Reactions to story from Open Left:: Global Suicide Pact: Amish Takeover

• 

  Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 1

  http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/06/20/global-suicide-pac...
  78 days ago in It’s Getting Hot In Here · Authority: 249

  Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death. This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don’t. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name “China”. (9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV) Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who’s going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India. International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for “unauthorized gatherings”, they’re still shooting and killing Tibetans. They’ve also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe’s dictator, who’s currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan’s exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they’re now the world’s top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita. Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don’t understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn’t exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal. Indeed, let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from? I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I’d done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world’s shoes. Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that “many factories have to meet social obligations” and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US. Nobody in power ever really likes labor agitators. Not most ostensibly liberal employers, not even theoretically communist governments. It all starts to sound so familiar. Like a story we’ve heard before. Which it is, of course. We are rightly angry about Tibet, about Darfur. But we should be as angry about the engine of consumption, consolidation and extraction that created Tibet and Darfur. That created Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, vietnam, and so many other shattered nations at various stages of piecing a society back together or splintering further apart. Maybe you don’t know all the stories of those other places. Or, like me, perhaps you know more or less enough to cringe over their names. Perhaps you know enough to make you really angry. There have been (and let’s try and stick with being charitable) terrible abuses. Though as is so often true, abuse begins at home. And by home, in this case, I mean the home of the social system in which the Chinese government operates. They Had No Title To Their Land, They Were Sold As Slaves First, there was a plague and wars. Then the Western elites saw that the people who lived on the land, the subsistence farmers, had no titles of ownership to the land they farmed crops and grazed animals on in commons. The elites put up fences, they secured official deeds, they evicted the farmers and herders. They had the force of arms and the backing of the law. Whole families were cut off from their livelihoods, leaving many to flee to the growing slums of the cities to try and eke out a living at the whim of the manufacturing economy. South America? The Native North Americans? No. The European peasantry, starting mainly in the 1400-1500s. Though it was a gradual process that took place at different rates in countries like England and Italy. It isn’t that manufacturing is bad, necessarily. But you had a whole class of people, who once might have been able to choose to work at it or not, separated from the basic means of subsistence that allowed them to try and maintain their families when there was no work. The lands they were turned out from stopped being used for the trifling purpose of supporting the people who lived nearby. They became productive lands that supported the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, they created great fortunes. In 1776, in the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about the situation that had become the lot of ever greater numbers of people in his day. A peasant underclass that was not merely poor, but entirely without means: We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate. That went and happened again. Many times, all over the world. The last few decades have seen an acceleration in mass displacement of subsistence farm families in developing nations. Now their lands are productive though, supporting the accumulation of great wealth. Too bad those people have had to flee to cities where their isn’t enough work for illiterate former farmers, too bad they can’t afford to buy what they used to grow. When the American colonies began to be settled with commodity farming in mind, people were taken from their homes, from prisons, press-ganged to the New World to work as slave labor on farms. They owed fealty, as if to a king or aristocrat, to the leaders of the London Company, the Ohio Company, the Dutch West India Company, among others. [1] Black Africans? Not in this case. Again, the European peasantry. That’s how many of the first Whites to come to North America first came; as slaves press ganged against their will, indentured servants, and mercenaries bound by oath. Will Allen, The War On Bugs, 2008 [1]: Historian James O’Neal described the climate of freedom in eastern North America immediately before and after the Revolutionary War: “From 1682 to 1804 the proportion of white slaves to the whole number of immigrants to Pennsylvania steadily increased, till they constituted two-thirds during the last 19 years.” Pennsylvania was politically the most liberal state and did not even require property ownership for voting privilege. But even in this most liberal state, only one-third of the immigrants in the period immediately after the Revolution obtained their freedom when they arrived in America. Everybody did it, you know, lived in a society that kept slaves. It’s still done, even though it’s illegal. Back when it was legal here in the United States, there were also free White people who sold their own children as slaves, if you can believe it. It should hardly surprise anyone that a society like that would go on to do the same things to people from other societies. That their elites would steal land from Native Americans. That they would also buy and sell human beings who didn’t look related to them. It doesn’t excuse anything done to Blacks, neither to the Native Americans who were also kept as slaves and worse, nor could it excuse the racial apartheid that followed the formal end of slavery. It just goes to show that the ancestors who founded this country were very sick, in more ways than we always remember. It’s to their credit that, being products of such a brutal upbringing, they were able to lay the foundations for a more expansive democracy. That even though many of them strove for a pseudo-aristocratic stranglehold on the wealth of the new nation they were building, they set in motion an engine of greater liberty than they were themselves capable of envisioning. To love or respect any person, or human enterprise, without acknowledging their flaws, is ultimately not to love. Not to respect. It is to dream about people that never were. If you want only to dream, go to sleep. Inhumanity How nice it would be if we were past all that. Institutionalized, legal slavery is gone in the US. But there were many poisonous aspects to it that remain, demons that have yet to be exorcised. Mostly, the way there’s always some group of people that other parties to events can’t see as human. People whose hurt and sufferings and shattered lives we can’t feel. If it were my sister treated as the women are by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, it would injure me, too. If it were my cousin, reduced to howling grief on the street because all his precious children lay in tatters in a bombed out house as happens in Iraq, I would howl with him. It would break me to know and love those people and hurt for them; I would have to act, to try to help. We were all asked to do this, to care for each other a long time ago by a very original social radical, but hardly anyone listened. Maybe there’s still time for that, but it has yet to work. How nice it would be if it had worked to just tell people to be good to each other, as if the motive had been to treat people badly in the first place. That’s just the byproduct. Just. After all, the modernized nations were perfectly willing to give up most of the mistreatment of their own people as soon as they had people in other nations to exploit or steal from. It wasn’t personal. We often forget, now, that it’s how those who came before us jumpstarted our own prosperity. Though the peoples we hurt along the way haven’t forgotten. The Chinese, who long for prosperity of their own, they remember. They aren’t evil, they just want to thrive. As the people whose cultures originated in Europe had previously explained it to them: if you want to thrive, this is how it’s done these days. It would be better if only the victims lived someplace else. Not on top of the Chinese’ land. Not on top of the US’ oil. Not on that really nice farmland they weren’t using properly. It would be better if they’d buy our stuff and would just sell us what we want them to. Then there wouldn’t be any problems, it’s only that the engine must be fed. Must. It’s too bad people won’t go along quietly. Too bad they don’t understand. Now look what they made us do. [1] “The War On Bugs” by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture. [2] “Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change” by Paul Brown, 2007, Reader’s Digest. Or, as they say at the Fafblog, “Global Warming: How F*cked Are We? The answer may surprise you! But only if you thought the answer was “not f*cked,” ’cause it turns out we’re pretty f*cked.” [3] “China: Inside the Dragon” a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008. Other GSP installments: Transnational Maoism - All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords. Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn. Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn’t think the Chinese had no precedent, did you? Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I’d rather have a civilization. The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins. The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality. X-posted from OpenLeft
• 

  Global Suicide Pact: The Efficiency Trap

  http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/05/28/global-suicide-pac...
  102 days ago in It’s Getting Hot In Here · Authority: 249

  Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death. This is the origin story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn’t. What exactly is efficiency? You probably think about it in terms of hours worked to work product generated. In any science class, it usually means how much energy as applied to a system does useful work, as opposed to what’s lost as heat. In biology, that general science definition gets applied to living things and what powers them, their food. In every stage of terrestrial food consumption, called a trophic level, about 90 percent of the energy consumed is lost. At the first level, there are organisms like plants, also called primary producers, which take energy from the sun as food and harness that power to transform carbon dioxide gas into energy-rich sugars; the carbohydrates that are the base fuel for all other organic reactions. Primary producers are chemical factories that supply the base total amount of energy available to all the other chemical reactions needed to sustain life. At every successive level, animals who eat plants, then animals who eat animals who eat plants, about 90% of the remaining energy is lost. This doubtless seems very inefficient. Unfortunately, everything you know about efficiency is based on a lie. It’s a long story. Maybe it will help if you think of living things for the duration as machines powered by volatile chemicals, but here’s why what we think we understand about efficiency is wrong, and dangerously so. Rise of the Chemical Machines In the beginning, Earth was a big ball of lifeless rock with a molten core, a poisonous atmosphere and a lot of nutrient saturated surface water. Every year, this ball of rock got light and heat from the sun and trapped some of it as kinetic energy. That energy did nothing more than keep the surface gases and liquids from freezing solid. On the whole, it was a good system for keeping the planet from icing over completely. From my perspective though, and perhaps you’ll agree, keeping planets from freezing when they’re only 93 million miles away from a massive fusion reaction is kind of boring. Something interesting was happening under all that water, though. Near the gas vents at the ocean floors and even within the warm, but not too hot, layers of rock, machines began assembling themselves. No, really! Somehow, chains of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus compounds had gotten carried away with self-replicating chain reactions enclosed within soap bubble-like membranes, powered by chemical reactions and warmth. [You've heard of them referred to as cells, and that's fine. Just don't allow your multi-cellular myopia prevent you from realizing that a free living single-celled organism is a complete example of its species every bit as much as your many cells together taken in totality. Even if they aren't conscious as we know it.] The machines started concentrating the abundantly available nutrients into their bodies, but when food eventually became scarce in places like marginal, open water habitats (or perhaps before, and for fun, it isn’t like they wrote any of this down,) they began at some point to consume each other to get those same stores of nutrients, dissolving a second machine into its base molecular components for their own sustenance. Then something odd happened. The light and heat from the big fusion pile in the sky had always bombarded the surface layers of the planet with ultraviolet radiation that introduced so many errors into the machines’ processes that they were permanently stopped on exposure. Astonishingly, some of the machines figured out a way to harness some of that sterilizing radiation and use it as a power source. The result created deadly oxygen gas that permeated the seas, pushing the other machines farther away from the surface, but also changing the atmosphere so that more UV radiation was reflected into space. The machines were able to creep closer and closer to the surface without breaking and permanently stopping, and more of them all the time, as other machines developed ways to deal with oxygen. Then something even stranger happened. Some of the machines ate each other and, instead of the second membrane-enclosed, self-replicating machine being digested for scrap, it was incorporated into the body of the first as a working mini-organ, or organelle. Certain of these organelles produced energy for the host cell, more than it ever could have generated on its own. The DNA, or operating instructions, for the organelles migrated slowly, though incompletely, towards the central DNA repository for the host. The two became one flesh. At some point, these odd hybrids developed sex. Wahoo! Which meant that two replicating machines could mix up their operating instructions and produce another hybrid organism that resembled them both, but was unique. This was an energy-expensive process, but flush with the power boost provided by organelles that could harness oxygen-fueled reactions, they were able to take advantage of the way that sexual replication rapidly produced highly fit and complex iterations. The iterations produced by sex replication could be made of many linked cells that would formerly have been out on their own. The many became one flesh. The multicellular organisms proved very efficient at concentrating nutrients by consuming other chemical machines, though the descendants of the original self-replicators were still around. They still represent the greatest chemical diversity of any living things. There’s always room at the bottom. What The Machines Did And so goes the story of the planet’s earliest life forms, our ancestors, the bacteria and their immediate descendants. There are bacteria that can eat virtually anything and live under almost any conditions. Some have different DNA codes, or run entirely on RNA, which is a single strand complement of DNA in cells, one that evolved first and gave rise to the double strand DNA molecule. They generated a wide variety of novel, self- and sex replicating life forms. Together, they and their descendants turned a bare, boring rock into a planet covered with life, which is way more interesting than rocks. For one thing, life tends not to stay where it’s been put, moving around willy nilly under its own power. Hours of entertainment! Yet in all those billions of years, summed up here so brusquely, the Earth continued to get the same amount of energy just about every year. Give or take a few asteroid collisions, it had about the same amount of raw materials available to us, today. In fact, considering that UV radiation began to be reflected away, less heat and light now makes it down to the surface. All these tiers of living things, feeding on each other in life and death, use no more energy than was available to their ancestors. What they do is keep more of it and use it more creatively. They hold carbon that used to be in the atmosphere, where it trapped in too much heat and created too much pressure for comfort as gaseous carbon dioxide, in their living tissues. They power exotic chemical reactions in response to each other, and far more complex living conditions. The energy of that fusion pile in the sky can be used to power several cycles of living things before being dispersed again, slowly and in stages, as waste heat. Inefficient, Bloody Machines And all of this is, in a way, very inefficient. It relies on maximum energy being trapped at each step along the way. It allows entirely unnecessary things like sex, multicellular organisms, colorful appearances and delicious food. It allows over-sized nervous systems and millions of varieties of chemical machines to compete at performing a basic task like converting light and heat, or light and heat stored as sugar, fat and protein, into chemical reactions. I mean, why not have just one kind of machine, or just enough to fill the basic ecosystem niches? The way life operates in systems is different from a modern capitalist conception of efficiency, not in terms of wanting to get more out of the same or less, but what gets done with the ‘more.’ Energy, fuel and materials, often symbolized by money, but always coming back to a basic capacity to do work, is supposed to flow towards fewer and fewer hands to be efficient in the modern capitalist sense. In living systems, it’s supposed to flow through ever more hands, getting trapped and held at every level for the work of powering all sorts of life processes, but never held permanently. A lion, for example, concentrates a lot of energy and nutrients, but at some point it releases them back down the chain, which allows living things other than lions, and less efficient at trapping energy, to flourish. That’s good for the lions, because otherwise they’d eventually run out of food. You see how it is. Modern economies are structured with the goal of efficiently reducing the energy stored at every stage to produce large concentrations of wealth that are not released for other processes. Ecosystems are structured with the goal of storing energy (i.e., wealth) across as many structures and in as many hands as possible in case … well, there’s always an ‘in case.’ There are climate changes, disease epidemics, natural disasters, damaging mutations, droughts, famines, all kinds of problems that are unpredictable but come around over and over again with a certainty. Living systems that are diverse and superficially inefficient, where at every stage there’s enough energy to maintain a flourishing bounty of living beings, ensure the greatest chance of survival of at least some of them. On the other hand, in ecosystems where one species has over-concentrated energy to the detriment of all the others, a change in circumstance can be far more destructive than it might have been otherwise. It’s actively inimical to life. Also, an indication of a floundering economy, as Adam Smith himself noted in Wealth of Nations: The liberal reward of labour, therefore, … is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards. And that makes sense. We’re living things, too, complex and self-directed; not simple clockwork parts. Even as we’re like machines in some ways, we require a considerable portion of our energy for our own purposes — and this is not waste, but the preservation of life in its rich elaboration. “The Original Purchase-Money” From the beginning of industrialization, when it became possible to super-concentrate more wealth than ever before, humans have been rapidly displacing other chemical machines. We consume nearly 40% of the primary productivity, (that energy captured into living things and stored as carbon compounds,) of the entire planet. There are now fewer kinds of things that don’t stay where they’re put. Fewer kinds of things that can take energy and make something more fun happen with it than the production of waste heat. Again, that sounds like an increase in the boredom quotient to me. And I so hate that! We’ve increased the efficiency of the process of nutrient and energy flow on the planet. It goes from the sun, to a plant, maybe to an animal that eats that plant, and onto our dinner tables or into our consumer goods chain, then … waste heat. Then, the loss of the nutrients fixed by that energy to the ocean, or a waste dump, or the atmosphere. We’re starving our fellow species out and impoverishing ourselves in the process. Because there’s always as much dead matter as there ever was. Matter, the base chemical components of the universe, can neither be created nor destroyed. There aren’t always more living, chemical machines; with their quirky operating instructions, engineering creativity, inefficiency, and autonomous motion. Machines that can do truly interesting work and … remember that we’re talking about the capacity to do work, right? Adam Smith, once more from Wealth of Nations: Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who posses it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. There is nothing that so distinguishes the Earth from sweltering Venus, or from the frigid mineral opulence of the asteroid belt, as the laboring life that it harbors. That life which has spent patient aeons complicating things. Lurching between equilibrium and catastrophe, being culled thin and very slowly rebuilding, creating and solving fascinating problems, it has bequeathed to us a masterwork of chemical and mechanical wealth. Then we decided it’d be better to make all of that a little simpler. Simple enough, it seems the goal is, that an illiterate child working for $0.25 an hour could run it from a sweatshop, with the sole intent of her employers being to afford another dead yacht. Simplify, simplify, simplify. This is the call of the clockwork culture. Simplifying everything, not to free energy to sustain a greater wealth of life. No. To put everything within reach of ever simpler processes, and then use those processes to support ever fewer beings with ever greater energy. Simplify, simplify, simplify. It is an order of destruction. A death march. There’s a lot more to understand about life on Earth and our place within it. Yet without these realizations, our resource and energy use policies will continue to be harmful. They will continue to miss the point. And we all, tragically, will continue to pursue the most efficient possible path towards self-destruction. X-posted from OpenLeft In gratitude: I owe many of these overall concepts to John Ikerd’s Sustainable Capitalism and James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. Other GSP installments: Transnational Maoism - All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords. Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn. Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn’t think the Chinese had no precedent, did you? Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I’d rather have a civilization. The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins. The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality.
• 

  Super Powers

  http://blog.arlecchino.org/?p=1022
  120 days ago in John Griogair Bell’s Blog · Authority: 2

  “Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.” “In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.” “If Keats’s philosophy is correct, then any intense experience — even letting your life rot away after a failed relationship, or enduring the agony of heroin withdrawal, or dying young of tuberculosis — is precious. … Each goes into making you into a unique being.” “… people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal …”
• 

  Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Part 1

  http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/09/global-suicide-pact...
  120 days ago in Crooks and Liars · Authority: 4,246

  Natasha Chart at Open Left: Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who’s going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India. International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for “unauthorized gatherings”, they’re still shooting and killing Tibetans. They’ve also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe’s dictator, who’s currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan’s exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they’re now the world’s top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita. Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don’t understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn’t exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal. Indeed, let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from? I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I’d done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world’s shoes. Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that “many factories have to meet social obligations” and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US. Read on…
• 

  Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 2

  http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5651
  121 days ago in Open Left:: Global Suicide Pact: Amish Takeover · Authority: 1

  Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death. This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China". (9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV) We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true. Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into. In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment. Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves. Paradise Burned Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911 For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease. The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark: The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon. The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit: [emphasis mine] ... Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks-they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. ... Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin-directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical," he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes." "Landscape" in this case is meant exactly-Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta-rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings. Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. ... Chemically speaking, fire is only a showy display of oxidation. The process whereby electrons are stripped away from atoms, quite commonly by interaction with oxygen. This releases energy, the capacity to do work, most of which will be lost as waste heat. It's happening inside your cells right now. It's an integral part of digesting and utilizing the food we eat. It happens in every living cell, this controlled burn. It even gives off waste heat. The most important oxidation reactions for living things involve carbon compounds, starches mainly, or as you might have heard them called, carbohydrates. Carbon hydrated, which is to say, carbon atoms joined to hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Photosynthesizing plant cells take water (H2O) carbon dioxide (carbon and two oxygens, CO2) and unburn it, if you will, into long chains of CH2O molecules linked together as fructose, cellulose, deoxyribose, what have you, and free oxygen (O2). Plant cells that don't photosynthesize, and almost all other living cells, take those starches and burn them, combine them with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide again. We eat the bodies of other living things in large part for their exotic carbon compounds. We combine that carbon with oxygen, slowly, with lots of intermediate steps, capturing and reusing as much of the released energy as possible. The pleasing warmth of our skin is the product of the form of steady combustion we're dependent on, that for humans, allows us to dependably fire the sugar-hungry engines of our brains. We burn gently alive. So do other beings, all the other chemical machines. Everywhere in the soil are bacteria and other organisms burning through the carbon that was left over from the waste or dead bodies of plants, animals, fungi and single-celled beings. When it's in soil, these carbon compounds are called soil organic matter (SOM), which I've mentioned before and will again. SOM is one of the most valuable substances on earth if you're a land-dwelling mammal, which I'm going to guess that you are. It's the main difference between a gloriously black and crumbly prairie soil, nurturing of plants and acquisitive of water, and a fine grade of dead beach sand or rock dust. It's an excellent fertilizer and a strong component of pest and disease resistance in healthy ecosystems. SOM is worth more than any metal, from a cosmic perspective far more rare, worth almost as much to us as free oxygen. Oh yes, oxygen again. Soil-dwelling beings combine SOM with oxygen to burn it to live. Much of it gets released rapidly again as carbon dioxide after being digested, some of it is turned into very hard-to-digest carbon compounds that can remain in the soil for a long time before some enterprising fungi or bacteria get around to eating them. SOM needs to be continually added back to the soil at a rate faster than the beings that live in the ground can burn it off or there will be a steady decline in soil quality and fertility. This can only be covered up for so long by chemical fertilizers. At some point, it simply becomes too resource intensive to replace what naturally ought to have been there. The style of mass cash-crop agriculture hatched in Europe that uses the land as if it were a factory does not replace SOM. It doesn't keep it at a steady state. It provides for a rapid burnoff of all that makes good soil distinct from sand, and it increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, which, for reasons unknown, decreases soil organic matter. This month's National Geographic[3] notes that global warming induced climate from increased carbon dioxide is already burning away the water stored in the glaciers of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau that feeds China's Yellow River, with over 3,000 of 4,077 lakes in one county there having dried up. They profile a Tibetan herding family that lost the better part of the animals that supported their nomadic lifestyle during the drought and had to accept a resettlement package from the Chinese government, because they simply couldn't support themselves anymore. Much of the Yellow River, the magazine explains, is now biologically dead; poisoned by industrial dumping and drained by agriculture, the water that remains is now often the death of the plants, animals and people who depended on it before. The Chinese farmed and worked in their country in the old ways for forty centuries. It was a good country that they kept passing down to successive generations as an abundant foundation for new life. They haven't been doing it the new way for even a full century yet, and their land is dying. Just as the rich, beautiful land of the Americas is. In 2005, there were 51,000 pollution-related protests across China [3] before the worst effects have even hit yet, when they already have environmental refugees. More than 40% of their land is now desert and another 800 sq miles or more become deserts every year [2]. China's fate, if they hold to their present road, is not to be the next global superpower. It's to starve. It's to be inundated with sand storms from the encroaching Gobi as 30 million surplus young men, men who will never be able to find a nice woman to settle down with because their parents' generation were ashamed to have daughters, realize that the taps have run dry. That story writes itself. Just As Broken ... Yu Baofa, a leading Shandong oncologist who has studied the villages of Dongping County, calls it "the cancer capital of the world." He says the incidence of esophageal cancer in the area is 25 times higher than the national average. The more than four billion tons of wastewater dumped annually into the Yellow River, accounting for a full 10 percent of the river's volume, has pushed into extinction a third of the river's native fish species and made long stretches unfit even for irrigation. Now comes the human toll. In a 2007 report China's Ministry of Health blamed air and water pollution for an alarming rise in cancer rates across China since 2005 -- 19 percent in urban areas and 23 percent in the countryside. Nearly two-thirds of China's rural population, more than 500 million people use water contaminated by human or industrial waste. It's little wonder that gastrointestinal cancer is now the number one killer in the countryside. ... [3] Does it hurt less when someone in your family dies of cancer than it does when they die by a machete? I'm dubious. ... The costs of Asia's industrial revolution are etched in little hamlets like Badui, a Chinese village in rural Gansu Province. -- ... The woman said her husband had just died in his thirties -- "of a stomach ache," she explained -- but what struck me was the way the teenage sons stared at me, their heads lolling to the side and their mouths creasing into monstrous grins. Their hair was shaggy and unkempt and their expressions preposterous. "Yeah, they're not right in the head," the mother said, as she saw me looking at them uneasily. "Nobody is in this village. That's why people in these parts call this the 'village of idiots.' I wasn't born here; I married into it. But the same thing is happening to me. I can feel it every day. My brain's getting fried up until eventually there'll be nothing left. ..." -- ... Then, smack in the middle of the path, was a lanky grandfather ... holding the hand of a little girl -- not just a little girl, but a miniature girl, who came up only a bit higher than his knees. ... She was the size of a toddler, and her split pants and lack of underwear showed that she was not yet potty-trained. But she stood and walked effortlessly on her own, and she gazed at me with solemn black sparkling eyes that were those of a child, not a baby. ... "She's Liu Yingchun, my granddaughter ... She's seven years old," he said, although I later worked out that by American conventions she was six. "Then why is she so short?" "Oh, kids here are like that," protested the grandfather, still beaming lovingly at her. "Plenty of the kids just never grow up, never learn to speak. But this girl, she's a smart one. She may yet learn how to speak. And she's growing. She's a growing girl." -- ... "What a cute baby!" I said ingratiatingly. It was perhaps the wrong moment, for he had just urinated where he was sitting. Everybody looked at him, and he began to play with his fingers in the urine. His mother picked him up, scolded him, and moved him away. "You dumbo!" she said to him lovingly, tapping on his chest. "You melon-head!" "What's the baby's name?" I asked her. "Wei Haiyun[, he's e[ight years old," she murmured softly. ... I was so stunned by his height that I took a piece of string and held it against him, cutting it off to record his height. (On returning home I measured it -- twenty-nine inches. That is the height an average American baby reaches at twelve months.) ... looking at his face alone I would have judged him a handsome boy of eight or ten. But he was miniaturized, roughly in proper proportions, and he behaved like a baby: He ran to his mother to be cradled when he was upset, and he had never learned to use the toilet. -- I turned out that one-third to one-half of the 180 people in Badui have some serious physical disorder, and nearly all the peasants die early -- often in their forties. Many lose their minds, or become deaf or blind before they die. Women report frequent miscarriages and stillborn children, as well as periodic birth defects. Shortly before I arrived, a baby had been born with fingers fused on both hands. But what struck me most was how many tiny children there were like Haiyun, many not just short but also mentally retarded or deaf. Similar problems, on a more modest scale, also confound thousands more peasants in other nearby villages, and everyone knows what the problem is: the effluent water dumped into the river by the Liujiaxia Fertilizer Factory just upstream. That river water is the only source of drinking water for Badui. The peasants know that the water is contaminated and that it will destroy their minds and bodies, but they are thirsty and there is no alternative. ... There is no alternative. Are the future hopes of those Chinese parents less destroyed than the future hopes of the Iraqi parents whose children are destroyed by bombs my taxes paid for? The Chinese government probably doesn't want to have to do these things. Killing people and oppressing them is very tiresome, and often, they come to complain and eventually resist. Putting down rebellions is even more tiresome. They're seizing at the first chance their people have had for real, mass prosperity. They do brutal things to hold on to power, but mostly, they probably want people to be reasonably satisfied and go about building the economy through the continuous processes of daily life. Which is pretty much what the US government wants of its own citizens: go to work, raise your family, buy stuff, don't make trouble. They probably don't see a way out of trying to copy what all the other successful countries are doing. Which is sort of ironic, as I'll get to next time. [1] "The War On Bugs" by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture. [2] "Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change" by Paul Brown, 2007, Reader's Digest. Or, as they say at the Fafblog, "Global Warming: How F*cked Are We? The answer may surprise you! But only if you thought the answer was "not f*cked," 'cause it turns out we're pretty f*cked." [3] "China: Inside the Dragon" a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008. Previous GSP installments: Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn't think the Chinese had no precedent, did you? Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I'd rather have a civilization. The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins. The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality.

Advertise on Technorati

Advertise on Technorati