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World at Gunpoint – Or, what’s wrong with the simplicity movement
Derrick Jensen, Orion
A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”
The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.
The second is that this is pretty much the only question that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some environmentalists) about the state of the world and our response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up 7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined). If you click on the websites that come up, you find just what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop, Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,” and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”
The third and most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.
So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause…
(May/June 2009)
The Malthusian insult
Paul Krugman, New York Times
So I’ve received a fair bit of correspondence denouncing me for saying that we have to do something about climate change. Among the various insults is the claim that I’m just another Malthus — which is interesting.
Leave aside the climate science issues. What very few people realize is that Malthus was right about most of human history — indeed, he was right about roughly 58 out of 60 centuries of civilization: living standards basically did not improve from the era of the first Pharaohs to the age of Louis XIV, because any technological gains were swallowed up by population pressure. We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.
Here’s a chart from Brad DeLong, showing population versus real wages in Britain. It was only in the late 17th century that Britain began to diverge from a simple population-wages curve; other parts of the world stayed Malthusian much longer.
(1 July 2009)
Interesting comment by Ezra Klein (Malthus’s Revenge in WaPo):
… We have, in ways that are pretty wonderful, a post-Malthusian attitude about technology. On some level, we trust that it will rescue us when necessary. We may not be able to predict the form of that rescue in advance. But in recent years, trusting that our knowledge will outpace our problems has been a pretty good bet. This has, I think, bred a certain background level of comfort with climate change. There are plenty who believe it a bad thing, but on some fundamental level, don’t believe that really bad things still happen. We’ll find a way out. We always do. If this were a television program, we’re barely at the first commercial break.
And maybe that will prove true. Maybe the hydrogen breakthrough is just around the bend. There’s no obvious reason to think otherwise. But it’s worth remembering that for most of human history, our problems were at least as big as our brains, and technology rarely intervened to avert calamity. There’s no iron law that human civilization can’t be torn apart by catastrophe. It has happened before, as you can see on the part of the graph coinciding with the Black Death. It will likely happen again. Malthus could still be vindicated. So it’s good to put policies in place that make a breakthrough on energy technology more likely. But it’s probably not a safe idea to put such insufficient policies on carbon emissions in place that our real policy is to hope for an technological breakthrough.
New book looks at economic devastation in an Iowa meat-packing town
Tom Philpott, Grist
It’s become axiomatic that to peer deep into our reliance on fossil energy is to gaze upon human wreckage: bombed-out Baghdad slums, desolated Nigerian townships, or Appalachian communities eviscerated by the removal of mountaintops.
The food system has its own war zones, its own spaces of suffering and despair. Like the energy giants, food corporations generally manage these scenes off-stage, as hidden as possible from public view. Consider thousands of Florida tomato pickers living in poverty and, occasionally, slavery; or meat-packing workers, toiling in conditions so dire that Human Rights Watch was not long ago moved to issue a damning report. Or consider the more banal, everyday indignities endured by low-wage workers at fast-food outlets, institutional kitchens, and grocery-selling retail giants like Wal-Mart, ably documented by writers like Eric Schlosser, Liza Featherstone, and Barbara Ehrenreich.
This week’s New York Times Book Review shines a hard light on one of those scenes, in Walter Kirns’ compelling review of Nick Reding’s book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.
I have not gotten a copy of Reding’s book yet. If we believe Kirns, it’s a doozy. The book focuses on an Iowa town whose main legit business is a meat-packing plant. It’s chief underground activity, until recently, was the meth trade.The two are evidently intimately related.
…Reding is working in terrain mapped out by Osha Gray Davidson in his searing 1996 book Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, which surveyed the human wreckage of the 1980s farm crisis. Crushed between high debt loads and low crop prices, midwest farmers exited their fields by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s. The small-town businesses that catered to them saw their profits vanish—and a social and economic crisis engulfed the Farm Belt, not unlike the ones that simultaneously gripped the great de-industrializing cities of the North. in Broken Heartland, Davidson documents the human costs: rising rates of alcoholism and child abuse; the paradox of hunger amid some of the globe’s most fertile soil.
(5 July 2009)
