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Finance Ministers Emphasize Food Crisis Over Credit Crisis
Steven R. Weisman, New York Times
WASHINGTON – The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater threat to economic and political stability than the turmoil in capital markets.
The ministers, conferring in the shadow of a slumping American economy that threatens to pull down the economies of other countries, turned their attention to the food crisis and called on the wealthiest countries to fulfill pledges to help prevent starvation and disorder in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
(14 April 2008)
Related from AP: IMF head warns that rising food prices could destabilize governments.
Q&A | Energy and food problems need global solutions, says Sachs
Kristi Heim, Seattle Times
Any one of the problems that economist Jeffrey Sachs takes on would be daunting by itself: finding sustainable energy sources to avoid environmental destruction; stabilizing world population; ending extreme poverty and creating a new system for global cooperation.
Yet Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, tackles all four in his new book, called “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.”
He argues that finding solutions to these interconnected problems is not only possible, it’s inexpensive, and would take just 2 to 3 percent of the world’s annual income. He talked about a few of his ideas during a visit to Seattle. Below is an edited transcript.
Q: How dangerous a point has the world reached?
A: We’re unprepared for the changes that are taking place in the world; the soaring energy prices and food prices are an example of this. We have economic systems and strategies inconsistent with how fast the global economy is changing, how interconnected food and energy systems are. We’re way behind the curve in terms of the sustainable development challenge. The chances for crises are very high because we haven’t been thinking ahead.
(12 April 2008)
Where Have All the Joiners Gone?
Bill McKibben, Orion magazine
A declaration of dependence
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CHEAP FOSSIL FUEL has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich, powerful – Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise! But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the routines of your daily life wouldn’t change.
Now imagine how different things have been for almost all of human history. Two hundred years ago, if an American wanted to eat a hamburger for dinner, he needed to be able to convince his neighbors to, say, help him build a barn in which to store hay to feed his cows all winter. And to help him harvest his wheat crop. Likely they would have come together to thresh it-there wasn’t a surplus of machinery. A neighbor would have slaughtered the cow and another would have baked the bread, unless it was all done in the family. The same went for what was considered women’s work. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in a wonderful article in the journal Feminist Studies, showed that our notion of the self-sufficient farm family was bunk. There was a lot more to do than just berrying or washing or husking or quilting.
(March/April 2008 issue)
It looks as if Bill McKibben is referring an article in issue 6/2 of Feminist Studies (Summer 1980). Unfortunately the article doesn’t seem to be publicly online, though it is on JSTOR. The notes from the editors say,
… Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s examination of women’s relations as servants and mistresses, kinsfolk, and, above all, neighbors in Colonial northern New England also reinforces the confinued focuus we still must bring to bear on a specifically female-centered history. “‘A Friendly Neighbor’: Social Dimensions of Daily Work in Northern Colonial New England” re-presents evidence enabling us to see Colonial American women not only as the helpmeets of men, but also as weavers of their own social networks within and between households.
Contributor Rob Bracken writes:
McKibben sees a post-peak future along the lines of James Howard Kunstler’s “World Made By Hand” — a world of working shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors.
Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism
Alex Williams, New York Times
THE traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.
It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”
… Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.
Faced with a confluence of diverse threats – a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices – people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.
… Interest in survivalism – in either its traditional hard-core version or a middle-class “lite” variation – functions as a leading economic indicator of social anxiety, preparedness experts said
… One left-of-center environmentalist who is taking action is Alex Steffen, the executive editor of www.worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability. With only slight irony, Mr. Steffen, 40, said he and his girlfriend could serve as “poster children for the well-adjusted, urban liberal survivalist,” given that they keep a six-week cache of food and supplies in his basement in Seattle (although they polished off their bottle of doomsday whiskey at a party).
He said the chaos following Hurricane Katrina served as a wake-up call for him and others that the government might not be able to protect them in an emergency or environmental crisis.
… Many of the new, nontraditional preparedness converts are “Peakniks,” Mr. Rawles said, referring to adherents of the “Peak Oil” theory.
(6 April 2008)
