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The Fertile Crescent and the Closed Circle
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
The closed system is the holy grail of self sufficiency. In it, you would be able to produce everything you need at whatever level the circle operated (on your property, in your neighborhood, in your town, in your bioregion, and on up), without any necessary imports. And you would simultaneously grow enough resources to replace everything you consume – fertility, soil humus, natural resources. And ultimately, the quest for sustainability requires that as a world we be able to live off the interest of our planetary capital – that we cease to deplete non-renewable resources and that we renew the renewable ones at least the rate of depletion. We are doing neither, and thus we need all the models of closed systems we can get.
When a lot of us discover peak oil or other ecological crises, we start by thinking about how we can preserve our immediate family and ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with this – but we often begin from the notion that we ought to try and achieve a kind of self-sufficiency. So we often start on the journey to self-sufficiency thinking primarily about sustainability at the household or family scale.
At some point, however, we look up from our family situation and realize that we can’t attain security without other people around us having security. And then situation becomes larger, and seems less manageable. Sometimes we draw tight borders, imagining that we can keep those limits under control, other times we give up on the project altogether, and focus our energies somewhere else.
(7 October 2007)
Also new from Sharon: Form a Neighborhood Cooperative
World moves into the ecological red
Jeremy Lovell, Reuters
The world moved into ‘ecological overdraft’ on Saturday, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New Economics Foundation think-tank said.
Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006 which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond its environmental means in the 1980s.
“As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20 tonnes of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tonnes,” said NEF director Andrew Simms.
“And why would that wasteful trade be more the rule than the exception,” he added.
Not only was there a massive gulf between rich and poor but there were deep variations in environmental profligacy between the rich countries, NEF said.
(5 October 2007)
The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability
Sandy Irvine, What Next Journal
What Next editor: Leon Trotsky showed great insight on many issues but, argues Sandy Irvine, his biggest blind spot concerned ecological sustainability, now the greatest issue of our times. His thinking reflected the technological cornucopianism that bedevils the socialist tradition. Unless addressed it threatens to render the movement unable to address today’s primary challenge.
IT IS a tribute to Leon Trotsky’s standing that his ideas are still widely discussed. If the number of ex-members as well as actual supporters of avowedly and quasi-Trotskyist groups were to be counted, the total would reveal an army of people who, to some extent at least, have been influenced by his thought and deeds. It is not a question of numbers per se. Many leading figures in contemporary anti-globalisation, anti-racism and “stop the war” movements are Trotskyists in the broadest sense of the word. Many apolitical citizens are aware of his struggle with Stalin and subsequent fate.
…It is argued here that Trotsky both reflected and encouraged an even worse tendency amongst the radical Left, namely an almost total myopia about the most significant of all developments in the 20th century, the ecological crisis. It is the most serious, all-embracing challenge of our times. Global overwarming is only one of many symptoms of dangerous planetary disorder. Not only did Trotsky fail to anticipate the most serious failing in the dominant social and economic order, he actually endorsed technologies, lifestyle choices and policy goals that could only serve to increase the unsustainable impact of humankind on the Earth’s life-support systems. (The threat from nuclear war will not be discussed since, fortunately, it remains only a possibility whereas ecological meltdown is an actuality).
The following study focuses on one person. In doing so, it also comments on the more general socialist tradition, especially its Marxist variant of which he was a leading representative. Trotsky provides a particularly good case study. Whatever his failings, he was a very intelligent man. His writings on literature and other arts show great subtlety. He demonstrated immense foresight on many issues, especially the threat from Fascism. In his early political career, he perceptively warned of the dangers of excessive centralism in political organisations. In short, Trotsky combined remarkable erudition with often sharp perception.
His ecological blind spot was not some personal failing but the product of a whole political tradition that, in this respect at least, was gravely flawed. Unless corrected, this ecological blinkeredness will make it as irrelevant as more conventional politics, no matter what sensible things socialist activists might say about specific matters such as the better funding of public services, job security, protection of citizen rights, militarism and the closing of the wealth-poverty gap.
(no date. September? October? 2007)
From the British Marxist discussion journal, “What Next”. Recommended by Louis Proyect of Marx Mail.
Review: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
John Marsh, Bookslut
…For Bill McKibben, however, the farmer’s market is more than just a pleasant, ethical convenience, and more than just an alternative to the Kroger’s and Wal-Marts of America. It is, instead, the only sustainable model for a twenty-first century economy; a model for the local production and distribution of everything — food, energy, communication, democracy — that people need to survive.
McKibben’s praise for farmer’s markets starts as a sustained critique of the current economy and its monomaniacal emphasis on “growth.” That growth economy, McKibben argues, is unequal, unsustainable, and, perhaps most surprisingly, depressing. It is unequal because, as he puts it, “Though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was thirty years ago. The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily: they earned $27,600 in real dollars in 1979, $25,600 in 2005.” If the wealth created in the last thirty years has not gone to the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers, where has it gone? The math is fairly obvious: like the latest round of tax cuts, it has gone to the richest 10 percent of Americans.
But inequality is not the fundamental problem of our economy. We could, assuming the political will existed, spread that growth more evenly through a variety of wage and redistribution policies. But that would not solve the problem of sustainability.
(October 2007 issue)
