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.

Looking at a Lifestyle 2

“Being green is more than just buying ‘eco’. It is an unshakable commitment to a sustainable lifestyle.” Jennifer Nini

In the first essay in this series I described how I came to try to live with the behavior and consumption equivalent to the productive capacity of one earth – the one and only earth that we have – the ‘one earth’ calculation based on The Ecological Footprint. This important accounting measure needs to be better and more generally understood.

The linked long explanation of Ecological Footprint should be on every concerned person’s reading list (I hope that many reading here will, at least, look at it before reading on); my very brief recap doesn’t do justice. The Ecological Footprint work is a serious and exhaustive accounting research project, developed from the most respected and reviewed information sources available, of the human use of the earth’s resources and of the earth’s productive capacity. The effort began in 1991 with the simple, researchable question: “How much do people take compared to what the earth can renew?” And the effort has been added to and refined progressively; always inviting criticism and responding with continual improvements in methods of analysis and data collection.

It must be clearly noted that the comparisons of the human use the earth’s resources and the capacity of the earth’s production and restoration produced by the Ecological Footprint research are very conservative and leave out, because of lack of fully verifiable data, potential human interventions in the environment and losses to earth’s production and restoration potential . The errors in footprint comparisons are almost certainly in the direction of showing less actual human use and impact than is occuring.

The Ecological Footprint evaluation has two primary uses: as a policy tool for government and business, by those governments and businesses that have concern for the longevity of life on earth (shockingly, it seems some do not); and the personal evaluation as an educational tool to inform the public about the needed changes in lifestyle if the human use of the earth’s resources are to return to sustainable levels. It is this second apparently more aspirational use of footprint evaluation that I will deal with here.

What makes the use of the individual evaluation tool confusing is that essentially no one will discover that they are using the earth’s resources at a sustainable level.It can be reasonably assumed that everyone using the tool will find that they are using 3, 4, 8 or 10 earths’ worth of productivity for their lifestyle if everyone on the earth lived as they do; and that even with this information, few have any intention of changing the fundamentals of their lifestyle to reduce their impact: Recycle, yes. Install water saving showerheads, yes. Consider or actually purchase an electric auto, yes. Attempt to buy more locally produced foods, yes. And a variety of other ‘environmentally’ friendly actions, yes. But, deep substantive changes, no. There are good reasons for this that need to be made clear.

First, it would be devastatingly disruptive of present economic systems, social systems and individual lives if a substantial part of the population seriously reduced their footprint. Second, it would only ‘make sense’ to most people (and to the planet) if almost everyone did it. And third, the biggest abusers of the planet’s resources are not individuals or not individuals in the ordinary sense.

What follows is a look at various common lifestyles and the Ecological Footprints generated by the online tool; here are the questions the online tool asks, given in a cursory form: consumption of animal origin foods, consumption of local foods, house type and energy efficiency, house size and numbers of people, source of electricity, garbage amounts, use of cars and other personal vehicles, use of public transportation and, finally, the frequency of air travel. The summing together of responses to these questions correlate well with overall use of earth’s resources.

The default answers, not necessarily the most common, but common enough, result in the use of 3.2 earths (I will shorthand in this way, number of earths, though it is to be understood that the meaning includes ‘if everyone lived this lifestyle’). A generally mode/median* non-city lifestyle, income $50 to $70 thousand per year, 3 people in a small to medium sized freestanding house, with little effort to act on ecological concerns, gives the use of 4.8 earths. A city mode/median lifestyle for apartment dwellers with essentially the same behaviors as the non-city lifestyle gives a use of 4.2 earths.

A solidly middle class, upper middle class, lifestyle with little ecological concern, larger house, 3 people, $150+K income, more travel, essentially more of many consumables gives a use of up to 10 earths or more. The tool fails to be able to properly evaluate higher incomes beyond the middle classes. People and collectives of people with vastly greater use of resources no longer are described by these questions. Other measures than the online tool are needed for someone who flies regularly in private jets; has multiple houses, apartments and yachts with staff to maintain them; fleets of autos and trucks; and unlimited budgets for toys, foods and entertainment.

But, what about those people in the general population, in the US, who are making a serious effort to reduce their impact on earth’s resources? A mode/median non-city household of 3 people living in the same sized house as above, with the same income, can with some effort, reduce their footprint to 2 earths. A mode/median apartment dwelling household of 3 people with even more serious effort can reduce their footprint to 1.7 earths, the world average.

The obvious question is: what has to be done to reduce the footprint? All the measures of consumption must be lower: very little garbage (a measure of general consumption), minimal air travel (6 hours a year) or no air travel, minimal auto (50 miles a week in a high mileage car averaged over the year) or no auto use, public transportation use, little to no animal origin foods, about 70% or more of food from local sources, increasing the energy efficiency of the smallest functional home, renewably sourced energy/electricity:

And still the Ecological Footprint is most often between 2 and 3 earths even with effort to reduce environmental impact! Obviously, to get the whole population to an average consumption of one earth would require even less consumption and energy use by all levels of society. The current public argument is for the burden to be on the Great Many whose use exceeds the earth’s productive capacities by 2, 4 or 6 earths, not the 10s or several 10s of earths of the most profligate. At this time there is no plan in general circulation for how to reach the needed reductions in total human impact on earth’s systems; even without a plan it seems clear that major restructuring of the world’s economic systems would be required: there is no major economic system or socially valued expectations for how to live that isn’t based on economic growth and increasing consumption.

Even still, getting to one earth must not be considered only an aspirational goal; there is no other alternative but for the human global consumption of the earth’s productivity to be less than that productivity. It is a concept so simple that 7 year olds can grasp it (Piaget’s stages of development). And, as noted, the present world average is 1.7 earths.

The questions are then: Will the needed changes in the economic and social systems be based in economic equity and social justice? Will the needed changes force all or almost all deprivation onto the weakest and most vulnerable? Will action on these issues be ignored and put off until the failure of earth’s productive systems so limit human life and activities that humans are forced to take less from the remaining productive capacity?

It is fairly clear that an economically powerful segment of humanity is moving in the direction of setting up conditions that will place the greatest burden on the weakest and most vulnerable; even to make more of the world’s people vulnerable by increasingly marginalizing them. While not fully offering an argument against that approach to our dilemmas, it is almost certain that the result would be to exacerbate all of our challenges and prevent effective responses to social, economic and environmental crises. As far from the possible as it may seem, one line of rational reasoning offers the conclusion that only a general response that addresses the three overwhelming issues, economic inequity, the lack of social justice and environmental degradation, would have a chance to avoid the variety of conflagrations facing us.

We humans have been very good at adapting to our destructiveness, most often calling it progress (but, be clear, damaging ecological relationships and the earth’s biophysical systems is destructiveness). We adapt to what we have already put into place with incredible inventiveness. Now is the time to find a further capacity: pre-adaptation, adapting to most likely futures. We haven’t been good at that; and now we must, because failure to limit our damaging actions and failure to prepare our whole social and economic systems for that future will almost certainly deny us a future all together.

The use of the Ecological Footprint tool and the result, that vast numbers of us are using more of the earth’s capacity than can be renewed, must inform us of the need for action on the real issues, not just on our own consumption. The economic and social systems in place make living at one earth consumption effectively impossible for many of the earth’s highest consuming populations; while we should try to reduce our consumption, that effort needs to go hand in hand with developing new models for social and economic life that more closely align with ecological realities and to the activism to give those efforts, and us, a chance.

*I am using the terms ‘mode/median’ to indicate measures of central tendency that describe the more common conditions. The arithmetic average, the mean, is a poor measure for describing the most common conditions in highly skewed number sets like the income and wealth levels of developed countries, especially the US.

Looking at a Lifestyle

“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle”. – Pope John Paul II

Preamble: It is universally recognized among those who are paying attention to political, economic and environmental changes, that how most of us will live in the not distant future is uncertain; but though uncertain as to details, certain that many of those using the most of the earth’s bounty will have to use less. The details of how to distribute the reductions for all of those using more of the earth’s capacity than can be justified will become the most vital and important history ever lived and written by us, either the greatest possible demonstration of our capacities for compassion and goodwill or the greatest demonstration of our talents for destructiveness.

* * *

I am, I suppose, like most people; I want to live and work in my community and society, to be seen as normal and acceptable. I am an unlikely person to be an environmental activist; a poor boy from the rural south, the attaining of a middle class lifestyle, while not a primary goal, was an accomplishment; my adult life has been lived as a teacher and a small businessman.

In an enlightening moment in the mid 1990s I came across a data collection and summarizing effort called The Ecological Footprint. This monumental project was attempting to use the vast amounts of economic and behavioral data collected by the world’s institutions, governments and other sources, to measure the human use of the earth’s resources; and to use ecological data collected by governments and academia to measure the earth’s productive and buffering capacities. If reasonable measures of these things could be made, then our use of the earth could be compared to the capacities of the earth to meet our uses.

The first summaries of the data proved shocking: humans were using the earth’s resources at a greater rate than the earth’s capacities to produce and recover; for earth’s life sustaining systems that would be catastrophic! Further, the researchers who created the Ecological Footprint measurements have never been criticized for being alarmist, but only for being too conservative and cautious.

An online tool was soon added to the system allowing individuals to measure their use of the earth’s resources in either how many hectares (or acres) their lifestyle required or in terms of how many earths would be needed if everyone lived as they did.

When I used the tool, I found that the relatively simple life I was living required the productive capacity of more than 4 earths if everyone lived as I did. At a deep emotional level this was unsatisfactory to me. I had grown up loving the wildlands of this earth in such a natural way that I didn’t even realize the depth of that love until I watched the draglines, bulldozers and dredges turn ‘my’ wildlands into housing developments, roads and parking lots.

What does one do when you know that something is wrong, existentially wrong; when you know the solutions, but that they would be life changing, for you and for everyone; when you know that people, in general, will not make the changes required without great effort?

Raising my children seemed to require an acceptance of the lifestyles of my community, but when they were grown I decided that I would try something, try something even if finally the wrong thing; I would still learn and potentially be a source of information for others. I decided to try to live as close to a ‘one-earth’ lifestyle as I could while remaining part of the society. I wasn’t trying to escape society or to be noble; I simply couldn’t not respond to the measured and clear reality that humanity was using more of the earth’s resources than the earth could sustainably supply.

* * *

I knew that my project was ‘artificial’ from the start, people in general couldn’t do what I was planning to do. For my experiment, It was necessary for me to live in a rural off-grid setting; I wouldn’t be allowed to live as I do where the vast majority of people live, and where it is most important to make the kinds of changes I was going to make.

My experiment is not a criticism of others; that is not the point. I have consciously chosen a process of discovery; clearly the vast majority of people don’t have such an option, just as I didn’t recognize the possibility for a long time. I rather think of it as an experimental vehicle on a test track: not ready for the open road or city traffic; it is funny looking and uses a fuel that isn’t readily available, and sometimes you have to give it a push start as part of its design.

It was my hope that if people, broadly and generally, realized that we are using, right now, much more of the earth’s capacity than is supportable over the ecological/geological long term, even over the next several generations, then more of us might look to these kinds of lifestyle changes and try different forms of small and large experiments in their own living situations.

To presage one conclusion of my experiment, the singular greatest limitation to the success of how I live as a way to reduce the human impact of the environment is that there isn’t a community sharing the effort; not necessarily to make it physically easier, but to share effort and material; to share experience and to share the new feelings that come with the daily activities; it is from the sharing of how one feels that new expectations come. This is a limitation that would be more easily addressed in the places where the most of us live.

* * *

I live in a 500 square foot house, designed and built mostly by myself with help from my children and a couple of their friends: I was 71 years old the summer the house was built. The design made the most efficient use of commonly available construction materials. It is comfortable, efficient, embracing and lovely.

The off-grid solar-electric set up is driven by a 1200 watt solar array for the house and 200 watt array for the workshed. The house wasn’t designed primarily for solar gain, but does have large south facing windows with the roof line placed to cut off direct sun in the summer and to collect direct sunlight in the winter, effectively warming the house on sunny days.

House water comes from a hand pumped deep well and is hand carried. Rain water is collected in barrels from the house and shed roofs and transferred to storage barrels for garden, greenhouse and other sundry uses.

While I could go into detail about how every need is met and how waste is composted, how there is a plan to build soil over several years, how the greenhouse is used, how there is an attempt, ultimately not met, to have inputs and outputs net to near zero as natural ecological systems do – I am recording these details – but, it is more important to talk about the principles that inform these efforts.

* * *

It is the natural habit of people when acquiring new skills and experiences to copy what they see; this is usually a good way to do things, but not so much when the situations one is applying the new learnings to are each very different. Then it is more important to have the principles underlying the actions clearly in mind rather than the specific actions. At this time most of the people trying for more environmentally appropriate lifestyles are living off-grid in rural settings while the greatest need for changing lifestyles is in the towns, cities and among the affluent. Only a tiny percentage of people can live off-grid on several acres, but what they learn, and can teach, about how changing lifestyles works are the principles that reduce their impact on the environment, principles that can be applied to other situations with imagination and the desire to make these important changes.

Here are the principles that I have come to, some I began with and others came as part of the experience. They are of two types: structural – things that are physically designed into the way of life; and habits, beliefs and expectations that support that way of life.

Principles designed as structure:

Hands-on steps should be designed into as many need-meeting actions as possible: in my case, a hand pumped well, hand tools rather than power tools (within reason), wheelbarrow and shovel rather than machinery and more.

Material inputs should (nearly) equal outputs in the manner of natural ecosystems. This is an impossible goal in the present economy, but is a goal none-the-less. If perfect, there would be little or no garbage or waste product that isn’t usefully used in some way. It can be simple, like using bits of a paper bag as kindling to light the woodstove or more complicated: a composting system for all organic waste that produces clean soil building compost over the years.

Make it difficult or impossible to be wasteful. This is to be a matter of design to limit choice, an effort to create new habits and expectations. For example, I have a very small refrigerator/freezer suited to my small solar electric system. This informs my shopping and nothing ever goes bad. My solar heated shower can hold, by intention, only 3 gallons of water.

Habits and expectations:

The habit of questioning what you are doing and why; is it wasteful? Can it be done with less pollution? Is the drive necessary or would walking serve as well?

Learn about your space: Whether you live in a forest, desert or a city, the place where you live can be used with greater ecological efficiency when you know it well.

Create comfortable spaces; an important part of your efforts come from your devotion to and comfort in your space.

Seek joy in what your are doing; finding joy in how you are living can come in many ways, but often is related to the willingness to find it.

Mixed structure and expectation:

Use community resources and support their maintenance. As one example where I live, our roads are maintained by the people who live here. We get together a few times a year and repair sections. Support libraries. Support local farmers.

Use technologies that increase safety, knowledge, communication and engagement with the space in which you live. Avoid technologies that distract from the primary purpose of an ecologically sustainable lifestyle and that have high environmental costs; requires ‘hands-on’ research.

While I have come to these principles living in a rural setting they can be applied in various ways to non-rural settings with imagination and desire. It seems to me that in urban settings there would be a greater need for leadership and community organizing of group activities, but organizing can be done around these principles and the variations of them as people discover new possibilities.

* * *

Conclusions: The kinds of lifestyle changes that will ultimately have a meaningful impact on our precipitous movement toward environmental instability will only come from communities adapting to and adopting new expectations for how to live. Individual lifestyle changes will never be enough. Individual, family and small group** actions can help show options and provide encouragement, but a major effort will be required to adapt these beginnings to our communities, small towns, urban settings and the profligate. These efforts are underway, though under-reported and under-supported.

It is also clear that human inventiveness will have to be a major part of how we approach the solutions to the changes in lifestyle; there will be no stepping back to simpler times even as we will be living more simply. The controlled, thoughtfully negotiated uses of technology will be essential; even, potentially, AI systems might facilitate community sharing of resources. Technology** in support of less environmental impact rather than being a source of greater impact must be a goal.

The present economic system in the developed world makes ecologically sustainable lifestyles effectively impossible. Individuals and families, even with their best and most committed efforts can seldom have Ecological Footprints less than 2 or 3 earths. The averages for the affluent can go to 100s of earths of consumption. Placing the responsibility for lowering environmental impact on the general population in wealthy countries and on the poor generally is a distraction by the greatest energy and material using entities to avoid responsibility. A large majority of people in developed countries are concerned with and act at some level on environmental issues; they need to understand that their efforts to live more sustainably, while laudable, will only be effective if the very wealthy and corporate interests greatly reduce their environmental impacts. More would be accomplished by actions that hold the major environmental abusers to account than by the relatively small reductions of impact from lifestyle changes like I have made.

It is obvious, sitting in the loft of my little house looking out over the beautiful high desert landscape, that the lifestyle I have been living is only a pale effort in the face of the challenges humanity as a whole faces, but it points out possibilities, more about the human capacity to try than the details of those efforts.

* * *

Final thoughts: Humanity is now the most powerful force acting on the earth’s biosphere on a daily basis (other than the sun); our individual lifestyle choices…not so much choices for the most of us, but rather uncritical acceptance of lifestyle…will determine what the world will be like for many of those alive now and for their children and for their children. Most people will follow the expectations of their communities which makes leadership of vital importance.

The economic equity and social justice movements must include stronger environmental protection emphasis. Reducing our impact on the environment will only be accomplished by reducing our total consumption by almost all sectors of society, especially by the worst abusers, toward what the earth can sustainably provide and can only be peacefully done with equity and justice: this is not a trivial observation! Reduction in human impact will happen either under our influence or not; it will happen with the consideration of equity and justice or not. It is up to us.

And then, finally, what about my efforts? My Ecological Footprint, living alone off-grid even with my best efforts, has never been better than using 1.6 earths, the global average. If I lived much closer to a town and could walk or bike most of the time or if I was even more isolated and directly provided far more of my needs, I might reduce that number. If another person lived in the same house, the number would be reduced. But, ultimately, what matters is that how most of us live is very demanding of the earth’s resources. Reducing our impact on earth’s systems to the point of sustainability will require the attention and active engagement of a significant percentage of us at all levels of the society; this will be the ultimate and possibly the final test of our human capacities.

We Must Question Everything (A Challenge to environmental activism)

Preamble: Looking at the world with perspective, it is clear that there are an overwhelming number of issues of concern needing general recognition and action. Most often, people moved to action by these concerns see the immediate need or danger with clarity: people are hungry, give them food; people are sick, give them medical care; a polluting industry is to build next to you, organize against it. Actions that arise in such direct ways address immediate needs and must be supported and have the most immediate benefit on people’s lives. But, where one begins an analysis of a problem or issue can make substantive differences in approaches. Seeing primarily the most immediate and clearly addressable form of an issue can miss ways to address, with essentially the same amount of effort, the problems more globally. We are reaching the point in our social and environmental distress that missing opportunities becomes more and more costly. Some of the time the best place to begin is with questioning everything, and it is often best to begin at the beginning.

We must question everything: Pt 1 (Where to begin)

Humans have lived, in organic communities, with relative ease in well provisioned ecosystems for hundreds of thousands years; our species developed a variety of technologies from projectile devices that extended the reach of the arm by many meters; we captured fire discovering its many uses, many uses completely new to the universe. Since those times we have made millions of ‘new things’ from shovels to computers to space ships.

Now, our vast numbers and myriad inventions have organized into social and economic dependencies utterly disconnected from essential ecological dependencies, dependencies that have long informed all of many many trillions of living things over billions of years. This is simply the recognition of what are the most explosive changes in the nearly 4 billion year history of life on this planet; these recent changes have reshaped the planet’s surface physically, chemically and energetically more quickly and with greater magnitude than any previous biophysical events. Unremitting regular environmental violence has come with our huge human populations and the biophysically influencing pollutants and activities that have characterized the last 10,000 years of human history.

Each year’s production of new humans begins life with the technologies and behaviors of their time as the base experience of what is real. This sets the changes created by our species into a dangerous competition with the biophysical designs of planetary stability, and suggests the need to question everything that we have done.

We need to understand that our species has reached a point, in our numbers and in our powers over material and energy, that our actions compete in major ways with earth’s productive and buffering systems; we have been changing biological systems in major, unsustainable, ways for millenia, but have been able to move on from the damages done to new regions with adequate soil, materials, biodiversity and living space: that period of options is long over.

We need to use our best epistemologies, scientific and philosophical understandings, to try to understand how we have come to this place in our history; and we need to be ready to be surprised by the answers.

We must question everything:Pt2 (If everyone made their mark, there would be no place left to write.)

For millions of years the biological world organized the behaviors and communities of ours and related species. Today, we organize and make judgments not from any ecological informing source, but by what has been accomplished within the designs of social valuing: a community or social system adapts a hierarchy of performable actions for which a variety of practical and social rewards are attained. A most underlying principle of social life in all human societies is to find ways of being valued, to accomplish something, either within the overarching social hierarchies or within the hierarchies of some part of society. It is my argument that this, almost completely unquestioned, social motive has been and remains the most destructive biologically created force in the evolutionary history of life on this planet.

I realize that such a statement is far outside of the central principles of my society, that it is represented by only a very tiny subset of values and ideas, and that such a statement is easily rejected out of hand. But, it should be obvious that the many billions of small and large acts of accomplishment, largely disconnected from ecological realities, result in vast and rapid changes to our world, almost completely without design or reason.

Yet, we, each of us, are moved to ‘make our mark’, to achieve in ways that distinguish us....and, in the process, to add, incrementally, to the impact of the human species on total earth biophysical systems. The human animal has been doing this for all of its time as the dominant species, but for more than 99% of the nearly 3 million or so years that our genus has been tooling up its dominance, the communities and social organizations of the various species were embedded in the feedback systems of their local ecosystems, populations were small and impact was part of evolutionary adaptive processes. And note: there has never been before a single dominant species in the whole 4 billion history of life on the earth!

Today, our present species has rejected both recognizing and responding to ecological feedback information in favor of social and economic feedback; this is the ‘overcoming and defeating the forces of nature’ of which we are so proud. And today, we exist in many orders of magnitude greater numbers than any land animal of our physical size in the history of the earth; each using, on average, many times more resources per individual animal, while returning very little useful to the environment and much that is damaging; this is unlike every other species in the history of life.

The social motive structure of accomplishment is such a deep and ubiquitous expectation in all human societies, that it is almost impossible to imagine organizing human actions in any other way: Humans imagine and invent at a rate and in volumes vastly greater than evolutionary processes of environmental fitness; ours is an entirely new way of selecting, storing, manipulating and implementing information. What I am suggesting is that this ‘new way’ has reached its limit in its present form. The changes we have wrought confront destructively both environmental and social Reality. This is not, by any means, a new observation; what is a bit new is that the social motive of accomplishment is seen as the foundation of our dilemmas; our most revered and cherished motive is the most dangerous and destructive.

Further, the ‘social accomplishment’ of doing as little as possible for one’s self by one’s own direct action is a deeply distorting influence that has increasingly dominated human societies since institutional agriculture became the primary source of human nutrition. It means that wealth must be accumulated as a sort of violence to force others to do the ‘onerous’ and devalued things that ‘must be done’. Rethinking and remaking this institutional structure and expectation of human society, fundamental to all political forms presently on the planet, will require uncharacteristic understanding, selflessness and cooperation…to the point that there is considerable despair that it can be done.

But, accomplishment as human motive will not be removed; social hierarchy with its defining activities will not be removed. The human activities of imagination and invention will not be removed. BUT, changes within these givens must be imagined and must be implemented. ‘Accomplishments’ and social valuing can be measured against projections of long-term destructiveness to social and environmental systems. Material and energy use limits can become society-wide expectations…along with a shifting from personal material accumulation to various forms of personal non-material attainments.

These things are possible! Humans have the capacity to imagine, invent and implement imaginative thought. Up to this point these powers, while supplying us with literally incredible material accomplishments, have brought us to the brink of environmental and social catastrophe; still these capacities do have the potential to recognize the realities of the moment, can give credence to informed knowledge sources and imagine-invent-implement designs that reorder human habits and expectations. Individual humans and groups of humans have been making decisions that benefit community for as long as the species has existed; in fact, the valuing of the community over individual attainments or privilege has been fundamental to human survival, and can become so again.

A few millions of people are in the process of understanding these things and some of them are acting on them. While no viable solution to the present dilemmas may be forthcoming, we are the only animal that can even make the effort.

We must question everything: Pt 3 (Humans as Ecological Organisms)

All organisms in the history of life on the earth are, and have been, organized in such a way that physical form, physiology and behaviors of each species integrate with these same qualities of every other organism in their space, and with the physical qualities of the total environment, creating the earth’s ecosystems. And in ecosystems, for every taking from the biophysical space there is some complimentary compensation made in return to make for a near net-zero input-output balance (while ecologists recognize that there can be wide deviations from input-output balance in the moment, over time such deviations follow homeostatic principles).

All forms of life on the earth, other than our species, have formed and existed within the designs of these fundamental principles; most, with every immediate exchange of energy and material; and the more complex, with delays of exchange limited to their lifetimes; only our species has, as a consequence of our specialized adaptations, put off the fundamental taking/compensation design for extended generations. It is increasingly clear that putting off the consequences of not compensating for our taking has reached the point of disrupting the services that the environment provides to living things.

In order to properly address how we might re-engage the fundamental designs of the biophysical space, and appreciate the absolutely essential need to do so, we must understand how it is that we came to violate that design as has no other organism in the history of life on earth.

Here is a ‘thumbnail’ sketch: Humans evolved adaptations for taking from the environment with greater and greater ease…as giraffes have adaptations for eating from the tops of trees... and, as we were ‘successful’ at easy taking, the natural forms of compensation attached to the taking fell away. There was, sometimes, recognition of our role in creating damage by our actions, without clarity, and humans made ‘sacrifices’ as a form of compensation, but these were sacrifices of things that humans valued, not actually ecologically balancing compensations.

As humans created new ways of taking from the environment using their expanded capacities of communication, finer and finer levels of detail allowed for individual experience to be shared with family group/community: learning became a group process rather than individual. As the communication of detail developed, the level of the recognition, selection and storage of environmental detail increased; and a new capacity developed increasing the rate of change: the comparison of observed details as speculative elements to be mixed and matched beyond the direct and immediate experience of them…imagination. Since the reader is a human and deeply possessed of this capacity, it is the water in which we all swim, it is easy to miss the incredible powers and changes to the earth’s ecology both implied and actualized.

With this new and powerful capacity to take from the environment, humans competed directly with nature rather than living within nature’s designs. There was no intention or agency in the competition; it arises from the different ways information is selected, stored and implemented and the many forms of previously ‘non-existent’ information that could be accessed. It is this competition that is the foundation of our present dilemmas and deepest deviations from the biophysical and social Realities to which every living thing must, and in our case eventually, answer.

There are three primary elements to our human situation: 1) our biological-physical designs and limitations including emotional, motivational, cognitive behaviors, 2) our human tool kit, which our imagination has actualized, a tool kit that has grown from a few sticks and stones to giant earthmovers, computers, space shuttles and atomic weapons… 3) our consciousness-cognitive capacities for social and economic adaptations to the huge increases of our numbers, our organizations and our relationship with the fundamental necessities of the living state.

The essence of what is needed to readapt and normalize toward an ecological existence becomes clearer from this formulation. The first, our native nature, isn’t optional, even though we have long treated it as optional. The second, our tool kit, is optional which, in the inverse of the first, we have treated as necessity. The third, our unique adaptability, makes clear that we must act with clearer appreciation of our nature and with selective control of technologies. Then it would be possible for our capacities of imagination to be devoted, in reality, to present dilemmas: we can’t act in biophysical reality when we don’t know who we are, what we want or need and when our only solutions are to make more poorly considered technical changes.

But, this is not to say that these are new understandings or that worthy efforts at explicating them haven’t been made; both understanding and explication have a long, long history: as humans began moving out of the neolithic, what was being lost as we moved away from ecological closeness was apparent to many humans and they wrote it down as some of the first uses of written language as seen in some early cuneiform religious texts. Early ‘civilized’ religions addressed these concerns, many times with common themes of restraint.

As each generation succeeded the previous, new life experience, by tiny increments, included more technology and less ecology. Concern for nature became more and more quaint, so that today it is possible to live almost completely within a human designed and created space with all needs and experiences filtered through human and technical actions. We can believe that the whole earth, even the universe, is here for human use. We can assume infinite economic growth without question; we can be told that the earth’s resources and environmental services are being used beyond capacity without any recognition of its meaning. The Reality-organizing property of ecosystems has been lost and not replaced with any comparable or efficacious informing source.

We are, therefore, the first pure contradiction in the earth’s, and possibly the universe’s, history: a biologically evolved creature with a biological adaptation that exceeds the parameters of biological systems and can be, and has proven to be, in direct competition with the fundamental principles upon which life is organized in the biophysical space.

We must question everything: Pt 4 (Issues and solutions)

A seemingly obvious direct and simple mitigating response would be to intentionally design more activities around environmental experiences, especially, though not only, for children. But while a useful and relatively easy start, it is not nearly enough; such experiences tend to be perfunctory at best. We cannot narrowly train or argue our way to changes in our most fundamental habits: as Upton Sinclair succinctly put it a hundred years ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” I would add that it is difficult to get a person to understand something when they have no life experience relating them to the understanding: Dare I say that we will not save what we do not love; and we cannot love that which isn’t brought close in our experience.

One thing that is needed is for every actual human hand to be laid to, at least, some of the tasks required for meeting one’s most primary needs in the immediate ecosystem: it is absolutely not enough, actually destructive, to make “workplace jobs”, and fungible currencies, the only way to get water, food, shelter, safety, companionship, etc. So, there is the dilemma: the necessary solution is for a majority of humanity to very quickly change behavior, to act in ways for which they have no foundational experience; in fact, to act in ways directly opposed to much of their life expectations and experience.

While this statement of what might be the only solution that can minimize conflicts over dwindling earth resources, it is not as completely hopeless as it sounds at first, though admittedly dangerously so. In the approximately 300,000 year history of our species and nearly 3 million year history of our genus, only the last several hundred years have “stolen” from the ‘human hand’ its utility to inform the mind of biophysical supremacy; people have long directly supplied many of their own needs and made objects of use directly from ecosystem sources: the fundamental relationships with environment were natural and unavoidable in our development as genus and species and in the greatest part of our time on the earth.

The most fundamental impediments to redeveloping ecologically sustaining ways of life for humanity seem to be:

• Non-adaptive, environmentally destructive, expectations for how life should be lived.

• Belief systems that do not comport with biophysical reality.

• Economic systems that are functionally Ponzi schemes requiring ever increasing population, material production and consumption, exacerbated by these schemes’ unquestioned acceptance.

• Present social and economic ‘communities’ fail in significant ways to meet human needs resulting in a variety of distortions to what I call specieshood (essentially, human nature). The human animal evolved within and to the emotional, motivational and intellectual structure of natural organic communities.

This last bullet point needs deeper consideration and is vital to any truly possible solutions. What we call communities today are not communities at all when compared to natural organic communities. Original human communities were (are) formed by the full variety of all those born into them, and were (are) benefited by having all the inborn and acquired characteristics among their many different individuals. The community was the entity that organized its actions in the environment, supported by the many talents, capacities and behavioral variety of its people. All the learning and experience of its individuals was shared, spread and accentuated by community; the community acted as a coherent unit for its own maintenance, enhancement and survival within the fullness of the living world.

In the broadest strokes, community solidarity needs to be valued over the economic designs of advantage. This is difficult since, when the original organic community's “gravitational” designs of love, respect and mutual obligation weaken, individual advantage takes their place and becomes a new ‘gravitational force of life’, organizing the social order into individual centers of power and influence. But, this is also a place that people can begin, begin to begin again, renewing 300,000 years of habit, a habit seemingly still weakly 'remembered' in an almost universal nagging suspicion that ‘something isn’t right’.

We know how and can create community-like organizations around specific issues, the people who organize community action can be the guides, but ultimately we need diverse communities organized around, not one issue, but rather around the survival of community; the survival of the nurturing community must be, must become again, the fundamental goal and obligation of life, and can become the essential organizing principle for humans readapting as part of the world’s ecosystems. And then, communities of communities where people are respectful beyond their own close associations, not by any demand, but because they have lived the same experiences.

Adapting such designs to the many varied ways that people live would be a considerable challenge, though it seems that increasing numbers are ready for changes that they don’t yet understand, but know need to come. Social, economic and technological innovation need to be evaluated by communities, for benefits or dis-benefits to the community and not only for advantages conferred on a few; the actual meaning of this would be especially hard to make part of social expectation: using less, valuing nonmaterial accomplishments, rejecting technologies and products that weaken community solidarity. Only the integrated experience of people organized in mutual caring and respect could do it.

If none of this sounds new, that is obviously because it isn’t. Humans have tried similar efforts many times. It will remain “too hard to do” until it becomes an option for a significant number of people either through education or necessity.

We must question everything: Pt 5 (Special Case of Environmental Activism)

Only the environmental movement is naturally equipped to take on these challenges. But, because of a natural dependency on the methods of community organizing for its support base, it is easy for energy generated by focused actions, some of which could go to addressing global issues, to slip away. Leadership must consistently make clear to those working with them, and to the media that covers actions, that the focused activities are a singular part of a much larger movement with global concerns directly related to the action being taken; creating a public and media habit of seeing local action as part of a global effort is vital.

The plutocracy is benefited when each individual environmental action can be framed as isolated, weak and trivial. When environmental activism is focused primarily on immediate concerns and not expressly relating local activism to resolute globalist conceptions of purpose, then the ‘dark side’ forces of environmentally destructive plutocratic interests will control events that overwhelm with thousands of individual destructive actions that spread thin the capacities of activists to respond. Social movements can keep attention on issues and make marginal, though locally important, changes, but ultimately the asymmetry of power to influence events is overwhelmingly on the side of the plutocracy.

The whole variety of social, economic and political activist movements need to append environmental issues to their other more focused concerns: because: 1) Environmental issues almost always underlie the issues that they are working on. 2) A broader support system can be formed as the many different activist organizations adopt some common language and bridging interests. And 3) combining the power of many organizations can create the force and energy needed by the environmental movement, on the one hand, and can leverage that energy back to the focused projects of the various groups, on the other. An inhabitable world is the first necessary condition for everything else!

But, the environmental movement, and activists movements generally, have no inherent, naturally motivated powerbase; the base must be created. While the general population has a natural interest in their own well-being, what is to constitute that well-being isn’t at all clear to most people; much of the activist agenda has been framed by plutocratic propaganda as dangerous to jobs, lifestyles, personal safety and beliefs. Activist movements need the strength of centralized organization to challenge that narrative; we cannot wait for environmental failures to convince people of the dangers that we all face. There just isn’t a sufficient powerbase for either the magnitude or the urgency of the changes needed to be made. The public is too fragmented and misinformed; governments have become, especially on these issues, deeply compromised by wealth-power.

With The People and government compromised, a cold-eyed, critical analysis leaves the uncomfortable conclusion that only a coalition of activist movements and great wealth remain with a chance of organizing “humanitarian” solutions to coming environmental and social crises. Activists have the knowledge and activist base. Great wealth has impunity level power-control over the widest array of human activities . Of course, the activist community must make every effort to inform the public and to influence governance, but with the clear understanding that these efforts, while necessary and power creating, are insufficient on their own.

We are watching, in our own and international politics, authoritarianism, opportunism and demagoguery taking political power as human actions are disconnected from the real environmental dangers facing us. Such self-serving governance only increases the stresses on economic, social and environmental systems; assuming that we survive these command-control totalitarian responses to our present confusions, what comes next will be determinative.

It must be taken as reality that the plutocracy has so fortified the ‘power of wealth’ that there is no effective challenge possible. The only option being talked about – when options are talked about at all – is taxation; however, the fundamental design of the tax code puts the writing of taxing legislation largely in the control of the rich. What we have seen up to now is great wealth organizing to maintain the industrial-level domination of environmental and social concerns. With only regard for short-term gains, these powerful economic interests create a plethora of seemingly incomprehensible humanitarian and ecological disasters.

But it seems almost inevitable that some wiser elements of the plutocracy will realize (are even at this moment realizing – even green-washing is a beginning: here, here) that only by engaging with the relevant activist movements can the more devastating consequences of social and environmental collapses can be minimized; it must be increasingly realized that there would be no protection for anyone in an uninhabitable world. Great wealth has hands on the real levers of power and activist movements have essential knowledge and a dedicated workforce.

As uncomfortable as it may be, the power of great wealth in the present world is ubiquitous and overwhelming. If that power stands in the way of ecological stability, it will not happen (except as an extinction event). If elements of wealth-power can have sufficient overall influence, in combination with academic and activist powers, the need for humanitarian solutions (in the Panglossian sense!) could, at least, be possible. Given the time frame of environmental degradation, every other potential action appears to lead either to violent revolutions from which there can be no recovery or resource wars from which there can be no recovery.

The environmental movement is uniquely positioned to respond to and guide such coalition efforts (there are a number of international organizations well positioned for such an effort, e.g.: WWF, IPCC, IUNC). While it is completely unclear how a coalition of a cabal of plutocrats and the most farsighted environmentalists could directly address the three great challenges: destructive wealth inequity, dismal worldwide state of social justice and the destruction of the environment, the power/control of great wealth and the knowledge/social base of the environmental movement could potentially be organized on an international scale with sufficient real power/control over government and business interests that the most essential changes in human impact on the environment would be made possible. If this sounds both unlikely and very dangerous for a beneficent future, it would be both! There would be many ways that those kinds of forces for change could go very wrong; but reflect, there would be no greater danger than the consequences of going on as we are.