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Shrinking the Technosphere, Part IV

October 28, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part IV

In the previous parts of this series, we started picking away at a very big subject: what a successful strategy for bringing about rapid social change would look like, such social change being necessary if we were to avoid the worst ravages of catastrophic climate change. This change must introduce “naturelike” technologies that would bring the technosphere back into balance with the biosphere.

To be effective, this strategy must rely on technology—but not in the usual sense of fancy gadgets or gewgaws, of which the following examples spring to mind:

• Smartphones and other such gadgets. (“Stupidpeople” no longer know how to get by without them.)
• Windmills that take plenty of coal and diesel to build and maintain, swat migratory birds out of the sky and produce energy in a form that cannot be stored effectively.
• Majestic sailing ships that transport fair trade chocolate, coffee and wine to delight effete foodies in “first world” countries.

No-no-no! The technology in question is political technology, designed to overcome the awesome force of social inertia and to cause society to move in a direction in which it initially doesn’t want to move.

Political technology offers ways of:
1. Changing the rules of the game between participants in the political process
2. Introducing into the mass consciousness new concepts, values, opinions and convictions
3. Directly manipulating of human behavior through mass media and administrative methods

Since the term “political technology” was new to most readers, we made a detour in order to put it in context. To recap, political technologies can be used to pursue the following aims:

1. To improve everyone’s welfare by pursuing the common good of the entire society, as it is understood by its best-educated, most intelligent, most decent and responsible members. Political technologies of this kind result in a virtuous cycle, building on previous successes to increase social cohesion, solidarity and setting the stage for great achievements. (These are the good kind.)

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

Permaculture: Regenerative – not merely Sustainable.

October 21, 2015

Permaculture: Regenerative – not merely Sustainable.

Introduction.

September 2015 saw the International Permaculture Conference, held in London followed by the Convergence, which occupied 6 days at Gilwell park, on the Essex-London border, where practitioners of the discipline gave presentations and workshops on various aspects of this growing art, which is a sustainable design system intended to emulate the principles of living ecosystems. While it has been emphasised that such terms as sustainable development, and sustainable agriculture, are really oxymorons, since neither untrammeled growth nor our present form of industrial food production can be maintained in perpetuity, permaculture has a value-added factor that extends beyond what might be merely maintained or sustained, which is the quality of regeneration.All sustainable solutions are unsustainable over the longer term, if they are not also intrinsically regenerative.

Nature offers the ultimate example of a design that is both sustainable and regenerative, and it is logical to appeal to natural principles for solutions to many of our current problems. This is sometimes taken to mean that we need adopt more “simple” lifestyles, abandoning our technology in the process, but the reality is more complex. Within a broader perspective of Regenerative Design, permaculture identifies the elements of sustainable living which are harmonious with nature. Discordant practices which lead, e.g. to soil erosion fret the environment, and are neither sustainable nor regenerative, but degenerative.

Regenerative versus sustainable.

That which is sustainable maintains what already exists, but does not restore (eco)systems that have been lost. The word “sustainable” strictly means “self-sustaining” but is often understood, particularly in the media and by the general public, to merely mean “able to last” or “the capacity to endure.” This has been represented, humorously, by the example of two men talking together. One asks the other, “How’s your marriage going?” To which the other man replies, rather dejectedly, “Well, it’s sustainable.”

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

Presuming to Care about the Earth

September 28, 2015

Presuming to Care about the Earthstuff on cats

Photo: Mihnea Stanciu/Flickr CC.

There are times that I find myself wandering pensively in the woods, asking aloud, “so how should I presume?”

I just read about the land sinking — up to thirteen inches a year in some places — in the Central Valley of California.

I also just read about there being no mountaintops left in certain areas of West Virginia anymore. None. And, the coal companies are pulling out. West Virginia’s usefulness to them as a sacrifice zone is over.

I also read about the botany studies indicating that the sounds of nature have empirically diminished — less bird song, less insect cacophony — having been drowned out by the noise of industrialization. So, really, how should I presume?

Prufrock Nation

T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, like so many literary examples in modernity, is concerned with issues of meaning, doubt, and individual significance. Prufrock is riddled with uncertainty as his place in the universe seems shaky. He questions, but appears to find no answers. Prufrock finds the modern world becoming a place of spiritual emptiness, a certain absence of the sacred proliferating as modernity takes hold.

Prufrock, then, bombarded by questions that he is unable to answer, finds himself growing old in a world that seems alien to him. I am there. I can’t wrap my mind around a world that is willing to destroy nature in order to grow economies.

Pre-industrial societies knew that nature was their home. Industrial society, quite to the contrary, sees nature as a repository of resources to be used for profit. Native Americans talked to nature. We talk about nature. This is a critical distinction. First People were a part of nature. We objectify it. We are products of Cartesianism and, thus, think that we are separate from nature (or, as Descartes would have called it, all of that “dead matter”) — distinct from our very home. We suck it dry, frack it, mine it, cut it down, pave it over and poison it — all in the name of progress. Civilization.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/09/presuming-to-care-about-the-earth/#sthash.9ovHnLN7.dpuf

 

The Gift of the Maya

July 28, 2015

The Gift of the Maya

“The Maya forest garden holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises.”

It takes a bit of time for the elegance of a food forest to emerge, something on the order of decades. Strolling the garden through the morning mist in a hot Tennessee summer, we tried to remember what this landscape looked like 21 years ago, when we moved to this site, set up our yurt and started in on our little corner of paradise.

What we see today does not remotely resemble what was here then. Then there was a wire-fenced, stony horse paddock in a re-emerging poplar forest. The deep soil tilth now is blanketed in thick vines, their giant leaves hiding pumpkins, squashes and melons. Bamboo cathedrals twined with akebia and passionfruit arch 70 feet (20 meters) over a duck pond next to our cob henhouse. As we let out our poultry for their daily bug chase, bullfrogs croak and leap away. A snapping turtle submerges beneath the mat of duckweed and hyacinths at the water’s edge. All around us figs, peaches, apples, pears, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, plums and persimmons bend down boughs under the weight of their fruit, rabbits stealing out to grab a windfall and then hop back to cover, while high up in the oaks, beech, butternuts and hickories, squirrel forest wardens check the progress of their winter larder.

All this complexity, shrouded in mist and glistening in dew, would not be called orderly by farmers trained in Ag schools or raised in a tradition of straight rows and powerful machines with air-conditioned cabs. They can pump food from the earth the way you would pump barrels of oil, but not without depleting reserves accumulated over eons. As they pour on chemicals, the genetically monocultured crops gradually but inexorably lose nutrient density and attract predators.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China

June 21, 2015

Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China

China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.”  Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.”  However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique.  Marx explicitly defined socialism in terms consistent with the development of an ecological society or civilization — or, in his words, the “rational” regulation of “the human metabolism with nature.”

In recent decades there has been an enormous growth of interest in Marx’s ecological ideas, first in the West, and more recently in China.  This has generated a tradition of thought known as “ecological Marxism.”

This raises three questions: (1) What was the nature of Marx’s ecological critique?  (2) How is this related to the idea of ecological civilization now promoted in China?  (3) Is China actually moving in the direction of ecological civilization, and what are the difficulties standing in its path in this respect?

Marx’s Ecological Critique

In the late 1840s the German biologist Matthias Schleiden observed in his book The Plant: A Biography: “Those countries which are now treeless and arid deserts, part of Egypt, Syria, Persia, and so forth, were formerly thickly wooded, traversed by streams.”  He attributed this to human-generated regional climate change.  At the same time as Schleiden was developing these views, the German agronomist Carl Fraas was making similar observations in his Climate and the Plant World, arguing that “the developing culture of people leaves a veritable desert behind it.”  Marx and Engels, who were becoming increasingly interested in ecological degradation and regional climate change were influenced by these ideas.  In 1858, Marx, following Fraas, wrote: “Cultivation — when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled . . . leaves deserts behind it.”

 

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

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth

May 11, 2015

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth

Last week’s piece drew responses that throw into relief how much the language we use depends on our most basic assumptions about how the world works. If left unexamined, that language leads to further conclusions that go unchallenged because the underlying assumptions are never scrutinized.

I challenged the Breakthrough Institute’s notion that humans are in one category and nature in another. If one views humans as merely a part of nature or the universe or the web of existence–however one chooses to name that which includes everything–then our role becomes distinctly different.

Under my assumption humans are embedded in the natural world. They are not the sole actors or agents in it, only one of countless actors, most of which we probably know nothing about. We cannot get one up on nature. We can only cooperate with its workings.

When we put nature in one category and humans in another, we make humans an outside and preeminent force over nature. We (falsely) imbue ourselves with god-like power to “control” nature. In this case, “control” means we get what we want without self-annihilating effects. For who could say that they are in “control” of a plummeting airliner headed for a crash just because they still have the ability to move the throttle.

Now, if humans are one with nature, then the only thing they can do to it is alter it. They cannot “destroy” nature. Only if we conceive of ourselves as living on a different plane from nature can we “destroy” it. And, only if we conceive of nature as immutable can we “destroy” it. But nature is always in flux including any flux that results from human action. There is no immutable nature to “destroy” or to “restore.” We cannot run entropy in reverse and reassemble the universe into exactly a state that existed in the past, not anywhere.

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

 

 

 

‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’: Truth and confusion in the same breath

May 4, 2015

‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’: Truth and confusion in the same breath

I really do want to applaud the Breakthrough Institute’s recently released paper called “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” It speaks with candor about the possible catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change. It recognizes the large footprint of humankind in the biosphere. It wants to address both, and it wants to do so in a way that offers a positive vision for the human future that will attract support and, above all, action.

But, I can’t applaud it because of its underlying assumption: that humans are in one category and nature in another. The key paragraph starts with the key sentence:

Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree. Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive.

“Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree.” This statement seems reasonable only if humans and nature are in different categories. But, they aren’t–a concept that is distressingly NOT clear to most everyone who styles himself or herself as an environmentalist. Humans and their creations are as much a part of nature as everything else. Humans don’t “materially depend on nature to some degree.” Humans are entirely and completely dependent on nature (of which they are a part) for EVERYTHING. Even every synthetic substance uses feedstocks and energy from the natural world.

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

 

U.S. Department of Energy: Our forecasts aren’t really forecasts (or are they?)

January 18, 2015

U.S. Department of Energy: Our forecasts aren’t really forecasts (or are they?)

Put this in the category of things that can’t be true, but that are nevertheless affirmed with a straight face: The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, does not issue forecasts, at least not long run forecasts.

So says Howard Gruenspecht, deputy administrator of the EIA, in a letter to Nature, the respected science journal. Gruenspecht was responding torecent coverage of an alleged EIA forecast which paints a rosy picture of U.S. domestic oil and natural gas production through 2040, a view challenged by the article in question.

Here is the bureaucratese from the letter: “Contrary to the presentation in the Nature article, EIA does not characterize any of its long run projection scenarios as a forecast.” Long run projection scenarios….huh. What could those actually be if not forecasts? And, why is the deputy administrator making such a big deal of this? We’ll come back to the second question later.

There has been little notice concerning the flap over coverage of the EIA’s recent nonforecast and the divergence of that set of “projections” from another much more pessimistic forecast issued by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. To cut to the chase, Naturestands by its story; and, I see no reason why it shouldn’t.

Perhaps the most important piece of information to come out of this kerfuffle is the insistence by the EIA that it doesn’t issue forecasts. Imagine my surprise! I have been perusing the EIA’s statistics on an almost weekly basis for years, and I have occasionally offered critiques of what I was sure were forecasts–lengthy complicated documents with color graphics and tables and elaborate justifications for energy production numbers far into the future. What’s more, everyone else called these documents forecasts, too.

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

 

The Radio Ecoshock Show: RUNNING OUT OF FUTURE

December 10, 2014

The Radio Ecoshock Show: RUNNING OUT OF FUTURE.

SUMMARY: Super scientist Kevin Trenberth on why oceans now hottest in recorded history, why that can make Europe colder. Stephen Leahy: we bankrupt water supplies with consumer purchases. Rob Aldrich on a generation with Nature Deficit Disorder. Radio Ecoshock 141203

Welcome back to Radio Ecoshock. Not a week goes by without a new, strange, and dangerous threat emerging out of the shadowy future. We start with the biggest under-reported story: unseen by land mammals, the world’s oceans are heating up. That determines the future and the new coastlines for hundreds of years. We’ll talk with Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists.

Did you know great rivers of fresh water are travelling around the world, hidden in the consumer products we buy? Environmental journalist Stephen Leahy explains his new book “Your Water Footprint”.

Then Rob Aldrich says “yes, there is a growing health crisis in the Western world, and the cause is Nature Deficit Disorder”.

…click on the above link to listen to the podcast…

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