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Adam’s Story: Banners in the Wind
John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
This narrative is the third part of an exploration of the five themes from my Archdruid Report post “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Future” using the tools of narrative fiction. As with the first two portions of “Adam’s Story,” the setting is the rural Pacific Northwest during the second half of this century.
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Adam and Haruko spent most of the next three weeks walking south along the coast highway, with the sea never far away to their right and a half-empty land to their left. Here and there, where rivers laid down pockets of good soil, there were farms and the occasional village, and people willing to trade an afternoon’s work for a meal and a dry place to sleep. Elsewhere, empty towns huddled against the gray sea – fishing ports abandoned when the seas were stripped of fish, tourist towns long empty of tourists – and those offered shelter, if nothing more.
Twice they’d found places to stay more than a night. One of those was a religious commune, a dozen or so adults and half that many children living all together in a big barn of a place just off the highway. They’d left the city fifteen years back to follow their own revelation, though Adam never did quite manage to figure out what made theirs different from anyone else’s. Still, they had goats for milk and meat, and the two travelers happened to arrive right as the nannies were giving birth, which meant extra hands were more than welcome.
They stayed there more than a week in all, and Adam guessed they might have stayed there for good if they’d had any interest in the commune’s religion. No chance of that, though; Haruko was Buddhist, devout enough to pray the nembutsu every night; Adam wasn’t sure what he believed, but that one little group of people were God’s chosen and everyone else was going to fry eternally for the sin of disagreeing with them wasn’t it. When the last of the kids had dropped, he and Haruko said their goodbyes and started south again.
(12 July 2007)
The Ants of Gaia
Joe Bageant, Blog
It’s only the end of the world, so quit bitching
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As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I’d guess that it was the lack of water that finally got ’em.
…Now you’d think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, “Done drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off.”
…Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice — the moral one. Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted to the rationality and embrace the spirit. Rationality simply turns back on itself like a mobius strip. Too much thinking, too much cleverness on the monkey’s part leads it to believe it can come up with rational solutions for what ration itself hath wrought.
…So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has always worked — empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away thorough insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and political parties and pretend the whole of American life is not a disconnect. Hell, all of Western culture has become a disconnect. Somebody needs to tell the Europeans too; progressive Americans give them entirely too much credit for the small positive variation in their cultures and ours. We both get away with it only so long as the oil and the entertainment last.
…The hearts of even our most avowedly thriving cities are just as dead, reduced to nothing more than designated spending zones, collections of bars and banks and overpriced eateries lodged at the center of a massive tangle of overpasses and freeways designed for a nation of soft people hurtling themselves through the suburbs in petroleum powered exoskeletons in search of fried chicken, or into the city for the lonely monetized experience called urban nightlife. Which is no life at all, but rather posturing in lifelike poses amid simple drunkenness and engorgement.
We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one we have known. Is it not true that our entire understanding of courage as we know it is about braving some unknown? About making the socially unaccepted and dangerous choice? Stepping forward in the face of the wars and evil mechanics of our own particular time?
Empire and its inevitable permanent state of warfare flourishes not because evil men are at the helm, but because the men at the helm are even weaker and more in denial than we are. (Look at Dick Cheney. The guy is a nervous wreck wrapped in arrogance and denial.) And so their uninformed and crude confidence is assuring to both them and us. We elect the worst among ourselves in increasing avoidance of ourselves and they are validated by our endorsement. Evil men seeking empire did not make us or the world this way. We made their existence possible through our denial, love of ease and non accountability.
…What’s left of my own aging hippie optimism dies hard.
…Younger men and women will live to rule or rule the day. So seize it for god sake! And listen to the cellular wisdom of the flesh. I did and do and am damned glad of it.
… Yet, what could be better than a meaningful life during meaningless times? Which is everything, whether we be artistic, queer, altruistic, an unheralded ox in the fields of labor — or one of the invisible ones out there with a stone cold determination to kill the supposedly deathless machinery in which we are expected to supplicate daily and call that a life.
I am not a wise man, but I dare say that’s about all you can hope for. A splash of small glory, or perhaps even a canteen filled with meaningfulness in the desert. It is no small thing.
So here we are. You and me. Let us hang all our laundry out to dry in this tiny corner of cyberspace. I think it is entirely possible that we can be honest cybernetic bards in an unpromising age, possibly even noble amid the ruins.
(3 July 2007)
Econ-Utopia: The Bloodless Revolution, part 1 of 2
Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, Econ-Atrocity
A review of Peter Barnes’ CAPITALISM 3.0
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A few weeks ago, CPE Staff Economist Jerry Friedman wrote an Econ-Atrocity reviewing Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy. Though he says McKibben “has written a clear attack on much of what ails us,” Friedman nonetheless criticizes McKibben for approaching the environmental and social problems of the day from an individualist perspective. For all that McKibben wants to promote and revive “community,” he has the attitude (says Friedman) of a “personal Salvationist . . . [who thinks that] the enemy [is] ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.” What McKibben misunderstands or ignores, Friedman argues, is the power of social institutions to drive behavior, regardless of the desires and seemingly free choices of individuals.
I think that Friedman will find solace in Peter Barnes’ recent book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, since Barnes’ approach is definitively institutional. The problem, according to Barnes, is that the structure of the economy and society leave too much power in the hands of corporate capitalism. Even if all the CEOs and boards of directors and politicians were replaced with kind-hearted souls like McKibben, we would still face pretty much the same issues of environmental decay, economic inequality, and other social ills-the logic of capitalism and the legal structure of private property rights force the leaders of corporations to do what they currently do. He learned this from personal experience as co-owner and manager of several business ventures, most famously Working Assets (a telephone and credit card company that donates one percent of gross revenues to progressive charitable organizations). …
While the government is necessary, in Barnes’ view it is incapable of successfully addressing these big problems because “most-though not all-of the time, government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders.” (Emphasis in the original.) Having realized that neither the market economy nor the government has any likelihood of halting global warming or reducing inequality, Barnes began to wonder “Is there, perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us?”
He’s been thinking about it for ten years, and he has a positive answer: the commons, which Barnes defines “as a generic term, like the market or the state. It refers to all the gifts we inherit or create together . . . The commons designates a set of assets that have two characteristics: they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared. A gift is something we receive, as opposed to something we earn. A shared gift is one we receive as members of a community, as opposed to individually. Examples . . . include air, water, ecosystems, languages, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics, parks, the Internet, and much more.”
(20 June 2007)
Also online:
Second part of this review
Online version (free) of Barnes’s book
Review of McKibbens’s book by Gerald Friedman
The Comparative Sociology of Environmental Economics in the Works of Henry Carey and Karl Marx (PDF)
Michael Perelman, History of Economics Review (Issue 36)
Abstract: Sets out the views first of Henry Carey and then of Karl Marx on the significance of resource scarcity for the economic development of advanced capitalist societies. Concludes that both emphasised reproduction costs, pointing the way to an economic theory consistent with environmental sustainability. Carey, however, stressed material flows, while Marx paid more attention to the role of social relations in the efficient use of natural resource
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Few economists would seem as dissimilar as Karl Marx and Henry Carey, yet, in a strange way, they shared certain characteristics. Both worked for the New York Tribune. For a brief period before the Civil War, Marx and Engels wrote the bulk of the articles for the paper, while Carey supplied the editorials on economic subjects. Both saw themselves as engaged in changing the course of world history. Marx was working for a proletarian revolution to usher in a socialist world, while Carey was doing his utmost to undermine the British in order to make the US into an autarkic, laissez-faire economy.
…Although Henry Carey and Karl Marx proposed very different visions of an ideal economy, they both shared a similar understanding of the nature of environmental limitations and the requirements of economic sustainability, although, not surprisingly, neither credits the other.
We cannot know today if Marx and Carey took ideas directly from each other, but the protectionist, laissez-faire regime that Carey favoured and the socialist environmental model that Marx envisioned drew upon similar environmental analyses. Justus von Liebig was the key figure in this nascent movement, although Liebig himself drew upon Carey to give economic content to his analysis.
Central to the Marx-Carey-Liebig analysis was the realisation of the necessity for a metabolic balance between these materials taken from the earth and those deposited back on the earth. The modern agricultural system had broken the cycle of nutrients, which is necessary for sustained ecological health. Carey, Marx, and Liebig all agreed that the cycle to had to be made whole again by closing the material loops, although they disagreed about the root cause.
…Both Marx and Carey saw their respective environmental analyses as a major prop for their specific political agendas. For Marx, since environmental problems were the natural outcome of the market, these environmental failures would contribute to the ultimate downfall of capitalism. Carey blamed environmental problems on a particular type of market, namely, the regime of free trade dominated by Great Britain. For Carey, environmental failures were convincing evidence that trade with Britain was self-defeating for the US as well as Britain’s other trading partners.
For Marx, socialism had the potential to transcend environmental disruptions since, under economic democracy, society as a whole would make economic decisions. For Carey, the solution was a laissez-faire economy with production for local markets.
(2002)
The original article is a 26-page PDF. If one has doubts about the dominant school of neo-classical economics, a fruitful place to look for alternatives is in the history of economics.
Dr. Perelman also published a paper on Henry Carey’s Political-Ecological Economics which unfortunately is behind a paywall. The abstract reads:
Henry Carey was the most important American economist of the middle part of the 19th century. Although he lacked an academic following in the United States, he was influential in Europe. In the course of denouncing British trade policy and British political economy, Carey developed an ecological-economic analysis that prefigures much modern thought. Carey began with the dangers of soil depletion and developed a dynamic theory of value based on the cost of reproduction. He called for a development strategy based on the complete, local recycling of all goods, including even waste products from both animate and inanimate sources. This article details the strengths and shortcomings of Carey’s work. Although Carey was quite conservative and trusted in markets, his theories point in the direction of a radical ecological-economic program.
Henry Charles Carey (Wikipedia)
Henry Charles Carey, 1793-1879 – LINKS
A Biography of Henry Carey
