Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Social Ecology: Resistance and Reconstruction
Brian Tokar, Anarchist Studies
… Today, once again, people concerned about the future of life on earth are seeking an historical and philosophical, as well as a strategic underpinning for radical social and political action. The social ecology developed by Murray Bookchin in some thirty books and scores of articles, and advanced by Bookchin and his colleagues over more than forty years, offers the promise of a coherent theoretical outlook merging radical critique and analysis with a broad-ranging reconstructive social vision. In this age of imperial excesses, global injustices, and conspicuous disruptions in the earth’s climate, it appears that today’s social and ecological movements need social ecology more than ever. Murray Bookchin’s social ecology emerged from a time in the mid-1960s when ecological thought, and even ecological science, were widely viewed as “subversive.” Even relatively conventional environmental scientists were contemplating the broad political implications of an ecological worldview, confronting academic censorship, and raising challenging questions about the widely accepted capitalist dogma of perpetual economic growth. In a landmark 1964 issue of the journal Bioscience, the ecologist Paul Sears challenged the “pathological” nature of economic growth, and inquired whether ecology, “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind [sic], would . . . endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies . . .”1
Bookchin carried the discussion to the next level, proposing that ecological thought is not merely “subversive,” but fundamentally revolutionary and reconstructive. With the world wars and Great Depression of the twentieth century having appeared to only strengthen global capitalism, Bookchin saw the emerging ecological crisis as one challenge that would fundamentally undermine the system’s inherent logic.
… Social Ecology and the Future
In this disturbingly constrained political and intellectual environment, what is the future for ecologically minded radicals? Will capitalism finally come to terms with the environmental crisis? Or does the imperative of responding to the threat of catastrophic climate change still present a fundamental political challenge and a hope for a genuinely better future? To address these questions it is useful to consider some of the particular ways that social ecology may continue to inform and enlighten today’s emerging social and environmental movements.
First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the supremacy of capitalism and the state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. At worst, capitalism offers false solutions—such as the worldwide production of so-called biofuels to replace gasoline and diesel fuel—that only aggravate problems in the longer term.28 Ultimately, to fully address the causes of climate change and other compelling environmental problems requires us to raise visionary demands that the dominant economic and political systems will likely prove unable to accommodate.
Social ecology’s forty-year evolution also offers a vehicle to better comprehend the origins and the historical emergence of ecological radicalism—from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early sixties, to the eco-saturated present.
Brian Tokar is a faculty member at the Institute for Social Ecology and director of the Institute’s Biotechnology Project. His books include Earth for Sale (South End Press), Redesigning Life? (Zed Books), and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom).
(May 2009)
Long backgrounder on an intellectual precursor to the sustainability movement. Also at ZNet. -BA
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
Lester Brown, Scientific American
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse
—
Key Concepts
- Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
- Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees.
- Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production.
- Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis.
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!
For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.
I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.
(May 2009)
Where Is the World Headed?
Immanuel Wallerstein, ZNet
As the world heads into the next decade, there are two arenas where we can anticipate great turbulence the geopolitical arena and the world economy, with the relative decline of US geopolitical power, now acknowledged by almost everyone and which even President Obama will be unable to reverse.
We’ve moved into a truly multipolar world where the power of relatively weaker states is suddenly much greater.
… This geopolitical disorder accompanies acute uncertainties about the world economy. There is first of all the issue of currencies. We have lived, since 1945 at least, in a dollar stabilized world. The decline of the US, in particular its decline as a dominant locus of world production, combined with the overstretch of its debt, has caused a serious decline of its exchange rate, one whose end point is unclear but probably still lower.
This decline of the dollar poses a serious economic dilemma for other countries, particularly those which have placed their increasing wealth into dollar denominated bonds and stocks.
… Many large countries have seen large increases in both their productive output and their level of consumption. Take the so called BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India, and China which harbor something like 60 percent of the world’s population. The increase in their output and consumption levels has led to an incredibly increased demand for energy, raw materials, food, and water. Something must give. We could have a major worldwide inflation, as the prices of all these commodities zoom upward, fueled by surging demand and speculation. We could then have massive protectionism, as governments seek to safeguard their own supplies by limiting any and all exports.
But, as the world has now acknowledged a so-called credit crunch, the more likely scenario is acute deflation. Excessive inflation and nominal deflation are simply two variants of serious constraints on world production and serious misery for the large majority of the world population.
As we know from past experiences, this could create an erratic vicious circle. We could have massive food and water shortages felt here and there, resulting in high mortality rates and serious additional environmental catastrophes.
Governments assaulted by reduced real revenues, under pressure not to increase taxes to compensate, might cut back in the three key domains of education, health, and old age pensions. But these are the domains that, as part of the democratization of the world over the past two centuries, have been the key demands in which publics make demands of governments. Governments unable to address the maintenance of these three forms of social redistribution would face a major loss of legitimacy, with uncertain consequences in terms of civil uprisings.
Now this entire short run negative picture is exactly what one means when one says that the system has moved far from equilibrium entering into a state of chaos. Chaos, to be sure, never goes on forever. Chaotic situations eventually breed their own resolution in what Prigogine and Stengers called “order out of chaos” in the English title of their classic work. As the authors emphasized, in the midst of a bifurcation, there is creativity, there is choice, but we cannot be sure what choices will be made.
(8 May 2009)
