We are really hurting now – Part One
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I am struck by the enormous transition taking place in our world. This is not a sudden occurrence with last year’s financial collapse, this year’s recession, and the beginnings of climate catastrophes. This has been unfolding for some time.
But until it hurts, we seem not to want to notice.
Mercury Marine rally - Photo: The Post-Crescent
Economically, we are really hurting now. Here’s a link to a piece in the NY Times on Sunday that gives a quick snapshot of the reality of unemployment, now approaching 10%: Jobless, Sleepless, Homeless. Click on the image to view the highlights of the poll. Things are going to get pretty desperate ‘out there’ as personal lives unravel without the social safety nets that some societies have (like much-scorned European nations, for example). Really, how are people supposed to eat, or shelter their children? Keep this poll in mind if the Democrats capitulate on real health care reform.
“…corroded by despair” – thousands and thousands of us.
What does this look like in the real world?’ While we have this absurd, even insane, conversation about Obama’s uneventful speech to students on Tuesday, this is the real world of hurt and worry, and I don’t see many journalists giving us compelling stories of the actual human beings, the families, children, who are the living, breathing reality of these statistics. This isn’t about politics or what Obama can and can’t do. This is far bigger, with deeper roots than one crazy political season.
Remember that term ‘jobless recovery?’ The financial world is recovering, though I think some of that is fake (given the amount of unpayable debt hidden on bank balance sheets, another reflection of the reality behind the poll), while unemployment is still going up. I worry that what is really happening here is that global capitalism is shaking off its excess, and a lot of that excess consists of human beings no longer needed to keep the profit-generation machines running.
Mountaintop removal, WV - photo: Vivian Stockman
Coal — once needed lots of miners. Awful work, but paid, and for a while, union-paid with benefits. Now miners are replaced with machines of gargantuan size and explosives. Cheaper to blow the mountains away and push the detritus into the valleys. Cuts down on your labor force.
Or an example right here in my state — the threat of Mercury Marine to move out of Fond du Lac WI for a cheaper non-union labor force in Stillwater OK. The company is hurting because fewer people are able to buy outboard motors right now. So they told workers that there would be layoffs, that they needed a new union contract, and this would include a wage-freeze and cuts in benefits. Plus, the company insisted that, should production rebound after the recession, those rehired would have to agree to a 30% wage cut. The company said, accept our offer or we’re leaving. At first, the union voted no, thinking there would be another bargaining opportunity. Instead, the company said, we’re outta here.
Down in Stillwater, workers desperate for jobs waited with baited breath, and the local governments offered the company all sorts of incentives. But when the Fond du Lac workers realized the company was serious, they voted again and took the company’s offer.
Okay, times are tough at Mercury Marine, but I have never seen such a classic case of a company playing desperate workers off against one another to get a cheaper labor agreement. This is what high unemployment will do for capitalists.
So I don’t see ‘recovery’ coming any time soon, not for workers, not for the unemployed, not for economically stressed families — not from this economy. Wage workers have been in this downward spiral for a couple of decades now. Wealth has increased for the wealthy, and concentrated, but wages purchase less and less of the American Dream for the majority of folks. Gaps between rich and poor are growing, and things like a decent education and health care are becoming privileges of the rich.
What does this have to do with our ecological crisis, much less ecological hope? Well, of course, economics and ecology are deeply connected. Organized dynamically within the real functionings and limits of nature, economies can operate in balance with ecology, but that balance is long gone and we are all suffering the consequences. Whether it’s blown-up Appalachian Mountains or human workers, it’s all just stuff exploitable for the bottom line of economic ‘growth.’ There when you need it, disposable when you don’t.
The attitude that we have towards the natural world will say a lot about our attitude towards the human community and vice versa. If we are all at the service of economic growth, then nature and us, or nature-including-us, for we are embedded in nature and part of one another, are in real trouble as we move more deeply into this time of ecological overshoot and climate disruption.
We are a society embedded within an economic system utterly unsuited to responding to the ecological crises of our times. So I wish, I wish, that more of us would address our messages to the hurting, the insecure, the frightened, and begin to provide a different narrative than that of nativism or racism or concealed or unconcealed weapons or scary liberals and fascists and socialists…
I wish we would provide a narrative that clarifies the story in which we are actually living - so that we could begin now to shape a different ending than the one taking shape right now. If we continue to put our story in the hands of the ones holding the levers of power and wealth, and the corporate media, we will continue to watch news-as-entertainment, like we have been these past weeks with town hall mania and crazy people talking about indoctrinating our children with socialist thoughts and gun-crazy people carrying automatic weapons to community forums.
Sometimes it feels like we are going mad. Maybe we are, but maybe truth and compassion can save us. Maybe from those roots we can build a new narrative for living on a depleted suffering planet.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
“I wish we would provide a narrative that clarifies the story in which we are actually living -… Sometimes it feels like we are going mad”
I agree with that sentiment, I felt it myself enough. I think madness is an essential part of a time of transition: the old “road maps of reality” no longer work – is that not madness in its purest form? (Those who are classified as mad have “road maps of reality” that are too deviant from norm / dangerous for them to be allowed to roam freely. The same applies to societies in transition..)
Social change comes through the administration of
1- “the stick” (pain, punishment, adverse consequences of actions: “negative reinforcement”). This drives society away from the trajectory it is now following.
2- “the carrot” (pleasure, reward, positive consequences of actions: “positive reinforcement). This entices society off in a new (preferred) direction
The two probably have to be administered wisely. Too much “gloom and doom” and people begin to search for scapegoats and messianic (and truly mad) leaders. Hitler is the stock example of course. Too much “techno-optimism” and people won’t take climate change seriously enough to act.
I wonder if you would like to carry a sort of chronicle of positive things people, towns, cities, states, companies, etc. are doing to meet the current challenges. In the city of Montréal, Québec, Canada, for example, the city has initiated the “Bixi” project. People can rent a bike anywhere within the city limits and drop it off at their destination. New York city is interested and is, I believe, in negotiation with Montréal to install the system in the big apple.
I have some short articles of this sort posted on several sites which, if you are interested, I could begin to post here. Alternatively I could provide a link every time I update the chronicle.
Here is short one for a sample:
http://www.runboard.com/benvirows.f2.t199
Please let me know if you are interested
September 10th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“.. maybe truth and compassion can save us. Maybe from those roots we can build a new narrative for living on a depleted suffering planet.”
Truth and compassion: unexplored options in the present context. I think greens may have made a tactical blunder in stressing the effects on nature of unsustainable “development”. The REAL losers will not be Nature, the Earth but humankind. True, we are into the “6th extinction” of life on earth but the process is self-limiting:
Since we depend on nature for “ecological services” (clean air, water, fertile soil, oxygen, an equitable and stable climate for agriculture..), industrial society will collapse as it devours the ecological bases of its own survival. Since I am not one of those who feel we yet have the power to render all life on earth extinct, WE will go extinct before we succeed in killing off the natural world. At the worst, the planet will bounce back – as it has before – without homo sapiens.
What about tyranosaurus rex? Top predator, lived for MILLIONS OF YEARS, gone, extinct.. And the world went on without him. So too, perhaps, for homo “sapiens”, the current top predator. And the permian extinction of 250 million years ago was far, far worse indeed than the K-T extinction event that killed off TRX (65 Million years ago). In that greatest of extinctions about 95% of terrestrial species disappeared and the evolutionary clock was set back 100 million years or so..
The fact that we, humanity, will be the greatest losers – and by our own cupidity / stupidity – seems to get lost in the touching images of cuddly pandas and other endangered species. The public does not grasp that, in reality, WE are on the top of Endangered Civilizations (if not the Endangered Species) list. In my book we are on both lists. Charity begins at home!
I believe we need to set the record straight on this point: humanity will be the greatest loser. The planet will, most likely, recover and go on doing what it has for the past 4 BILLION years without us..
“Remember that term ‘jobless recovery?’ The financial world is recovering, though I think some of that is fake (given the amount of unpayable debt hidden on bank balance sheets,..”
I may be wrong here but I suspect that no recovery (no long term recovery, at least) is possible. We waited too long to begin a smooth transition (using “bridging technologies” like natural gas and even nuclear energy) to a renewable energy economy. Now we will have to kick the petroleum habit with hard, “cold turkey” withdrawal: not enough “bridging technology” available and many folk forced to live with less energy per capita in the industrialized and much of the industrializing world.
I base this analysis on the Peak Oil Hypothesis: cheap oil reserves are or soon will be exhausted. This does NOT mean there will be no oil and society will collapse as the machines we depend on die. Rather, it means that as easily extractable (cheap) oil runs out – over a decade or so – we will be forced to use more exotic, less easily extractable – hence more expensive – oil to run our economies.
This novel, emerging price regime will, I believe, effectively kill the globalized economy. Example: long term transport of bulky / heavy goods – like food – will become unprofitable due to high transport prices. People will be forced to turn to local food sources hence “de-globalizing” or “re-regionalizing” the agricultural sector. THE SILVER LINING TO THIS CLOUD: a (potential) rebirth of local and regional agricultural communities, a “return to the land” of a sizeable portion of the population, fresher food, and more “communitarian” market mechanisms (farmer – consumer coops, farmer coops). Hopefully, ORGANIC FARMING WILL BENEFIT, conserving and improving soil fertility, providing healthier food and better living conditions for livestock.
In my humble opinion, IT IS UP TO US, the greens, TO ASSURE THAT ORGANIC FARMING AND COMMUNITARIAN MARKET STRUCTURES BENEFIT FROM THE CRISIS. “Once burned, twice shy!” This time we have far less excuse for not getting things right: the evidence is in plain sight, for all to see, the current “System” is in plain decomposition, deliquescence..
Peak Oil price hikes will, I believe, be far more destructive to the globalized economy than most N. American boomers could possibly imagine (I am a boomer: the “me generation” grew up believing we were somehow entitled..). The “tightening of supply” will, in classical economic theory, cause a long term rise in oil prices as demand from industrializing countries pushes demand. Added to this is a REALLY nasty phenomenon: speculative bubbles. Speculation on oil prices increases the “volatility” of prices: they jump up and down in sharp spikes and dips as we saw in the summer of 2008 when oil prices hit $140 per barrel. The recession, of course, provoked – as expected – exactly the opposite phenomenon: prices crashed through the floor until “recovery” causes them to spike back up..
It turns out that volatility is the REAL KILLER for the globalized economy. Example: what happens if, in the current context, you want to use natural gas as a “bridging technology” to the renewable energy economy? Well, you got problems on your hands! Natural gas liquification projects, for example, are massively expensive. They require long term planning to ENSURE RETURN ON MEGA-INVESTMENTS which, in turn, requires A STABLE PRICE ENVIRONMENT. Due to the partial – and growing – interconvertibility of oil and gas as energy sources, volatile oil prices make predicting long term market gas prices impossible. The “System” really is buggered, and buggered beyond repair.. and on a number of different (and interlocking) levels, to boot..
September 10th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
http://www.futurescenarios.org/content/view/13/27/
This site, by a “futurologist”, gives 4 scenarios of the possible evolution of the present energy / climate crises (rapid versus slow depletion of cheap energy, rapid versus slow climate change).
Some of the text is “bad futurology” (most futurology is in this category): the attempt to predict where the unfolding of human POTENTIAL can / will lead us. I tend toward the school that human potential is, in principle, radically non-deterministic in nature and thus not subject to prediction. In his pet scenarios, for example, the author PROJECTS HIS PERSONAL VALUE SYSTEM: the type of society HE would like to live in (“eco-feminist”, “earth-spiritual”, “democratic”, “egalitarian”, “communitarian”..)
But a good part of the text is “good futurology”, dealing with – more or less – measurable LIMITATIONS on human behavior. Physical constraints arising from the nature of the world we live in can, to some degree, be analyzed with the deterministic language of traditional science. The grandaddy of the “good” futurological studies is the Club of Rome’s report: The Limits to Growth, of course.
I think the above site is worth visiting as it provides some good talking points to open up a debate. It provides a common set of reference points one can use to frame arguments and build strategies. At least, it’s a starting point.
September 15th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Reflexions after a visit to futurescenarios.org. I am beginning to feel a slight wind of optimism (as Canadian economist Jeff Rubin does) concerning the current trend of “deglobalization”.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/why-your-world-is-about-to-get-smaller.php
Why optimism (or at least the potentiality of optimism)? The author of future scenarios accepts my argument that humanity blew the opportunity for a smooth transition to a renewable economy about 30 years ago (first OPEC oil price crisis). That SHOULD have been the wake up call but it wasn’t. So now we pay the price for our past inaction (bad karma). The optimism – or the potentiality for same – comes from the fact that we are now being forced back to more local, more decentralized / community centered forms of production and exchange.
It will be hell of course; tragic days lie ahead for sure but if we play our cards right, some painful lessons will be learned which, hopefully, will force society onto a more creative path. It’s only a possibility for an optimistic outcome but better than nothing (we live in an uncertain, contingent universe – what more do you want !??)
At any rate, this POSSIBILITY for an optimistic outcome – the Coming of God’s Kingdom on Earth – is ALL we got going for us. That, in itself, is a blessed good reason for optimism!
When you stop to think about it, the World Process – the living world, anyway – is probably FOUNDED on a deep Archetype of Hope. The network of interlocking, mutually reinforcing crises we are living through today carries within itself the seeds of its own resolution.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259
Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US by Dmitry Orlov
A fascinating – partly tongue-in-cheek – overview of the Post-Peak Oil world that (probably) awaits the West. Orlov, a Westernized Russian living in the West, argues that the US will suffer from ITS collapse more than Russia and Eastern Europe suffered from the collapse of the Soviet empire.
What Orlov is talking about is familar to students of Self-Organizing Systems
http://www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm
Such systems (the earth’s climate regulation sytem, biological evolution, human social organization..) possess negative and positive feedback loops. This makes them prone to “tipping point” transitions in which the system can pass from one stable mode of operation to another in “the wink of an eye” (specifically, the vernacular expression “when the poo hits the fan”).
Such shifts – “phase or state transitions” – are NOT mere quantitative adjustments but, when large, constitute QUALITATIVELY different “emergents”: the shift from the “Age of Dinosaurs” to the modern biological world, occasioned by an asteroid stike 65 million years ago, is a grandaddy example of such an “emergence”. What comes out, after the dust settles, is not just a “quantitatively adjusted” variant of the Ancien Régime, it is a radially different, alien, mode of existence, operating with (some) new rules, with quite a few new players and actors.. “The game has changed”. (For those who detest the status quo, this is not bad news!)
Likewise, as Orlov points out, not just one or two things go wrong. Instead, we witness multiple / cascading / mutually reinforcing failures ramifying and proliferating throughout the “sytem”. In this sense, “globalization” will turn out to be a Trojan horse. The lack of “modular redundancy” (local / regional centers of partial self-sufficiency), means that disturbances – once begun – will propagate throughout the system eventually taking it all down. Our world political, economic, cultural “system” has insufficiently robust firewalls to contain disturbances at the local or regional levels. Example: the recent “financial meltdown”, followed by the “real economy” recession in staples, goods and services. Both of these collapses rapidly became GLOBAL in nature (and one triggered the other).
Collapse (disorganization, destructuration, chaos..) is, generally speaking, a prelude to
- system regeneration – reorganization – transformation which can be incredibly rapid OR to
- long term , even permament, system simplification (regression to an earlier evolutionary status. Example: the turning back of the “evolutionary clock” some hundred million or so years following the Permian Age extinction, 250 million years ago. Life regressed and stayed regressed for a long time. Recovery was very slow – the expected “bounce back” long delayed which, when it came, was actually quite rapid in evolutionary terms. In human historical terms, one could cite the collapse of the Civilization of Antiquity in the Western World, 5th century, common era. It took Europeans 1000 – 1500 years to get back to the level the Romans enjoyed, depending on geographical region and the area of human activity under consideration..)
As Orlov, points out, such considerations should not be seen as purely negative. Au contraire! New niches for life to explore and flourish in are opened up for those with the wit to survive and flourish. Living on the margins – as the inefficient Soviet system forced its citizens to do – tends to stimulate resilience, creativity, self-sufficiency, group solidarity.. , valuable cultural traits for future “evolutionary thrusts”!
It’s not always easy to tell when Orlov is serious and when he’s pulling our leg, but, either way, it’s a fun read – and insightful..
“When the goin’ gits tough, the Tough gits goin’” – Anon.
“The gods blind those they would destroy” – Sophocles