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"I'll never forget the day about four years ago
when I suddenly understood the implications of Peak Oil. I felt like I'd taken
the red pill and abruptly awoke in a completely new and unsuspected reality.
From that point on almost all the information I uncovered about the state of
the natural world, the way we humans live in it and the reasons we behave as we
do painted the outlines of a system that was very near the breaking point. As
time went on, I came to understand that we were not just near the breaking
point, we were already at it.
"The truth of my new perception
proved impossible to communicate to those who had not undergone a similar
epiphany -- while for those who had, no explanation was necessary. To those who
didn't get it, I was speaking pure defeatism. For those who did, it was simple
realism. Those who get it understand that to respond to a great crisis you need
to understand it fully in order not to waste time pursuing avenues that are
unworkable or counterproductive. Those who don't get it look on any such
critique as obstructionism that doesn't recognize the boundless inventiveness
of the human mind. Those who don't get it think every problem has a solution.
Those who do get it understand that we are not facing a problem, but rather a
predicament, with the obvious distinction that while problems have solutions,
predicaments may not. Those who get it tend to think in terms of adaptations or
mitigations, rather than solutions.
People who make this jump move
their worldview into a frame of reference that is largely incomprehensible to
those still working from the old story. As a result their new perceptions tend
to be derided as “faith-based” because the inner logic of the new
frame is not derivable from the old." - Paul Chefurka
"The ideology of globalization, like all
"inevitable" utopian visions, is being exposed as a fraud. The power elite,
perplexed and confused, clings to the disastrous principles of globalization
and its outdated language to mask the looming political and economic vacuum.
The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and
political constructs led industrial nations to sacrifice other areas of human
importance – from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to
hunger, to health and pollution – on the altar of free trade." -
Christopher Lynn Hedges
"Nearly 70 percent of world trade is controlled by
just 500 corporations, and one
percent of all multinationals own half the total stock of foreign direct
investment. In both the United States and across the
globe, many large corporations
- either directly or through intermediaries - are obeying the implacable
logic of capital by creating barriers to entry,
stifling local economies, and racing to liquidate
finite resources. " - Donald O. Mayer
"Until our global
economy is fueled by more than unfettered
markets and an insatiable appetite for
profit at the expense of
human dignity,
history will repeat itself." - Marie
Dennis
"Edward Abbey once
said that "an economic system that can only expand
or expire must be false to all that is
human." Some part of
society must soon step up and begin to figure
out how to end "progress", if not reverse it, until the world reaches a steady state of
ecological sustainability." - Fred S.
Barker
New World Order "In
1921, British and American elite academics got together with major
international banking interests to form two "sister institutes" called the
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, now known as Chatham
House, and the Council on Foreign
Relations in the United States. Subsequent related think tanks were created
in Canada, such as the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, now known
as the Canadian International Council (CIC), and other affiliated think tanks
in South Africa, India, Australia, and more recently in the European Union with
the formation of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Following
World War I, these powers sought to reshape the world order in their designs,
with Woodrow Wilson proclaiming a right to "national self determination" which
shaped the formation of nation-states throughout the Middle East, which until
the war was dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Thus, proclaiming a right to
"self-determination" for people everywhere became, in fact, a means of
constructing nation-state power structures which the western nations became not
only instrumental in building, but in exerting hegemony over. To control
people, one must construct institutions of control. Nations like Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, etc., did not exist prior to World War
I.
Following World War II, America became the global hegemon, whose
imperial impetus was provided by the strategic concept of "containment" in
containing the spread of Communism. Thus, America's imperial adventures in
Korea, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America became defined by the
desire to "roll back" the influence of the Soviet Union and Communism. It was,
not surprisingly, the Council on Foreign
Relations that originated the idea of "containment" as a central feature of
foreign policy.
Following World War II,
America was handed the responsibility for overseeing and managing the
international monetary system and global political economy through the creation
of institutions and agreements such as the
World Bank,
International Monetary Fund
(IMF), NATO, the UN, and GATT (later to become the World Trade Organization).
One central power institution that was significant in establishing consensus
among Western elites and providing a forum for expanding global western
hegemony was the Bilderberg
Group, founded in 1954 as an international think tank.
In 1972, Zbigniew Brzezinski and his friend, David
Rockefeller, presented the idea of a "New World Order" built upon ideas of
global governance under the direction of
transnational elites at the
annual Bilderberg Group
meetings. Rockefeller was, at that time, Chairman of the
Council on Foreign Relations and was
CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1973, Brzezinski and Rockefeller created the
Trilateral Commission, a sort of
sister institute to the Bilderberg
Group, with much cross-over membership, bringing Japan into the western
sphere of economic and political integration.
In 1975, the
Trilateral Commission published a
Task Force Report entitled, "The Crisis of Democracy, of which one of
the principal authors was Samuel Huntington, a political scientist and close
associate and friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski. In this report, Huntington argues
that the 1960s saw a surge in democracy in America, with an upswing in citizen
participation, often "in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest
movements, and cause organizations." Further, "the 1960s also saw a reassertion
of the primacy of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life."
Huntington analyzed how as part of this "democratic surge," statistics showed
that throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there was a dramatic
increase in the percentage of people who felt the United States was spending
too much on defense (from 18% in 1960 to 52% in 1969, largely due to the
Vietnam War). People were becoming politically aware of empire and
exploitation.
Huntington wrote that the "essence of the democratic
surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority,
public and private," and that, "People no longer felt the same compulsion to
obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age,
rank, status, expertise, character, or talents." Huntington explained that in
the 1960s, "hierarchy, expertise, and wealth" had come "under heavy
attack."
Huntington concluded that many problems of governance in the
United States stem from an "excess of democracy," and that, "the effective
operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of
apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups."
Huntington explained that society has always had "marginal groups" which do not
participate in politics, and while acknowledging that the existence of
"marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic," it has
also "enabled democracy to function effectively." Huntington identifies "the
blacks" as one such group that had become politically active, posing a "danger
of overloading the political system with demands."
Following the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, American ideologues "politicians and
academics" began discussing the idea of the emergence of a "New World Order" in
which power in the world is centralized in the United States laying the basis
for an expansion of elitist ideology pertaining to the notion of
"globalization": that power and power structures should be globalizaed. In
short, the "New World Order" was to be a global order of global governance. In
the short term, it was to be led by the United States, which must be the
central and primary actor in constructing a new world order, and ultimately a
global government." - Andrew Gavin Marshall
"Persisting social crisis,
the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media
to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal
transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society. Such a
society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would
rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of
traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its
political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public
behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such
circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would
not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits. The
traditionally democratic American society could, because of its fascination
with technical efficiency, become an extremely controlled society, and its
humane and individualistic qualities would thereby be lost." - Zbigniew
Brzezinski
"The Technological Revolution has allowed elites to redirect
and control society in ways never before imagined, ultimately culminating in a
global scientific dictatorship, as many have warned of since the early decades
of the 20th century. The potential for controlling the masses has never been so
great, as science unleashes the power of genetics, biometrics, surveillance,
and new forms of modern eugenics; implemented by a scientific elite equipped
with systems of psycho-social control (the use of psychology in controlling the
masses)." - Andrew Gavin Marshall
In 2005, Brzezinski wrote an essay for
The American Interest entitled, "The Dilemma of the Last
Sovereign," in which he explains the geopolitical landscape that America
and the world find themselves in: "For most states, sovereignty now verges on
being a legal fiction."
In 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski published an
article based on a speech he delivered to the London-based Chatham House in
their academic journal, International Affairs. Chatham House, formerly the
Royal Institute of International Relations, is the British counterpart to the
US-based Council on Foreign
Relations. His article, "Major foreign policy challenges for the next US
President," aptly analyzes the major geopolitical challenges for the Obama
administration in leading the global hegemonic state at this critical juncture.
Brzezinski refers to the "global political awakening" as "a truly
transformative event on the global scene," since:
"For the first time in
human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically
conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity
left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and
engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today
around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge
in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in
a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or
imperial domination. The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central
challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening." - Zbigniew
Brzezinski
unregulated
tradeOne of the founding premises of unregulated
trade is that it will reduce the
temptation of participating nation states to engage in armed conflict.
Unfortunately there are too many emerging signs
of discontent from different places on
the Earth and from varying
ideologies to continue to
marginalize those who
question the wisdom of an unfettered global corporatism and the colossal
disparities in the distribution of wealth
.
Global free
trade
economists claim
developed countries can export lowbrow jobs while retaining the high paying
creative skills work. If that is the case why did 12 million Latin
American illegal immigrants move to America after Ronald Reagan's amnesty in
1986?
Once trade barriers to
Japan were lowered a large part of Americans
vehicle and electronic manufacturing was outsourced to Japan. Japanese
corporate
culture of keiretsu (close business
relationships) works to exclude foreign
companies. American skilled work was
outsourced to Japan!
Anime
uses creative skills but how many
Americans are drawing cartoons in the most
prominent creative media
of Japan?
None! The lowest paid workers in Japan draw anime!
Yoshitake Ogata of the Anime Union, which represents freelance
illustrators, said: "However keen they
are when they come in, the reality is that they
cannot live on the pay. There are
animators with 10
years experience earning less than
$20,000 a year. In
the end, they have to quit."
The main factor holding down pay for anime
illustrators is the availability of cheap labor in East Asia. Japanese
production companies now
outsource to
illustrators in South Korea, the
Philippines and
China who do much of their routine
work.
Global
free trade
economists,
neo-liberals to the rest of the world (neo-cons to Americans), argue that
eventually the rest of the world will "develop" and their
living standards will reach those of
"developed" copuntries.
With the ongoing
population
explosion it is impossible for the
average Earth standard per capita income to ever
catch up with standard middle class
American economic
expectations.
To
remain competitive on an
Earth in which billions of
workers are paid one
dollar a day and have absolutly no benefits, and in which
corporations need not
worry about the
environmental
destruction of the Earth, requires Americans to drastically lower their own standard
of living.
"We are often told that ‘Americans won't do that job,' but never does a
businessman or politician add the
other half of that argument, namely,
‘at the meager wage that I am willing to pay'." - Gary Peters
A
much ballyhooed success of the North
American Free Trade Agreement has been the opening of Mexico to
American industrial agricultural
corporations, who are now selling
millions of bushels of maize south of the border.
Why would Mexico, whose
people still subsist on
maize, whose farmers still grow more maize than any
other crop, ever buy
maize from an American farm corporation?
Because
American industrial agricultural
corporations can sell it much more
cheaply than any Mexican farmer can.
How? American government writes
subsidy checks to
American industrial agricultural
corporations encouraging them to
undersell Third World farmers.
"Our
system is so complicated - ie. rigged - that
it's almost impossible to know how much agricultural
subsidies cost
American taxpayers. Since 2000 the
American government paid out $1.3 billion to "farmers"
who don't farm. They were simply "compensated" for owning land previously used
for farming. Cash payments have cost $172 billion over the last decade, and $25
billion in 2005 alone, nearly 50% more than what was
paid to families receiving welfare. These
numbers barely tell the story of our appallingly immoral agricultural
corporatism.
Subsidies combined with trade
barriers (another term for
subsidy) prop up the price of
food for
consumers at home and hurt
farmers abroad. This keeps Third World nations impoverished,
economically dependent and
politically unstable.
Subsidies wreak havoc on the
ecosystem. One small example: There's a
6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf
of Mexico. It's so depleted of oxygen because of algae blooms
caused by fertilizer runoff that shrimp and crabs at the Louisiana shore
literally try to leap from the water to
breathe. Most of the fertilizer comes from a few Midwestern counties that
receive billions in subsidies (more
than $30 billion from 1997 to 2002 - Environmental Working Group). Also consider that
American farming is hugely energy intensive.
Those energy costs are not fully borne by the producer, so in effect the
taxpayers is paying for
greenhouse emissions that do not benefit
him." - Jonah Goldberg
A river of cheap
American corn began flooding into Mexico after NAFTA took effect in
1994.
A 2003 report by the
Carnegie
Endowment says this flood of
subsidized corn has washed away 1.3 million
small farmers. Unable to compete, they left
their land and illegally
immigrated to the United
States to pick crops - former farmers have
become illegal alien
day laborers. Now they have
learned that
construction jobs pay better and
refuse to work in the
industrial agricultural sector.
Cheap
American corn in Mexico threatens all
humanity. The small Mexican
farmers who grow maize in southern Mexico are
responsible for
maintaining the genetic diversity of
the species.
While American
industrial farm corporations raise a
small handful of genetically nearly
identical hybrids, Mexico's small farmers in
the past grew hundreds of different, open pollinated
varieties, commonly called landraces.
Monsanto produces the nearly identical hybrid corn
seed. The seed from this genetically altered hybrid corn is unviable and will
not grow. Each year a new supply of seed must be purchased from
Monsanto.
{Monsanto's MON 810
corn causes sterility according to studies published by the Austrian
Government. Monsanto's MON 810 corn contains the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus
which, when ingested, lowers the bodies CD 4 cells to a point which, on immune
tests, indicate that a person has HIV/AIDS. The lowered CD 4 cells results from
eating GMO corn, the staple of the diet in many parts of Black Africa. MON 810
is grown in Europe for animal feed and in many places, including the US, around
the world for human food.
"The Committee of Research and Information on
Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN) and Universities of Caen and Rouen studied
Monsanto's 90-day feeding trials data of insecticide-producing Mon 810, Mon 863
and Roundup® herbicide absorbing NK 603 varieties of GM maize. The data
"clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary
detoxifying organs, as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal
glands, spleen and haematopoietic system," reported Gilles-Eric
Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen." - Rady
Anada}
Monsanto:
Extinction
Maize originated in southern Mexico where it was
domesticated from teosinte, a wild
grass. Scientists at four universities analyzed the
DNA sequences of 774 genes in strains of
teosinte and corn. They found that a small group of these genes were alike in
all corn strains, but far more varied in teosinte strains. This implies that
these genes, because they shaped corn like traits, were bred for during
domestication.
This
genetic diversity,
created over the course of 10,000 years by
human genetic
manipulation, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable
genetic information on Earth. These landraces will
survive only as long as the
farmers who cultivate them do.
From 1996 - 2004,
worldwide genetically modified plantings expanded to 167 million acres, a
40-fold increase on 25% of global arable land. Over two-thirds of American
farmland grows genetically modified plants on more than 106 million acres.
Argentina has 34 million acres, and production is expanding in Brazil, China,
Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, Spain and Eastern Europe.
{On December 4, 2009 a federal jury ruled in re Genetically Modified
Rice Litigation, 06-MD-01811, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri
(St. Louis) that Bayer CropScience AG was responsible for the contamination of
farmers Ken Bell and Johnny Hunter long grain rice crops with genetically
modified organisms (GMO). Bayer CropScience AG admitted it was unable to
control the spread of its genetically-engineered organisms despite ‘the
best practices' to stop contamination. Bayer CropScience AG was ordered to pay
just under $2 million in compensatory damages as a cross-pollination event
occurred mixing regular and genetically modified seed.
When the U.S.
Department of Agriculture announced in August 2006 that trace amounts of the
genetically modified rice were found in U.S. long-grain stocks a decline in
rice futures cost U.S. growers about $150 million. The European Union, Japan,
Russia, and other markets refused to purchase rice from the United States. The
USDA deregulated one of the two grains implicated in the lawsuits by November
2006 in an attempt to salvage contaminated rice. It is estimated that over 30%
of ricelands have been contaminated with LibertyLink strains of rice which were
designed to be resistant to the Liberty (gluphosinate) herbicide.
"Traces of LL601 rice were discovered in the rice grain merchandising
system in Europe, Africa and Asia in August 2006." - E. Neal Blue
"Aside from the risks involved in the process of developing this
genetically modified rice residues of the powerful herbicide - LibertyLink
(gluphosinate) - also put at risk those who will be consuming it on a daily
basis and at least two times a day. GMO rice should never be allowed to enter
Philippine shores again and threaten our rice supply in the future." - Danny
Ocampo
Over 1200 farmers in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and
Missouri filed separate lawsuits which are pending against Bayer CropScience
AG. The total costs incurred throughout the world as a result of the
contamination are estimated to range from $741 million to $1.285
billion.}
"Nearly all of the crops in the
United States Department of Agriculture's database of approved genetically
engineered varieties have been modified for resistance to certain insects or to
tolerate applications of herbicides. None has been shown to increase intrinsic
crop yields, nor do any have traits for drought tolerance. Biotechnologists are
finding drought tolerance to be a major technical challenge. Meanwhile,
traditional farming systems have demonstrated their effectiveness in raising
yields and improving drought tolerance; they should receive the lion's share of
attention as a route to increasing food production." - Doug
Gurian-Sherman
"Biotechnology companies are keeping university
scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of
the industry's genetically modified crops." - Andrew Pollack
"No truly
independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions." - 26
corn-insect specialists
"If a company can control the research that
appears in the public domain, they can reduce the potential negatives that can
come out of any research." - Ken Ostlie
DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta
basically control the biotech seed market. The
growers' agreement from Syngenta not only prohibits research in general but
specifically says a seed buyer cannot compare Syngenta's product with any rival
crop.
In the 2006 Mexican Presidential election it was
revealed that for every maquiladora job created
(job created by NAFTA) there were four jobs lost in the Mexican agricultural
sector. "The global free
trade economy is a
disaster for the
environment, a
disaster
socially, a disaster
for small farmers, it drives wages down and is a
giveaway of sovereign power to corporate and goverment bureaucracies.
Economic globalization is not satisfying
human needs. This doesn't lift all boats, it's
lifting yachts. Eventually the only way
order can be maintained is through oppressive means.
The solution: site here to sell here."- Jerry
Mander.
Globalization has created
interdependent
systems spread across the face of the
Earth. From food production to financial transfers, the electricity grid to the
internet, critical American infrastructures
are linked to one another in an
interlocking web of connections.
Interdependent networks are
vulnerable to the unintended
consequences of
interdependence. When one
"domino" falls a cascading set of "dominos" may fall in every direction.
As an example take the interdependent
electricity grid.
Intelligent
problem solving suggests Americans encourage "distributed energy
production" which means having lots of
small generating plants rather than a few large plants.
This is one
way to reduce the "domino" effect from
creating large scale power outages.
But then the corporate
interests of the transnational
elites would no longer be able to control
resources.
When the
transnational elites
depends on other nation states to
provide the world with 'necessary' resources Americans lose
freedom by having to
protect those
resources.
In 2005
America had over 1.4 million
men and women
in uniform.
At the end of 2005 69,000 troops are stationed in Germany
and 40,000 troops are stationed in Japan. Why does America need to have 109,000
men and women
in Germany and Japan?
160,000 troops were stationed in
Iraq at the end of 2005. The rest,
which totaled 500,000 in 2004 are stationed in nearly every country on
Earth to protect resources deemed critical to the
transnational elites.
The truth is global
"free" trade is a race to the bottom.
"People do lose their jobs as a result of
globalization, and it's painful for those who lose their job." -
George W. Bush
Individuals
who go through major life changes due to
income reduction caused by
outsourcing show a significant
increase in mental illness,
suicides and family breakdowns. These are hefty
human and social
costs that global free
trade
economists
conveniently forget to plug into their equations.
"Unemployment makes
people very unhappy." - Carol Graham,
co-director of the Center on Social and
Economic Dynamics, Brookings
Institute
The recent exponential increase
in the power of
corporate and global govermental
bureaucracies to challenge other
nations traditions, environmental,
social and business laws on behalf of global
free trade
transnational elites
assures us that the fight to keep
our standard of
living from being drastically
reduced will not be an easy fight for
working class
Americans to
win.
Working class Americans must use
courage and vision to lift the fog in
which transnational elites
have shrouded this whole sordid,
greedy, evil
business.
"There is more on the table than sugar when it comes to the
Central American Free Trade Agreement. An article on the pros and cons of CAFTA
would be of more interest than an editorial that says, "It defies all
economic reason for
America to grow most of the sugar it
consumes."
Historically one of the factors aiding the
demise of a civilization was due to that
civilizations dependence on outside sources for
food coupled with the variable conditions of war and climatic conditions. What will be the
effect of CAFTA on American agriculture in
general? For example, what will happen
to the avocado growers and other
sources of food production in California? Will these types of
questions be addressed before CAFTA is
pushed through Congress?" -Carol M. Harder
Childhood in the New
World Order
The United Nations children's agency,
UNICEF, stated in annual State of the World's
Children
report in December 2004 that out of the 2.2 billion of the Earth's
children:
640 million lack adequate shelter;
500 million have no
access to sanitation;
400 million lack safe water;
270 million receive no healthcare;
140 million, mostly girls, receive no education;
90 million are severely deprived
of nutrition;
10 million children younger than 5
die each year of diarrhea or measles;
and 2
million are exploited by the global
commercial
sex industry.
"Too many
governments are making informed,
deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood,"
- UNICEF Executive
Director Carol Bellamy.
A UNICEF study in 2007 looked at childhood in
over 20 developed countries and found that America and Great Britain ranked
last in childhood well-being. Lower rankings were the result of less spending
on social programs and "dog-eat-dog"
competition for jobs that lead to
adults spending much less time with their children.
America was at the bottom in health and safety
because of high rates of child mortality and accidental
deaths. America has the highest rate of children
living in single parent homes and
has one of the highest rates of children living in
poverty.
"Our
global economy is
outgrowing the capacity of the Earth to support
it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and
possible collapse. In our
preoccupation with quarterly
earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how
large the human enterprise has become relative to the Earth's resources. A century ago, annual growth in
the global economy was
measured in billions of dollars.
Today it is measured in trillions.
As a result, we are consuming
renewable
resources faster than they can
regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands
are deteriorating, water tables are falling,
fisheries are collapsing, and soils are eroding.
We are using up
oil at a pace that leaves little time
to plan beyond peak oil. And we are
discharging greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere faster than nature can absorb
them, setting the stage for a rise in the Earth's
temperature well above any since agriculture began.
{"The amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned
since the Industrial Revolution began in 1751 is equal to all the plants grown
on Earth over 13,300 years. Fossil fuels developed from ancient deposits of
organic material, and thus can be thought of as a vast store of solar energy.
It took an incredible amount of plant matter to generate the fossil fuels we
are using today." - Jeff Dukes, Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption
of Ancient Solar Energy
98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant
material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars.
Fossil fuel consumption in 1997 equaled the energy in 7.1 trillion kilograms of
carbon in plant matter. Land plants today contain 31.6 trillion kilograms of
carbon above ground.}
"Can we just realize that there are limits
to growth? That "smart growth", at best, delays the moment when we must concede
the limitations of a finite world? After observing the
mindless expansion of the Los Angeles region, predicated on a future of cheap
energy that will not be realized, I have to ask, are we smarter than a colony
of bacteria that reproduces and proliferates until it suddenly dies off from an
exhaustion of resources?" - David M.
Marquez
Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first
civilization to move onto an
economic path that was
environmentally
unsustainable.
Many earlier civilizations also found themselves in
environmental trouble. As Jared
Diamond notes in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, some
were able to change course and avoid economic
decline. The Sumerians, the Mayans,
Easter Islanders, and other early
civilizations that were not able to make
the needed adjustments in time.
If
economic progress is to be
sustained, we need to replace the fossil fuel
based, automobile centered, throwaway economy with
a new economic model.
The new
economy will be powered by abundant sources of
renewable energy: wind, solar,
geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels. The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive
reuse/recycle "cradle-to-cradle" economy.
We have the technologies to
build it - including, for example, gas-electric hybrid cars, advanced-design wind
turbines, highly efficient refrigerators, and water-efficient irrigation
systems. We can see how to build the
new economy brick by brick. With each wind farm,
rooftop solar panel, paper recycling facility, bicycle
path, and reforestation program, we move
closer to an economy that can
sustain economic
progress.
"Imagine what happens to a culture when it becomes based on
the idea of transcending limits. . . and enshrines that as the purpose of its
near-global civilization. Predictably it will live in the grip of the
technological imperative, devoted unceasingly to providing machinery to attack
the possible. . . . Imagine then what happens to a culture when it actually
develops the means to transcend limits, making it possible and therefore right
to destroy custom and community, to create new rules of employment and
obligation, to magnify production and consumption, to impose new means and ways
of work, and to control or ignore the central forces of nature. It would no
doubt exist for quite a long time, powerful and expansionary and prideful,
before it had to face up to the truths that it was founded upon an illusion and
that there are real limits in an ordered world, social and economic as well as
natural, that ought not be transgressed, limits more important than their
conquest." - Kirkpatrick Sale
No
economy, however
technologically advanced, can
survive the collapse of its
environmental support
systems.
The collisions
between our demands and the Earth's capacity to
satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be
another crop-withering heat wave,
another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or
another aquifer pumped dry.
Resources that accumulated over eons of
geological time are being
consumed in a single human
lifespan.
In our fast-forward civilization, we
learn that we have crossed
natural thresholds only after the fact,
leaving little time to adjust. For example, when
we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery,
the stocks begin to shrink. Once this natural threshold is crossed, we have a
limited time in which to back off and lighten the
catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding
populations shrink to where
the fishery is no longer viable, and it
collapses.
Nature has
many thresholds that we discover
only when it is too late.
We know from earlier
civilizations that the lead indicators of
economic decline were
environmental, not
economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally
the civilization itself. To archeologists,
the sequence is all too familiar.
Our situation
today is far more challenging because in
addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling
water tables, more
frequent crop-withering heat waves,
collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts,
deteriorating rangelands, dying coral
reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful
storms, disappearing
species, and, soon, shrinking oil
supplies.
"We are dependent on oil for our food,
transportation, commerce, medicine, communication, sanitation and the job
specialization that provides the vast majority of our livelihoods. Breaking our
dependency will involve wholesale change in the way we live and who we are as a
people." - Sara Anne Edwards
Although these
ecologically
destructive trends have been evident
for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has
been reversed at the global level.
The
bottom line is that the Earth is in what
ecologists call an "overshoot-and-collapse"
mode.
{Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and
sometimes to a complete collapse.
In 1944 the Coast Guard introduced 29
reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the
Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a
station there. After World War II ended a
year later, the base was closed and the men left the
island. When United States Fish and Wildlife
Service biologist David Kline visited St.
Matthew Island in 1957, he discovered a thriving
population of 1,350 reindeer
feeding on the four-inch-thick mat of lichen that covered the
332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island.
In the absence of any predators, the
population was exploding. By
1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St.
Matthew Island in 1966 and discovered an
island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not
much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived:
41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so,
the remaining reindeer had died off.
In the former, a remnant of the
population or
economic activity survives in a resource-depleted
environment. For example, as the
environmental resource base of
Easter Island in the South Pacific
deteriorated, its population
declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to
today's
population of fewer than 4,000.
In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during
the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of
environmental adversity.
As
of 2005, some 42 countries have population that are stable or
declining slightly in size as a result of falling birth rates. But now for the
first time ever, demographers are projecting
population declines in some
countries because of rising death rates, among them Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia,
and Swaziland.}
Demand has exceeded the
sustainable yield of
natural systems at the local level countless
times in the past. Now, for the first
time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the
Earth as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread.
(Harvests of nearly 30 percent of commercial seafood
species already have collapsed.
Harvests of less than 10 percent of historic
highs is considered a collapse. In 1950, only six
commercial seafood species
worldwide had collapsed. By 2003, more than 2,200 species - 29 percent of all
commercially fished species on
Earth - had collapsed.)
Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent.
Water tables are falling in many countries.
Carbon dioxide emissions exceed
carbon dioxide fixation everywhere.
We are meeting current demands by
consuming the
Earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline
and collapse.
Paul MacCready notes that when agriculture began,
humans, their livestock, and pets
together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total weight of all
vertebrates on the land and in the
air. In 2005 Paul MacCready estimated that
humans, their livestock, and pets
accounted for 98 percent of the Earth's total
vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the
wild portion, the latter including
all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so
forth.
Although no one
knows exactly when
oil production will peak, supply is already
lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.
"One of the realities
global inhabitants face but don't seem to realize is oil depletion. The
world is currently using about 3% of the remaining oil
supplies annually. If global oil usage remains constant over the next 10 years,
the annual worldwide depletion rate will rise to 4.5% just because of the
diminishing oil reserves. Some say the usage rate would rise because of the
increased demand in China and India. Others say it would fall because of the
increasing difficulty and expense of extracting the remaining oil. In either
case, pressure for reduced United States oil usage will be great." - Dwayne
Deets
In this new global order, the price of
oil begins to set the price of food,
not so much because of rising fuel costs for farmers and food processors but
more because almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel for
cars.
In this new global order
of high oil prices basic food
commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans and sugarcane will also become major
energy sources.
The International Monetary Fund
recorded a world wide 23% rise in food prices between January 2006 and June
2007.
Wheat going into the commodities
market can be converted into bread for food
or ethanol for gas stations. Soybean oil can go onto
market shelves or it can go to gas stations
to be used as diesel fuel. Owners of the Earth's
800 million cars will be competing for food resources with the 1.2 billion people
living on less than a dollar a
day.
"The
government is overspending on the defense budget and underspending on more
effective ways to bring
peace and stability to the
Earth. Why are we fueling what looks to be an
unending "war on
terror" when we could spend a fraction of it on helping people struggling
with extreme poverty, people
living on less than $1 a
day? What people don't realize is that, by
helping the poor, we create stability and
promote democracy in Third World countries without
shedding any blood." - Jackie
Steinle
Faced with an insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers
will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce
sugarcane, oil palms, and
other high yielding fuel crops
generating a massive new threat to the Earth's
genetic diversity through conversion to
industrial monoculture.
As humanity turns to wind, solar cells, and
geothermal energy in this century, we will witness the localization of the
energy. The globalization of the Earth's food
economy will also be reversed, as the higher price
of oil raises the cost of transporting
food internationally. Both will
reduce centralization. For many years
environmentalists have pointed to
America as the Earth's leading
consumer, noting that 5 percent of
the Earth's people were
consuming nearly a third of the
Earth's resources. Although that was
true for some time, it no longer is.
China has replaced America as the leading
consumer of basic
commodities.Among the five basic food, energy, and
industrial commodities— grain and
meat, oil and coal, and steel—consumption in
China has eclipsed that of
America in all but
oil. China has opened a wide lead with grain,
consuming 380 million tons in 2005
versus 260 million tons in America. Among the
big three grains, China leads in the
consumption of both wheat and rice
and trails America only in
corn.
Although eating hamburgers is a defining element of the American lifestyle, China's 2005 meat
consumption of 67 million tons is far
above the 38 million tons eaten in America.
While American meat intake is rather evenly
distributed between beef, pork, and poultry, in China pork totally dominates. Indeed, half the
Earth's pigs are now found in
China.
With
oil, America was still solidly in the lead in 2004,
using more than three times as much as China
- 20.4 million barrels per day versus 6.5
million barrels. But American
oil use expanded by only 15 percent
between 1994 and 2004, while use in China
more than doubled.
Having recently eclipsed Japan as an
oil
consumer,
China now trails only
America.
Energy use in
China also obviously includes coal, which
supplies nearly two thirds of the China's
energy.
China's annual
burning of 960 million tons easily exceeds the
560 million tons used in America.
With
this level of coal use and with oil and
natural gas use also climbing fast, it is only a matter of
time before China's carbon dioxide emissions match those of
America.
Then the
Earth will have two major countries driving
climate change.
China's consumption of steel, a basic indicator
of industrial
development, is now nearly two and a
half times that of America: 258 million tons
to 104 million tons in 2003.
As China
has moved into the construction phase of development, building hundreds of
thousands of factories and high-rise apartment and office buildings, steel
consumption has climbed to levels
never seen in any country.
With consumer goods,
China leads in the number of cell phones,
television sets, and refrigerators.
America still leads in the number of personal
computers and automobiles, though likely not for much longer.
That China has
overtaken America in
consumption of basic
resources gives us license to ask the
next question. What if China
catches up with America in
consumption per person?
If
the Chinese economy continues to grow at 8 percent a year, by
2031 income per person will equal that in
America in 2004. If we further assume that
consumption
patterns of China's affluent
population in 2031, by then
1.45 billion, will be roughly similar to those of Americans in 2004, we have a startling answer to
our question.
At the current annual American grain
consumption of 900 kilograms per
person, including industrial use,
China's grain
consumption in 2031 would
equal roughly two thirds of the current
world grain harvest.
If paper use per person in
China in 2031 reaches the current
American level, this
translates into 305 million tons of
paper—double existing
world production
of 161 million tons.
There go the Earth's
forests.
And if oil
consumption per person reaches the
American level by 2031,
China will use 99 million barrels of
oil a day.
The Earth is currently producing 84 million barrels a
day and may never produce much more.
This helps explain why China's
fast-expanding use of oil is already
helping to create a politics of scarcity.
If
China one day should have three cars for every four people,
as America now does,
China's fleet would total 1.1 billion
vehicles, well beyond the current world fleet of 800
million. Providing the roads, highways, and parking lots for such a fleet would
require paving an area roughly equal to
China's land in rice, its principal food
staple.
The inevitable conclusion is that there are not
enough resources for
China to reach American consumption levels.
"We are shipping our middle class jobs to countries
that make almost no products for their citizens; instead, they export back to
us. Meanwhile, all we can sell them is our means of production. Farmers call
what we have been doing "eating our seed corn." As our depleted middle class
reaches a tipping point, we will no longer be able to support the trade
imbalances.: - Larry Severson
The western
economic model - the fossil fuel based, automobile
centered, throwaway economy - will not
work for China's
1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for
China, it will not work for India
either, which by 2031 is projected to have even more people than
China. Nor will it work for the
other 3 billion people in
developing countries who are also
dreaming the "American
Dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where
countries everywhere are competing for the same
resources—the same
oil, grain, and iron ore - the existing
economic model will not work for industrial countries either.
Our twenty-first century global civilization
is not the first to face the prospect of
environmentally induced
economic decline. The question is how
we will respond. We do have one unique asset at our
command—an archeological record that
shows us what happened to earlier civilizations that got into
environmental trouble and failed to
respond. As Jared Diamond points out in Collapse, some of the early
societies that were in environmental trouble were able to
change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse.
Six centuries
ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their
grass covered highlands was leading to extensive
soil loss from the inherently thin soils of
the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and
face economic decline, farmers joined together to
determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among
themselves, thus preserving their grasslands and
avoiding a tragic loss in
value of the commons.
The Icelanders understood
the consequences of overgrazing and reduced their sheep numbers to a level that
could be sustained.
We understand the
consequences of burning fossil fuels and the
resulting carbon dioxide buildup in
the atmosphere. Unlike the Icelanders who were able to restrict their livestock
numbers, we have not been able to restrict our
carbon dioxide emissions. Not all
societies have fared as well as the Icelanders,
whose economy continues to produce wool and to
thrive.
The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth
millennium BC was an extraordinary one, advancing far beyond any that had
existed before. Its carefully engineered irrigation
system gave rise to a highly
productive agriculture, one that enabled
farmers to produce a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities.
Managing the irrigation system required
a sophisticated social organization. The Sumerians had the first cities and the
first written language, the cuneiform
script.
By any measure it was an extraordinary
civilization, but there was an
environmental flaw in the
design of its irrigation
system, one that would eventually
undermine its food supply. The water that
backed up behind dams built across the Euphrates was diverted onto the land
through a network of gravity-fed canals. Some water was used by the crops, some evaporated, and
some percolated downward. In this region, where underground drainage was weak,
percolation slowly raised the water table. As
the water climbed to within inches of the
surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt. Over
time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface lowered its
productivity.
As salt
accumulated and wheat yields declined, the Sumerians shifted to barley, a more
salt-tolerant plant. This postponed Sumer's decline, but it was treating the
symptoms, not the cause, of falling crop yields. As salt concentrations
continued to build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The
resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined the economic foundation of this once-great
civilization. As land
productivity declined, so did the
civilization.
Archeologist Robert
McC. Adams has studied the site of ancient Sumer on the central
flood plain of the Euphrates River, an empty,
desolate area now outside the frontiers of cultivation. He describes how the
"tangled dunes, long disused canal levees, and the rubble-strewn mounds of
former settlement contribute only low, featureless relief. Vegetation is
sparse, and in many areas it is almost wholly absent....Yet at one time, here
lay the core, the heartland, the oldest urban, literate
civilization on Earth."
The New World counterpart to
Sumer is the Mayan
civilization that
developed in the lowlands of what is
now Guatemala. It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around
AD 900. Like the Sumerians, the Mayans
had developed a sophisticated, highly
productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth surrounded by
canals that supplied water.
As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently
linked to a failing food supply. For this New World
civilization, it was deforestation and
soil erosion that undermined agriculture. Changes in climate may also have
played a role. Food shortages apparently triggered civil
conflict among the various Mayan cities as
they competed for food. Today this region
is covered by jungle, reclaimed by
nature.
During the later centuries of the
Mayan civilization, a new
society was evolving on faraway
Easter Island, some 166 square kilometers of
land in the South Pacific roughly 3,200 kilometers west of South America and
2,200 kilometers from Pitcairn Island, the
nearest habitation. Settled around AD 400, this
civilization flourished on a volcanic
island with rich soils and lush vegetation,
including trees that grew 25 meters tall with trunks 2 meters in diameter.
Archeological records indicate that the islanders ate mainly seafood, principally
dolphins—a mammal that could only be caught by harpoon from large
sea-going canoes.29 The Easter Island
society flourished for several centuries,
reaching an estimated population of 20,000. As its human
numbers gradually increased, tree cutting exceeded the
sustainable yield of forests. Eventually the
large trees that were needed to build the sturdy canoes disappeared, depriving
islanders of access to the dolphins and
dramatically shrinking their food supply. The archeological record shows that
at some point human bones became intermingled with the dolphin bones,
suggesting a desperate society that had resorted
to cannibalism. Today the
island has some 2,000 residents.
One unanswerable question about these earlier
civilizations was whether they
knew what was causing their decline.
Did the Sumerians understand
that the rising salt content in the soil from water evaporation was reducing their wheat
yields? If they knew, were they simply unable
to muster the political support needed to lower
water tables, just as the world today is
struggling unsuccessfully to lower carbon dioxide emissions?
These are just three of the many early
civilizations that moved onto an
economic path that nature could not sustain.
We, too, are on such a
path. Any one of several
trends of environmental degradation
could undermine civilization as we know
it. Just as the irrigation system that
defined the early Sumerian
economy had a flaw, so too does the fossil fuel
energy system that defines our modern
economy.
For them it was a rising
water table that undermined the
economy; for us it is rising CO2 levels that
threaten to disrupt economic progress. In both
cases, the trend is invisible.
Whether it resulted from the salting of Sumer's cropland, the deforestation and
soil erosion of the Mayans, or the depleted forests and
loss of the
distant water fishing capacity of the
Easter Islanders, collapse of these early
civilizations appears to have been
associated with a decline in food supply.
Today the
annual addition of more than 70 million people to a world population of over 6 billion at a
time when water tables are falling,
temperatures are rising, and oil
supplies will soon be shrinking suggests that the food supply again may be the
vulnerable link between the environment and the
economy.The
first big test of the international
community's capacity to manage scarcity may come with
oil or it could come with grain. If the
latter is the case, this could occur when China - whose grain harvest fell by 34 million
tons, or 9 percent, between 1998 and 2005—turns to the
world market for
massive imports of 30 million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of
grain per year.
Demand on this scale could quickly
overwhelm world
grain markets. When this happens,
China will have to look to
America, which controls the world's
grain exports of over 40 percent of some 200 million tons.
This will
pose a fascinating geopolitical situation. More than 1.3 billion
Chinese consumers, who had an estimated
$160-billion trade surplus with America in
2004 - enough to buy the entire American grain
harvest twice - will be competing
with Americans for
American grain, driving up
American food prices.
In such a
situation 30 years ago, America simply
restricted exports. But China is now
banker to America, underwriting much of the massive
American fiscal deficit with monthly purchases
of United States Treasury bonds.
Within the next few years,
America may be loading one or two ships a
day with grain for
China. This long line of ships stretching
across the Pacific, like an umbilical cord providing nourishment, will
intimately link the two economies. Managing this
flow of grain so as to simultaneously satisfy the food needs of
consumers in both countries, at a
time when ethanol fuel distilleries are taking a
growing share of the American grain harvest,
may become one of the leading foreign policy
challenges of this new century.
The way the Earth
accommodates the vast projected needs of China, India,
and other
developing countries for grain,
oil, and
other
resources will help determine how the
world addresses the stresses associated with
outgrowing the Earth. How
low-income, importing countries fare in this
competition for grain will also
tell us something about future political
stability. And, finally, the American response
to China's growing demands for grain even as
they drive up food prices for American
consumers will tell us much about the
capacity of countries to manage the emerging politics of scarcity. The most imminent risk is
that China's entry into the
global market,
combined with the growing diversion of farm commodities to biofuels, will drive
grain prices so high that many low-income developing countries will not be able to
import enough grain.
This in turn could lead to escalating food prices
and political instability on a scale that will
disrupt global economic
progress.
The fates of all the peoples of
Earth are intertwined.
This interdependence can be managed to our mutual
benefit only if we recognize that the term "in the national interest" is in
many ways obsolete.
The question facing
governments is whether they can
respond quickly enough to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes. The
peoples of Earth have precious little
experience in responding to aquifer
depletion, rising temperatures, expanding deserts, melting polar ice caps, and
a shrinking oil supply.
These new trends will fully challenge the capacity of our
political institutions and
leadership. In times of crisis,
societies sometimes have a Nero as a
leaders and sometimes a Winston Churchill.
The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is getting the
market to tell the
ecological truth.
The dysfunctional global
economy of today has been shaped by distorted
market prices that do not incorporate
environmental costs. Many of our
environmental travails are the
result of severe market distortions.
One of these distortions became abundantly clear in the summer of 1998
when China's Yangtze River valley, home to
400 million people, was wracked by some of the worst flooding in history. The resulting damages of $30
billion exceeded the value of the country's
annual rice harvest.
After several weeks of flooding, the government in Beijing announced in
mid-August a ban on tree cutting in the
Yangtze River basin. It justified the ban by noting that
trees standing are worth three times as much
as trees cut. The flood control
services provided by forests were
three times as valuable as the lumber in the trees.
In effect, the
market price was off by a factor of three!
With this analysis, no one could
economically justify cutting
trees in the basin.
A similar
situation exists with gasoline. In
America, the gasoline pump price was over $2
per gallon in mid 2005 and $3 per gallon by mid 2006. But this reflects only
the cost of pumping the oil, refining
it into gasoline, and delivering the gas to stations. It does not include the
costs of tax
subsidies to the
oil industry, such as the
oil depletion allowance; the
subsidies for the extraction,
production, and use of petroleum; the
military costs of
protecting access to
oil supplies (the war in Iraq cost up
to 02/02/08 was $491 billion -
total current
expenditures); the health care costs
for treating respiratory illnesses ranging from
asthma to emphysema; and, most
important, the costs of climate change. (ExxonMobil made $36 billion in 2005. In the
spring the retiring CEO of ExxonMobil
received a retirement package worth $398 million.)
If these costs, which in 1998 the International Center for
Technology Assessment calculated at roughly $9 per gallon of gasoline
burned in America, were added to the $3 cost of the
gasoline itself, motorists would pay about $12 a gallon for gas at the pump.
Filling a 20-gallon tank would cost $240. In reality, burning
gasoline is very costly, but the market
tells us it is cheap, leading to gross distortions in the
structure of the
economy.
The challenge facing
government is to incorporate such
costs into market prices by
systematically calculating them and
incorporating them as a tax on the
product to make sure its price
reflects the full costs to society. If we have
learned anything over the last few years,
it is that accounting systems that do
not tell the truth can be costly. Faulty
corporate accounting
systems that leave costs off the
books have driven some of
America's largest
corporations into
bankruptcy, costing millions of people
their lifetime savings, retirement incomes, and jobs. Distorted
global market
prices that do not incorporate major costs in the
production of various
products and the provision of
services could be even costlier.
They could lead to global
bankruptcy and economic decline.".
from Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0
Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
"Our global economy is
"driving ahead full speed". As a species we are
consuming the
Earth's resources and upsetting
ecosystems much faster than
nature can rectify the damage we inflict." -
Robert Sollen
"The time is long past that we end the placing of
Band-Aids on lethal wounds. We must put the same innovation and energy that we
used in placing men on the moon into a
sustainable future. In the
balance, I have little doubt, is the
survival of civilization." - Don Malvin
"America requires
8.9 million barrels of oil a
day to fuel its vehicles. Replacing our cars
with prize-winning vehicles would reduce consumption to about 1.8 million barrels
a day. It would also slash
carbon dioxide emissions. It is
critical to American national interests to
reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
The growth of the Chinese and Indian economies
increases global demand for oil. Our
economic lifeblood must be immunized against
the dictates of a global petroleum
cartel. We must not allow our potential energy vulnerability to become our
Achilles heel. The challenge before us transcends traditional
ideological barriers." - Dan Lungren
the comparative theory of
superpower collapse"If there is one thing that I would like to
claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse.
For now, it remains just a theory,
although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested.
The
theory states that the United States and the
Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and
chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that black magic
addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade
deficit, a runaway military
budget, and ballooning foreign debt.
I call this particular list of
ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup."
Other factors, such as the
inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or
a systemically corrupt political system incapable of
reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to
collapse, because they do not put the country on
a collision course with reality.
I've been working on this theory since
about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US
is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. I grew up in Russia, and
moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I
understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian
can. I went through high school and university in the US. I had careers in
several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I also
have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and
idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still
seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the
economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went
back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet
collapse first-hand.
By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American
Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for
world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually
leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins,
a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries
between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention,
and they have been growing more obvious ever since.
It is the
asymmetries, the differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be
most instructive.
When the Soviet system went away, many people lost
their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for
months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food,
gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and
violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse.
Many aspects of the
Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse,
many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such
that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could
survive even without an income.
The Soviet economic system failed to
thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing
a worker's paradise on Earth was, in the
end, a failure. As a side effect Soviet economic system inadvertently achieved
a high level of collapse-preparedness.
There is a wealth of useful
information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which
we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new
living arrangement here in the United States - one that is more likely to be
survivable.
The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice
such ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory,
getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing
Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the
foreign policy wonks coined the term "hyperpower" and were jabbering on about
full-spectrum dominance.
Professor Fukuyama told us that
history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese
made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when
these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping
houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really
just useless bits of ticky-tacky.
Alan Greenspan chided us about
"irrational exuberance" while consistently low-balling interest rates.
It was the "Goldilocks economy" - not
to hot, not too cold. Remember that?
And now it turns out that it was
actually more of a "Tinker-bell" economy, because the last five or so years of
economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt
pyramids, the "whole house of cards" as President Bush once referred to it
during one of his lucid moments.
While all of these silly things were
going on, I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of superpower
collapse to myself.
During that time, I was watching the action in the
oil industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles' heel of
the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was
scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things happened that
delayed it by at least half a decade.
People who try to predict big
historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful
predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as timing: the world
as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January 1, 2000.
Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at
the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known
universe.
What we need are examples of things that have been shown to
work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all
likely to have to confront. Although the term "best practices" has been diluted
over time to sometimes mean little more than "good ideas," initially it stood
for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has
worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control
risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It's a way of
skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to
just go with what works.
In organizations,
especially large organizations, "best practices" also offer a good way to avoid
painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to "think outside the box"
whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any
good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn't feel so compelled to
spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm.
If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now
thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel
happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different
box inside of which to think - a box better suited to the post-collapse
environment.
Here is the key insight: you might think that when
collapse happens, nothing works. That's just not the case. The old ways of
doing things don't work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated,
conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different
set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear
immediately, and the sooner the better.
Here is another key insight:
there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about
everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things
that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse
occurs, and vice versa. The situation is either slightly better than expected
or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from
economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some
television bobble-head said so.
Starting from the very general, what
are the current macroeconomic objectives?
First: Growth, of course!
Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in
commodity prices, so let's just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus,
a.k.a. printing money. Let's see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe
this time around we will achieve hyperinflation.
Second: Stabilizing
financial institutions: getting banks lending - that's important too. You see,
we are just not in enough debt yet, that's our problem. We need more debt, and
quickly!
Third: Jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course,
to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we've been shedding for decades
now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without
any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the
rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their
jobs.
If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt
expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then
I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at
macroeconomic straws even sillier.
Except that it won't be funny: what
is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions
that are keeping us alive.
And so I don't recommend passively standing
around and watching the show - unless you happen to have a death wish.
In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily
industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and
pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial
climate, the farmers' access to financing is not at all assured. This
agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as
free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit
of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being
embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system
makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds
of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it
takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be
stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance
of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food
sources once they are no longer able to drive.
Besides the supermarket
chains, much of the nation's nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of
fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less
fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is
all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to
the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.
Fast food outfits
such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more
resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they
are no substitute for food security, because they too depend on industrial
agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically
modified foods, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and
so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as
fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer,
supplying food-that-isn't-really-food, but eventually they will run out of
inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a
time sell burgers that aren't really burgers, like the bread that wasn't really
bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi
blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.
Start breeding donkeys! Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys
can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a
donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II.
There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist
Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party
newspaper, and so that's what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest
any kind of cellulose, even when it's loaded with communist propaganda. If I
had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.
As
municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the
police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on
a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down,
soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into
civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same
predicament. And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former
prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent
tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of
armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic.
The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose
all touch with people who are not "on the force" and most of them develop an
us-versus-them mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often
suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a
variety of psychological ailments as well.
All of them will sooner or
later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political.
This will make it impossible for society to
continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use
of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever
they need to survive.
Right now, security is provided by a number of
bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual
institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and
dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why
we have the world's highest prison population.
They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality
their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and
those who own it.
Once these bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual
institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but
in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face,
and Justice will once again become
a personal virtue rather than a federal
department.
There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are
on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path
is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare
ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our
needs. By refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of
adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to
others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist." - Dmitry Orlov
February 14, 2009
See
Silas Marner
See
Thabo Mbeki
See Economics
See The
Corruption of the American Dream
See The
Subversion of American Democracy |
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