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The Price of Truth
Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones
IN OUR BUSINESS, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some expert waxing on about what ails journalism and how to fix it. Gratingly, many of those who tout prescriptions are the same people who let the patient get critical. And the new-media pundits whose analysis was fresh five years ago now feel like a Greek chorus that won’t shut up after the curtain’s down and the seats are empty. (Or, to retweet @theatavist, a.k.a. writer Evan Ratliff: “Maybe the future of journalism is just an endless vacillating din of banal bluster and whinging about the future of journalism.”) We’ll save you the agony; here’s the Masterplots version:…
…So where does that leave us? All the honest pundits will give you the same answer: No &$#@ing idea. We may well end up with a society that simply doesn’t have the quantity and quality of journalism we’ve enjoyed. Other countries don’t; though those that run well also have functioning regulatory systems and raucous, diverse, parliamentary oppositions—not our two-party compromise machine…
(Sept/Oct issue 2009)
Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster (book review)
Review by Derek Paul, Ethical Markets
Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster
by Peter Victor (Edward Elgar Publishing 2008)
260pp. including bibliography and index
Hundreds if not thousands of intellectuals across the world have by now come to their own conclusion that continued economic growth on this planet no longer makes sense, since the present rates of consumption in developed countries are unsustainable. Nevertheless, any mention of an economy without growth brings derision in business and government circles, to the point that it cannot seriously be mentioned. It is a non-starter. But the facts are that in the developed countries our economies have grown too much along with our populations, and these countries have mostly allowed their ecological footprints to become much larger than the biological capacity of their land and fisheries to sustain them. For instance, the ecological footprint of the Netherlands exceeds the biological capacity of its lands by a factor greater than four! A plot of the world’s ecological footprint from 1961 to 2005 is to be found in Peter Victor’s fig. 6.1. This most enlightening graph is key to the necessity for change in the way we run our economy. For more than 20 years, we have been living off the bounty that should belong to future generations.
It requires a great deal of temerity to embark upon a serious work on an economy without growth, and it needs skilled presentation to bring it off. Peter Victor has managed this well, beginning with much of the history of growth, excellently referenced, and providing a fine list of earlier authors who have warned of the impossibility of growth continuing indefinitely. By citing key works in economics at every stage, the author builds up a case no economist could lightly dismiss. It is essential that economists and people in business read this book, because it plots possible first stages toward a future economy that will eventually have to be sustainable. It behooves others to read this book too, as it contains the elements with which one can defend oneself against the nonsense protagonists of growth can hurl at anyone proposing new economic thinking…
This book has been out for a few months but it looks quite timely at the moment. -KS
Return To Asia
Amanda Kovattana, blog
… Bangkok now boasts the largest shopping mall in Southeast Asia, the Siam Paragon, filled with high end status shops of international renown. It’s plaza and façade were easily visible from the sky train, the sleek, overhead, light rail that made mobility feasible in this part of town. Clustered nearby were all the other shopping malls. My mother as a champion shopper, wanted to see it all.
As a writer of energy use issues I had, just last year, traveled to the North East of Thailand where I had had opportunity to hear, first hand, the story of how 1700 families were displaced by the Pak Man dam, a hydroelectric power plant that would, in the end, produce just enough power for half a shopping mall of this caliber while destroying 80% of the local fisheries and the livelihood of another 6,000 plus families. Thus I would always see these malls in terms of the price of power and the uneasy status of democracy in Thailand favoring the wealthy while making protesters of the poor. Such information makes me a professional wet blanket. So while I made sure my mother had the “trip of a lifetime” as she wrote to friends back home, I kept a lid on my usual railings and put in my miles scoping out the shopping malls.
… Twice the city had boasted the tallest building in the world. The high rises around us were dwarfed by the sparkling chrome and glass of the Petronus twin towers, lit by night like a delicate jewel. The haze of smog adding a soft glow. We were dazzled. The twin towers of oil I nicknamed them. We were both thinking the same thing as we surveyed the KL downtown by night. “It’s New York city on steroids.”
Petronus is the government owned oil company of this oil producing nation. Their offices occupy one full tower and there is a museum of oil between the towers on the 4th floor (above a shopping mall, natch). I managed to get in a visit and was amused to find that the entry into the Petrosains museum consisted of a ride in an oil molecule back into time with a voice over narration booming a tone of awe at this miracle substance that man had harnessed through “determination and technology”. It brought back the Disneyland ride in Tomorrowland that shrank me to the scale of a specimen on a microscope as a voice (sponsored by Monsanto) narrated the miracle of science and technology. How fitting a narrative for a city that so completely manifested the splendors of oil consumption.
(20 August 2009)
Amanda adds:
While I was experiencing Malaysia, an oil-producing country, I had to wonder if their peak oil scenario would be completely different from one we PO doomers speculate on ad nauseum here. I mean talk about dancing while Rome burns. Same in Thailand too I think.
