February 2010
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and his latest, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong. They have a son, Konrad, who is also a Canadian.
Below is an excerpt from “ZeroPoint of Systemic Collapse” in www.countercurrents.org.
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A self-regulating market, [Karl] Polanyi wrote, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing.
When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: “This is for me the end, but also the beginning.” Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his defiance ultimately condemned his executioners. ??We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.”
The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.
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As a bonus feature this month, below is a quote from American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebur is best known for relating Christian teachings to the realities of modern political issues, and is one of the favourite philosophers of U.S. President Barrack Obama.
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Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
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January 2010
This month, we feature a piece called Who Says the Science is Settled by Peter Jones, a founding member of ForOurGrandchildren, which comes in response to the commentary by Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun, an Australian journalist and climate change naysayer. Bolt refers to a recent study by Qing-Bin Lu, a University of Waterloo Professor of Physics and Astronomy, who suggests that contrary to the overall consensus in the scientific community, we are actually entering 50-year period of global cooling.
Please read Peter’s response below and email us with your thoughts.
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Who says that the science was settled?
By Peter Jones
Andrew Bolt, an Australian commentator whose words appeared in t he Herald Sun, headlined his commentary on the research of Qing-Bin Lu, a Waterloo University Professor of Physics and Astronomy with these words. Mr. Bolt has written even more scathing remarks about those who consider climate change a risk to the Earth. Another of his columns was headed “Climategate: A Warmist Conspiracy Exposed?
Let’s stick with the work of Professor Lu. His findings are that CFC’s have contributed more to climate change than CO2 emissions, a finding that does not agree with other research. That conclusion in itself does not suggest that there is no climate change, and that CO2 is not a contributor to this change. His work suggests that with the banning of CFC’s the risk has been reduced.
Professor Lu observes that there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, but also that there has been global cooling from 2002, which is when the presence of CFC’s in the atmosphere has diminished. He further concludes that global cooling will continue for the next 50 years.
And how significant will this cooling be? And is cooling assured even if nothing is done to stop the increase in CO2 emissions? Professor Lu does not resolve those questions.
Returning to Mr. Bolt, accepting Professor Lu’s research, we are not at a stage where the science is settled. But there is sufficient to justify action to prevent an extreme risk that is long term, and in the long term may prove to be irreversible!
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December 2009
This month, we feature George Monbiot’s recent article, “This Is About Us“, published in The Guardian on December 15, 2009. Please read the article here and email us at forourgrandchildren@gmail.com with your thoughts.
November 2009
The following are remarks from Peter Jones, one of the Founders of ForOurGrandchildren, in which he explains why there is such a strong need for all of us to take action now on behalf of all of our grandchildren.
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Margaret Wente did us a favour by her assessment of the efforts to explain to uncommitted Canadians the need to take action against global warning (Globe & Mail, Saturday, October 16th). She points out that people find it hard to react to invisible, distant threats. So they shrug off evidence, such as the significant reduction in Polar Ice Caps, that is short of calamitous.
And there are plenty of other worries on which people focus: in Canada concerns about global warming is somewhere below crime, health care, taxes, municipal spending, transportation and the economy. So, as she observes, the lamentable lack of political action is understandable: the Canadian government has just been reading the polls.
She asks:” Why are people cooling on warming?” She might have questioned whether people have really been other than cool. Instead, she blames the apocalyptic language used by some environmentalists. Here she departs from journalistic fairness. She comments: “When they say we are doomed unless we radically change our way by the end of next week, people figure the problem is exaggerated.” No environmentalist has referred to such an absurd time line, and certainly not Tim Flannery, whom she refers to in her article.
She has hit on a “catch 22″ problem that faces environmentalists. They have not seen action for the decades after the risks have been recognized. They feel compelled to use dramatic language to “wake up” those who remain indifferent. When they do they are regarded as harmless cranks, much as Winston Churchill was for his efforts to alert the British people to the threat of Nazi Germany until it was perilously late.
ForOurGrandchildren attempts to reach Canadians by drawing attention to the position of their descendants. As grandparents most of us are unlikely to be severely hit by global warming. But our grandchildren will be on this planet, in whatever state it is in, for the rest of this century. We owe it to them to keep the issues before the public, as that is the only way to keep the pressure on our Government.
As our logo states: “Our Legacy; Their Future.”
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October 2009
This month’s feature is adapted from Chapter 1, “Selling Our Future,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4
For more information on Lester R. Brown, please click here.
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Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, puts it well: “At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation.” The larger question is, If we continue with business as usual—with overpumping, overgrazing, overplowing, overfishing, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide—how long will it be before the Ponzi economy unravels and collapses? No one knows. Our industrial civilization has not been here before.
Unlike Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which was set up with the knowledge that it would eventually fall apart, our global Ponzi economy was not intended to collapse. It is on a collision path because of market forces, perverse incentives, and poorly chosen measures of progress.
In addition to consuming our asset base, we have devised some clever techniques for leaving costs off the books—much like the disgraced and bankrupt Texas-based energy company Enron did some years ago. For example, when we use electricity from a coal-fired power plant we get a monthly bill from the local utility. It includes the cost of mining coal, transporting it to the power plant, burning it, generating the electricity, and delivering electricity to our homes. It does not, however, include any costs of the climate change caused by burning coal. That bill will come later—and it will likely be delivered to our children. Unfortunately for them, their bill for our coal use will be even larger than ours.
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September 2009
This month’s feature is an adapted excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lester R. Brown’s “Entering a New World, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization”. The full text is available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.
More information about the highly influential author is available here.
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Nearly all of the 80 million people being added to world population each year are born in countries where natural support systems are already deteriorating in the face of excessive population pressure, in the countries least able to support them. In these countries, the risk of state failure is growing.
Some issues seem to exceed even the management skills of the more advanced countries, however. When countries first detected falling underground water tables, it was logical to expect that governments in affected countries would quickly raise water use efficiency and stabilize population in order to stabilize aquifers. Unfortunately, not one country–industrial or developing–has done so. Two failing states where overpumping water and security-threatening water shortages loom large are Pakistan and Yemen.
Although the need to cut carbon emissions has been evident for some time, not one country has succeeded in becoming carbon-neutral. Thus far this has proved too difficult politically for even the most technologically advanced societies. Could rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere prove to be as unmanageable for our early twenty-first century civilization as rising salt levels in the soil were for the Sumerians in 4000 BC?
Several converging trends are making it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the growth in food demand. Prominent among these are falling water tables, the growing conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, and more extreme climate events, including crop-withering heat waves, droughts, and floods. As the stresses from these unresolved problems accumulate, weaker governments are beginning to break down.
Compounding these problems, the United States, the world’s breadbasket, has dramatically increased the share of its grain harvest going to fuel ethanol–from 15 percent of the 2005 crop to more than 25 percent of the 2008 crop. This ill-conceived U.S. effort to reduce its oil insecurity helped drive world grain prices to all-time highs by mid-2008, creating unprecedented world food insecurity.
We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems. Can we phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we gather the political will to halt deforestation in the Amazon before its growing vulnerability to fire takes it to the point of no return? Can we help countries stabilize population before they become failing states?
We have the technologies to restore the earth’s natural support systems, to eradicate poverty, to stabilize population, and to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play.
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Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.
August 2009
This month we feature the 1991 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship winning novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. This creative and highly readable book blends philosophy, ethics and history with lessons on how to develop practical, sustainable solutions to global issues.
About the Author
The American Daniel Quinn (1935-) spent over twenty years in educational and consumer publishing in Chicago before giving up this career to become a freelance writer in 1975. He didn’t receive widespread recognition for his work until Ishmael was published in the early ’90’s, but when it was, his international fame grew rapidly. Quinn followed up on the success of the novel with The Story of B and My Ishmael to form a trilogy.
It is testament to the creativity and original thought of Ishmael that the environmental movement, simple living movement, anarchist movement and Anarcho-primitism movements all came to identify with the ideas Quinn put forth.
Quinn himself never considered himself an environmentalist, per se, because he felt the that the environmentalist doctrine implicitly treats humans and nature are separate elements. His central thesis is that humans are a part of nature, and our relationship with the environment does not need to be parasitic or toxic. Based on an understanding our place within the broader environment, Quinn argues that we can build a genuinely sustainable society.
About the Book
Ishmael begins when the narrator finds newspaper ad that simply states: “Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person”. Upon responding to the ad at the listed address, the narrator unexpectedly finds himself in a room with a large gorilla. Even more unexpectedly, the gorilla – Ishmael, the teacher – is able to communicate with him telepathically.
From here, the novel progresses as a Socratic dialogue between the two, in which Ishmael draws from his life experiences, and leads the narrator back through the evolution of human culture and civilization. This examination illuminates that like an animal in a zoo, human beings are held ‘captive’ by the fallacious story - the mythology – we have come to believe of how we have come to this point in history, and what we consider ‘progress’.
Ishmael says:
““There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
In another metaphor, Ismael explains that the way we have constructed our civilization is akin to an aspiring aviator who builds a ‘flying machine’ that is not in accordance with the laws of physics or aviation, and then launches his creation off a high cliff. As he hurtles towards the distant earth, he takes the fact that he has not yet crashed, and continues to remain airborne, to mean that his machine is a success, and that he is flying. Only when he finally hits the ground will he realize that he was not.
Similarly, our civilazation is structured in a way that is not in accordance with nature; we have created a system where we continually diminish finite natural resources at an ever-growing rate. Since these resources were once plentiful, we have convinced ourselves that our system works, though it is absolutely clear that we are doomed to crash, and that we are not ‘flying’.
In order to create a society that can truly fly, we need to build it in cooperation with nature: we need a system that replenishes the resources that it uses. This, Ishmael argues, is by no means impossible, nor is it a mystery. All we have to do is look around us at the natural world in which we participate as a prime example of an incredibly complex, abundandant, and self-sustaining system for inspiration.
This is a highly recommended book: while you may find some of its themes and metaphors eloquent and inspirational and others controversial, it is the type of book that provokes thought and spurs discussions years after you’ve put it back on the shelf.
July 2009
This month we feature Hot, Flat, and Crowded by multi-Pulitzer-winning journalist Thomas Friedman.
About the Author
Thomas Friedman has been a major voice in the politics of globalization for many years and in various capacities. Born in Minneapolis, USA in 1953, his resume includes three Pulitzer prizes – twice for International Reporting (1983, 1988) and the third for Commentary (2002) – for his work with The New York Times. His extensive writing on foreign affairs – specifically on global trade, the Middle East and environmental issues – has been informed through assignments and postings worldwide.
Friedman’s most well-known work as an author is The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (2005), a #1 bestseller that dealt with the changing global landscape that is still in the process of emerging due to political developments, new technology, and a shift in the global balance of power. One of his most appealing points as an author and commentator is that he is constantly searching for new perspectives and iknowledge; he remains grounded enough to accept challenges to his positions and to adapt them based on emerging information
About the Book
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman makes his most concerted forray into the climate change debate and what we can do to avoid the type of catastrophe that Thomas Malthus predicted in the mid-19th century. Friedman calls for America to take the lead in what he describes as Geo-Greenism, a revolution that will not only avert the potentially disastrous effects of climate change, but will also make the world a safer, healthier, and more innovative place. He believes that it is not too late for human ingenuity to save us, but emphasizes that for this to happen we need to act now, and on a large, top-to-bottom, across-the-board and united scale. “We need 100,000 people in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things — in the hope that five of them break through”, says Friedman.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded clearly shows that Friedman understands climate change as a deadly threat to society, yet he balances out doomsday rhetoric with a palpable sense of energy and optimism that inspires action rather than despondency. While his writing at times is too heavy on buzz-words, Friedman also offers complex and highly-informed solutions that apply to government and the private sector right down to the level of the individual.
If you are looking for a dense and comprehensive yet energetic and readable insight into both the scale of the climate change problem and the scale of the necessary solutions, look no further. You might not agree with everything that Friedman says, but you will certainly find his arguments well-researched and thought-provoking.
