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The Crises That Have Come With Urbanization

September 12, 2017

THE CRISES THAT HAVE COME WITH URBANIZATION

One of the defining aspects of our current civilization and one of the most worrying trends of modernity is our urbanization as a species. When we take the long view of human history, it becomes obvious that for 99% of our history, we have been a rural people, the majority of us making our living off the land and in small, agrarian communities.

Though history (especially the last 2,000 years or so) has been written by the pens of the powerful. Concentrated in urban centers, our collective dependence on rural areas and the people who lived and farmed there was a stalwart of our survival.

According to recent studies, we have recently crossed the threshold of becoming a majority urban-dwelling species. Over half of our more than 8 billion people live in urban centers around the world and that number is only expected to increase in years to come. What does this mean for our collective survival? Is our urban-ness sustainable and desirable? How can we forge a healthy, ecological civilizational paradigm that is built around billions of people living away from the land where the most basic necessities of our survival are found and cultivated?

To begin with, we want to recognize and affirm that it is imperative for us as humans to reverse the trend of increasing urbanization. According to UN Habitat, every WEEK, close to three million people migrate from rural areas into urban areas. If this trend continues, the crises that come with urbanization will only propagate and magnify.

While we can construct sustainable urban spaces with the amount of people currently living in cities, we simply cannot continue to depopulate rural areas where the natural resources for our survival are found.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who’s in Power

March 28, 2017

The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who’s in Power

No leader can reverse the dynamics of mutually reinforcing crises.

Commentators seem split into three camps: those who see Trump as a manifestation of smouldering social/economic ills, those who see Trump and his supporters as the cause of those ills, and those who see Trump as both manifestation and cause of those ills.

I think this misses the point, which is the overlapping crises unfolding in this decade– diminishing returns on skyrocketing debts, the demographics of an aging populace, the erosion of the social contract and the profound disunity of political elites–will continue expanding and feeding on each other regardless of who is in power.

Historical analysis seems to swing between the “Big Man/Woman” narrative that views individuals as the drivers of history, and the “Big Forces/it’s all economics” narrative that sees individual leaders as secondary to the broad sweep of forces beyond the control of any individual or group.

So while the mainstream views President Lincoln as the linchpin of the Civil War–his election triggered the southern secession–from the “Big Forces/it’s all economics” view, Lincoln was no more than the match that lit a conflict that was made inevitable by forces larger than the 1860 election.

The tension between these two narratives is valuable, as history cannot be entirely reduced to individual decisions or broad forces (weather, resource depletion, financial crisis, geopolitical upheaval, demographics, plague, etc.). The dynamic interplay between the two shapes history.

Individuals do matter–but they cannot offset structural crises for long.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Watch These Geopolitical Flashpoints Carefully

March 25, 2017

Watch These Geopolitical Flashpoints Carefully

Anyone who has been involved in alternative geopolitical and economic analysis for a decent length of time understands that the establishment power structure thrives according to its ability to either exploit natural crises, or to engineer fabricated crises.

This is not that hard to comprehend, but for some reason there are a lot of people out there who simply assume that global sea-change events just happen “at random,” that the elites are stupid or oblivious, and that all outcomes are a matter of random chance rather than being directed or manipulated.  I call these people “intellectual idiots,” because they believe they are applying logic to every scenario but they are sabotaged by an inherent bias which causes them to deny the potential for “conspiracy.”

To clarify, their logic folds in on itself and becomes faulty.  They believe themselves objective, but they abandon objectivity when they staunchly refuse to consider the possibility of covert influence by organized special interests. When you internally dismiss the possibility of a thing, no amount of evidence will ever convince you of its reality.  This is how the “smartest” people in the room can end up being the dumbest people in the room.

In the survivalist community there is a philosophy – there is no such thing as a crisis for those who are prepared. This is true for prepared individuals as much as it is true for prepared communities and prepared nations. The only way a society can fall is when it becomes willfully ignorant of potential outcomes and refuses to organize against them.

By extension, it would make sense that by being prepared for a particular crisis or outcome an individual or group could not only survive, but also profit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economic Crises and the Crisis of Economics

January 13, 2017

Economic Crises and the Crisis of Economics

LONDON – Is the economics profession “in crisis”? Many policymakers, such as Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, believe that it is. Indeed, a decade ago, economists failed to see a massive storm on the horizon, until it culminated in the most destructive global financial crisis in nearly 80 years. More recently, they misjudged the immediate impact that the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote would have on its economy.

Of course, the post-Brexit forecasts may not be entirely wrong, but only if we look at the long-term impact of the Brexit vote. True, some economists expected the UK economy to collapse during the post-referendum panic, whereas economic activity proved to be rather resilient, with GDP growth reaching some 2.1% in 2016. But now that British Prime Minister Theresa May has implied that she prefers a “hard” Brexit, a gloomy long-term prognosis is probably correct.

Unfortunately, economists’ responsibility for the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent recession extends beyond forecasting mistakes. Many lent intellectual support to the excesses that precipitated it, and to the policy mistakes – particularly insistence on fiscal austerity and disregard for widening inequalities – that followed it.

Some economists have been led astray by intellectual arrogance: the belief that they can always explain real-world complexity. Others have become entangled in methodological issues – “mistaking beauty for truth,” as Paul Krugman once observed – or have placed too much faith in human rationality and market efficiency.

Despite its aspiration to the certainty of the natural sciences, economics is, and will remain, a social science. Economists systematically study objects that are embedded in wider social and political structures. Their method is based on observations, from which they discern patterns and infer other patterns and behaviors; but they can never attain the predictive success of, say, chemistry or physics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unlimited Propagandistic Lying from CNN

April 3, 2016

Unlimited Propagandistic Lying from CNN

On Saturday April 2nd, CNN headlined, “U.S. F-15s Deployed to Iceland,” and Zachary Cohen opened: 

Demonstrating its commitment to a ‘free’ and ‘secure’ Europe, the United States deployed 12 F-15C Eagles and approximately 350 airmen to Iceland and the Netherlands on Friday, the Air Force announced.

U.S. aircraft units from the 131st Fighter Squadron at Barnes Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts and the 194th Fighter Squadron at Fresno Air National Guard Base in California will support NATO air surveillance missions in Iceland and conduct flying training in the Netherlands.

The F-15s are not the only package of American fighters being sent to Europe in an effort to deter further Russian aggression in the region.

Next to that text appears a video from Christiane Amanpour, “Amanpour in Focus,” which opens with her saying:

Of all the crises plaguing Europe right now — Grexit, Brexit, the migrant crisis, the economy even still — the worst, by far, is the Ukraine-Russia crisis, which still has the potential to flare into open warfare beyond the borders of Ukraine; and who would have thought that in two thousand [inaudible]teen, we would still hear President Vladimir Putin sometimes raise the nuclear option. This extraordinary state of affairs has come from Ukrainians protesting for their independence — they saw off one President, and they elected another one, Petro Poroshenko.

Here’s the actual history behind all of that:

Back in February 2014, Obama overthrew (please click on the link if you have any doubt about anything that’s being said here) the democratically elected President of Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, in an extremely bloody coup, which was at least a year in being set-up, and the rationale for this ‘democratic uprising’ was that that actually democratically elected President was corrupt — but no one mentioned that all of Ukraine’s post-Soviet leaders have been  corrupt. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We’re Not Going To Make It…

March 30, 2016

We’re Not Going To Make It…

…without real sacrifice 

Right now I’m on a Metro North train heading the NYC. I’ve been invited to sit on an advisory council at the UN on building a sustainable energy future.

I’ll let you know how the meeting goes, after I take a few selfies to immortalize the experience in case I’m not invited back.

Why might I not? Because I can either be a good boy, hold my tongue, and get to serve on more committees (maybe); or I can speak the truth as I see it.

It’s not a hard decision: I’ll be going with the latter. I really don’t know how to do differently any more; it’s a matter of internal integrity.

Now, I may not understand the ‘truth’ any better than the next person. But I do have access to a lot of data that seems to confirm this one idea: Humanity is not going to painlessly wean itself off of fossil fuels.

Instead, we’ll hit some sort of a wall: be it a food/population crisis, a climate crisis, or a debt/fiscal/economic crisis.  Each of those candidates has it roots in our global society’s addition to fossil fuels.

No growth in fossil fuels and we get no growth in our debt-based economy. Translation: we’ll have a debt/financial crisis.

No fossil fuels and our entire method of industrial agriculture breaks down. Food crisis anyone?

Now, we won’t suddenly run out of fossil fuels. But we are going to find it increasingly difficult to extract more and more of them. And other limits like oceanic acidification and climate change may force us to move away from fossil fuels for a totally different set of reasons.

No matter the path we take, we need to transition sooner or later. We should know that.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Grand Finale: “World War III Will Be A Fight Over Basic Human Needs – Food and Other Commodities”

November 15, 2015

The Grand Finale: “World War III Will Be A Fight Over Basic Human Needs – Food and Other Commodities”

resource-wars-2

As political tensions heat up it is becoming clear that the world’s super powers are vying for control of resources like oil, water, metals and food. And though developed nations have thus far avoided any significant clashes with each other, the proxy wars being waged in the middle east and Europe are a slow burning fuse that will soon lead to widespread military confrontation.

Throughout human history one key factor has been behind every major war: a battle for resources. As the following documentary from Future Money Trends warns, this time will be no different:

“The Pentagon told Fortune Magazine that World War III will be a fight over basic human needs – food and other commodities.”


(Watch this video at Youtube)

Natural resource wars are brewing and becoming an increasing threat, and may be the grand finale to an already intensified currency war among the world’s top economies.

Most wars in human history are a fight over natural resources.

… Credit is ever expanding, but the resources we pull out of the ground are finite.

The culmination of economic, financial and monetary crisis will be a grand finale unlikely any seen in the history of the world. War is coming. The time to prepare is now.

Preparedness Critics Are History’s Cannon Fodder

July 8, 2015

Preparedness Critics Are History’s Cannon Fodder

The world is entering a kind of no man’s land, in between the realms of insane denial and utterly obvious crisis. Europe is now destabilizing amid the Greek soap opera (an event that I predictedin January would occur in 2015); China’s stock market bubble is bursting; and the U.S. dollar’s world reserve status is about to be decimated by the global shift toward the International Monetary Fund’s basket currency reserve system. I’m afraid I’m going to have to say this because I don’t know if anyone else will: Alternative economic analysts were right, and the mainstream choir was either terribly wrong or disgustingly dishonest. However, as most of us in the liberty movement are well aware, being right is not necessarily a solution to disaster.

At the forefront of alternative economics and constitutional vigilance are the people doing thereal work in the movement: the preppers. These are the activists taking concrete action in the tangible world (as opposed to the ethereal laziness of the intellectual world) first to make themselves as independent as possible from the mainstream grid, thereby removing themselves as a potential refugee or looter in the event of national crisis. Second, they are the people mastering valuable and necessary skills that will allow them to rebuild any collapsed social and financial system. Third, they are the people most capable of defending our inherent freedoms and the principles of our founding culture, and they are the only people organizing locally for mutual aid and security. The fact of the matter is preppers are free, and almost everyone else is a slave — a slave to dependency, a slave to doubt, a slave to ignorance, a slave to fear and, thus, a slave to petty establishment authority.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resilience is The New Black

May 8, 2015

Resilience is The New Black

This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.

Nelson Lebo III: Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand, before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the list continues.

Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy, the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to ‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me explain.

Since 2008, most of the pre-existing trends in income inequality, extreme weather events and energy price volatility have ramped up. Sustainability is about halting and reversing these trends, but there is essentially no evidence of that type of progress, and in fact the data shows the opposite.

Plenty of quantitative data exists for the last seven years to document these accelerated trends, the most obvious is the continually widening gap between rich and poor everyone else. The second wave of commentary on the Baltimore riots (after the superficiality of the mainstream media) has been about the lack of economic activity and opportunity in many of the largely African-American neighbourhoods.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

WANTED. Planet in crisis seeks leaders up to the job

April 29, 2015

WANTED. Planet in crisis seeks leaders up to the job

V leadership-transition

When the essence of leadership tends in the direction of doing injury and inflicting harm, it is a collapse of leadership, for which we do not have a name. – Stephen C Rose, in the introduction to his book: The Coming Collapse of Leadership.

Why is it that slow food, slow money and slow travel are so appealing, but that there’s nothing quite as dull as a slow catastrophe?

Perhaps it’s because when you slow down food, money and travel, it allows you to more fully savour the genuine rich pleasures to be had in the senses and in the moment.

Whereas if you slow down a catastrophe, that doesn’t work at all, because catastrophes are meant to be enjoyed at pace. Catastrophes are about adrenalin rushes, shock, calamity, split second decisions, hair’s breadth escapes and above all, heroic leadership.

Catastrophes are not about watching forests dry, nor about watching water levels creep up. They are not about watching ice melt or sea creatures dissolve, either. No wonder we’re so turned off by the ponderous ecological and climatic catastrophe unfolding at a planetary scale around us all. It’s so very … tedious. Worse even than watching grass grow.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide

February 26, 2015

The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide

I’ve commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing:  the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that’s responsible for most of what we call culture. Sometimes that conversation takes place second- or third-hand—for example, when ideas from two old books collide in an author’s mind and give rise to a third book, which will eventually carry the fusion to someone else further down the stream of time—but sometimes it’s far more direct.

Last week’s post here brought an example of the latter kind. My attempt to cut through the ambiguities surrounding that slippery word “progress” sparked a lively discussion on the comments page of my blog about just exactly what counted as progress, what factors made one change “progressive” while another was denied that label. In the midst of it all, one of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Jonathan—proposed an unexpected definition:  what makes a change qualify as progress, he suggested, is that it increases the externalization of costs.

I’ve been thinking about that definition since Jonathan proposed it, and it seems to me that it points up a crucial and mostly unrecognized dimension of the crisis of our time. To make sense of it, though, it’s going to be necessary to delve briefly into economic jargon.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Revolution, Part 2: The New Paradigm | Degrowth 2014

December 24, 2014

Revolution, Part 2: The New Paradigm | Degrowth 2014.

Worried about the shit hitting the fan on climate change and other major crises? Good. Because those crises prove that civilization is in the midst of a phase shift to new forms – and we’ve got the opportunity, right now, to ride the wave of five interlinked revolutions in information, food, energy, finance and ethics, to co-create a new way of being that works for everyone.

In part 1, I pointed to the leading edge work of University of Turin economist Prof Mauro Bonaiuti on the deeper roots of the ongoing crisis of capitalism in a wider environmental crisis, where the ‘endless growth’ model of unlimited material accumulation is increasingly breaching natural and environmental limits of the biosphere.

Bonaiuti’s message though, far from being all doom and gloom, captures how this phenomenon is symptomatic of a shift in the very nature of civilization itself as it transitions to new social and political forms, as the limits of the biosphere enforce human practices to adapt to the consequences of breaching these limits. This ‘phase shift’ means we are on the brink of a fundamental change in the way civilization works, one that could have both positive and negative outcomes – depending on the choices we make as a species.

Here, I round up what I believe to be the five most significant ‘revolutions’ that constitute the positive components of this phase shift, and whose inexorable evolution and proliferation offer profound opportunities for systemic transformation that benefits humanity, and the planet: information, energy, food, finance and ethics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Last Days Of The Growth Story – The Automatic Earth

October 22, 2014

The Last Days Of The Growth Story – The Automatic Earth.


Dorothea Lange Rear window tenement dwelling, 133 Avenue D, NYC June 1936

I am thinking about the similarities between a financial crisis and for instance a family crisis, the death of a loved one or close friend, a divorce, or a personal bankruptcy.

And I wonder why in the case of our recent (aka current) financial crisis, we allow nothing to enter our communications, and our train of thought, but the idea of recovery and a return to growth. Has everyone always reacted that way after earlier financial crises – history is full of them -, or is something else going on?

Why do we insist on returning to something we once had, even if we have no way of knowing whether we can ever return? Why don’t we focus – more – on what lies ahead, instead of what is behind us? Is it because we loved what we had so much? Or is something else going on?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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