forecaster at the EIA, and
the exact numbers behind the charts cannot be released...
(10
May 2010)
David
Morgan, Reuters
Executives
from BP Plc (BP.L) and two other companies were appearing before two
Senate committees on Tuesday for grillings about the gushing BP oil
well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty-two
of the 40 Democrats and Republicans who sit on the Energy and Natural
Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee have
collected millions of dollars from BP or other oil and gas interests
during election campaigns dating to 1990, public records show. BP
interests alone -- including the oil giant's political action committee
and associated individuals -- contributed nearly $320,000 to lawmakers
who are now scrutinizing the company's actions. That works out to
$10,000 per senator. Lawmakers
who count oil and gas interests as major donors collected $5.9 million
from the industry as a whole in just the past five years, according to
reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The
sum includes $2.4 million in industry donations to Republican John
McCain's 2008 presidential bid. About
80 percent of the industry total went to 14 Republicans. The remaining
one-fifth was collected by seven Democrats. That
means oil and gas interests spent $170,000 on each Democrat who
accepted major contributions in the past five years, and more than
$336,000 per Republican. The
following tables show contributions to committee members. Each senator
serves a six-year term. The contributions are measured in two time
periods: 2005-2010 and 1990-2010. All
the figures were compiled from public records by the nonpartisan Center
for Responsive Politics, which tracks money's influence in the U.S.
political process.
(2X
April 2010)
BBCnews
The
US is to break up a federal oil industry watchdog - amid conflict of
interest fears - following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled the plans to split up the Minerals
Management Service, which both inspects rigs and collects oil royalties. Oil
executives have been passing blame, as they were grilled at a Senate
hearing into the spill, amid protests. President
Barack Obama says he is "frustrated" the leak is not plugged. British
firm BP will make a second attempt this week to seal the oil well. An
attempt to drop a huge box on to the leak failed at the weekend and BP
will now try to cap it with a smaller box. The
energy giant is also expected to try to plug the well using rubbish
like tyres and golf balls.
Oil
executives were met by angry protesters as they attended a
congressional hearing into the disaster on Tuesday. Senate
energy committee chairman Jeff Bingaman said at the outset it was
important to remember the 11 lives lost in the disaster. He
added: "The sobering reality is that despite the losses and damage that
have already been suffered, we do not yet know what the full impact of
this disaster will be."
(11
May 2010)
Peak
oil, prices, and supplies - May 12
by
Staff
Julia
Harte, solve climate
The
U.S. Department of Energy has long disavowed peak oil theory: the
notion that annual world oil production will peak, plateau, and then
enter a decline. But the agency’s stance appears increasingly at odds
with the future predicted by many world energy analysts, including the
US military.
In
February, the United Kingdom Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy
Security—a group comprised in part by renewable energy
companies—published a report warning that global peak oil would
probably occur within the next decade. And
in March, the U.S. Joint Forces Command released its Joint Operating
Environment 2010 report, a forecast of likely national security
challenges. Drawing on several energy information sources, the report
concluded that "world surplus oil production could disappear by 2012,
and shortages of 10 million barrels per day could be seen as soon as
2015." With
the BP Gulf oil disaster continuing with no resolution in sight and
mounting public concern over the wisdom of offshore drilling, more
pressure is mounting on DOE to justify its optimistic forecasts and its
belief that the nation will be producing millions of more barrels of
oil a day within two decades. Change
in DOE stance?
A
few weeks after the joint force report came out, there was speculation
that the DOE had endorsed peak oil theory after Glen Sweetnam, former
director of the International, Economic and Greenhouse Gas division of
the DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), told French paper Le
Monde that, "if the investment is not there," world oil production
could enter a "decline" by 2011. Sweetnam
has since left the EIA on a yearlong reassignment: a development
unrelated to the interview he gave Le Monde, according to Lauren Mayne,
a liquid fuels analyst at the agency. Mayne
clarifies that the EIA does not expect oil production to peak in 2011.
When asked if the EIA expects to see oil production ever peak and
diminish, Mayne replied that the agency does not anticipate a peak oil
scenario resulting from supply shortages: “We do not see a peak, if a
peak means a sharp retraction in oil production.” In
fact, Mayne argued, the world’s total projected oil consumption in 2030
"could be met, given current resource estimates." That
claim is backed up, according to Mayne, by the EIA’s country-by-country
estimate of future oil production. "Actual production, of course, will
likely differ somewhat, but we do feel from an analytical basis that
these production estimates are likely to progress in a way that’s
shown" by EIA models, she said. Those
models predict significant production increases in several countries
over the next two decades. In a presentation from a round-table of oil
economists that Sweetnam presided over in April 2009, several graphs
showed estimates of the world’s liquid fuels supply through 2030, and
how production would change in the current top 15 oil-producing
countries. But
all the estimates of project production were based on a "proprietary
database," according to Linda Doman, another forecaster at the EIA, and
the exact numbers behind the charts cannot be released...
(10
May 2010)
David
Morgan, Reuters
Executives
from BP Plc (BP.L) and two other companies were appearing before two
Senate committees on Tuesday for grillings about the gushing BP oil
well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty-two
of the 40 Democrats and Republicans who sit on the Energy and Natural
Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee have
collected millions of dollars from BP or other oil and gas interests
during election campaigns dating to 1990, public records show. BP
interests alone -- including the oil giant's political action committee
and associated individuals -- contributed nearly $320,000 to lawmakers
who are now scrutinizing the company's actions. That works out to
$10,000 per senator. Lawmakers
who count oil and gas interests as major donors collected $5.9 million
from the industry as a whole in just the past five years, according to
reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The
sum includes $2.4 million in industry donations to Republican John
McCain's 2008 presidential bid. About
80 percent of the industry total went to 14 Republicans. The remaining
one-fifth was collected by seven Democrats. That
means oil and gas interests spent $170,000 on each Democrat who
accepted major contributions in the past five years, and more than
$336,000 per Republican. The
following tables show contributions to committee members. Each senator
serves a six-year term. The contributions are measured in two time
periods: 2005-2010 and 1990-2010. All
the figures were compiled from public records by the nonpartisan Center
for Responsive Politics, which tracks money's influence in the U.S.
political process.
(2X
April 2010)
BBCnews
The
US is to break up a federal oil industry watchdog - amid conflict of
interest fears - following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled the plans to split up the Minerals
Management Service, which both inspects rigs and collects oil royalties. Oil
executives have been passing blame, as they were grilled at a Senate
hearing into the spill, amid protests. President
Barack Obama says he is "frustrated" the leak is not plugged. British
firm BP will make a second attempt this week to seal the oil well. An
attempt to drop a huge box on to the leak failed at the weekend and BP
will now try to cap it with a smaller box. The
energy giant is also expected to try to plug the well using rubbish
like tyres and golf balls.
Oil
executives were met by angry protesters as they attended a
congressional hearing into the disaster on Tuesday. Senate
energy committee chairman Jeff Bingaman said at the outset it was
important to remember the 11 lives lost in the disaster. He
added: "The sobering reality is that despite the losses and damage that
have already been suffered, we do not yet know what the full impact of
this disaster will be."
(11
May 2010)
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dtxqwqr_20dc52sm
The
first culprit is Freud's nephew Edward Bernays who took his uncle's
idea that human nature was controlled by unconscious urges and unless
people's minds were properly managed, ordinary people were likely to be
a danger to society. Bernays had Freud's books translated and marketed
them into best sellers, then offered himself as a consultant. His ideas
were adopted by ad men who changed advertising from simply touting the
virtues of a product to creating stories to appeal to underlying
emotions. The same concept was applied to politics and government
leading to a strategic covert propaganda.Film
review: The Century
of the Self
by
Amanda Kovattana
Illuminating and infuriating. I had no idea I could
blame so much on Freud. This four part BBC series tells the story of
how American consumerism was created as well as the fear of communism
and how the human potential movement was co-opted into focus groups
that, later, rendered politicians, especially liberal politicians,
impotent while creating a citizenry catered to by boutique politics.
Documentqry
film series by Adam Curtis for the BBC
2002
The
series can be watched online at several locations on the Web, including:
Part
two covers the career of Freud's daughter Anna, who made it her life
goal to spread her father's ideas about the danger of uncontrollable
urges. This was the time of shock therapy and the espousing of
homophobic pronouncements along with other words of wisdom by the
psychiatric community. This misguided efforts to force people into
becoming a perceived normal was merely a reflection of the cultural
morality of the time, but of course they did not see it that way. They
were supposed to be scientists and immune to so base a perspective as
cultural bias. The suicide of their key subjects including Marilyn
Monroe, fortunately put a stop to such overt manipulations. Meanwhile
Bernays taught the government how to defend the interests of United
Fruit by creating a campaign that painted a democratically elected
socialist politician in Central America as a dangerous communist
because he had suggested nationalizing the land owned by United Fruit. In
part three we learn that Freud's opposition was psychoanalyst Wilheim
Reich who felt that everyone's problems would be solved if they only
had enough orgasms. Anna Freud, the reigning virgin queen of
psychoanalysts, would have none of this and plotted to ruin his career;
he ended up in jail. Nothing is mentioned of Reich's attempt to
reconcile his Marxist leanings with psychology and his belief in
women's economic independence and other socially progressive ideas. When
the Freudian perspective lost popular appeal we see the rise of the
human potential movement adopting Reich's theories. The human potential
movement was supposedly the logical outcome of the student uprisings of
the left (or perhaps it was the Marxist thread within Reich's work).
Since it was not possible to overthrow the state and free the people
from the oppression of a police state, the strategy of turning within
and freeing the individual from internal oppression became the deciding
trend. All we needed were the ESTholes to discover that societal
concerns were empty and meaningless and that all that mattered was the
fulfillment of the self. (As an eye witness I warn the viewer that the
trends depicted here were that of a small group of mostly middle class
idealists suffering from the betrayal of a liberal arts education. And
while these trends did enter the general conversation, the majority of
the public was watching TV. The benefits of such "liberation" arrived
through a trickle down effect perpetuated by the advertising strategies
that ensued.) The
new non-conformism, the liberation of the self and the encouragement to
recreate said self as anything was a bit of a bump in the road for
marketing forces so used to presenting the appeal of mass production,
but this was soon overcome by advertising geniuses studying the new
psychology and offering seemingly more choices in the hip new
vernacular. This new sense of individual freedom was thus completely
co-opted by products catering to the creating of identity for the self,
much like a Mr. Potato Head kit. In turn such distractions ensured that
social obligations were replaced by the narcissism of consumerism. The
final episode follows the strategies of Thatcher and Reagan in creating
a new politics by appealing to the wants of the individual and
institutionalizing the denial of compassion for those less fortunate.
Liberal politicians follow the lead of the advertising community and
come to rely ever more heavily on focus groups in an attempt to appeal
to the feelings of voters and their individual need for expression.
This leaves them with clever slogans, but no actual political platform
with which to lead. Thus voters, having become a slave to their own
desires, elect politicians without vision in an effort to have their
personal needs met. The series concludes that we have forgotten how to
think in terms larger than own own tiny desires so as a result have
diminished the human potential to be something greater than ourselves. So
in case you were wondering why the population cannot seem to get it
together to move forward on solving real problems like climate change,
peak oil and unregulated corporate criminal activity, this might be a
clue. I
watched these episodes twice. Apart from the revelation of Bernays'
influence on propaganda and the tyranny of psychotherapy on American
culture, in the end, I was unsatisfied by the blame for the unraveling
of democracy being laid at the feet of this psychological journey into
consumerism. It still comes down to the power of corporations, who are
essentially the engines of empire, needing to increase market share and
using whatever tools available to manipulate the people into allowing
them to do their looting unwatched, whether it be through religion,
bread and circuses or mind control. The series implies that Freud and
Bernays invented consumerism by focusing on the self, but that was just
the means. This is perhaps just another way to blame the public for
being duped by the immoral activities of wealth and power. --- As
for human responsibility, the book The
Tipping Point asserts
that a handful of trendsetters direct culture, but it should also be
noted that a great deal of effort and expense on the part of power is
put into suppressing ideas, i.e. the American socialist movement of the
30s. And a lot of ideas simply go out of print. I'm not sure I go along
with the rock bottom idea either, because of Maslow's hierarchy of
needs. I still think humans are capable of being inspired and I
question the current trend, as in this BBC series, to attempt to
generate outrage by showing how we are duped. Instead the series could
have redirected us towards uncovering ideas that once inspired us to be
greater than ourselves but then that might have become the story of how
these ideas are suppressed.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151#