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From State-Based Sovereignty Towards Bright Green Governance
Billy Matheson, WorldChanging
In his book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (2007), as well as through the Wiser Earth project, Paul Hawken offers a compelling vision of a green future in which people all around the planet reconnect with each other, with place, and with an understanding that “all life is sacred.”
If, as Hawken suggests, we are in the middle of the “next great transformation,” it will require us to form relationships with each other — and not just the easy kinds of relationships with people we like, but the hard kind: relatedness across difference and across scale.
The hardest differences to bridge might be differences in how we understand governance and imagine sovereignty.
Much of our modern thinking about rights is informed by an idea of sovereignty that emphasises autonomy rather than relatedness. Nations go to war because they have the right to do it. Businesses pollute because they have the right to pollute. Governments pass environmental legislation because they have the right to make laws. Community groups organise and campaign because they have the right to, people vote because they have the right to.
In some ways the idea of sovereignty is an abstract concept, but it”s an abstraction that informs so many of our actions in the world. So how else might we govern ourselves, and each other, in a bright green future?
(9 November 2007)
Big Gav comments:
One to freak out anti one world government conspiracy theorists.
World Energy to 2050: A Half Century of Decline
Paul Chefurka (GliderGuider), The Oil Drum: Canada
This article supercedes an earlier work, “World Energy and Population: Trends to 2100”. Compared to that paper this article offers a more comprehensive look at the world’s evolving energy picture and confines its projections to the first half of the century. Also unlike that earlier work, this article makes no assumptions about changes in human population due directly to reductions in the world’s energy supply. At the end of the article I will briefly examine one highly probable effect the decline in total energy would have on the quality of human life.
Introduction
Throughout history, the expansion of human civilization has been supported by a steady growth in our use of high-quality exosomatic energy. This growth has been driven by our increasing population and our increasing level of activity. As we learned to harness the energy sources around us we progressed from horse-drawn plows, hand forges and wood fires to our present level of mechanization with its wide variety of high-density energy sources. As industrialization has progressed around the world, the amount of energy each one of us uses has also increased, with the global average per capita consumption of all forms of energy rising by 50% in the last 40 years alone.
This rosy vision of continuous growth has recently been challenged by the theory of “Peak Oil”, which concludes that the amount of oil and natural gas being extracted from the earth will shortly start an irreversible decline. As that decline progresses we will have to depend increasingly on other energy sources to power our civilization. In this article I will offer a glimpse into that changed energy future. I hope to be able to provide a realistic assessment of the evolution of the global energy supply picture, and to estimate how much of the various types of energy we will have available to us in the coming decades.
…Conclusion
How many ways are there to say the world is heading for hard times? Losing most of our oil is bad enough, and losing most of our gas as well borders on the catastrophic. Combining these losses with the exponential growth of those nations that can least afford it is nothing short of cataclysmic. The ramifications spread out like ripples on a pond. There will be 7 billion people who will need fertilizer and irrigation water to survive, but would be too poor to buy it even at today’s prices. Given the probable escalation in the costs of fertilizer and the diesel fuel or electricity for their water pumps, it isn’t hard to understand why the spread of famine in energy-poor regions of the world seems virtually inevitable.
In normal times the poor would appeal to the rest of the world for food aid. However, these times may be anything but normal. Even the shrinking population of the rich world will see its wealth eroded by the drop in energy supplies and the increasing cost of producing the energy they do have. This decline in their wealth will in turn erode any surpluses they might otherwise have donated to international aid. In any event, there will be over twice as many hungry mouths crying for that aid, with less and less of it available.
This assessment doesn’t even consider the converging and amplifying impacts of the other problems I mentioned above: the loss of soil fertility and fresh water, the death of the oceans, rising pollution, spreading extinctions and accelerating climate change.
The solution to this dilemma, if solution there may be, does not seem to lie in some Deus ex Machina or in a technological revision of the parable of the loaves and fishes. If the dark visions outlined in this article come true, we will be faced with a world in which the only way forward is to accept that Mother Nature does not negotiate. We must use our considerable intelligence to figure out ways to live within the ecological budget we have been allotted. More than that, we must change our values away from our current paradigm of growth, competition and exploitation to one of sustainability, cooperation and nurturing. The longer and tighter we cling to our present ways, the more damage we will ultimately inflict on ourselves and the world we live in. For many, the time for such a change has already passed. For a fortunate few there may yet be enough time to move toward the new ways of living and being that will be required in this brave new world.
(10 November 2007)
Scared? Duh.
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
“I’m afraid there’s no denyin’
I’m just a dandelion
A fate I don’t deserve.
I’d be brave as a blizzard…
If I only had the nerve.”
…Now I tend to be an optimist by both nature and inclination. I’m not generally fearful or easily made unhappy. I love my life. Despite the fact that my job is to read all the bad news about peak oil, climate change, soil and water depletion, resource wars, environmental toxicity, financial trouble and all the other crap you can imagine, and write about it, I tend not to take it all too seriously. That is, I do, but I also take very seriously the good stuff in my life. Generally speaking, they balance one another out. But not always. Not, perhaps, as much lately as I’d like.
The thing is, I think most people have a choice when they are confronted by a reality like peak oil and climate change – either they develop a thick skin for at least some things, or they deny. We’re all aware that denial is the most popular choice, and why not – denial is a very happy place to live, as long as you don’t mind the cost. Otherwise, you have to develop enough emotional scales to at least cover up the horror of the thing. For example, confronted with the fact that 40% of the population of Swaziland is starving to death, you have to be able to find something darkly, horribly funny in the appalling realization that the government of Swaziland is still growing Cassava to make biofuels – that is, in the face of starvation, a government has decided to turn the staple food of that nation into gas, or in the larger truth that we’re doing that all over the world now, as we drive food prices up and up and up…
I’ve got a lot of practice laughing rather than weeping, or winding up my computer and typing out my outrage hoping to break through someone else’s scales and make them as angry as this stuff makes me, so that maybe, maybe we can do something to stop it. But I’m less practiced at dealing with my own fear.
…The same is true about our present situation. This is scary stuff. There’s nothing crazy or unreasonable about being scared by what we’re facing. We’ve got bad news, and it is *appropriate* to feel bad about it. There’s no reason we have to be fearless here – frankly, the only way I can imagine being fearless is to be stupid. But we do have to be brave – that is, we don’t have to feel brave, but like the Cowardly Lion, like the Mom who doesn’t really want to get up for the two am feeding, we have act the right way, to pretend as hard as we can that we have, as the song says, the nerve. And the amazing thing about pretending hard is that sometimes – not always, but just sometimes, you become, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “what you pretend to be.”
Which brings me back to fear, and the only antidote to fear I know – good work.
(7 November 2007)
