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Earth Democracy – notes on Vandana Shiva
Amanda Kovattana, Flickr blog
Justice, Sustainability, And Peace. Vandana Shiva dares to go where other food systems activist will only make vague references. She believes that peasants should be able to make a living based on access to land, rivers, forests and oceans and that governments must protect the health of these commons for the good of all. This makes her a radical. She also makes complete sense and answers many of my questions about the inequity of the poor.
Much of this book is a discussion of the commons and the enclosure laws in England in the 16th century that allowed the commons to be privatized. Critics of Vandana claim that she is asking for a return to feudalism, but they are not hearing her out. (And besides feudalism guaranteed that the peasants would eat, while privatization guarantees that those without money will starve while taking away access to the land that originally provided them with a livelihood.) Much of the battle of the enclosure laws is waged with words. By claiming that an area of land is a wasteland and is not being used by anyone, this somehow gives private companies the right to buy the land or contract to use it for development purposes.
… She talks about how the sustenance economy is not valued on the market because it does not involve paid labor (think women’s work, home economics, childrearing). Yet such work is how the recognized market can exist. She warns that the market is bent on the exploitation of resources that support the sustenance economy such as clean water, air and land and comments that the only sustainable economy is the sustenance economy because of its built in feed back loops and community. The market however solves problems by providing solutions of increasing complexity involving more exploitation of resources and more privatization as seen with privatization of water.
Getting inside Vandana Shiva’s worldview stretches my head, but I really think she gets to the root of global issues. If we could embrace what she is saying, solving our biggest problems could be a lot simpler. I shall have to read more of her books.
(18 September 2008)
Also on Amanda’s Flickr blog, some notes on childraising (The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children.. -BA
The old future’s gone (audio)
Ecoshock
As Wall St crumbles, Texas U Prof Robert Jensen asks if days of mass movements are gone. The 60’s are not coming back. Alternative title: “The Delusion Revolution: We’re On the Road to Extinction and In Denial”
From Radio Ecoshock
(September 2008)
Ordinary human poverty
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
At one point in his writings, Sigmund Freud (who, btw, was not at all the caricature that many readers imagine him as and who is well worth reading in his own right) wrote about the difference between two states – one of them abnormal, and subject to resolution by the “talking cure,” the other ordinary and not necessarily remediable. The first he called “neurotic misery,” the other “ordinary human unhappiness.” His point was that psychoanalysis could only address pathological states, neither it nor any other solution could preserve us from the ordinary bad experiences of being human, and that distinguishing between them was essential. Ordinary human unhappiness did mean, of course, that one was unhappy every second, merely that one accepted that normal human states had periods of suffering, sadness, anger and fear in them too – it was important to recognize that nothing, no tool, could ever make life good every second.
Riffing on Freud, for some years, I have been arguing that the reality of peak energy, climate change and our precarious financial situation was leading us towards re-experiencing “ordinary human poverty” – a state that I would argue is fairly normal, if at times unpleasant. I also believe it is the future for most of us. And it would be easy to imagine that this meant that our future was one of true horror, an pathological nightmare from which we cannot awaken. The despair many of us feel when we see that word “poverty” can’t be underestimated.
I think we are now at the point where the argument I’ve been making all these years – that peak oil will be less about whether there is gas in the gas stations or whether the grid crashes – and more about whether we can buy gas or whether the utility company shuts us off for nonpayment is pretty much certain. Right now, we are watching the crisis unfold mostly far from us. It is coming home – and rapidly, and we are shifting to a lower eocnomic level. For example, as the New York Times reports, retail chains are in real danger – remember, 70% of our economy depends on consumer spending. Most of us will cut back, and many chains will go bankrupt for lack of funds and credit – and that cascade of bankruptcies will further echo, as more and more of us who still have jobs and money to spend see no point in buying things at successful chains – why bother when the same jeans are available at 75% off at the going out of business sale of another store in the same mall?…
24 September 2008)
