This Time “We” Are The Indians

This was written in 2010; it seems even more relevant today.

I have read many essays and papers looking for either that one essay filled with explanation, solution and hope or a constellation of essays and papers capable of compilation into those same virtues.  There are many that nibble at the edges, but not one that is the Salk vaccine for our systemic polio.  I know that there are hundreds of pure geniuses and thousands of really smart motivated people trying to answer the questions of our time, as well as trying to produce prescriptions for present and future actions.

If all this effort could be brought together, it should be possible to design a plan for how to effectively address the major, and even minor, issues of our time.  Unless… unless we, the Great Many, are not what matter, but are more and more in the way of the future, in the way of ‘manifest destiny’ as seen by the plutocrats and oligarchs who increasingly rule this nation and world.  We would be then the “aboriginal Americans” and our issues, our troubles would be being delivered by the corporate invaders.  We seek solutions, but as in the conflict of the Indians and European settlers, what was good for the settlers was definitely not good for the Indians and vice versa.  There was just no way to compromise the clash of ‘realities.’  That is more and more seeming to be the true design of our present difficulties: there is not a compromise position waiting as yet undiscovered, no solution that is eluding us.

Ultimately, the invaders took what they wanted. The Indians were given no satisfactory option; their last big push at solution to their dilemma was the Ghost Dance, a pure fantasy Indian fundamentalism based on the insanity that the invaders could be disappeared if ‘the people’ only acted correctly: the victims having only the power to use their helplessness, and so tried to remake the helplessness into a source of power.  And we have seen what happens when we use our helplessness alone to stand against the press of mad power.

The present situation is, however, not at all the same in all ways. Even if the Great Many are to be the Indians and the people suckling on the Corporate Oligarchy are the Europeans (or the Borg of Star Trek), and it certainly is looking like that is the model, the only way for it to work is for the Great Many to believe that they are helpless.  The Indians didn’t believed themselves helpless, even when ultimately they were.  We often believe ourselves helpless when ultimately we are not!

I have no way of knowing (which is its own issue) whether the symphony of events making up the social presentation of life and “culture” comes from some coordinated plan or is just the economic process run amok, but it is clear that the flood of information into and onto the Great Many is: largely untrue, fear producing, emotionally addictive, power draining, action stopping and, did I say, untrue.  A most flagrant example, clearly tipping the oligarchic hand for those able to listen, was the admonition to “go shopping” after the 9/11/2001 incidents.  The (slightly) more subtle, “this changes everything,” really meant; ‘This makes it possible to be more open about the invasions and evasions of public rights and responsibilities that have been in progress for sometime.’

If we are to be the Indians, then we have to believe ourselves small and helpless, otherwise our great numbers and the fact that it is the Great Many that makes the whole thing go could at any moment overwhelm the corporate oligarchy.  Think about it; what is the message from the media? Is it that each and everyone is powerful? Or is it that you will be crushed by the economy if you don’t have a credit score in the 700s?  Is it that you should organize with like-minded people to live a fully satisfying life? Or is it that there are serial killers on every other street, gangs rule the neighborhoods, be afraid?  Is it to use your resources wisely and live for the human and community pleasures of life? Or is it that ‘success’ is money, possessions and uncommitted sex with a hot bod, regardless of how you get them?  And all attainable only by full admission and commitment to the individualist and materialist religion.

Another message is that the oligarchs are really us, that we have the same interests and that ‘we’ are to aspire to be ‘them.’  And since we have the same interests ‘we’, who are not them, should do what is good for the ‘we’, who are them. This is, of course, madness.  If we are the same, then why are we to aspire to be them.  Why would all of the variety of the Great Many want to live the narrow description of the corporate princelings?

But as I said, our present situation is not a few disorganized, weakly armed, bands of ‘us’ facing the ‘white eyes’ who are like the stars of the sky.’  There are about 300 million of ‘us’ and a few million of ‘them,’ the oligarchs.  We are the stars of the sky.  We also actually control everything.  Rest assured that all but the most disinterested of the oligarchs know that (or rest disturbed!). 

What we are, however, is disorganized: we have the wealth collectively, we have the numbers, we have the real levers of action; we do not have the education, we do not have the organization, we do not have the leadership and we lack many of the intermediate tools of organization, control and coercion.  By this I mean that we don’t control police functions or many economic tools, our main power is the withholding of our support for the present order.  If we do this individually, the effect is insignificant; done in large numbers the effect is devastatingly powerful.

The Indians did not have this option, even though sometimes they tried to use it by refusing to be part of the reservation system, and so were simply allowed, in many cases, to die in foodless winter camps hounded by the army and the settlers; or were hunted down and killed in major and minor massacres.  If the Great Many could decide to hold a general strike, it would not be like a few starving Indians refusing to be driven onto a reservation and easily ignored. 

What would be required for the Great Many to regain control of their lives and destinies? That is what is at stake.  That is what is missing.  We would need what we do not have: knowledge of our real power, organization, leadership, some intermediate forms of power (mainly through organization that could use our collected wealth), a single important focusing common interest and the communication and courage to use our ultimate weapon: the in-mass refusal to give our support to the oligarchy.

The oligarchy has come to believe that the amassing of wealth and the manifestations of power seen in actions of those subordinate to them give them the advantages of the conqueror.  We can see this displayed more and more everyday as it becomes increasingly impossible to hide flagrant assumptions and abuses of power:  the granting of nearly unlimited personhood to corporations, the willful violation of antitrust laws in corporate mergers, the direct writing of legislation by the corporations intended to be regulated by those same laws, the seamless movement of members of the oligarchy between corporations and government, the obvious and unchallenged lying (obvious to those who read and remember) of just about everyone in power, the clear “ownership” of political leaders by corporate interests and on and on we could go [1].

The oligarchs are only in control because the Great Many have been doing as they are told, and believing what they are told.  While I can find no rule in physics or psychology to support it, it seems to me that people will eventually reject identifiable lying even if there is nothing else to take its place. The people of the Soviet Union, in large numbers, came to understand that nothing they were told could be believed. This is both empowering and disempowering: empowering since it is not the lie that is acted on, but disempowering because the information necessary for action is not clear.  As the Russian people became more and more demoralized, the Soviet Union became weaker and weaker – a hollow shell and eventually the international criminal enterprise it is today [2]. 

This is the direction in which the US is heading.  While some might say that we are already there, I don’t think so quite yet, though we are close.  If the population becomes less educated and less critical in their collective thinking, if laws and rules are passed and enforced that further limit popular organization and expression (the de facto impossibility of third parties, for example), we will be left with only the general refusal to give our work and skills to the corporate state as a means of expression.

There are many people who believe in God and Country, who have been conned into rooting for the home team, people who are being fooled by wedge issue strategies.  Others continue to believe that they are just one lucky move away from becoming a junior associate princeling themselves.  Still others would rather ‘go along to get along,’ ‘watching their Ps and Qs’ and generally clichéing their ‘making no waves’ way of life through life.  As the dishonesty becomes unavoidable, confidence is shattered – like the standing buildings after a big earthquake, there is serious structural damage.

Whether the Great We realizes in time, that we must restore the oligarchs to their true role as our servants, will decide our fate.  There is no question that they will not give up the status of princeling without a fight.  All the complexity really does come down to the Indians (the people) versus the settlers (the oligarchs), but this time the people have all the power if they but realize it.  Had the Indians been able, in the beginning, to organize the many different tribes, the invaders could have been pushed into the sea.  But they were divided by many competing interests.  In most cases the invaders’ numbers were bolstered by members of competing tribes; but having no loyalties, the invaders would then turn on their previous supporters using new helpers bought by some new disingenuous promise.  This proceeded until the invaders had the power to frontally overwhelm all who rose against them.

Piecemeal controls have lost their possibility; the oligarchs too entrenched.  Only a general strike can put the elites in their place and make clear who holds the ultimate power.  And that tool is within our power.  If we are lucky and have the right leaders, such a strike, properly followed up with political action, could reset the clock on the entropy of our democratic system; though it could also speed us along on our way to a criminal state.  But, doing nothing will guarantee a victory for the corporate invaders and our enslavement on the national reservation that was also once our own land.

  

[1] Violation of Constitutional war powers of congress, bribery of public officials by lobbyists, ignoring clearly demonstrated public will in favor of corporate interests, supporting and profiting from the actual extortion and theft of public moneys in the various “bank bailouts,” executive branch threatening of independent agencies (especially in the Bush administration), weakening of usury and bankruptcy laws, removal of consumer and environmental protections, war crimes that violate both our own and international law and again this could go on and on.

[2] A national state-established criminal organization is one that exists for its own maintenance and parasitizes the captive population; there are and have been many such states.

Looking at a Lifestyle 4: population

“Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”

Jacques Cousteau

“If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature and without pity – and will leave a ravaged world.”

Henry Kendall, Nobel Laureate in Physics

“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

Thomas Malthus

The issue of human population (fundamentally, the only real issue when you think about it) is absolutely clear; it shouldn’t be necessary to explain why our thousand-fold increases in the last few millennia are the forces behind essentially all of our ‘human’ concerns and dilemmas, including the increases of technological discoveries and implementations, both ‘chicken and egg’ to population growth. But while we know that populations have grown to…really beyond…dangerous levels, there is still a lack of clarity as to how to respond. Here are, broadly , the two different views of how populations will, and need to, change over this century.

One view is that there is a ‘natural’ demographic process that will reduce population. This process is thought to be seen in the lowered population growth rates over the last half century.  While population is continuing to markedly increase, the percentage increases have been getting smaller, with the projection that the growth rate will go to zero between 2080 and 2100 at a population of between 9 and 12 billion depending on a number of factors; at which point the population will gradually get smaller. The implicit assumption is that by some ‘invisible hand process’, based in civilization, education, shifts in human understanding and values, human population will reduce and stabilize.

Which leads to the second argument, which data and reason increasingly favors, that the present population is at least twice (and more likely 4 to 8 times) sustainable levels; that there is near certainty that the result of present and future increases will be cascading waves of environmental, economic, social and political failures in the next few decades, long before any meaningful reductions will be seen from the ‘natural demographic’ process. Further, that so-called natural demographic changes are far from natural which can be seen in the human population growth process of the last several thousand years.

Population change is simplicity itself: increase birth rate while decreasing death rate and population numbers increase (we have been doing this for thousands of years); decrease birth rate and increase death rate and population numbers decrease.  But, after that bit of simplicity there are few parts of human life more fraught with issues of sober practicality and issues of subjective, fanciful and fanatical belief… and the very essence of biological motive.

But there is a fundamental and terrible difference between birth rate and death rate: one involves bringing or not bringing something into existence and the other involves removing something from existence, though this distinction gets muddied in human societies by biology and the political uses of belief. First, a cold-eyed look at birth rates.

Birth rates: Human females typically produce one child at a time and, very often, give that child 2 or more years of attention before becoming pregnant again. If a large percentage of women were empowered and educated to their capacity to control fecundancy, and if, especially, they limited themselves, on average, to one child, the most basic element of birth rate reduction would be met. There are a number of conditions that would support this general goal: 

Generally passive conditions:

• Improved broad-based education of, especially, females.

• Social expectations for the age of first pregnancy to correspond with true emotional maturity.

• Widely available and social approval of contraceptive methods for females and males.

• Unlimited access to abortion services.

• Clear routes for economic independence for females.

• Social structures empowering females to fundamental human equality.

Generally active (coercive) methods;

• Reducing the number of fertile females.

• Active social and legal prohibitions of reproduction.

• Economic penalties for having children.

• Forced sterilization of males and females.

If population numbers are to decline in meaningful timeframes, present birth rates need to be reduced well below replacement. This would be required, 1) given that timeframes are narrowing with each new discovery of our environmental impact, and 2) taking into account population (demographic) momentum (that absolute birth numbers continue to remain the same or increase as present populations of juvenile females reaching reproductive age increase for a generation or so). Worldwide birth rate average is presently 1.6 - 1.7% (1.6% increase in total population per year by numbers of births); a number which varies significantly by region and nation (1). These are the base figures that produce the BAU (Business As Usual) projections for population increases across the 21st century.

An in-depth analysis by the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), looking at, essentially, all reasonably possible non-catastrophic scenarios, makes clear that even with various stringent reductions in birth rate alone, meaningful population reduction over the coming century is unlikely to happen. Without uncommon action world population will continue to increase with the foreseeable consequences of, to put it bluntly, larger and larger numbers of people enduring greater deprivation and suffering as environmental systems fail and humans respond violently to the rapid loss of life sustaining conditions.

 

The PNAS analysis considered a variety of plausible scenarios: age ranges, unintended vs intended pregnancies, influence of demographic momentum, enforced birth limitations and others. What are called “realistic changes in rates” produce populations of over 9 billion in 2050 and 10.5 billion or more in 2100. “Draconian fertility reduction” in rates produced almost 9 billion in 2050 and about 7 billion in 2100.  A scenario of enforced worldwide ‘one child’ policy and “no increased survivability” over present levels resulted in a population of about 7.6 billion in 2050 and about 3.5 billion in 2100. A variety of projections between these extremes were obtained by minor ‘twinking’ of the scenarios in different ways.

 

One interesting finding was that even large acute catastrophic population reductions by typical pandemic disease or other significant acute conflagration were largely inconsequential to the major demographic movements of population change; such rapid short-term increases in death rates showed only brief population reductions while the percentage increases ‘soldier on’.

Death rate: The uncomfortable conclusion is that increasing of death rates will have to be looked at in the immediate future; The continued lowering of death rates is the major driver of population increases. Birth rates have been very slightly higher than death rates for a very long time, but as birth rates began to decline in the last century, death rates were dropping even faster, from approximately a 2% death rate in 1950 to less than a 1% death rate today. But, proposing death rate changes have many fraught ramifications throughout the society:

• The distribution of dying is spread disproportionately across age, ethnicity, class and other social divisions.

• There are many causes of death, both passive and active.

• A very large part of economic activity is directly dependent on maintaining the living, avoiding dying….and the living are completely dependent on economic activity.

• The living, the already existing, are often very reluctant to die and can offer great resistance in a wide variety of ways.

Today the total death rate worldwide is 0.7% to 0.8% per year (almost one person in every one hundred dies each year), though widely variable by region and nation. Again, this is the base beginning number for BAU calculations of population changes over the century.

Given the above bullet points, it is clear why most of the arguments and potential efforts of population reduction concern lowering birth rate; the only “change” that the PNAS report can offer about death rate is “no increase in survivability” across one of the scenarios: meaning that advancing medical options and other interventions would not be used to decrease the death rate. It should also be noted that focusing on birth rate places both the active and passive controls of population very largely onto females, whereas, societal actions to increase death rate would equally be a responsibility of males.

Historically, death rates have been ‘outsourced’ to environmental and ‘natural’ actions: diseases, accidents, starvation, conflicts, predation and, finally, aging out. Death rates over most of our history have varied from about 5% to 10% with corresponding birth rates closely tracking. But these ‘environmental actions’ have become increasingly, directly or indirectly, influenced by human actions.

 

The major human response to death rate has been to reduce it,,,at least within our own societies; such reductions are considered among our crowning achievements, but now that effort seems to be falling under the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ category. Without the worldwide developing of more realistic expectations about death, there is, increasingly, the likelihood that billions of people will be condemned to the most terrible suffering living things on this planet have ever experienced.

Estimates vary, but are all in the same direction: the earth can sustainably support somewhere less than 1 and no more than 4 billion people, with the strongest arguments centering on 1 to 2 billion…and we do not have unlimited time to get to those numbers. In fact, it seems that a combination of environmental degradation and the dangers that we represent to ourselves as we vie for advantage in a world of declining survivability, suggest that substantive changes must be made in the next few decades. Assuming that such projections have a high probability of being correct, it means that death rate will have to be increased; reducing birth rate alone in any responsible way will not be enough!

Someone is thinking about these numbers, we can be sure: if the death rate is, over the next decade, increased from 0.8% to 1.5% or 2.0% and the birth rate is reduced from 1.6% to about 1% and is maintained at these values, then world population will be about 7.5 billion in 2030, 6.5 billion in 2050 and 5.2 billion in 2080; this is assuming relatively benign world events over that period; major conflagrations involving WMD or high morbidity pandemics would change the projections.  With reducing populations and successful economic and social adaptations to the reductions, the world’s ecological systems and human systems would have a better chance of stabilizing at sustainable levels, though without certainty; even greater reductions in numbers and total human impact may be required.

I have built self-calculating spreadsheets for population change, of birth rates, of death rates organized by age, causes of death, income and other variables; have looked at death rates over the last several decades, at death rates of the world’s nations and regions….. No matter how the numbers are manipulated there is one conclusion: if the death rate is doubled from 0.8% to 1.6%, more than 60,000,000 people will die each year than would otherwise (a 0.8% death rate results in about 64,000,000 deaths per year with a population of 8 billion; doubling the death rate would double that number). Manipulating the numbers only distributes those additional deaths in different ways among different demographics. We could look at it this way: about 8 people in 1000 die per year now, 16 people in 1000 would die per year with the increase. The reason that the totals work out to be 60,000,000 more deaths is, of course, that there are so many of us now!

Cutting through the swamp of fantasy, fallacy and fearfulness of death, all the arguments of religion, morality, economics, politics and personal/individual rights…we are left with the simple biology/ecology imperative that death is part of a species’ adaptation to its ecosystem. It is fundamentally unworkable in any system of Reality to see death as a biological adaptation to be avoided at all costs. Just as a species has rates of renewal, it must have rates of removal appropriate to its relationship with its environment.

 

One reasonable summary of our present condition is that humans must die in greater numbers than it is in our capacity to prevent. There is a draconian sound to such a statement, but it actually presents us with no greater problem than many others that we already deal with: we distribute society’s wealth in ruinous ways, we assign selected demographics to die in wars and other dangers, we withhold medical and other ‘life saving’ interventions for a plethora of economic, social and practical reasons. It is not so much that practical methods to accomplish these changes are just unthinkably inhuman, simply can’t be done… Rather, our attitudes toward death and therefore life itself need changing; a not at all unthinkable proposal since these attitudes have often been, many times throughout history, very different than at present.

It is time for this discussion to be had, openly and honestly, in the public forum…along with a basket of other related vital existential issues.

Notes: (1) The birth rate/death rate data for the poorest countries is questionable; the data simply is not systematically collected. This is especially obvious in the death rate data from the low income nations, as defined by the World Bank. Reported death rates are not different from the rates in higher income countries even when social unrest, civil war and famine are clearly occurring.

A Hill Top on the Caja del Rio

(Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are proposing a major electrical power line to cross the Caja del Rio plateau. There are three primary concerns: one is the damage to a unique natural area (a concern which the proposal has only very weakly addressed and which is intended to have little influence in decisions); two, it is an area with great cultural significance to the surrounding indigenous people’s Pueblos; and three, violations of existing legally established use restrictions. Specifically rejected from consideration are the objections to the Nuclear Mission of LANL and the NNAS and the broader aesthetic and spiritual values of the place to humans generally. I wrote this in 2011 after an evening on the Caja; it is not unique to either my time on that land or to many others who go there for respite from a challenging world.)

There are times when the world is best seen from the top of an old lava flow tens of miles from the nearest collection of humanity; here, long history collides with the present moment in unpredictable ways. At certain moments 2 million years ago this spot was alternately sending forth red splatters of rock, like giant Roman candles, and andesite lavas, flowing up from vents and long vertical cracks, coming from deep in the molten mantel!

The rock tells the story. Following the ascending volcanic dike to its crest, a wall of the red pebbly splatter rock lay hard against the cold andesite lava that had long ago flowed up and poured out building this hill and flowing into the surrounding basins. But, the land is now only a collection of clues – if that is how one sees it. Or it is what it is: hills and valleys, temporary streams and canyons.

As I walked and scrambled up the broken piles of rock toward the top of the old dike, a mule deer whistled below telling all and sundry that I was there. A few minutes later it whistled again and then once more. I had seen her tracks, quite fresh, in a hidden curve of the dike wall lower down and wondered how nearby she might be. The sound was shockingly familiar, like the hands-clasp whistle that my son uses to call his dog; and for a moment I searched the valley below me with binoculars looking for some other human walking in this remote place. (Later, as I returned to my evening spot, the deer hopped out of hiding, crossed the valley and disappeared into the tiny trees of an adjoining hillside. I watched its hindquarters disappear into heavy cover, and then, like the closing scene from Harry and the Hendersons, parts of several deer appeared briefly in the spaces between the trees and just as rapidly disappeared into the tall brush.)

I sat on the top of the tall hill, sat on the lava that had been, all those many years ago, 2000º F, pushing up out of the earth making a terrible mess of this place – it would have been catastrophe for the plants and animals living here. The serenity and beauty of the present moment would not let me delve too far into the conflagration that visited, and built, this place millions of years ago, hundreds of square miles and hundreds of volcanic vents like the one upon which I sat.

The serenity and beauty of this place and this moment also formed a mansion of experience in which to contemplate the present conflagration that was “flowing” in from only several miles away….and from millions of “vents” spread, literally, over the whole surface of the earth.

Not to be too dramatic, though perhaps unavoidably: the lights from Los Alamos shine down on this place. Oppenheimer, Groves, Teller and many others have seen this landscape from their physical and intellectual aerie as they plotted the potential futures of the world: the atomic and hydrogen bombs born on the pyroclastic ash-flows from a super-volcano! But this was not on my mind more than as the recollection of the previous color of a well known room; no, from this hilltop, looking out over the valleys and hills of this old volcanic shield, seeing the lights of Los Alamos to the west, Santa Fe to the east, the glow of Albuquerque to the south, it was the class war of the worlds that came into focus.

Sitting there at the crest of the long volcanic dike as the sun was setting, a geological feature called a ‘hog back’, my lack of being alone was more than palpable; it was reality. The doe just down the hill was, without question, giving my presence her attention; this was the center of the range of a mountain lion that I had once caught napping in a shaded canyon; had seen tracks and scat nearby. Though unseen, coyotes were coming out to hunt all around me and would sing to me later in the evening; and all the smaller mammals: skunks, cottontails, jacks, the various rats and mice. I listened for them, watched the changing light define and undefine the land shapes in which they were certainly walking, stalking and secreting themselves.

Ravens flew in, two by two, calling to each other, swinging by overhead to have a look and treating me to the whoosh whoosh of their wing beats. I was of little interest, too far from their cliffs and had no visible long gun, a recognition that they make most readily. Other than their occasional sounds the rest was an embracing silence.

These partners in the experience of the moment were also part of my considerations. I was with companions in this place – not far away from “real life” under the twinkling lights. I was here, on purpose, to be with the creatures of the desert hills. I was here to feel my life in communion with theirs, seeking a different context. I was here to be free of language, to be hungry for every sound, every sight of movement; here to be free of level floors and paths, to walk on the uneven earth; here to be free of comfort, to feel the cold wind, to have to shield my eyes from the low angled sun.

I sat on the hilltop and felt my way through the wash of sub-verbal ideas: the 100 thousand people in the valley east, west, north and south were an anxiety, an empathy, as I looked around beyond the low hills; their lives, hopes and dreams, rushed by like a super-speed fast-forward, all montaged together as in a bad movie; reaching out beyond the hills, beyond the Rio Grande Valley, beyond the western high plains to the coasts and on over the oceans.

A billion voices in the whoosh whoosh of the raven’s wing flew the wordless thoughts through my mind (to be read as a single burst, like the spark from a steel on flint): humans possess biological capacities that have been adapted into very powerful designs, and have lost control of the power that changes the world around them; and some humans had collected to themselves such vast power that a madness has been created in them beyond all help. All the behaviors, instincts and feelings that matter have been swept aside by domination of physical spaces, ability to carry out almost any desire, domination and control of other people, feelings of omnipotence and omniscience: the madness of power over others rather than the communion of common purpose.

The human species is ultimately flawed. The primate social pattern of domination, long since obsolete as an adaptive device, continues to be expressed in our economics and politics; and is now imbued with physical and organizational powers thousands, even millions, of times that which both enforced and inhibited the actions of our ancestors. We adapt, in our expectations and behaviors, to our present powers and the conditions that surround us and yet still feel about and act on them with the emotions of a tribal primate.

For all the complexity in the human world, our situation comes down to a class of humans acting in every possible circumstance to advance their interests without regard to the costs that are inflicted on living others and the future. As long as there is a significant surplus of material and services available, the native design of human species will move some of its members to try and collect that excess to their control. This creates the basis for an escalating process of wealth accumulation with primate hierarchical social patterns transforming into aberrant power-dominated class systems.

This process can take on a hundred different forms, and so confuses us. Those who follow this course as capitalists claim that it is the socialists that are making trouble and the communists say that it is the capitalists who trample people’s rights to the right kind of wealth. So-called Christians team up with capitalists and another set of Christian beliefs finds more commonality with socialists, yet both act with antagonism toward atheists or Muslims. And on it goes.

The one “religion” that seems to cut across all of these lines of difference is excesses of power and wealth: the obscenely rich may fight among themselves, but it is mutual understanding of their common relationship to the rest of humanity that draws them into communion for the maintenance of wealth, power and privilege: the actions that are needed to extract an abundance of wealth from the labors and fears of the human herd are a blood-bond for the elite.

The elite of Roman abused the common folk. The elite of Europe abused the common folk, first at home and then abroad in their colonies. The elite in the old Soviet Union abused the common folk. The elite in China have and are abusing the common folk. The elite in the US are abusing the common folk. The elite in India are abusing the common folk. The elite of the major institutional religions abuse the common folk. And in places where the common folk are not being abused, the elite are preparing conditions of the global economy to abuse them. When there is sufficient stored and tradable excess converted to private wealth, 10, 20, 50 times greater than basic need meeting, this will always be the outcome.

If life can’t be imagined except within the circle of the distant lights, the whole package of “goods” must be accepted: mining, smelting, manufacturing, retailing; economic growth, progress, wealth accumulation and power; the overcoming of meaninglessness with the meaningless.

How is it possible to live without the light switch, without unlimited access to TV, refrigeration, wifi, year round 70º F regardless of ambient temperature, unlimited choices and supplies of food and ‘consumer goods?’ Who and how many would give these up willingly? And in these questions lies the understanding of the elite; who and how many would willingly give up the power to have and do as they wish, to live with impunity, and what actions would be taken to maintain such power?

It is easy to say that wealthy and corporate interests have leveraged their increasing control of economic and political institutions to the point that the primary legal foundation of the US and much of the world must be broken to accommodate them – these foundations, as habits of practice and expectations, have already been bent as far as they will go. It is what we, as a people, accept as correct and honorable, applied consistently and to an extreme – an extreme that we never intended – that is the essential engine driving us to this place.

Like all movements we have our prophets: Henry George, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, C. Wright Mills, E. F. Schumacher, Hervé Kempf, Joe Bageant, Noam Chomsky, David Cay Johnston, Chris Hedges, Chris Glugston, George Monbiot, Herman Daly, Bill Mckibben, Derrick Jensen and dozens of notable others, most you will never have heard of, like Coralie Koonce who has written very readable, and scholarly, books bringing all of the issues together. And there are many many more, completely ignored by the media and the “world of influence”, who work everyday to better understand and to better inform their fellows of the grave danger and the hard choices that the immediate future holds. (I apologize if I have left out one of your favorite prophets, my point in making a compact list is that there are many – enough to make up the rooster of a baseball team or of a representative body.)

It is so clear a summary of their work, and that of my companions on the hilltop, that great wealth must not be in private hands; human hands must belong to the same class – the human class. And the amount of wealth extracted and sequestered outside of the movement of environmental processes must be reduced to the barest minimum. Humans must take less from the total energy flux and material cycles. The human pleasures of life, and there are many, must and do come primarily from communion with our fellows, both human and non-human; we must again learn to distrust inventions of behavior and objects that separate us. All of this and more will come, if it comes at all, with the greatest of effort, pain and great luck.

* * *

As I sat on the hilltop all of these thoughts went through my mind as movements of emotion, as wordless sensations guided by the far away city lights. But, what was real was the doe below me in the cactus meadow. We were both occupying the same space in the desert hills with our similarities and differences. She was about 170 pounds, young, strong; sharp eyes, ears and sense of smell; fleet of foot and dangerous with sharp hoofs. She knew the terrain, the plants, where to find water, the dangers from mountain lions, coyotes, and humans. I am 170 pounds, old and strong enough, in a weak sort of way (I could not hop across the 200 meters to the trees on the near hill in a few seconds). I have weak eyes that need prostheses; my hearing has been damaged by years in noisy places; I can still smell things placed under my nose. I know the area in a general sort of way. I can be dangerous and very fast using human tools. I can build a fire. I can think ahead. My delicate feet are cased in good boots; my cold-prone head is cased in a wool fleece cap. My hairless, thin-skinned body is cased in wool and out-door approved synthetics. I have, in my motorcycle panniers, food, water, emergency sleeping bag, flashlight, cameras, campstool and other useful items. And, unlike my companions here, I can leave this place if I wish.

The doe belongs here. Her lineage almost certainly goes back thousands of years in this general area, perhaps 1500 generations. 1500 generations for me would include the episodic pulses out from the African cradle, the cave painters of southern Europe, the explorers of the west Asian steppes and the intrepid probers at the Beringia passage to North America. Not only do I bring the ideas and concerns of the present intellectual world to this hilltop, but also the generational history of a good part of the earth; where I belong is a matter of conjecture.

The deer should whistle a warning again and again, louder and louder, until all can hear it.

Looking at a Lifestyle 3

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” ― Gautama Buddha

 

In the second essay of this series, I offered the thought that ‘we’ need to more competently develop the capacities of pre-adaptation: making adjustments to our habits and expectations in response to future events rather than only responding to the conditions, albeit new ones, that are immediately before us. But, of course, knowing how we will be living in the future is a substantial difficulty; cue, Mr. Berra.

 

The first steps are, of course, to accept that there can be predictable futures and that responses in the present are needed to mitigate future dangers. Competent sources of knowledge and prediction need to be recognized and empowered. Then, as with any journey of consequence, we must have a clear idea of destination in order to decide a route.

 

To begin we must reorient ourselves with a diametrical turn in our most fundamental comprehension of our place in the world. Our dominating response to the most challenging issues today continues to be: “What ‘new things’ can we invent to defeat the unfortunate consequences of what we have done?” But the question must be: “What does the biosphere require to retain and regain integrity and stability?” The focus must be on the systems and processes that have evolved and maintained the biophysical structures of the earth over billions of years, not the short-term needs of an economic or political calculation. To put it bluntly: If the human ‘we’ is only able to focus on how to maintain our present ways of life and parochial thinking, then ‘we” will not survive; the conditions for complex life on the earth’s surface could well be compromised by our failures for thousands (perhaps millions) of years. I realize that this sounds overly dramatic, especially given the ease with which most people live in the developed world, but an increasing number of the most sober and serious thinkers** in all relevant areas of study are either at this level of concern or rapidly moving in that direction.

Here are three conditions of a long-term survivable future; a ‘place’ we need to get to. We actually know them, even as we don’t want to recognize them!

• The human animal needs to use far less of the earth’s productivity: perhaps somewhere around 10% of the present use. Reducing the human use to the ‘one earth’ measure of the Ecological Footprint tool will be woefully inadequate to allow the biosphere to reorganize into a healthy, self-maintaining system that isn’t continuously challenged by human activity. Such a use rate would still be orders of magnitudes greater than any other species has ever used in the history of life on the earth.

• A near net-zero exchange relationship within ecosystems: even with a reduction in the use of the earth’s productivity, the way humans use what they take from the environment and what is returned to the environment must be in homeostatic ecological balance – as is, and has been, true of every other species of living things for billions of years.

• Absolute accountability for actions in the environment: feedback systems that make human economic/political/social structures and actions directly accountable to ecological conditions and events in the manner of all other organisms. The powerful human adaptations** that have made possible, for many generations, the ‘defeating’ of ecological conditions, require inhibition and regulation; must be directly responsive to their effects on the living space.

Our present human world seriously violates all of these conditions; we are not a functioning, integrated part of the biophysical systems that sustain and allow complex life on this planet and it is increasingly clear that the universe will not be bent to puny human will (make note of exceptionalism from The Enlightenment). All of the narrowly focused economic, social and political narratives and arguments that massively dominate the discussion of our human future are devoted to very short term and ultimately distracting actions that ignore, deny or are simply ignorant of these realities.

* * *

What would the human world look like as people fulfilled these conditions? How would societies be structured? What political and economic systems would support those conditions? How could social, political and economic systems be made directly responsive to environmental conditions and changes rather than the immediate perceptions of economic need and political advantage? There are only a few ways that these conditions might be met, only a few; that is the nature of biological fitness. I am proposing one option that seems possible; others should be proposed.

Since it is often assumed that ‘we can’t get there from here’, that some form of conflagration will be required before humanity will begin to make the needed changes, we can’t know how we will pass through the changes as human made ‘realities’ ultimately collide with Biophysical Reality. We cannot know what form of situation will precede our potentially adapting to environmental reality, but informed thought and preparation now is essential.

I will begin with the assumption of a population of about 4 billion people; any population much less than that in the next 100 years could only be the result of catastrophic destruction of human societies and the earth’s biophysical systems resulting in some unthinkable post-apocalyptic scenario completely beyond the scope of our potential influence.  (the next and last essay in this series takes on the thorny issue of population reduction).

With such a large population in some continuity with the past, all the present issues of human nature and limitations, economic dependencies, political aspirations, nation states, business interests, ethnic and ‘racial’ confusions and more would still be with us; we would not be living in wickiups, or sod houses, in tribal communities, plowing our fields with mules. It would not be a luddite world; we will remain industrial, technological societies. The changes that our species must make will have to come from more fundamental aspects of ourselves; otherwise, we will very rapidly repeat all the behaviors of our history.

• The most fundamental change would be to return the natural, biophysical world to its role as the primary informing source for our actions.

• An economic system designed to distribute compensations based on contribution to the material productions and stability of society rather than extracting and concentrating society’s production of wealth.

• Hierarchical systems of social valuing that depend on contributions to values of respect, honesty, social stability and an informed population.

• Our expectations of how we are to live a ‘proper life’, need to come from our ecological relationships, replacing the anthropocentric “stories of us” that dominate the present time.

It is essential to understand that any coherent system must have an informing source: in the living world that ‘source’ is the evolutionary process mediated through the designs surrounding and functioning by the DNA/RNA/protein nexus; in the human world, as it separated from the living world, our coherency was mediated by the stories that we told ourselves. These stories were, for hundreds of thousands of years, almost entirely based on our relations with the immediate ecologies in which our communities lived; were therefore closely related to and responsive to biological processes. We adapted ways of restraining and regulating stories so that while they might seem quite fanciful to an observer, they were instructive and integrating of actions in the environment. But, as, increasingly, our own stories came from our imagination and were less and less restrained and regulated by the biophysical reality of an ecosystem, we lost our way as a functioning part of earth’s systems.

The essential condition of competent response to a world of still large human populations will require a reattachment to ecological feedback with extensive measurement, evaluation and enforcement of environmental data (the only other way is to live in direct and immediate individual sensory contact with the environment as small populations of essentially hunter-gathers). Without immediate, controlling feedback from the world’s ecosystems, we would certainly use our powers of long-term avoidance of environmental consequences to quickly recreate all of the present devastating ills, just as we have done in the past when faced with more local failures of environmental services. We have clearly demonstrated in the last 10 to 20 thousand years that Homo sapiens sapiens cannot be trusted to act in the world without the environment as a dominant external informing source.

 

This all leads me to a radical, frightening and very unsatisfying conclusion: Humans must find a way to create a computer based system to which they give up major aspects of what we have come to see as our proper powers of control over ourselves and the world. Such an ‘intelligent’ computer system would have to be untouchable by any human agency once set in place.

 

We have tried to use stories of moral authority. We have tried laws. We have tried regulation. And through it all we have gone in 10,000 years, not even a wink in evolutionary/geological time, from stone tools to structures attempting to fuse simple atoms in the manner of the interior of the sun… Gone from a million or so people to 8 billion and increasing… Gone from functioning stable biophysical environmental systems to dangerous levels of new chemical species from pole to pole and disrupted biophysical systems endangering the present assemblage of life… and we are not fazed; we are continuing on with the same methods: growth and change, more energy production, more intervention.

Since we will not, cannot, restrain ourselves with any devices of our own control, we must use what we do, invent and implement, to find a way that will be effective in restraining and regulating us. It seems that such an option is sitting there in front of us: artificial intelligence, sophisticated computer and measurement systems with actionable powers over economic and physical operators.

To be clear, I hate the idea. But, I have a correspondent who is thinking of another option; eugenics (with the full range of the new genetic methods) to change the very nature of the human mind and native behaviors that would allow for our survival as a new species, manufactured in the manner of wolves turned into domestic dogs. There is a point in survival when it isn’t survival at all! It is more than beginning to appear that we must consider the difference.