Hunger – and getting worse
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Last year nearly 1 in every five people here in the US lacked the money at some point to buy food, according to a Gallup survey released in January carried out on behalf of the Food Research and Action Center.
One in every five. Think about that – in a country with more than enough to go around, where financial industry CEOs rake in millions in bonuses after bringing the economy to its knees, where baseball stars make more then $20 million in a single season.
More than 38 million people in the US received food stamps.
Something is so very wrong here.
Bob Herbert, a NY Times columnist, shared these facts in an Op-Ed on Feb. 9: in the 4th quarter of 2009, folks that make more than $150,000 per year had an unemployment rate of 3.2%; folks with incomes between $100,000-$149,000 had an unemployment rate of 4%.
Folks with annual household incomes of under $12,500?
30.8%!
On this website, part of our reflection has to do with who bears responsibility for the ecological wreckage of the planet, and for the injustice that is another profound reflection of it. Sometimes stats provide an unsettling response to that challenge. Sometimes stats give us a troubling image of the world we have made.
Because the same forces that are causing the unraveling of the ecological life of the planet in which we are embedded are also behind inequity that is this glaring, intractable, unfair, immoral.
Meanwhile – and are we surprised? - job satisfaction in the US is at an all-time low, that’s if you have a job, and, if you do, you probably hate it. US Americans find their jobs to be largely uninteresting, wages have been stagnant for a couple of decades now, and the health care costs and insurance premiums combined with depressed income are destroying the middle class. Again, those with jobs lucky enough to have insurance may hate those jobs but dare not leave them.
What a world we have made. What an awful unhappy world. May I just venture to say – human beings did not evolve for this.
Evolution did not take 13.7 billion years of turbulent creation to make this beautiful planet and grow all this life to arrive at human consciousness so that we could be miserable, alienated, struggling with self-worth, dignity, real meaning for our lives and in the work we do.
Income groups by percentage of US population based on US Census Bureau
Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (who has become a real moral voice in the midst of the economic collapse), wrote in a December column:
Today, one in five Americans are unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.
Money still exists, of course, but more and more of what once was shared more broadly among a US middle class is now being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, especially investors using it to make still more money.
Once upon a time, many workers had guaranteed pensions. Then the society was talked into replacing them with 401ks. What was once guaranteed income for retirement was now put in the hands of investors using the life savings of workers for Wall Street gambling. They wanted (and still want) to do this with our Social Security money, too. You already know how well this 401k thing turned out.
Folks, it’s not like there is a plan to reinvent the US middle class, or bring back good-paying union jobs in the manufacturing industry, or make higher education affordable, much less free, for the middle class (forget the poor – they’re already eliminated from the calculations about ‘rebuilding’ the economy). You can’t win elections admitting this, but those days are over.
The US now boasts one of the most extreme gaps between rich and poor in the world, and it is getting worse, inexorably worse. The economy as structured, and as restructuring, cannot possibly include the growing masses of workers, laborers, subsistence farmers, even Ph.D.s, in its evolving structures. In fact, the whole point is that it is shedding workers (like replacing coalminers with enormous machines that blow up mountains and scoop out the coal). It has a glut of them, which is why once good-paying jobs now barely provide enough food on the table.
This is depressing – and urgent – but why write about it on a blog dedicated to spirituality and ecology?
Because the very same economy, the very same economic model, that creates this profound injustice and vast human suffering and anxiety, is the one ravaging the Earth at a mind-numbing pace. That economic model cares as little for the working poor, or the unemployed, as it does about trees in the way of suburban development, or groundwater where shale holding potential for natural gas production exists, or mountain ecosystems that contain coal veins.
It’s an attitude towards the world that is the problem – the profound moral problem – of our times. And the folks with the worst attitudes, the most destructive attitudes, towards wealth generation, towards the planet which it views as resource for that wealth generation, that feels the suffering of the vast majority of poor, hungry, economically insecure a matter of their bad luck as compared to their own marvelous good fortune – well, those are the ones who have most to lose if we begin to chart out a different path for the human.
It’s going to be a monumental struggle. But one way we can most serve the collapse of such a damaging model of human economy is to remove ourselves as much as possible from the role of holding it up.
It is important to insist over and over again on this point – we do not need to make a choice between justice, human well-being, and the eco-communities of the planet. The choice for justice and dignity rests in the choice to pull back the damaging ecological footprint of the human species, damage fueled by economics of growth from which the already-affluent benefit most. They are the same choice. But more – neither one can be had without the other. As we continue to damage the biosphere and atmosphere of the planet, we make increasingly impossible the prospects for social and economic justice and equity.
We are part of one vast organic web of relationships that make up the life of the planet. Greed, obscene wealth generation, economies of growth on an already depleted planet – these are forces that block the possibility of pulling ourselves back from the brink of ecological breakdowns of all sorts. We cannot continue growing economies of high-tech gadgets, plasma screens, defense industries, more and more synthetic chemicals, factory farms, and long-distance transportation of the goods and services we consume and think we can avoid those breakdowns.
We cannot keep putting our most vital economic and environmental decisions into the hands of huge profit-making corporations or Wall Street investors. Unless we find economic democratic processes not geared towards the defense of the interests of wealthy humans, or even of humans alone, but also the interests of the whole of life and its generation within the living systems of the planet, we face a terrible future.
Decisions get starker and starker with every passing day. I know we don’t want this to be true, but there it is. All over the world groups are beginning to forge this new path. That is the good news. And that movement holds within it not an ecological hope apart from the notion of social justice, but ecological hope that has embedded within it the project of justice and human dignity. That is the whole of our struggle – and its promise.
March 8th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Perhaps we can agree that at least one of the global challenges presented to humanity in these early years of Century XXI is the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of the human population on Earth. Are absolute global human population numbers a function of food supply or not? This is the vital question for which humanity needs a realistic answer. The best available scientific evidence needs to be acknowledged rather than perniciously cloaked under a veil of preternatural thinking and inadequate theorizing about human demographics that gets conspicuously and erroneously passed along to the human family by self-proclaimed ‘experts’ as adequate scientific evidence.
The wonder of science is that it can be shared widely and validated. It strikes me a breach of “duty to warn” humanity whenever potentially vital scientific evidence is shrouded in silence and willfully denied. Once the measure of the admittedly formidable global challenges before us is taken, ways will be found to address and overcome whatever the challenges by acting courageously according to humane, universally shared values.
My father was born in Mannheim, Germany 99 years ago. If he was alive today, he would be one person among many, I suppose, who learned tragically during the dark days of the 1930s in Deutschland that there is no safety or security in silence and avoidance. I expect he would report that denial of reality is dangerous, even deadly. Unfortunately many too many people among us still expect to find safety and security in remaining silent and denying reality. Even now many too many of us consciously choose to forget the maxim “denial of reality is dangerous” and to see the world in foolhardy, self-serving ways….not as everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows it to be.
Thanks to everyone in the SEH community for being “now-here” just as you are and for all you are doing to protect life as we know it on Earth from huge human-driven threats. You have probably been correct about the formidable challenges that are likely the result of human activity borne of carelessness, arrogance and greed. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity.
Still I believe in remaining engaged with you and others in this necessary struggle for the future of life as we know it, a sacred struggle in which so many human beings with feet of clay have been involved for a lifetime. The first fifty years of my life were lived as if in a dream world, the profane one devised by the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness a single generation would elect sponsors of powerful, greed-mongering economic powerbrokers who would formulate policies and implement business plans that irreversibly degrade Earth’s environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere. My failures include not communicating well enough that I and my greedy generation were ravaging the Earth and effectively behaving in a way that could lead to the destruction of our planetary home as a fit place for habitation by the children (let alone coming generations). Even though it is discomforting and difficult to responsibly perform all our duties to science and humanity, at least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate circumstances and in the process educate one another as best we can. Like you, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable ‘trajectory’ of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form. Much more problematic, however, is the ruinous determination of many too many experts who have colluded to consciously obstruct open discussion of the best available scientific evidence of “what could somehow be real”. If what could be real about the human condition and the Earth we inhabit is not confronted with intellectual honesty, the best available science, moral courage and careful action, how is it possible for the family of humanity to adapt to the practical requirements of “reality” in a reasonable, sensible, sustainable and timely way?
An ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of experts choosing to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute rather than skillfully examining, objectively reporting and openly discussing extant science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. Such willful refusal to respond ably by acknowledging evidence and accepting responsibility for the distinctly human-driven global challenges that have emerged robustly and converged rapidly just now could be one of the greatest mistakes in human history. After all, what mistake in history could be greater than the ones made in our time that lead humanity inadvertently to precipitate the demise of life as we know it and to put at risk a good enough future for the children?
March 11th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Let’s consider for a moment that many hundreds of millions of poor people are going hungry today and at the same time that a tiny minority of a few million foolhardy, arrogant and avaricious people among us are recklessly engaged in conspicuous consumption, excessive hoarding and wanton pollution activities which lead to natural resource dissipation, environmental degradation and climate destabilization as well as threaten to ruin Earth as fit place for habitation by children everywhere.
It appears that we are presented here with two problems: addressing the needs of hungry poor people and the looming ecological wreckage that could result from unbridled greediness of the rich and powerful.
How can we simultaneously overcome both of these human-induced global challenges?
Any thoughts? Plans of action?
March 17th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
“It appears that we are presented here with two problems: addressing the needs of hungry poor people and the looming ecological wreckage that could result from unbridled greediness of the rich and powerful.”
- Given the grip on the media of the Fossil Fuel lobby, it is difficult to envision a realistic debate on issues like Global Warming (GW) or Sustainable Development (SD)
- In this context, Climate Change (CC) and Peak Oil (PO) recessionary pressures may actually be godsends: they demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Status Quo. God / Nature is, in effect, short circuiting the closed informational loop produced by the Fossil Fuel lobby directed mass media (Fox and co.) I don’t know what the wake up call will be, when it will be, or what the reaction will be but the wake up call is coming and I suspect the wait is measured in years, not decades or centuries..
- groups like transition towns (google this name!) are spontaneously arising to deal with the challenges of the emerging “New Economy” (Post Peak Oil: the world after cheap fossil fuel energy). TT, in particular (from my personal association), is directed toward providing counter-measures to the toxic values of the neocon ideology: re-responsibilizing individuals and the communities they live in, rebuilding community conviviality (working together) and resilience (capacity to adapt to the economic / ecological / climatological shocks of the transition to the New Economy).
- The 3rd world is a difficult call. On one hand my heart says, we should help. My head though tells me that the West cannnot be trusted:
* the last 5 centuries of colonial-imperial expansion and plunder,
* the “other 9-11″ (Chile, Sep 11, 1973; the obscene Pinochet regime installed with CIA assistance),
* the war against Liberation Theology by the ruling US elite,
* western subsidized farms dumping their subsidized (tax payed) “surplus” on 3rd world markets thereby destroying local farming sectors (all the while their central governments intone the hypocrital mantra of “Free Markets / no subsidies / no socialism when it comes to renewable energy, public health and schooling)…
I concede that it is hard to envisage the 3rd world rising strong without aid (REAL aid, not short term “charity” or military assistance to bolster anti-democratic regimes). But if the worst predictions of the PO school are correct, they will have to do it on their own: the West will not be in any kind of shape to provide aid…
March 18th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
I think we ought to consider ‘aid’ to poor countries as reparations, rather than foreign assistance, or worse, charity. For all that western nations plundered from Latin America and Africa so that we could become wealthy, what do we owe in return as we move towards multiple crises, both ecological and economic?
Then how do we pay back? Not by dominating the programs these countries need, trying to run and control them, but by making available the resources to support local cultures and communities as they re-find their bearings after all the poverty and violence, to support them as they create their own initiatives to become resilient, regenerative, and self-sustaining communities and economies.
But a couple things must happen in order for this to occur. The international community must finally find in their hearts the commitment to end corporate control of aid programs (like Monsanto and GMO seeds), corporate acquisition of the resources of other peoples, corporate degradation of the environment in these countries (creating enforceable legal mechanisms to force perpetrators to clean up), and control of international finances by a small number of global mega-banks.
That’s for starters. Making resources available for such things is merely justice. And we also know that it is not too late to figure out a vast redistribution of wealth and goods that would make it possible for the human project overall to be scaled back while making it possible for the poor of the world to lead lives of dignity and security.
But the onus is on the wealthy nations of the world to begin to live radically differently – again, not out of charity or even concern for the environment, but as payback for generations of theft and exploitation, as what is called ‘restorative justice.’ And true restorative justice rests on living appropriately on the planet. Without a healthy eco-community, justice in the end won’t matter much, as we will only be divvying out a steadily deteriorating quality of life.
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:30 pm
All that you are saying makes good sense but, unfortuanately, the powers that be are “mad as hatters” (they are not reasonable). Otherwise, why would we be in the mess we are?
If I were in a third world country, I would not trust the West. Aid in the form of funding for Sustainable Development (equitable, decentralized, participatory, local community driven) does not benefit the megacorporations who prefer to export sweat shop jobs, “Green Revolution” agrotechnology and high tech gizmos like nuclear reactors, guns and planes. Hence the “development” that has taken place in the 3rd world during the post WW II period is not equitable, not participatory, is centralized and is not local community driven.
While it is true that life expectancies in the 3rd world have risen, the actually realizable LONG TERM benefits of such “aid” are dubious given the depleting non-renewable bases upon which that “development” is founded. In short, the “development” post WW II is largely illusory, ephemeral, NON-SUSTAINABLE. The 3rd world – like the 1st world and the ex-Communist worlds of Eastern Europe and China – needs a major fix from the bottom up (starting from new basic principles). If such a rethink does, in fact, occur it can only be in response to the ecological (demographic), economic, cultural and spiritual crisis we are ALL living through..
For the matter, If I were in Africa I’m not sure I would trust the Chinese either. I recently heard an article on French language Canadian Broadcasting Corp radio about Chinese “aid” to Ghana. Some people interviewed were surprisingly anti-Chinese. One fellow even preferred to deal with the Americans! The reasons given:
- the Chinese speak French very poorly
- the Chinese are “bad people” who treat the workers poorly
- more ominously, in some places the Chinese import Chinese prison labor (I have not confirmed this) because it is cheaper than native African labor (which certainly does not help develop the local economy!) If verified, this would be a disturbing development: it suggests an emerging system of de facto slavery, employing – potentially – Chinese political dissidents.
In the long run, our feelings on the issue of foreing aid, pro or con, may turn out to be moot: peak oil and its economic impacts may very well destroy the ability of the West to intervene in 3rd world economies and political systems as we are used to doing today. We may end up with enough problems at home to deal with to keep us busy and out of their hair! The 3rd world may have to learn to fly solo but is that necessarily a bad thing?? Necessity is the mother of invention and today we surely need people who can think outside the box..