John Thackara
Notes headed with the chapter they come from.
On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5
Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10
One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11
The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12
ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13
A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15
Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?
TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”
- Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
- Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
- Use more people and less matter. 16
…five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17
It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22
We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23
The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25
Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26
Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26
The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32
the age of acceleration
The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33
Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33
The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35
Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49
Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55
“There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63
“[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.
“Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72
A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76
“Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77
A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86
Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103
Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111
The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114
“When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117
Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135
We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137
Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143
Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162
The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171
Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180
How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183
We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191
Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195
The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198
China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201
“partial solutions, continually produced” 214
“We are all designers now” 226
Here’s an impressive documentary on Mike Reynolds, progenitor of the Earthship concept. 30 or so years ago he started to build houses out of trash: first tin cans mixed with natural cement, then incorporating tires and bottles. His keystone idea was that of a completely self–sufficient home. Harvesting rainwater off the roof, coupled with what’s come to be known as passive–solar to keep the place warm, small–scale electricity generation, and gardening for food. This kind of house covers all your bases. I’ve seen bits about earthships here and there (I’ve always taken an interest in the more marginalized forms of architecture), but learning more about these really fascinates me.
It’s the perfect blending of home and environment, wrapping you in a microclimate that bends natural processes to your will instead of opposing them. I found a clip of Reynolds on Colbert’s Show, and he said something along the lines of: “we pick banana trees in the middle of winter grown with our own raw sewage.” This isn’t quite true—it’s grey–water that flows through the planters with the banana trees, so not quite sewage—but that’s semantic. Colbert was baffled, his eyes doubled in size, about 5 seconds later he regained his composure and ended the interview with one of his quips. But that about sums it up for me. I’ve always wanted to build up my own place out in the woods, and when I do I’ll be hard pressed not to try out one of these.
— Garbage Warrior, by Oliver Hodge (torrent)
— Reynolds’s Organization
— Here’s a beautiful and recent Earthship being put up by Reynolds and his crew in Nicaragua
— A pretty decent 7–minute feature from the Weather Channel
— An equally long feature on an earthship in Normandy (in french)
Reynolds used to be an architect, but his state liscense was revoked in the 90s. He’s recently had it given back, but fuck that, he calls himself a biotect now.
Naomi Klein
Really a harrowing book from Naomi Klein. Follows the ideas of torture as they evolved scientifically, and melded with the economic theories of Milton Friedman to inspire a new way to run a country: that of corporatism. The first place these ideas took hold was in South America, when the CIA funded multiple coups d‘état and established military juntas supplied with Friedmanite economists (The and los Chicago Boys). This system was for some odd reason lauded by the West, and the systematic torture used to pacify those living in these countries was somehow seen as separate from the economic policies, when the economics were really the cause of the dissent that caused unheeded violence.
The system spread to all over the world, until it was ensconced in the Western canon of developing all Third World countries, as the IMF and World Bank. Systems were put in place whereby any country needing emergency loans from the IMF could only get the money they needed to forestall complete and disastrous economic collapse by parcelling up all different aspects of their nation (water, electricity, industry) and selling it off to multinational corporations. Which led to the same things that happened in Latin America in the 70s.
Now, under George W. Bush, this radical doctrine of privatization has taken hold on the US government. The war in Iraq has been fought by mercenaries and contractors just as much as by troops. FEMA doesn’t actually have any responsibility for dealing with disaster, it’s just an organization to arrange contractors around whatever happens to be the disaster du jour.
This book really damns the Western economic systems that have taken power over the past 50 years. The financial system, multinational corporations, governments, Aid organizations (even NGOs) have all had their part to play in the dismantling of countless struggling nations, only to benefit a clique of super–rich governmental and corporate tycoons. An awfully depressing read, but thankfully it looks like things might be getting better: the US seems on the verge of economic collapse, developing nations almost universally now scorn the establishments of the IMF and World Bank. They’re looking back to where they were before this plague of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism overtook them: developmentalism as opposed to “barbarian capitalism.” Good luck to them, here are my notes.
This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective bodhy politic as well as on countless individual bodies. 18
Ewan Cameron ran a research program funded by the CIA at a canadian university in which he pioneered the idea of shock therapy—that by dramatically altering someone’s environment and submitting them to excessive shock of various forms, they could be brought to a state of mental infancy, from whence they could then be rebuilt into functioning citizens.
Like pro–war hawks who call for the bombing of countries “back to the stone age,” Cameron saw shock therapy as a means to blast his patients back into their infancy, to regress them completely. 32
The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative1, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci–fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. 38
1 When the program came to light in a class–action lawsuit by patients of Cameron against the CIA, the media sensationalized the fact that LSD was administered. They forgot to mention the rest of Cameron’s program.
Jose Padilla:
Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Instead of being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all tights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was infected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.
[…] The Cameron–style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.” The Bush–appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fir to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.–run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the accountability of a civillian trial. 44
———
Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn 50
———
Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed. 55
And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong–headed but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi–academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations, but, in short order, spawned the global network of right–wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers world–wide. 56
———
Suharto then send out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated. 67
Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all–out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth. 86
All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. THere is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide–eyed knowing and eyes–closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did no know what nobody could deny.” 91
The Latin American operation was modeled on Hitler’s “Night and Fog.” In 1941, Hitler decreed that resistance fighters in Nazi–occupied countries would be brought to Germany to “vanish in the night and fog.” Several high–profile Nazis took refuge in Chile and Argentina, and there is some speculation that they may have trained the Southern Cone intelligence agencies in these tactics. 91
———
Rodolfo Walsh, a gregarious renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award–winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion. 94
The letter [Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta] begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery… You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours ro check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.” 95
The day after writing the letter, on a trip to Buenos Aries to distribute copies around to dissidents was ambushed by 10 soldiers at a supposed meeting to discuss a disappeared colleague.
Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river. 96
The leaders of the government had explicitly called for Walsh to be captured alive.
———
To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it a “war for freedom and against tyranny… a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life… We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise themselves with social crusades.” 96
Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands ad the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people. 102
———
“the only transcendental theology: solidarity” —Osvaldo Bayer 112
———
In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery. “It was as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered up the economic program,” Acuna told me. 125
To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all pervasive system. Simone de Beauvoir, 126
Foreign monopolies impose crops on us, they impose chemicals that pollute our earth, impose technology and ideology. All this through the oligarchy which owns the land and controls the politics. But we must remember—the oligarchy is also controlled, by the very same monopolies, the very same Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. It’s the structure we have to change. This is what I have come to denounce. That’s all. Sergio Tomasella, 127
———
The Falklands War, described by Jose Luis Borges: “a fight between two bald men over a comb.” 137
This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self–reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export–oriented economies, the more crisis–prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of melt–downs he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. 159
That meant that when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions [The World Bank and the IMF] for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. 163
The principle was simple: countries in crisis desperately need emergency aid to stabilize their currencies. When privatization and free–trade policies are packaged together with a financial bailout, countries have little choice but to accept the whole package. The really clever part was that economists themselves knew that free–trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly “obfuscated.” […] “no significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis.” 165
In other words: “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”
———
…not only did the ANC renege on Mandela’s original pledge of “the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry” but because of the debt [racked up by the pro–apartheid white government], it was doing the opposite—selling off national assets to make food in the debts of its oppressors. 212
In the end, South Africa has ended up witha twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise money for this generosity? By stripping the states of its assets through privatization—a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when t agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets, and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue today. 213
After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results are scandalous:
- Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
- Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
- Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.
215
Russia and Poland got the same shit deal South Africa did.
Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago–style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. 228
But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile—it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the west. 229
The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth—it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money. As the Moscow Times journalist Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein put it, “a few hand–picked men took over Russia’s state–developed oil fields for free, as part of a giant shell game in which one arm of government paid another arm.” […] In other words, the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country. 233
…quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick–start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia’s Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia’s institutions. 241
———
Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medecine to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… THe blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the entire world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name. Davison Budhoo, 261
In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more tnat the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming–in–pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”
After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results to the country. 262
In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won. With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMG was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 270
(Before the IMF’s demands, two of the candidates had run openly anti–IMF campaigns.)
———
When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty–first century—turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before. 284
From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash–in–the–pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture. 301
What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand–wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end. 306
“Ch 15: A corporatist state—removing the revolving door, putting in an archway.”
It’s hard to believe—but then again, that was pretty much Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks. 339
In other words, the U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage—there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti–state counterrevolution—a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.
I don’t quite know what that last clause means either. But the court decision referenced was that in which Custer Battles—a contractor accused of blatant fraudulent activities in Iraq—appealed and won on the grounds that the CPA was in fact not a government at all, that Iraq was in fact outside of US law (under which the initial verdict was reached), as well as outside whatever Iraqi system of governance was being put into place.
———
Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and f that government had real power, Washing would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. […] Within his first six months in the job, he [Paul Bremer] had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.. 364
In the first three and a half years of occupation, and estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth–baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical current running from live wires. 366
That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction. 364
It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900–a–day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead. 375
In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government. 377
The law passed. But not at first, when people were paying attention: it wasn’t rammed through until the insurgency and surge started to cause so much violence that Iraqis had better things to worry about then legislation.
———
It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and other like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami—it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arguam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumary said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.” 389
“Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests.” 399
Almost everyone I met commented on what one preist called “the NGO wild life”: high–end hotels, beachfront villas, and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand–new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the CHildren—as if they were visitors from a far–off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation, they were rolling microclimates. 403
———
Blackwater has a 600 acre, $40-$50 million dollar compound in North Carolina. 416
When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the hob to one of its major contractors, MPRI—it no longer had the know–how in–house. 417
Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. 418
No Conspiracies Required:
The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous [than the current american conspiracies]. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short–term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis–creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot–com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower–intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). 426
———
The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas [Developmentalism] were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled over by Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s, and Deng Xiaoping’s tanks. At other times, they were simply betrayed through what John Williamson called “voodoo politics.” […] It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place. 451
“barbarian capitalism” —Daniel Ortega 452
In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea of change in only two years. 457
In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred
Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.
I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.
The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.
And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.
Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?
I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.
Alan Weisman
A treatise on the environment, looking towards what it would become if humans suddenly vanished. With all kinds of interesting material, most of it damning our society’s penchant for unforeseen destruction, but elegies where they’re due to what good we have done, followed by how things might change with us out of the equation.
Recorded history from civilization’s Fertile Crescent beginnings to the present day has taken barely more than 1/100th of the time that our ancestors lived in this one spot [northern africa], grubbing plants and heaving sharpened stones at animals. There must have been a lot of prey to feed a growing predator population with awakening technological skill. Olorgesailie is cluttered with femurs and tibia, many smashed for their marrow. The quentities of stone tools surrounding the impressive remains of an elephant, a hippo, and an entire flock of baboons, suggest that the entire hominid community teamed up to kill, dismember, and devour their quarry. 69
Varosha) is a city on the island of Cyprus, uninhabited since the mid seventies. I really want to go there. It was a big tourist town until Turkey invaded Cyprus and stirred up a whole bunch of shit. It’s to be reopened for tourism by Turkey (in the view of the UN, stil illegitimate invaders) in 2010; but where’s the fun in that. I want to jump a fence and go there now. I’d probably get shot by the Turkish military, who’ve cordoned the area and seriously restricted access. 96
In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shipping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores – an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above. 105
no one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people — and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough to walk three abreast, connects to another underground city six miles away. 108
Nobody [knew how much plastic was in the ocean], because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. [Richard Thompson’s] team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them. 116
“Think of it this way. Suppose all human activity ceased tomorrow, and suddenly there’s no one to produce plastic anymore. Just from what’s already present, given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. THousands of years, possibly. Or more.” 118
So a million years from now, some organism will evolve the ability to gorge on plastic. Most of it will have settled somewhere, from tides or wind currents, so there will be large collections of the stuff. It’ll propel whatever organism to great things for a hundred or so years, until they realize that pretty soon the plastic is running out, and they start worrying and fighting each other for control of what’s left. Kind of like us with oil. Hopefully these organisms can at least break the plastic into something organic, and not leave piles of all kinds of waste shit covering the earth, swirling in the oceans, and clogging up the air.
In this age of deepening drought and rising temperatures, ski lift operators who, the Indians claim, defile sacred ground with their clanking machines and lucre, are being sued anew. Their latest desecration is making artificial snow for their ski runs from wastewater, which the Indians liken to bathing the face of God in shit. 120
In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface. In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much. 123
By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. […] Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization coudl convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore? 125
“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” 126
(Municipal sludge, since 1990 deemed too toxic to dump into the North Sea, is instead spread as fertilizer on European farmlands—except in Holland. Since the 1990s, the Netherlands has not only offered incentives that practically equate organic farming with patriotism, bit has also struggled to convince its EU partners that everything applied to the land ends up in the sea anyway.) 156
Mount Rushmore, carved into fine-grained pre-cambrian granite, rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, is gonna be around for awhile. 7.2 million years without an asteroid hitting it or something incredibly catastrophic. 181
The DMZ, as it is called even in Kore, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. 185
When the Korean war ended and the two countries split. Nobody lives there, or even goes there. An ecological dreamland.
The Passanger Pigeon, like the Chestnut tree, speaks to humanity’s tremendous power to wipe shit off the face of the earth. “It’s flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. (192)”
They only lived in north america, and they were all killed by modern americans. Gone by 1914.
By studying its [the Bobolink’s] eyes and brains, bird physiologist RObery Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses – particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum – purples, blues, and greens, – apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented. 194
Which gives us millions of birds lured towards large electrical and phone towers, marked with red lights by law to keep airplanes from flying into them, and killed. In north america and europe since 1975, the numbers of some migratory bird species have fallen by 2/3. 196 This isn’t the only way birds die. Hundreds of millions die yearly.
If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. 213
That is unfortunate [that the nuclear meltdown wouldn’t burn straight into the core of the earth], because deep self-internment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull, metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it – and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely. 214
After Chernobyl, “an entire pine forest died within days of the blast, and couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal (215)”.
…at Dos Pilas [a Mayan city], one victim was tightly rolled and bound, and then used for a game on the ceremonial ball court until his back was broken. 226
If we all bought into the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planed as close as possible to the garden of Eden (243).”
Bronze, a metal that doesn’t decay, makes a damn good statue. There are longs of ancient bronze statues for us to look back at.
Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for waeapons. “nintey-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. 247
Yet the biggest elephant o all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. […] The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on eEarth capable of bearing children to one.
If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, we’ll reach 9 billion.)
By 2075 we’d be half, and by 2100 we’d be down to 1.6 billion. back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril.
272
Just one benchmark for how drastically the world has changed in the past 100 years:
until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph, all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day. 274
Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; and consider, too, how carefully intertwined are the threads woven together to construct this fabric, how dense is this celestial weave!
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations
I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).
Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.
Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.
These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.
But now I have to get serious, and how do you get serious, you make a powerpoint, you know. Homage to the office package.
Hans Rosling, New insights on poverty and life around the world
(It’s a talk about global levels of poverty/development/whateveryoucallit. Watch to the very end, tremendous.)
The automobile works honestly. Long before its birth, when it is still just layers of metal and piles of drawings, it diligently murders Malayan coolies and Mexican laborers. It is born in agony! It shreds flesh, blinds eyes, eats lungs, destroys minds. At last, it rolls out of the gates into the world which, before its existence, was known as “bright.” Instantly, it deprives its supposed owner of his old-fashioned peace of mind. Lilac withers, chickens and dreamers dash away in terror. The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning, it flies down a slope. It can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: It is destined to wipe out the world.
A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.
I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?
For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17
Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.
Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28
If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32
Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.
By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.
By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137
Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.
1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:
Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.
To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144
What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150
...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155
I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.
While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193
Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”
The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196
Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197
...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198
The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202
It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]
...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.
And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.
To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew
Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241
Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything
. 268
Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286
We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290
He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (one cool guy) on the idea of the Big Here and Long Now. How we need to look at things with a 10,000 year perspective as opposed to the me, me, me; now, now, now that we’ve gotten used to. Thinking about the world not just as we’ll leave it to our children or their children, but 100 generations from now might just make us think twice about burning up a beautiful woodland for suburban tract housing, etc. The Long Now Foundation.
The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. 9, Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems
So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. 73
The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. 75
Bill Cosby says that in college he ran into the question, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” He took the question home, and his father told him, “It depends if you’re pouring or if you’re drinking.” 109
Governance itself is being rethought. “The proper role of government in capitalistic societies in an era of man-made brain power industries,” writes the economist Lester Thurow, “is to represent the interest of the future to the present.” Commerce has too short a time horizon to take the larger future seriously, therefore governance must do it. 122
Stairways to nothing. Stairways to everything?
Invade Venezuela.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.
How many people have died at the hands of poverty today?
Amazing images of earth from NASA.
I do love, but overwhelmingly hate, monkeys.
Our society is a program running under the operating space of earth, and it’s always had a memory leak. We’re leaving cycles open; allocating resources and never returning them to the pool. We’ve already taken all the RAM; for the past 300 years we’ve been eating more and more virtual memory. We’re finally getting to the point where there isn’t any more disk space to spool out. We’ve got to figure out our garbage collection, or the server running humanity and everything else will come tumbling to its knees.
There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained.
I’m getting the vibe that human industry is more harmful to nature then a nuclear meltdown. Ugh.
I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers. James Lovelock
Essay from Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael. Which if you haven’t read, you need to.
The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is not that the human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.
Nothing less than that is going to save us.
If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won’t be any people here in 200 years.
I can make another prediction with confidence. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won’t be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with equal confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they’ll go on living the way we do—and there won’t be any people here in 200 years.
Humans don’t belong to an order of being separate from everything else.
We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.
We’re systematically destroying the biodiversity of the living community to support ourselves, which is to say that we’re systematically destroying the infrastructure that is keeping us alive.
we’ve already screwed up pretty badly, and much of the evidence seems to suggest that no matter what we do now, we’ve already committed ourselves to profound climate change, species loss and ecosystem degradation. We can still head off the worst of it, but we can’t avoid big problems now. We’ve bought the ticket, and we’re going to take the ride.
we as a culture need to serve an apprenticeship with nature, and we need to do it now. We don’t know much about the world, really. We’re learning quickly, but ecological knowledge is an ocean, and we’ve only just left the shore.
My take? Humans are disillusioned and foolish. Assume that the body of human knowledge today is an atom. What humans don’t yet know amounts to the infinity of the entire universe. But don’t let my cynicism get to you.
What the world looks like from space, right now.
I was looking around for a good graph of this the other week, and never found one. This one is nice.
Sacrilege.
America just rounding error
compare to China
We barnyard buffalo
you runt pig
with no formal access
to prosperity tit
Ha Ha Ha
Maybe america
go get job at wendy
Oh Oh OhIn america
everybody gossip
because CEO government
give all business to china
Ha Ha Ha America
Why you so dumb?China no use abacus
use function graphing calculator
plot time-money amortization curve
America only know how to plot
shortest drive to wendyAny luck killing fear?
Maybe bomb anxiety first
then work way up to fear
China is already rubbing it in our face how bad they’re kicking our asses.
Daniel Quinn
You ought to go and read this book right now. There’s a summary on Wikipedia, I’d recommend it. But I have a few snips to make you read through.
The sense that something is very wrong with a certain style of living 11, or that something big is being kept from you. where, coming from the guy, 45 I get it all the time, I’ve also always wanted to find a teacher like Ishmael.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. Ishmael, 25
having impure thoughts about saving the world... Narrator, 28
Takers thought that the world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. 71
In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. Narrator, 75
The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he’s always screwed it up, because he’s fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn’t – and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he’s probably just going to go on screwing it up. Ishmael, 89
Takers explanation for why things are going badly in the world: something is fundamentally wrong with people. Yet Leavers lived in concert with nature for three million years before the Takers branched off ten thousand years ago. 118
The agricultural revolution sparked by the first Takers, is the manifesto on which the entire Taker society is based, as it was then, and as it will be until the Takers die off. 153
I need to read the Bible.
Quinn posits that parts of of the old testament are Leaver mythology, concerning the Takers.
Adam and Eve (Adam meaning Earth or Man; Eve meaning Life or Woman) in The Fall of Man, god casts the Takers from his kingdom with a vengeance. The Takers, having eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, now are able to decide who lives (themselves) and who dies (anything preventing them from living). Adam said yes to Life, and began to grow without limit. 180-81
Cain and Abel represent the Takers and Leavers, Abel a shepherd, Cain a farmer. God favors Abel, yet Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to have to wander the earth the rest of his life. Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they rapidly proliferate, moving south, and killing herders and gathers. 173
Even though the story of Adam and Eve made so little sense to us Takers (because it is Leaver mythology, demonizing the Takers), it’s a big deal because we directly identify with Adam: he is us. 184
There’s nothing in the past for [Leavers]. The past is dreck. The past is something to escape from, something to be escaped from. Narrator, 210
Whereas the Leavers infallibly have a rich connection back to the beginning of the earth – their method of living has evolved through thousands of generations stretching back millions of years. None of the Leavers just invented their cultures, the Takers did.
And now the Takers have all but abolished that Leaver wisdom. 205-7
Taker culture sees Leavers leading an incredibly grim life, but they actually really don’t. 220
Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, “Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air, They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?” In [Taker] culture, the overwhelming answer to that is, Hell no! Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering in barns. Narrator, 228
The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers those who live in the hands of the Gods. 229
Takers assume that they are the pinnacle of the world, the best that it gets. It’s inherent in their culture – the earth was made by the gods in their name.
The Takers jumped out of the hand of the gods – they’ve eschewed the evolution that ruled all species and ushered the Takers to the point at which they jumped off the wagon.
They’ve removed the need for natural selection by deciding they knew what was right and what was wrong. They don’t need to adapt to their surroundings, they force their surroundings to adapt to their needs. 239
Takers: the world belongs to man; Leavers: man belongs to the world. 239
Yet the world does not belong to man, the takers have always been right.
[Man’s] destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt – or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But it’s more then that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent. By giving all the rest their change – the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons – he becomes in some sense their progenitor… Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. Narrator, 242
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
We’re fucked. And yet could Kunstler be any less optimistic?
Opens june 9th.
The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.
And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.
Amazing flattened image of the globe. Taken 2004.
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion
If China isn’t ready to take over the world yet, I’d say your second best bet is google.
America is less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered.
Or: we all are fucked.
This final stage is described as “definitive victory.” Hussein writes that in the terrorists’ eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the “one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn’t last longer than two years.
Supposedly the terrorists goal is to consolidate the muslim world into it’s own Islamic caliphate. Think the USSR, but this time with radical islam instead of communism, and five times the population (USSR 293mil 1991, vs 1.5bil speculated in this article). And then fight the west.
Quicktime VR Panorama of hundreds of world heritage sites.
Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.
Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming.
Stunning column on how fucked the planet is getting. And society. Are we doing anything right these days?
The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every cal
