It’s time for action, not words.

This is a personal post. I’m sorry about that, but there is infact a person lurking behind the Twitter feed rather than an automaton. All politics is personal.

For the past twenty years I have been trying to get the message out there that something needs to be done to transition towards a genuinely sustainable way of life. Engaging with people I know, websites, collegues, even a little stint standing in the rain with Greenpeace trying to convince random passers-by who really would rather just get on with their shopping. I’ve been drowning myself in news from science, politics, economics and world affairs. I’ve been trying to learn the technics of how the predominent western way of life works and the relationships between all the various elements and increasingly convergent factors. 

About 6 years ago, I came to the conclusion that the issues are basically unsolvable. At least, they are on the scale of national and international government and corporate power. My bright green ecotechnic beliefs got pretty much shattered, as did my belief in right vs left politics. That wasn’t a fun time, but it was important. 

A couple of years ago, having come across the idea of peak oil in the meantime, I stumbled across ideas such as permaculture and the transition town movement. For the first time I had come across a positive movement, rather than the negative, reactive movements that we see typically in activism. Actual positive practical steps that don’t rely on big government or big business, because, well, they can’t be relied on. 

This blog and Twitter feed was part of that process. Trying to demonstrate that we really aren’t going to be given a sustainable future for Christmas. That the status quo really isn’t in our future, either by design or by circumstance. So I continued to scour the news, blogs, twitter, television, the web, etc, finding hopefully interesting snippets that point towards this, and occasionally interspersing positive alternatives to that status quo. 

But here’s the thing.  It makes me kinda miserable, and being miserable isn’t something I was planning on being for the rest of my life. And it does nothing for my or my partner’s place within a sustainable community, as it acts as a huge detraction from learning the skills needed in order to grow that place.

My time, now, is for doing just that.  For learning the skills, both mental and physical, for what I as an individual and as a member of a community needs to do to become genuinely sustainable, and to adapt to a potentially uncertain future in a positive and joyful manner. It’s time for me to turn off the TV, the RSS feeds and the Twitter feed that spews endless negativity into my head.

It is time to learn, and later to inspire others by involving myself in workable alternatives to the mess we currently inhabit. It’s my time for action, not words. TTFN.

Big

Governments are failing to address the incredibly important issues of our time. Climate change, issues of peak resources (yes, oil, coal and gas, but also water, soil and others), overpopulation, and an economic system that relies on infinite growth on a finite planet, are all converging to present a real threat to our species, and to countless other species across the globe. 

The last twenty years of remarkable inaction on these issues tends to support the idea that if we wait for governments to act on these issues, it will be too little, too late. 

The problem is, is that small state solutions, where we all take the initiative and responsibility for our lives as local communities, leave us vulnerable to the other powerful elite, one we have even less ability to influence or make demands of - big business.

I don’t expect big business to do the right thing - they are mostly unaccountable and only interested in maximising profits. Depending on their size, they use the disparity of their power (based on wealth and law) to bully and coerce individuals, groups, towns, cities and even states, and to externalise their costs onto them. 

Big government is meant to act as a counterfoil to big business - the former is theoretically meant to counteract the excesses of the latter by legislation and regulation. So when business pollute the skys of London causing the deaths of hundreds, the government steps in with regulation to stop it. Or when businesses constantly cut the wages of the poor, then government steps in with a minimum wage. Or when coal miners die of black lung or crushed to death under thousands of tons of rock, the government steps in with “pesky” health & safety legislation. Or when the health of the nation is deteriorating and the cost of healthcare is beyond what many can afford, then the government steps in and sets up a national health service.

All of these things were bitterly opposed by big businesses (and interestingly, in the case of the NHS, by many doctors). They screamed blue murder, and claimed they would ruin the country and economy. They did not.

However, as big business has had ever greater influence in government, and as successive right wing and centre parties have been busy deregulating and reducing the size of the state, so we have seen inequality rise, and businesses doing what they do best - exploiting things for their own advantage. The deregulation of the banking sector (the previous Conservative government’s “Big Bang” and successive government’s continuation) demonstrates this somewhat spectacularly.

So, big government is a problem. Big business is a problem. Maybe “big” is the real problem?

As we now start to look at new forms of living our lives, and new ways or organising our communities, we must not fall into the trap of just blaming government. We must not fall into the trap of removing the very thing that stops the worst excesses of big businesses without also tackling those same big businesses. As we localise our politics, our cultural sphere and our economies, we must do just that - reduce all of their scale. If we do not localise them all, then we will reintroduce into the system once more a huge disparity of power between large-scale organisations (whether governmental or business) and small communities.

I, as many others, believe that our futures depend on localisation on a community level, and that means ensuring that all aspects of that are appropriately scaled to ensure that power cannot rest in the hands of anyone other than our communities themselves.

Change of culture

As someone who advocates permaculture, I tend to view the future environmental, economic and social challeges ahead from a certain viewpoint that can be difficult to explain succinctly, as it’s a world view and a set of conditions that affects every aspect of our lives. It is further complicated as I tend to agree with quite an awful lot of anarchist-primitivist theory, and it is even trickier to explain how that type of theory relates to the practical challenges ahead. But boy, they do. It’s all about culture.

So sitting in the intersect of that particular Venn diagram, I am sometimes left with imperfect quotations and visions that get further to what I want to say than I can myself, but never quite close enough. So here is another one, from the co-originator of permaculture, David Holgrem:

“Energy descent is likely to give birth to a new culture, one more different from our current globalised culture than post-Enlightenment capitalism and industrialism culture was from its precursors in Europe. The energetic contraction will force a relocalisation of economics, simplified technology, a ruralisation of populations away from very large cities, and a reduction in total population. Over time, there will be a redevelopment of localised cultures and even new languages, although these developments may be outside the time frame of the peak-oil and climate change scenarios.”

A silver lining

Kathy McMahon is a clinical psychologist working in the USA. She runs a blog called Peak Oil Blues, and is a regular guest on several alternative radio shows, such as Radio Ecoshock, discussing peak (-oil, -soil, -population, etc), environmental, mental health and social issues. She’s a voice of sanity, trying to help people come to terms with what is happening in the world, so they can go out and help shape the future.

Enough introduction. About five years ago, she published a short story, offering glimpses of what one potential future might look like, and what happened between now and then (2050). I can’t claim to agree with all the elements, but it’s vision offers easily enough credibility to be of genuine use in helping you form your own thoughts about the future.

It’s reproduced here in it’s entirety. And as promised earlier this month, it’s not all doom and gloom. Enjoy.

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The future isn’t all doom and gloom.

The last post, below, seems like a bit of a downer, doesn’t it? All that talk of the need to take action, of those visions of a horrible, dislocated dystopic world. I think perhaps a bit of context is needed. And maybe some simple reminders of how our futures together will be radically different to what we experience now, but how different isn’t a synonym of terrible.

If, in 1900, I had written a pamphlet talking about how in the next 40 years, there were to be two world wars, the first resulting in the deaths of millions of conscripts, the second resulting in the holocausts of Jews, disabled, gay, mentally ill, gypsies and so on, people would probably have thought of me as a grumpy doom merchant at best, and possibly mentally ill myself. But looking back on those events, as horrific as they were, and as world altering and shaping as they became, the world that came after certainly had positives about it. After endless centuries of warring between European nations, we have had peace, at least in this bit of the continent, for close to 70 years. Unprecedented political and economic cooperation, to limit the usual causes (resources) from precipitating conflict. Another outcome was how women’s place in society was radically transformed by both wars. There are others, but I am too lazy to list them.

If in the aftermath of WWII, I had said that by the 60s, the two major victors of that war would come extremely close to nuclear war with one another, with arsenals that would dwarf that which was unleashed on Japan less than twenty years previously, people would have called me a crackpot. Or sectioned me. sadly, there isn’t a happy ending to that one, other than, of course, tens of millions of people weren’t annihilated in a nuclear apocalypse!

And if after the resolution of that crisis, I said that in another twenty years, a new virus would appear that would kill millions in Africa and across the globe, affecting mainly the poor, gays, drug users and haemophiliacs by destroying their immune systems, then I would have been pegged as a conspiracy nut and marginalised in society. Yet here we are, with even a loony right-wing government such as Cameron’s willing to maintain aid to Africa at Labour levels, and who wouldn’t dream of overturning civil partnerships for people who, in the 60s, faced imprisonment simply for being gay. And HIV is almost at the stage where, rather than a death sentence, it is classed as a chronic condition in the same way as diabetes, or, aptly, haemophilia.

The world is going to change. For some, us in the west, in will change rather more dramatically than for those living in countries that do not enjoy our current level of “live now, pay later” luxury and profligacy. But just because we will certainly face downsides, it does not mean that we will not also experience joy, happiness, and certain benefits that we can never have imagined or expected.

But when facing such awful things as ecological collapse, massive shifts in weather patterns, economic upheaval, possible die-back, mass extinctions and goodness knows what other dreadful things, it’s hard to see positives, and easy to slip into depression, or denial.

Over the coming months, along with the usual critique of this current system we are living in, and the seemingly endless barrage of negative tweets, I will try and give visions, by me and other authors, of what our future might look like. And because this is the real world, those visions will not be like reading The Road, or some other apocalyptic nightmare, but will hint at how our futures might just include a lot more of the positive things so many of us desperately want and need. And how you might be able to take a part in shaping that future, no matter if you are coming to this from a selfish or altruistic disposition.

So, about those 2050 targets…

“By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe. We are talking about Paris – as far north as Berlin. In Britain we will escape because of our oceanic position.

If you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions, then by 2040 every summer in Europe will be as hot as it was in 2003 – between 110F and 120F. It is not the death of people that is the main problem, it is the fact that the plants can’t grow – there will be almost no food grown in Europe.

We are about to take an evolutionary step and my hope is that the species will emerge stronger. It would be hubris to think humans as they now are God’s chosen race.” - James Lovelock, 2008

There is no time to lose. We cannot sit on our hands any longer - we have a responsibility, not just to our species, but to all the other species we’re currently doing our best to wipe out. If the state, the elites and the corporations won’t do this, and they are clearly showing themselves unwilling to do so on any level other than just enough to ensure passivity of the electorate (and customer-base), then it’s up to us. Not as individuals (though individual actions can and will help), but as communities.

And I don’t mean more recycling.

On democracy, scale and power

There was a time in human history, when social injustice and inequality was incredibly low. Everyone’s dwelling was pretty much the same size, and people had mostly equal say within their communities. That situation lasted for the vast majority of our time here as a species, only ending about 10-13,000 years ago.

Then, agriculture came, and the houses that were connected to granaries gained in size. As surpluses grew along with civilisation, so did inequality, with the emergence of the middle classes, to serve clerical and administrative roles between the wealthy in power, and the proles. And as industrialism emerged and capitalism developed, the economic and social systems became ever more complex, with division of labour and increasing separation from ourselves and our communities, and the meeting of our genuine needs.

We have reached a point, where in the UK it is not uncommon for a CEO of a major company to earn hundreds of times that of the lowest in their employ, and tens of thousands of times that of the least well off in our society. What does that mean for our society? What does the scaling up and stratification of society and it’s economy mean?

I think it calls into question the nature of democracy, an idea born of civilisation and a reaction to scale and the abuses of power disparity brings. Democracy pretends to give equal weighting to all in our society at the ballot box, but in reality, with such divergence in wealth comes divergence in power and the ability to exercise that power within politics. Politics and democracy are not mutually exclusive, after all, and neither is it a coincidence that two thirds of the cabinet are millionaires (or that George Washington just so happened to be the wealthiest man in America). Let’s use the shorthand of elite, shall we?

The elite get more than one vote. They get their vote in the ballot box, just like all of us.

Then, when a government is formed, they get a second vote, but sitting at the table as companies (which tend not to be mostly owned by the poor, funnily enough) with civil servants and politicians, influencing the formulation of that government’s policy. The current government is taking that one step further, inviting the elite to write policy directly, with civil servants commenting on it (rather an the more traditional method, in the UK at least, which is the other way around).

Then they get a third vote, with their lobbying tactics, towards individual MPs, Lords, MEPs and to the governments as a whole when it comes time to vote on legislation.

Their fourth vote comes in their power within the media and within the economy. They can lie, omit and obfuscate the truth through their ownership of the media. They can coerce in the workplace by demonising unions, and threatening staff. And best of all, within a globalised economy, they can threaten to take their ball to another country if they don’t get their way. If all else fails, they have access to multimillion pound lawyers.

None of this is possible without the disparity between the income (and therefore power) of the elite and the rest of us. None of this is possible without economies that work on such a large scale as to create that disparity. And democracy is not possible while that situation is allowed to continue.

This failure of democracy isn’t the only way the disparity between rich and poor affects society. As we live in a society that measures value predominately by money, it implies greater value to a single human life than to others, and by extension, devalues the concept of community as a whole. The CEO of Tescos, according to monetary value, is worth in excess of 600 checkout assistants. No wonder he gets more than one vote, he’s the equivalent of several villages! Or four Roman legions with a bit more to spare.

The reality is that large companies and elites such as this have a strange tendency to want to destroy the planet for short term economic gain - it’s called the externalisation of cost. They have a tendency to want to pay their staff at the low end less and less, and remove as many rights from them as they can. They have a tendency to want to move to cheaper parts of the world, and to avoid paying tax. And they have a tendency to get away with it due to the power they wield as the elites, the powerful, the ones with greater weight, in our society. More than that, they are rewarded for it, with ever greater riches and power.

They do this because, when they consider themselves to be valued in terms of hundreds of people, they cannot connect with or understand what it must be to be in a community. They cannot understand what it means to not be able to provide their children fresh fruit and veg unadulterated with E.coli, or fresh mean that wasn’t raised hundreds of miles away and spattered with other animal’s faeces in factory abattoirs.

Do these people sound like democracy’s allies?

Winston Churchill is known for having said that democracy is the least worst system we have. As a wealthy member of the elite, he would say that, wouldn’t he? It implies that there isn’t a perfect system, which is correct. But it is also fatalistic, and implies that there is no alternative. It is based on an unmentioned premise, that our current way of being, industrial civilisation, is immutable, that there cannot be another way of structuring our lives or our communities, other than tinkering with little changes here or there. A social democratic policy here, a conservative hawk tweak there.

I do not think that this current economy or it’s systems of governance and control is reformable. I think we need something new, something different. Something that borrows ideas from the past, but also takes forward what we have learnt too. I believe that localised small-scale communities that are strong, and resist serfdom, end up with vastly less disparity of wealth - their scale cannot offer anything else. They end up happier places - not dystopias filled with lonely atomised individuals. And they foster community sufficiency, not just the selfish desires of a few. More importantly, the likelihood of them being genuinely sustainable is massively increased.

But don’t take my word for it. If you believe that something new is needed, what would it look like to you? What are the pros and cons, and is the end result better for you, your community, other species and the rest of the planet?

Albert Einstein on capitalism and democracy

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition amongst the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.

The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not, in fact, sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

- Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, May 1949

And here we all are, over sixty years later, and it’s more so now than then. If we accept that we do not live in a functioning democracy, and that the capitalist system working within a pseudo-democratic framework inherently prevents a genuine reformist mass movement to tackle climate change, toxification, mass extinctions and social justice (for starters), then how does that affect our tactics and strategy? What, in that context, moves from being unacceptable, to necessary?

The price of free is freedom

Google isn’t a technology company, it’s an advertising company. This should worry anyone interested in ensuring democracy, and here is why.

Everything Google does, every single service they offer, is designed to build up a profile on the user. Search does it, both to improve the search results for an individual user, and also to serve adverts to the searcher. They scan emails in Gmail to do it too - when Gmail first came out, there was quite the furore about the idea of all a user’s emails being scanned, yet those voices of dissent are now quiet - Gmail is quite a good webmail service, after all.

They released a web browser, Chrome, to do it. Your browsing history and searches are all known by Google. Each keystroke in the URL field in Chrome is immediately sent to Google as you type it - even if you change your mind half way through typing in a search, they know what you were considering searching for. They run DNS servers which neatly let them harvest every single address you access on the internet, whether on the web, instant messaging, email or any other protocol.

They made Android, the mobile phone OS for the same profile-building reasons. They know where you are via GPS or via cellphone tower triangulation, and those details are logged. They know who you call, who you text, what you search for, what apps you download, what web pages you visit with the built in web browser, and again, scan your emails.

Google Reader knows what you are interested in reading about, what you share with your friends, when you read, where you read, etc. Google Books serves a similar purpose, and the list goes on. And on and on.

Now, at the moment, this is all just to target advertisements at you. That’s what Google does, it is an advertising company. The profiles they build are extremely valuable to advertisers as they allow for targeting of products and services to you. That’s the deal here, in effect - you give up personal information and anonymity in exchange for some free stuff. And the more profiling that Google does, the longer their history, the more valuable that information becomes to their paying advertisers.

But what about in the not so distant future? These profiles aren’t just of interest to people selling you stuff you don’t need. What happens when a government wants to know, from that immense data profile on you, who is gay? Who is a dissident? Who is organizing labour? Who might fight back? Oh, and where do they live, what are their movement patterns (and exceptions) and who are their friends? And which of their friends are kinda weak, so might be able to be leant on? Oh, and can we see some neatly tagged photos of them in Picasa, the Google photo sharing site? And how will we know if the government, or their corporate agents, ask for this information? How do we know that our profiles aren’t automatically forwarded when a set of triggers are reached?

But Google has a motto, of course, stating that it should “do no evil”. Which is nice. How are they defining evil? And do we honestly believe that if the state “asks”, they won’t give? Google is here to make money - if that is threatened, how will they redefine “evil”? And if the company directors are threatened with jail if they don’t collaborate?

Irrespective of how you feel about the world today or its immediate future, can you be sure that as our lives become increasingly profiled over time, that there is little likelihood of this being used in the future, whether by a corporation or a government, or both? Is it going to be used in your interests, or in someone else’s?

This isn’t paranoia. This is the reality of the Internet and the reality of now. And it’s just as true for Facebook, Bing, Hotmail, Yahoo and any other services that offer you something that costs quite a lot, for free, in exchange for effectively advertising to you. You just may end up paying an incredibly high, unintended price.

Petitioning the king vindicates his power

Clicktivism, it is said, is no substitution for taking to the streets. And, to an extent, I certainly agree with that. Clicktivism is safe. It’s safe from the perspective of all those who sign online petitions at the no10 website, or retweet, or Like, or any other online show of support for whatever the fashion is of the day - most of us cannot expect to be arrested, dragged into a police van and interrogated for such acts of dissent. At least, for the time being.

But it is also safe from being effective. Powers, corporate and government alike (so far as there is a difference anymore) are free to ignore it, and the results will simply be aggregated into their computer models, for whether to change the media message, or produce a slight shift in policy to placate just enough. Clever politicians preempt this by deliberately exaggerating a policy so they can scale it back to the level they wanted all along. They listened! See!

Taking to the street carries with it more agency, and more personal risk. But that agency is not nearly as great as it’s supporters wish to believe. Really, it is only effective as a form of gentle advertising for a cause to those who are likely near to being converted anyhow, and ultimately provides corporate and governmental powers (so far as there is a difference anymore) with a handy propaganda tool for everyone else. Did you see the violence? Those glass doors were cowering, fearful for their lives, and what of the poor glass door’s family? What of them? Aren’t there too many students anyhow? Hey, did you hear that David Cameron thinks it’s a good idea to have a extra bank holiday in 2011 for the royal wedding, even if it’s on a weekend? We can also expect extra choco rations and doubleplus goodness all round!

Taking to the streets is also super handy for the aforementioned powers. They get to make a big long list of potential troublemakers, complete with photos, addresses and with a bit of luck, DNA. Might come in handy that, if things were to get “worse” in any way in the future.

There is another, more sinister outcome of taking to the streets. Vindication. Milton Friedman’s Chicago School chums, in Chile, in Russia, in South Africa, in Poland, and everywhere else they have extended their fearsome ideas across the globe, were met with protests - proper, non-British ones at that. With people taking to the streets for real, in large enough numbers to require tanks, not kettles. And disappearings. Part of disaster capitalism’s method is that reform, which without exception punishes the poorest in favour of the wealth of the elites, should happen as early as possible when you come to power on the back of an emergency, whether imagined or otherwise. What is more, it should be as extreme as you can dare while keeping your head attached to your shoulders.

Vindication is when you see your party HQ smashed up, but you retain power, and somehow remain high in the opinion polls. Vindication is achieving just enough protest to know that the severity of your reform is on the right track. Within the first few months of a government, if there aren’t protests on the street, you really aren’t trying hard enough. Thatcher and her good friend Pinochet would be proud.

Vindication is seeing a populous so subdued and subsumed by consumerism, that in order to “save” British woodlands, they feel their only option is to click a button on that oh-so-nicely branded 38degrees website.

So, what to do. When the interests of the wealthy and the incorporate are more important than the interests of the poor and dispossessed within a so-called democracy, petitioning the king is ineffective, unless the petition is laid in gold leaf upon vellum, and delivered by a clergy of lawyers. Clicking a button is ineffective. Taking to the streets is almost as ineffective, and helpfully allows the powerful to more easily track and disrupt anything that could be effective.

This is not doom and gloom. Far from it. It is only doom and gloom if this is the only way of living, if there is no alternative, if this really is our lot. It isn’t.

There are things we can do to stop the destruction of our planet, of our human and non-human communities, of our human and non human lives. But the question we should all be asking is this: If petitioning the king is merely reaffirming the decisions he made that made you protest, what next? If you accept that we do not truly live in a democracy, how does that change your tactics and your strategy? If, as you move through life, you become less and less attached to a system you don’t believe in, and more aware of alternatives, how are you going to become less reliant on the current system, and therefore, more able to bring it down? And how are you going to help others do the same?