Orava Castle, north central Slovakia
All photographs copyright © Craig Mackintosh

Contrast and Change

I count it quite a privilege to be one of very few ‘Westerners’ to have been able to visit and observe the transition of former east-bloc countries – from shortly after their break-up from communism, through successive visits until today. It is now eighteen years since my first visit, and, in some places more than others, much has changed.

Looking back, I remember my initial trip to central Europe back in 1992 (then called the ‘East Bloc’). Entering Czechoslovakia from Germany was, to me, like leaving the earth and landing on the moon – except without the space travel in between to get one accustomed to the idea of where one was heading! The difference between the Europe I was familiar with, and the land I discovered immediately beyond the Czech border control, was like day and night. There was no gradual blending of the two civilisations – it was pure contrast.

Travelling on to the Slovak half of Czechoslovakia (or ‘Slovakia’ as of January 1, 1993, when Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech and Slovak Republics) brought a great deal of interest and discovery for me – it was, to a great extent, like travelling back in time. The vehicles, buildings – even colours – were old, and tired. There was only a few makes of vehicle – Czechoslovakian Skodas, Russian Ladas, and the notorious East German ‘Trabant’, made up the bulk of traffic. For heavy transport there were only the smaller blue (always blue!) Czechoslovakian LIAZ, Praga and Tatra trucks.

The east German trabant. Performance & Specifications: 650kg weight, 594cc
displacement, 2 stroke, 2 cylinders, 25bhp (19kW), 4-speed gearbox, front wheel
drive, 0 – 100kph in [an exhilarating] 21 seconds, top speed 112kph, ‘Duroplast’
body panels (plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton). This blue
smoke spewing car became the poster child of liberation from communism as
thousands of people rushed into western Europe in them when the
wall fell in 1989.

Shops sold a very limited range of goods, often of poor quality, and food items were often out of date. Service was ‘blunt’ to say the least. Because in communism everything is owned by the state, and whether you work hard, or hardly at all, you would benefit little from your effort, there was no incentive to go beyond the call of duty. It was very difficult to lose your job, the customer was definitely not king, and there was certainly no ‘suggestion box’.

Today, these countries are a real mixed bag. I still see contrast, but now the contrast is found within these countries themselves. There has been a lot of change, and, as expected, some good and some not – depending on your perspective.

Paneláks in Slovakia – today these are inhabited by a large percentage of
the country’s middle class

While the socialist politicians in power had always been ardent communists before, now they were quick to denounce the ideology and embrace capitalism as if it had always been their secret love. When communism ended here, there were no guillotines in the streets, no revolution, no violence. The nations’ leaders simply changed hats and continued in their positions, trying to bumble their way forward, awkwardly, into a new world chasing the great American dream.

Rather than develop local infrastructure at a community level, western businesses struck all the right deals and rushed in en masse in a kind of wild west economic, gold rush free-for-all. Collectivisation has continued in a new form. Old communist style apartment buildings (Paneláks) now overlook large, modern Tesco trucks delivering goods to new supermarkets from enormous distribution centres that source goods at great energy expense from all corners of the globe. McDonalds serves their standard fare alongside many other outlets in large western-style food courts. Service is improving in places, particularly from young retailers – who never had to live with the feeling of being controlled, or now unlearn the attitude that gave.

The UK’s Tesco has greatest control over the market in Slovakia today

Young entrepreneurs drive Audis and BMWs out of car lots, and onto new motorways. Previously, even if you could afford a car, you had to put your name on a waiting list, and do exactly that – wait! Now, the western problem of traffic jams and queues has well and truly arrived as more and more people get mobile. In fact, villagers in some areas are so up in arms about the tremendous flow of large new trucks they’re threatening blockades.

The leap from forty-five years of communism to full-blown capitalism is one that takes time – but some of these countries have certainly made headway, and, like in western countries, the move to large centralised stores is coming at great cost. Britain’s Tesco, Austria’s Billa and Germany’s Lidl chains have staked their claim and have become the dominant forces on the big box store landscape. Like the the west, these large supermarkets destroy the small, local ‘butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker’. Many of the smaller stores I used to frequent, co-ops which sourced their goods locally, are today closed, or in a worse state than before communism fell. They cannot compete. The move to low-paid production-line staff with just a few ‘fat cats’ occurred in double-quick fashion, and, in this scenario, the fat cats live in foreign lands, so profits do not return to the nation as a whole, let alone the community.

Some people are “lovin’ it”, and some are left behind. Some are now prosperous, and some penniless. During communism everyone was guaranteed a job, but not opportunity. Now there is enormous potential, but great obstacles – obstacles largely created by the exasperating but all-pervasive belief that anything ‘western’ must be better. At the time of the breakup of communism, there were calls from a few sober-minded souls, from both the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, that these nations would do well to take a moment of pause and consider a ‘third way‘. But these voices, which now seem almost prophetic, were drowned out amid a jubilant party mood, as a weary citizenry sought to reach for the stars. Since then, secretive corporate/political collusion has ensured the powerful their desired economic wedge into this newly accessible territory.

Not yet being as ‘fully developed’ as, say, the US or UK capitalist system, the effects of the 2008/2009 recession arrived late to these areas. But now that it’s here people are feeling the pinch. With growing unemployment, and a migration back home of workers that went abroad, people are increasingly pondering their future and questioning the wisdom of post-communism decisions. Official figures state that 13 percent of Slovakia’s population is living with, to use their diplomatic term, “borderline poverty.” For those who are mathematically challenged – that’s one in every eight people. At the same time, I see western charities seeking donations from these countries barely able to deal with their own problems.

People who had lived healthy, low carbon, sustainable lives in villages scattered all over the country are now dying of old age, their skills dying with them – while their children have vanished to the cities or foreign countries like Germany, the UK or further afield in search of a ‘better life’, plugging into the money economy just in time to see it collapse. Families are, just like in the west, getting more and more fragmented, while large-scale monoculture farming moves into place instead.

An often-asked question in the west is “can capitalism have a conscience?” It is sure that communism didn’t – their disregard for the environment and human rights, for example, is notorious, and although all were meant to be equal, the communist-period joke that “some people are more equal than others” was definitely more than just humour. But, can these societies that have, despite their bleak circumstances, traditionally been made up of tightly knit and supportive extended families, retain their ‘wholesome charm’ while rushing headlong into this new economy?

Kings and Conquerors – Capitalism ‘Triumphs’ Where They Didn’t

It’s fascinating to me that where centuries of kings and conquerors failed, capitalism is making short work of unraveling these localised economies. This region has been inhabited by Slavic peoples for a millennia and a half, some say much longer. These were largely agricultural, peasant folk, working their land, their gardens and husbanding their animals in what was often a peaceful, culture rich existence.

Almost every Slovak valley and village had its own unique design of traditional
dress – often extremely intricate and exquisite (see detail below). Such
time consuming and beautiful, ’superfluous’, work is evidence that this culture’s
lifestyle went well beyond just menial endeavours. [Note: excuse the happy
face - I am respecting the model's wish not to be published online]

Over these many centuries different invaders have done their worst – including the Romans, the Huns (think Atilla), early Germanic tribes, the Tatars (Turks), the Mongols (Genghis Khan), the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, the Austria-Hungarian dual monarchy, and of course much of these periods were only interruptions of eras of Hungarian control and even forced Magyarisation, where the Slovak language was banned in churches and schools. (In an interesting twist, this linguistic conflict continues today.) Then came the short lived but highly repressive Nazi invasion and the subsequent ‘liberation’ into complete communist control.

Although at times through the centuries the Slavic inhabitants were slaughtered and their homes and lands taken by force, by and large the life of peasant folk continued despite the presence of these oppressors. The sun rose and set over their fields, seeds were sown and crops harvested, wool was spun or made into felt so clothes could be made, lumber grew and was turned into homes – regardless of who claimed ownership over their existence from distant cities.

Villagers work their gardens under the Tatry mountains

These people lived by their own ingenuity and from the resources that surrounded them. There are still plenty of signs of this way of life alive today, a glimpse of which we’ll catch below, but capitalism’s economic subjugation of the people has been effective in a way that armies and swords never were. Money has won over might. Where people before might defend their land and life from invading armies, now they voluntarily, eagerly, give them up. Physical labour and frugal living has now become a life to be shunned and discarded, rather than defended. The poisoned carrot offered by media-led capitalism lures people away from their traditional, community-oriented sustainable existence, towards a dream of leisure and wealth. But, as we’re seeing today, that dream is just that – a dream. The youth are now discovering they’ve left their village to chase a mirage – a journey that has left them wholly vulnerable and dependent on a system over which they have no control.

In the capital, Bratislava, in the southwest of Slovakia, is a small city of Paneláks called Petržalka, where up to 115,000 people live in what is the most densely packed residential district in Central Europe. While a legacy of communism, it is also a fitting example of the kind ‘western development’ we see elsewhere. As a high rise city, it effectively becomes a large scale work camp, where workers can be tightly packed in close proximity to industry, to service the corporate need for labour. Without land, residents are wholly dependent on the money economy. I fear for regions like this in coming years – when peak oil’s stranglehold on the economy becomes all to real, and the trucks supplying food to the scattered supermarkets fail to show, what will become of these people who’ve painted themselves into a fossil fuel dependent corner?

A Glimpse of Past Resilience

Their names have been changed to protect their true identities – but let me introduce a wonderful couple I met a few years ago. I found them in the north of Slovakia, and they were kind enough to let me photograph them.

Marge & Ted

Ted was 86 at the time, and Marge 80. They live a very simple, self-sufficient life, hidden away from modernity in a tiny village in the hills. Their knowledge of the outside world was somewhat indicated by their questioning how long it would take to drive to New Zealand.

Ted is from a large family – he had eleven siblings – and has been a shepherd and peasant farmer all of his life. Marge’s mother died prematurely, so her family was not so large. Ted and Marge bore three children themselves, one of whom died from cancer a few years ago at the age of forty-nine.

One of their sons is pictured here – he lives with Ted & Marge, along with his wife. They all work together, and appear to be very happy in their work and life.

I was privileged to see some of the activities they perform in their daily work. Amongst these was the manufacture of a smoked cheese they sell. Here you can see Ted removing the two halves of a mould the cheese is formed in:

The cheese is produced from two cows that are housed in a straw-strewn stall underneath their house. The cows are kept inside through the harsh winter and were due to be taken outside within a day of my visit.

It is worth noting that, generally, people on the streets of Slovakia are usually very reluctant to smile or greet you. Wave to a villager as you pass by and more often than not they’ll just stare. Communism bred a certain amount of hesitancy and suspicion amongst the populace. In fact, many lived nervous of being reported to the authorities for offences (whether real or manufactured), and learned to be careful in making acquaintances. But, in contrast to this, when someone in Slovakia opens their home to you, they well and truly make up for their street-side aloofness.

Marge was very ‘animated’, and immensely pleased with my visit. She mentioned other people and activities in the village, and suggested I also visit a man a few houses along. I decided to take her suggestion, and promised to return afterwards.

Stan

Meet Stan. Stan was 68 at the time, and, like most villagers, a jack of many trades. He worked in a factory for much of his life, but had many other activities outside of this labour. He is a blacksmith, carpenter, builder, and hunter, amongst others.

He has (again, like most villagers) built his own house and almost everything within it. Stan was eager to show me his Remington single-shot rifle – with which he has shot boar, deer, and much more (antlers, stuffed animals, and the frozen stares from animal heads covered his walls). Hunting was clearly his primary passion – even the bottle and shot glasses he produced for sharing his homemade plum brandy (slivovica) were adorned with pictures of his prey.

More like rocket fuel than a beverage – but one must be polite…

Stan took me out to see a large old loom he had housed in an outbuilding, with which his wife weaves carpets from offcut material sourced from nearby. The loom is over 120 years old, and “never breaks down, nor needs oiling,” he proclaimed.

Back at Marge and Ted’s house, I discover the floors have been swept, benches wiped, and her hair brushed. Hospitality is in full swing, and I find myself needing to be careful what I accept, for fear I may not be able to keep it down! Already at Stan’s I struggled to swallow some of the stringy highly salted cheese that is popular in this region.

Ted offered a hearty cup of “Zincica” (there are accents needed on these letters I cannot provide with this keyboard!). This beverage is the result of boiling the thin milk that remains after producing cheese, until the Zincica (Zin-cheat-sa) floats to the top and is scooped off – ready to enjoy!

I left as Ted, Marge, and her son prepared to plant potatoes that afternoon. Marge’s son readied the plough for this purpose.

Marge gave me the warmest hug as I departed. I felt like I was from another planet entirely – but she made me feel right at home.

I am always humbled and impressed by people that can live apart from the hugely unsustainable society most of us don’t know how to escape. Even many well intentioned, and brave, ‘alternative’ individuals that attempt to live as these people do, find it virtually impossible to do so. Ted, Marge, Stan, and their families – with their fruit trees, their gardens, chickens, food preserving and root cellars – all learned innumerable skills from their parents that are now being discarded by a new generation who do not realise their value. But, as the vulnerabilities of our house-of-cards globalised economic system become obvious, some, even amongst the young, are starting to see value again in the accumulated wisdom of the past. Permaculture certainly has a lot to offer these people in fine tuning their traditional methods for increased efficiency and productivity.

These countries are changing – of that there is no doubt. As someone that’s lived mostly in western societies – I can’t help but wish they could learn from our mistakes, and not be too quick to discard their past completely. It seems with their new freedom there is much to gain, but perhaps also much that could get lost.

Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.

Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.

Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate–the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."

Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled–so they, too, started to take the checks.

Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization’s media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country…. But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren’t supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were ‘helping’ us, and that was it."

She soon began to see–as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.–how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of IKEA’s dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company’s defense, saying–wrongly–that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won’t happen. Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes cash from the company?

Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club’s Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest–but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were "truly superior." But it hadn’t. The Club’s Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, "We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors’ or good for the environment in any way.

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous–yet it is now taken for granted.

This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the atmosphere that the world’s climate scientists say we are close to the climate’s "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts of terrible things happen–we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages central Africa–but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.

Beyond 2 degrees, the chances of any stabilization at the hotter level begin to vanish, because the earth’s natural processes begin to break down. The huge amounts of methane stored in the Arctic permafrost are belched into the atmosphere, causing more warming. The moist rainforests begin to dry out and burn down, releasing all the carbon they store into the air, and causing more warming. These are "tipping points": after them, we can’t go back to the climate in which civilization evolved.

So in an age of global warming, the old idea of conservation–that you preserve one rolling patch of land, alone and inviolate–makes no sense. If the biosphere is collapsing all around you, you can’t ring-fence one lush stretch of greenery and protect it: it too will die.

You would expect the American conservation organizations to be joining the great activist upsurge demanding we stick to a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm), according to professor and NASA climatologist James Hansen. And–in public, to their members–they often are supportive. On its website the Sierra Club says, "If the level stays higher than 350 ppm for a prolonged period of time (it’s already at 390.18 ppm) it will spell disaster for humanity as we know it."

But behind closed doors, it sings from a different song-sheet. Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, in Arizona, which refuses funding from polluters, has seen this from the inside. He told me, "There is a gigantic political schizophrenia here. The Sierra Club will send out e-mails to its membership saying we have to get to 350 parts per million and the science requires it. But in reality they fight against any sort of emission cuts that would get us anywhere near that goal."

For example, in 2009 the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety"–a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is "compatible with human safety": restore us to 350 ppm. Suckling explains, "I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA’s side. They threw climate science out the window."

Indeed, the Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel, David Bookbinder, ridiculed the center’s attempts to make 350 ppm a legally binding requirement. He said it was "truly a pointless exercise" and headed to "well-deserved bureaucratic oblivion"–and would only add feebly that "350 may be where the planet should end up," but not by this mechanism. He was quoted in the media alongside Bush administration officials who shared his contempt for the center’s proposal.

Why would the Sierra Club oppose a measure designed to prevent environmental collapse? The Club didn’t respond to my requests for an explanation. Climate scientists are bemused. When asked about this, Hansen said, "I find the behavior of most environmental NGOs to be shocking…. I [do] not want to listen to their lame excuses for their abominable behavior." It is easy to see why groups like Conservation International, which take money from Big Oil and Big Coal, take backward positions. Their benefactors will lose their vast profits if we make the transition away from fossil fuels–so they fall discreetly silent when it matters. But while the Sierra Club accepts money from some corporations, it doesn’t take cash from the very worst polluters. So why is it, on this, the biggest issue of all, just as bad?

It seems its leaders have come to see the world through the funnel of the US Senate and what legislation it can be immediately coaxed to pass. They say there is no point advocating a strategy that senators will reject flat-out. They have to be "politically realistic" and try to advocate something that will appeal to Blue Dog Democrats.

This focus on inch-by-inch reform would normally be understandable: every movement for change needs a reformist wing. But the existence of tipping points–which have been overwhelmingly proven by the climate science–makes a mockery of this baby-steps approach to global warming. If we exceed the safe amount of warming gases in the atmosphere, then the earth will release its massive carbon stores and we will have runaway warming. After that, any cuts we introduce will be useless. You can’t jump halfway across a chasm: you still fall to your death. It is all or disaster.

By definition, if a bill can pass through today’s corrupt Senate, then it will not be enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. Why? Because the bulk of the Senate–including many Democrats–is owned by Big Oil and Big Coal. They call the shots with their campaign donations. Senators will not defy their benefactors. So if you call only for measures the Senate could pass tomorrow, you are in effect giving a veto over the position of the green groups to the fossil fuel industry.

Yet the "conservation" groups in particular believe they are being hardheaded in adhering to the "political reality" that says only cuts far short of the climate science are possible. They don’t seem to realize that in a conflict between political reality and physical reality, physical reality will prevail. The laws of physics are more real and permanent than any passing political system. You can’t stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, "Sorry, the swing states don’t want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years."

A classic case study of this inside-the-Beltway mentality can be found in a blog written by David Donniger, policy director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate summit. The summit ended with no binding agreement for any country to limit its emissions of greenhouse gases, and a disregard of the scientific targets. Given how little time we have, this was shocking. Donniger was indeed furious–with the people who were complaining. He decried the "howls of disaster in European media, and rather tepid reviews in many U.S. stories." He said people were "holding the accord to standards and expectations that no outcome achievable at Copenhagen could reasonably have met–or even should have met."

This last sentence is very revealing. Donniger believes it is "reasonable" to act within the constraints of the US and global political systems, and unreasonable to act within the constraints of the climate science. The greens, he suggests, are wrong to say their standards should have been met at this meeting; the deal is "not weak." After fifteen climate summits, after twenty years of increasingly desperate scientific warnings about warming, with the tipping points drawing ever closer, he says the world’s leaders shouldn’t be on a faster track and that the European and American media should stop whining. Remember, this isn’t an oil company exec talking; this is a senior figure at one of the leading environmental groups.

There is a different way for green groups to behave. If the existing political system is so corrupt that it can’t maintain basic human safety, they should be encouraging their members to take direct action to break the Big Oil deadlock. This is precisely what has happened in Britain–and it has worked. Direct-action protesters have physically blocked coal trains and new airport runways for the past five years–and as a result, airport runway projects that looked certain are falling by the wayside, and politicians have become very nervous about authorizing any new coal power plants [see Maria Margaronis, "The UK's Climate Rebels," December 7, 2009]. The more mainstream British climate groups are not reluctant to condemn the Labour government’s environmental failings in the strongest possible language. Compare the success of this direct confrontation with the utter failure of the US groups’ work-within-the-system approach. As James Hansen has pointed out, the British model offers real hope rather than false hope. There are flickers of it already–there is an inspiring grassroots movement against coal power plants in the United States, supported by the Sierra Club–but it needs to be supercharged.

By pretending the broken system can work–and will work, in just a moment, after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another–the big green groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to destruction–and calling it progress.

Even within the constraints of the existing system, their approach makes for poor political tactics. As Suckling puts it, "They have an incredibly naïve political posture. Every time the Dems come out with a bill, no matter how appallingly short of the scientific requirements it is, they cheer it and say it’s great. So the politicians have zero reason to strengthen that bill. If you’ve already announced that you’ve been captured, then they don’t need to give you anything. Compare that to how the Chamber of Commerce or the fossil fuel corporations behave. They stake out a position on the far right, and they demand the center move their way. It works for them. They act like real activists, while the supposed activists stand at the back of the room and cheer at whatever bone is thrown their way."

The green groups have become "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, regardless of how pathetic the party’s position is," Suckling says in despair. "They have no bottom line, no interest in scientifically defensible greenhouse gas emission limitations and no willingness to pressure the White House or Congress."

It will seem incredible at first, but this is–in fact–too generous. At Copenhagen, some of the US conservation groups demanded a course of action that will lead to environmental disaster–and financial benefits for themselves. It is a story buried in details and acronyms, but the stakes are the future of civilization.

When the rich countries say they are going to cut their emissions, it sounds to anyone listening as if they are going to ensure that there are fewer coal stations and many more renewable energy stations at home. So when Obama says there will be a 3 percent cut by 2020–a tenth of what the science requires–you assume the United States will emit 3 percent fewer warming gases. But that’s not how it works. Instead, they are saying they will trawl across the world to find the cheapest place to cut emissions, and pay for it to happen there.

Today, the chopping down of the world’s forests is causing 12 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases, because trees store carbon dioxide. So the rich governments say that if they pay to stop some of that, they can claim it as part of their cuts. A program called REDD–Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation–has been set up to do just that. In theory, it sounds fine. The atmosphere doesn’t care where the fall in emissions comes from, as long as it happens in time to stop runaway warming. A ton of carbon in Brazil enters the atmosphere just as surely as a ton in Texas.

If this argument sounds deceptively simple, that’s because it is deceptive. In practice, the REDD program is filled with holes large enough to toss a planet through.

To understand the trouble with REDD, you have to look at the place touted as a model of how the system is supposed to work. Thirteen years ago in Bolivia, a coalition of The Nature Conservancy and three big-time corporate polluters–BP, Pacificorp and American Electric Power (AEP)–set up a protected forest in Bolivia called the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project. They took 3.9 million acres of tropical forest and said they would clear out the logging companies and ensure that the forest remained standing. They claimed this plan would keep 55 million tons of CO2 locked out of the air–which would, in time, justify their pumping an extra 55 million tons into the air from their coal and oil operations. AEP’s internal documents boasted: "The Bolivian project…could save AEP billions of dollars in pollution controls."

Greenpeace sent an investigative team to see how it had turned out. The group found, in a report released last year, that some of the logging companies had simply picked up their machinery and moved to the next rainforest over. An employee for San Martin, one of the biggest logging companies in the area, bragged that nobody had ever asked if they had stopped. This is known as "leakage": one area is protected from logging, but the logging leaks a few miles away and continues just the same.

In fact, one major logging organization took the money it was paid by the project to quit and used it to cut down another part of the forest. The project had to admit it had saved 5.8 million tons or less–a tenth of the amount it had originally claimed. Greenpeace says even this is a huge overestimate. It’s a Potemkin forest for the polluters.

When you claim an offset and it doesn’t work, the climate is screwed twice over–first because the same amount of forest has been cut down after all, and second because a huge amount of additional warming gases has been pumped into the atmosphere on the assumption that the gases will be locked away by the now-dead trees. So the offset hasn’t prevented emissions–it’s doubled them. And as global warming increases, even the small patches of rainforest that have technically been preserved are doomed. Why? Rainforests have a very delicate humid ecosystem, and their moisture smothers any fire that breaks out, but with 2 degrees of warming, they begin to dry out–and burn down. Climatologist Wolfgang Cramer says we "risk losing the entire Amazon" if global warming reaches 4 degrees.

And the news gets worse. Carbon dioxide pumped out of a coal power station stays in the atmosphere for millenniums–so to genuinely "offset" it, you have to guarantee that a forest will stand for the same amount of time. This would be like Julius Caesar in 44 BC making commitments about what Barack Obama will do today–and what some unimaginable world leader will do in 6010. In practice, we can’t even guarantee that the forests will still be standing in fifty years, given the very serious risk of runaway warming.

You would expect the major conservation groups to be railing against this absurd system and demanding a serious alternative built on real science. But on Capitol Hill and at Copenhagen, these groups have been some of the most passionate defenders of carbon offsetting. They say that, in "political reality," this is the only way to raise the cash for the rainforests, so we will have to work with it. But this is a strange kind of compromise–since it doesn’t actually work.

In fact, some of the big groups lobbied to make the protections weaker, in a way that will cause the rainforests to die faster. To understand why, you have to grasp a distinction that may sound technical at first but is crucial. When you are paying to stop deforestation, there are different ways of measuring whether you are succeeding. You can take one small "subnational" area–like the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project–and save that. Or you can look at an entire country, and try to save a reasonable proportion of its forests. National targets are much better, because the leakage is much lower. With national targets, it’s much harder for a logging company simply to move a few miles up the road and carry on: the move from Brazil to Congo or Indonesia is much heftier, and fewer loggers will make it.

Simon Lewis, a forestry expert at Leeds University, says, "There is no question that national targets are much more effective at preventing leakage and saving forest than subnational targets."

Yet several groups–like TNC and Conservation International–have lobbied for subnational targets to be at the core of REDD and the US climate bills. Thanks in part to their efforts, this has become official US government policy, and is at the heart of the Waxman-Markey bill. The groups issued a joint statement with some of the worst polluters–AEP, Duke Energy, the El Paso Corporation–saying they would call for subnational targets now, while vaguely aspiring to national targets at some point down the line. They want to preserve small patches (for a short while), not a whole nation’s rainforest.

An insider who is employed by a leading green group and has seen firsthand how this works explained the groups’ motivation: "It’s because they will generate a lot of revenue this way. If there are national targets, the money runs through national governments. If there are subnational targets, the money runs through the people who control those forests–and that means TNC, Conservation International and the rest. Suddenly, these forests they run become assets, and they are worth billions in a carbon market as offsets. So they have a vested financial interest in offsetting and in subnational targets–even though they are much more environmentally damaging than the alternatives. They know it. It’s shocking."

What are they doing to ensure that this policy happens–and the money flows their way? Another source, from a green group that refuses corporate cash, describes what she has witnessed behind closed doors. "In their lobbying, they always talk up the need for subnational projects and offsetting at every turn and say they’re great. They don’t mention national targets or the problems with offsetting at all. They also push it through their corporate partners, who have an army of lobbyists, [which are] far bigger than any environmental group. They promote their own interests as a group, not the interests of the environment." They have been caught, he says, "REDD-handed, too many times."

TNC and Conservation International admit they argue for subnational accounting, but they claim this is merely a "steppingstone" to national targets. Becky Chacko, director of climate policy at Conservation International, tells me, "Our only interest is to keep forests standing. We don’t [take this position] because it generates revenue for us. We don’t think it’s an evil position to say money has to flow in order to keep forests standing, and these market mechanisms can contribute the money for that."

Yet when I ask her to explain how Conservation International justifies the conceptual holes in the entire system of offsetting, her answers become halting. She says the "issues of leakage and permanence" have been "resolved." But she will not say how. How can you guarantee a forest will stand for millenniums, to offset carbon emissions that warm the planet for millenniums? "We factor that risk into our calculations," she says mysteriously. She will concede that national accounting is "more rigorous" and says Conservation International supports achieving it "eventually."

There is a broad rumble of anger across the grassroots environmental movement at this position. "At Copenhagen, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing," says Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organization that sides with indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land. "These groups are positioning themselves to be the middlemen in a carbon market. They are helping to set up, in effect, a global system of carbon laundering…that will give the impression of action, but no substance. You have to ask–are these conservation groups at all? They look much more like industry front groups to me."

So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creeping corporate corruption, some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet. They are supporting a system they know will lead to ecocide, because more revenue will run through their accounts, for a while, as the collapse occurs. At Copenhagen, their behavior was so shocking that Lumumba Di-Aping, the lead negotiator for the G-77 bloc of the world’s rainforest-rich but cash-poor countries, compared them to the CIA at the height of the cold war, sabotaging whole nations.

How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we have left? Charles Komanoff, who worked as a consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council for thirty years, says, "We’re close to a civil war in the environmental movement. For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing…. We need to create new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals."

Some of the failing green groups can be reformed from within. The Sierra Club is a democratic organization, with the leadership appointed by its members. There are signs that members are beginning to put the organization right after the missteps of the past few years. Carl Pope is being replaced by Mike Brune, formerly of the Rainforest Action Network–a group much more aligned with the radical demands of the climate science. But other organizations–like Conservation International and TNC–seem incapable of internal reform and simply need to be shunned. They are not part of the environmental movement: they are polluter-funded leeches sucking on the flesh of environmentalism, leaving it weaker and depleted.

Already, shining alternatives are starting to rise up across America. In just a year, the brilliant 350.org has formed a huge network of enthusiastic activists who are demanding our politicians heed the real scientific advice–not the parody of it offered by the impostors. They have to displace the corrupt conservationists as the voice of American environmentalism, fast.

This will be a difficult and ugly fight, when we need all our energy to take on the forces of ecocide. But these conservation groups increasingly resemble the forces of ecocide draped in a green cloak. If we don’t build a real, unwavering environmental movement soon, we had better get used to a new sound–of trees crashing down and an ocean rising, followed by the muffled, private applause of America’s "conservationists."

~~~~~~
Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent in London and a contributing writer for Slate. He has been named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International for his reporting from the war in Congo.

Many people think that in India cows are almost universally worshipped, and treated better than your pampered collie or russian blue. But, the reality is that although killing cows is illegal in all but two states in the country, these laws are poorly enforced, and local officials are often bribed to turn a blind eye to both the cruelty and slaughter of these animals. And where they aren’t killed in states where it’s illegal, they’re forced to walk vast distances until they reach the states where killing is legal, or they’re crammed like sardines into trucks and train carriages in stifling hot conditions and taken there. Because of the distances involved, the herders often have to resort to extreme acts of cruelty to ‘encourage’ the animals to continue their trek – like breaking their tails and rubbing hot spices into their eyes, and worse. An example of ‘worse’ is making them drink water laced with copper sulphate. It destroys their kidneys so they can’t urinate, so while in agony upon arrival they are also heavier and fetch a better price.

This article gives you a bit of a start on the topic, and the video below is well worth a watch. Warning – extreme animal cruelty footage:

For me, scale is always the source of our problems – be they environmental, ethical or otherwise.

Our bonds with other species are as vital, to survival, as our bonds with other people. If we don’t choose our company carefully, disaster is likely to ensue.

As a species, we should be shopping for the best relationships. There’s a lot a stake, and we don’t want to be abused or neglected. When searching for a good fit, we should keep in mind the following characteristics of good relationships.

Healthy Relationships Are:

• Supportive
• Stable
• Trustworthy
• Reciprocating
• Versatile
• Low Maintenance

Any signs of abusiveness, jealousy, extreme neediness, aloofness, instability, selfishness, should be bright red flags. To satiate our needs, we require an assortment of healthy relationships, from lovers and close friends, to co-workers and acquaintances. We know that too few or too many relationships can be a bad thing.

The most conspicuous relationships of the human species involve domesticated plants and animals. Our common pets, and almost all the food items in a grocery store, are domesticated organisms. These are the barnyard plants and animals we learn about from the moment we begin to talk.

But these creatures were not always domestic. All of them descend from wild ancestors, just as dogs descended from wolves. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond provides an excellent overview of domestication’s history. The domestication of food plants and animals was the basis of the Neolithic Revolution, when Old Word hunter/gatherers became farmers. Diamond make a good point: the reason we domesticated wolves and wheat, instead of moose, zebras, or cheetahs, is because wolves and wheat had a natural tendency to associate with people.

Wolves, for instance, probably first encountered people while scavenging meat scraps from hunting camps. Since wolves and people where both social hunters at that time, and since both species had something to gain from cooperation (increased hunting success), it was highly likely that a relationship would form.

It was the same way with plants like wheat, which probably thrived in man made disturbances before it was domesticated. Out of this relationship people gained food, and wheat gained habitat. Moose, zebras, and cheetahs don’t associate with people, if they can help it, and don’t have much to gain from a relationship.

When examining the planet’s organisms, we find a whole spectrum of tendencies for associating with people. On one side, we have animals like spotted owls and arboreal salamanders, who have very different needs from people. They want little to do with us, because we have nothing to offer them. Endangered species are likely to occupy this side of the spectrum, because, as we modify their habitat to suite us, it becomes less suitable to them.

In the middle of the spectrum are organisms that have needs and habitats similar to ours. Deer for instance, were not abundant in Western Washington State, until people began clearing the old growth forest to suite their needs. While this activity seriously threatened the spotted owl, deer thrived in the fields and thick re-growth that resulted. Similarly, apple trees have a habit of sprouting up in disturbed forests around human settlements. Since people like to eat deer and apples, this is a happy relationship, and both parties have something to gain. But an important distinction is that these species do not absolutely need us. Deer and wild apples would do fine without human help, perhaps making use of natural burn areas. (Read Northwest Lands Northwest Peoples, edited by Goble and Hirt.)

At the far end of the spectrum are organisms that need humans to survive. Corn is an excellent example. In the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan pointed out that without human intervention, corn could not even reseed itself. Helplessly, corn relies completely on people for it’s propagation. Corn is so needy, it can only survive by rewarding the humans who plant it with prodigious amounts of food. Through the hybridization and genetic modification of corn and other domestic organisms, we make them still more dependent on us. If humans quit supporting them, these organisms would cease to exist.

The Domestication Spectrum:

The most domesticated organisms in the spectrum reward us with the greatest quantities of food, but it comes a cost. Anyone who’s noticed the luxurious lifestyle of some pet dogs has witnessed that cost. I am referring to the frightening phenomenon of co-domestication.

Sure, dogs keep us company, they intimidate thieves, and they fetch the paper. But these same dogs enjoy a constant supply of free food and the freedom to sleep the entire day, while their owners slave away at full time jobs. Who has domesticated whom? This article (PDF) sheds light on how powerfully canines have shaped our species, not just vice versa.

All domestic organisms are the same way. They give more because they need more. The reason they can yield so much more than their wild counterparts is that they have differed the work of their upkeep to us. As much as we have domesticated them, they have domesticated us. We do their bidding, even when it becomes painful.

But do we want to be domesticated? Jared Diamond demonstrated that such relationships have been a primary vector for pandemic diseases throughout history. Almost every plague can be traced back to a domestic animal, even the more recent "swine flu". Domesticated animals also develop much smaller brains than their wild counterparts. Neoteny, or juvenilization, is a common trait exhibited by domesticates, a phenomenon by which adult animals retain the traits of juveniles, becoming helpless, cute, dumb, and compliant. This process can happen in as little as fifty years, as demonstrated by Dmitri Belyaev’s experiment in domesticating the silver fox. The idea that humans have been similarly tamed is a chilling one. (See http://www.primitivism.com/domestic.htm for effects of domestication.)

Have our co-domesticates made lap dogs out of us? Consider that most of the calories you consume come from just four crops. Consider that most of the carbon that comprises your body was fixed by corn. Or take a drive through Middle America and see it stretch to the horizon; corn, corn, corn, corn…. Or better yet, visit the Gulf of Mexico’s vast "dead zone" where all the fertilizer washed from the Mississippi’s corn and soybean fields accumulates, and becomes a patch of lifeless reeking sea as broad as Massachusetts. (http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/general.html)

Who is in charge here? Whose greed is ravishing the planet? Is it the Exxon? Is it George W. Bush? Is it Wal-Mart?!

No. It’s corn. Corn is in charge.

People are conceited enough to believe that we are the cause of this nightmare. But if our species was really in control, the world would look a lot differently. However greedy we may be, it was never in our interest to pollute and overpopulate the planet, dine on high fructose corn syrup, work long hours plowing up the soil, and cover every arable acre with wheat, rice, and corn. This is, however, very much in the interest of corn.

The human/grain relationship is the definition of unhealthy. Of all the plants we could have loved, we’ve chosen the ones that destroy our home and feed us junk. This is abusive. If we had any spine at all, we’d ditch them forever.

As a species, it’s time we had a talk with crops like corn. What we ought to be saying is, "Look Corn, things started out alright between us. I remember when we first got together in Mexico, we hung out with Beans and Squash, we made tortillas together, it was beautiful. But things aren’t the same anymore. Corn, you’ve been so draining lately. I’ve taken you everywhere and given you everything; land, water, fertilizer, herbicide, even genetic modifications – do you have any idea how many prairies and watersheds I sacrificed? I butchered the nitrogen cycle for you! And what do I have to show for it?! Corn-syrup! Lousy corn fed beef! Diabetes and heart disease! That’s what I have to show for it! And if it was up to you, I’d never have anything else. A person can’t live on cornflakes alone! Corn, I’m an omnivore, I need variety, adventure, and Omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t mind having corn on the cob now and then, but corn syrup on every label? You’re even in my gasoline! I can’t go on like this. You’re jealously is insane! This relationship isn’t working for me anymore. I think it’s time I saw other species."

What would it mean, to divorce ourselves from our co-domesticates?

A healthier relationship with our food might resemble our hunter/gatherer past, when we utilized a greater diversity of plants and animals in our diet. Hunter/gatherers across the world eat somewhere in the ballpark of 200 different plant species. We are omnivores, descended from a long line of omnivores. Even our chimpanzee cousins eat about 200 plant species. Primate intelligence may have evolved, in part, to facilitate such an eclectic diet. Ethnobotanists estimate that indigenous people from my home region, the Columbia Plateau, utilized at least 135 plants for food. When we consider how many non-native plants are available to us, as the result of global exchange, it does not seem unreasonable to demand a 300-plant diet. This is not to mention animal foods, which lag not far behind plants in hunter/gatherer diets, in terms of number of species eaten. The markets of the undeveloped world are a tantalizing example of just how much culinary variety we miss out on in the industrialized world. Broadening the scope of our menu would certainly improve our health and the health of the planet.

A healthier relationship with food might also look a little more independent. By eating from a wider swath of the domestication spectrum, and avoiding the extremes, we could spare ourselves internal and external damages. For instance, most of the vegetable greens consumed by modern Americans come from domesticated crops grown in intensively managed fields, which is totally absurd. There is no shortage of wild greens growing in our waste places, even in urban settings. Commonly overlooked "weeds" such as nettles, lambs quarter, amaranth, purslane, etc. are higher in vitamin and mineral content than their domestic counterparts, and thrive with zero maintenance. Many of these taste as good, or better, than domesticated greens (see http://www.eattheweeds.com). They are more than abundant enough to meet the vitamin and mineral needs of everyone. If we incorporated these semi-wild plants in our diets, we would waste less money and energy, and preserve our integrity as low-maintenance omnivores. Instead, most of us continue to be trapped by our bias toward tame, high-maintenance things.

Few societies are as irrational as ours in this regard. Most of the world’s other cultures have realized that while some foods are worth the effort to cultivate, others are best harvested from the wild. The hunter/gatherer Indian cultures of the Northwest were happy to adopt domestic species like chickens, potatoes, and turnips. It was no stretch. After all, they had been gardening tobacco for a very long time. But almost nothing could stop them from harvesting huckleberries, or wild salmon. Only our culture would build the Grand Coulee Dam, thus terminating a free and abundant supply of wild salmon, in order to irrigate potatoes. Most long-established agricultural societies derive a significant part of their diet from the wild. Farming corn did not keep early American societies from dining on venison and nuts as well.

Sea food, the one wild harvest industry our society wasn’t so squeamish about, is rapidly being replaced by high-maintenance fish farms, and other forms of aquaculture. On the whole, the industrial world has done a very poor job of striking a balance between low and high maintenance sustenance strategies. Indeed, we seem to have an uncanny tendency toward the latter extreme. Why? Why would we go to so much trouble? Perhaps it is because, as any government employee can tell you, make-work can be profitable (the Grand Coulee Dam makes another pertinent example). But this is an entirely different topic, perhaps better covered by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine.

If you’re like me, make-work isn’t your forte. You’ve got better things to do than labor for things nature offers for free. You may also like the idea of moving your diet toward the healthy norm – two or three hundred plant species. Find out more about increasing the diversity of your habitat at: https://sites.google.com/site/humanhabitatproject.

That sun that pours its rays down onto our world, and passes its energy into the food we, in turn, take into our bodies, has always been our ’solar power’, enabling us to actively perform our allotted tasks – that of providing for ourselves and our families.

This was, and is, the natural order of things. The carbon cycle, and ecological balance, is dependent on it. We partake of the energy, and impart it in our labours, and our labours, if executed wisely, gave back to the natural world that feeds us. In this, we are the same as all the other creatures we share this planet with.

Admittedly, throughout those same millennia, there were always a few that sought, and found, an alternate way. This ‘alternative’ way of life came through the violent process of turning the people around us into ‘machines’, enslaving them to do our will. We harnessed their energy, and in our stead they fulfilled the tasks we somehow came to regard as beneath us.

Although this kind of social injustice still continues today in its human form, the rise of the machine age enabled us to transfer a large portion of the work to our new, fossil fuel powered mechanical slaves – and the belief that manual labour is not befitting an advanced member of the human race has not only persevered, but has now become all-pervasive. Those we would have, without the machine, continued to enslave, are now inspired by the belief that physical work is unseemly. They too seek to become masters of the machine and to partake of its supposed benefits.

I’ve lived and travelled in countries which many in the west would regard as ‘backwards’ and ‘under-developed’, countries where physical labour is still applied to the majority of tasks. For the purposes of comparison, a road-repair exercise in such a country might be accomplished over the course of several days, with a team of twenty men armed with hand-tools and brute strength. The same project in the west may take four men a single day – two of whom will stand still, in one spot, directing traffic at each end of the construction zone; a third will sit in a fossil-fuel powered digger, with the fourth directing the driver.

We regard the latter scenario as more efficient, but in reality, is it? The former is a carbon neutral exercise and requires no ‘offsetting’ – no building of solar panels or wind turbines in an attempt to negate the fact we’ve wasted the energy we already possess within ourselves. The former requires no destruction, no factories to build the machinery, and there’s no environmental clean-up or consequences. By relegating to a machine a task we could have done for ourselves, we’ve created additional tasks – which we in turn delegate to yet more machines.

Putting aside the ecological costs, the greenhouse gases, and the realities of the finiteness of our energy sources, what is the result for the individual – the lucky recipient of this new world without physical labour? The irony, you see, is the result itself. We’ve endeavoured to escape something that is, in fact, inescapable – a physiological need to move and work and exercise. In our road-construction example above, the physical proportions of the men in each respective team make an obvious statement on their own. The pot-bellied man in control of the digger forms a stark contrast to the ruddied and muscular form of the labourer – and as physical and mental health are as intimately entwined as the brain is to the body, the state of mind are also in contrast. Physical ailments and psychological maladies rise up in our cities faster than our skyscrapers.

In an unnatural environment, we perform unnatural tasks

And, with the berating of health practitioners, we endeavour to make up for this short-fall in our exercise quota by expending even more fossil fuel energy in our recreational and leisure pursuits. We drive to energy-consuming gyms where we transform ourselves into a kind of hamster-on-a-treadmill, becoming a slave to the machine, reluctantly expending our internal energy in our precious free time – energy that could have been put to practical use in our daily work, if only that kind of work wasn’t disappearing as fast as the CO2 content in our atmosphere is increasing.

Yet we seek to ‘advance’ yet further. The digger driver studies, and strives, and works to become something ‘more’. He lands an office job and finds himself in a wonderful new cubicle world where, for a while, he feels he’s arrived; but just for a while.

Historically treadmills were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.

Today we’re virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling to further corporate profits.

To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the ‘rewards’ of consumerism, the existential emptiness inside is filled up with huge quantities of food and comfort snacking as well as borrowing more money to buy status symbols, and then have to work harder to pay off our debts.

… Wasn’t that what school was all about? Sitting behind a desk for six hours, mindlessly bored. Just being ‘trained’ to fit into the new-style treadmill of work. – Cubicle World

But the reality is we never escape from being enslaved. From the person on the end of the broom to the CEO working for shareholders, we become just one small component in an ever-enlarging machine. It’s a Wal-Martisation process that turns us into the very thing we sought to escape – giving us a new and unhealthy kind of drudgery that leaves us without any feeling of accomplishment, creativity or inner moral satisfaction.

An article from a couple of years ago describes just how well enslaved we are to ‘the machine’:

Wal-Mart—the largest private retailer in the United States—is about to completely change the system it uses for scheduling workers’ shifts.

Last year, the company implemented the new system for a portion of its workers, including cashiers and office personnel. This year, Wal-Mart will begin using the system for all of its 1.3 million workers.

The system, developed by Kronos Inc., uses data from previous years along with new information on individual store sales, transactions, units sold and customer traffic to create a “cost-cutting” schedule.

Workers will now be asked to work shifts during those times in which potential profits are the highest.

Wal-Mart is not alone in implementing the so-called scheduling optimization system. Payless Shoe Source expects to have this system in 300 of its 4,000 stores by the end of January 2007. Radio Shack and Mervyns are also implementing the new system.

Nikki Baird of Forrester Research said, “There’s been a new push for labor optimization.”

“Labor optimization” is a euphemism for an attack on worker rights. While the implementation of this system is a new tactic in the bosses’ constant drive to increase the exploitation of workers, it is anything but a new push.

The bosses must compete with each other to constantly increase the rate of profit. They consistently work to undermine workers’ job stability, wages and benefits while increasing their workloads.

… The sweat shop of old has now become the corporate cube-farm where employees are still required to work long hours without sufficient pay. Instead of paying workers by the hour, the corporations came up with the ego-assuaging idea of designating nearly all positions as “salaried” which means they are free of overtime costs. Workers are laid off, their pensions diverted to deceptive “401K” plans that often means they will not be free to retire ~ ever. – Cubicle World

Perseverance is an attribute, depending on the goal. In our bid to avoid work, while we run roughshod over our environment, and each other – trying to clamber our way to our own distorted view of success – it would be timely to stop and take stock of what we really want from our life, or more importantly, to ask ourselves what we could do with it instead.

There is nothing more absurd, to give an example that is only apparently trivial, than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking. We have millions, too, whose livelihoods, amusements, and comforts are all destructive, who nevertheless wish to live in a healthy environment; they want to run their recreational engines in clean, fresh air….

The growth of the exploiters’ revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger, at first some person, and later something, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack “labor-saving devices.” We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other’s niggers.

But is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so. All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise. It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis – only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.

Thus we can see growing out of our history a condition that is physically dangerous, morally repugnant, ugly. Contrary to the blandishments of the salesmen, it is not particularly comfortable or happy. It is not even affluent in any meaningful sense, because its abundance is dependent on sources that are being rapidly exhausted by its methods. To see these things is to come up against the question: Then what is desirable? - Wendell Berry, The Agricultural Crisis, A Crisis of Culture. p. 16, 17

It is of no use to romanticise and gloss over the troubles of our ancient past. We have battled each others’ greed and excesses throughout history. Likewise we cannot ignore the benefits that have come hand in hand with our industrial woes. But where from here? What is desirable? Just as the urbanisation of our world is accelerating, the collective minds of our race are being brought to bear on this very question.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.

… for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, any more, to look upon what we call “progress” as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that will destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as we can, good animals. – Wilderness Letter

Sixty years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote these stanzas:

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

- Thomas Hardy

Today most of our people are so conditioned that they do not wish to harrow clods either with an old horse or with a new tractor. Yet Hardy’s vision has come to be more urgently true than ever. The great difference these sixty years have made is that, though we feel that this work must go onward, we are not so certain that it will. But the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope. - Wendell Berry, The Agricultural Crisis, A Crisis of Culture. p. 19

We’re being offered a last opportunity to make good, to learn how to become successful stewards of ourselves, our fellows, and our resources. It’s our last chance to realise the beauty, and experience the satisfaction, of our own activity – to make use of our forgotten energy.

It was about this time, that we heard Bill Mollison speak on Permaculture, with zones, to encourage a design plan that integrates the environment, plants and people with a vision of possibilities.

Vegetable and herb gardens were started and fruit trees were planted. Poultry, dairy goats, pigs and milking cows were added. Derrick being very gifted with skills of building fences, sheds, and as ‘a fix-it man’ was able to do many and varied tasks on the farm. Derrick, being a butcher by trade, was also able to turn the animals into cuts of meat for the freezer, mince into sausages, meat into smoked hams.

A nursery area was started to provide our own plants for the farm. Soon, people started asking us for various herbs and edible plants and the nursery grew like ‘topsy’.

I found plants so fascinating and loved to read about them and learn as much as I could. Collecting edibles was fun and resourceful for the farm and the nursery. Today our large range of culinary and medicinal herbs, spices, fruits, rare edibles, and seed varieties are sought by people from near and far. Postal orders placed by people for plants and seeds, keeps the family very busy. Derrick, now retired, is still the handy-man. Angela and her husband David, assisted by their daughter Aleisha, now run the farm.

For many years the Farm held regular, free guided farm tours, when I’d would show people around explaining the many useful plants that people could grow in their gardens. These Farm Walks were very popular and large groups of people would assemble to learn.

At the end of one afternoon farm walk, an elderly man was most enthused by the many edible plants, but said, he would never be able to remember all the information. He suggested that I write a book. Many other people over the years echoed the same suggestion.

But, where to find the time, to write a book? However, the concept was often in my thoughts, and I made notes and collected information, and recorded my own and other people’s experiences of benefits to their health with herbs. Herbs can play such a valuable role in health and this is what I wanted to enthuse people to see, and to use their herbs regularly.

Then in 2001 I started to write, and in June 2003 the book was born: “How can I use herbs in my daily life?” which covers over 500 herbs (see this DVD also). The response to the Herb Book from all over the world has been overwhelming, with readers saying they use their herbs more and report wonderful benefits to health. People have told me that they use the Herb Book as a constant reference, and also share the information with others and this is what herbal folklore is all about – passing it on.

Good health is precious. Every person needs to work at maintaining health, therefore, we need to learn all we can about how the body functions, nutrients required, digestion and assimilation, the many benefits of herbs, and the value of food with living enzymes.

As I became more aware of the value of enzymes and living food, I started to see that little things like ‘sprouts’ could have a big impact on health, as they provide a high degree of vitality and rejuvenation to the body. People who were reading the Herb Book were interested in knowing more about wheat grass and sprouts, which I had mentioned in the book. I showed them how I grew sprouts, particularly fenugreek, which is my favourite sprout. It was from that interest, the book “How can I grow and use sprouts as living food?” came to be written (see this DVD also).

Sprouts have so many valuable attributes: high protein and nutrient content, fibre and essential fatty acids, and they are rich in antioxidants and living enzymes. Sprouts are ‘super foods’ and are something every person can grow right in their kitchen at very minimal cost.

Many readers of the sprout book have said that this book should be in every home. The book is easy to read, and it is easy to put the simple steps into practice. I encourage every home to grow sprouts regularly, and get the many benefits of sprouts as living food.

In 2007 I was led to write once more, resulting in "How can I be prepared with Self-sufficiency and Survival Foods?" Many people have said that this book is very timely with the present financial situation.

Just why did I come to write a book centered on this topic? For many years I taught herb courses, covering many edible plants, and included a segment on the importance of self-sufficiency and survival for possible hard times.

During one class, when I asked, “If shops closed tomorrow, how much food do you have to feed your family?”

One woman replied, “Maybe enough for one week.” This made me think how dependent the majority of people are on farmers, trucking companies and shops to provide their daily food. People often expressed that I should put information on self-sufficiency into a book. Then, in 2007, my son Ricky rang from Adelaide, while doing a course on alternative energies.

Ricky said, “Mum, when are you going to write that book on self-sufficiency and survival? There will be a big demand for it.”

His words gave me the nudge to get writing! During 2008 I sensed a real urgency to put this information together. This is not only my perception of what is happening in Australia and world-wide, but everyone is feeling and experiencing the pressure, as everything they purchase has risen in price, dramatically.

The AIM of this book is to share with people the importance of being as self-sufficient as one is able, with the likelihood of very difficult times ahead. We all need to rethink our current wasteful habits and consider the best use of our natural resources and renewable energies. It is time for us all to take action to: reduce, recycle, repair and reuse items, over again.

This book is written for people who have relied upon shops for everything and so that people who already grow some food in their backyard will be spurred on to be even more self-reliant.

After a half-century of forming new states from former colonies and from the breakup of the Soviet Union, the international community is today focusing on the disintegration of states. The term “failing state” has entered our working vocabulary only during the last decade or so, but these countries are now an integral part of the international political landscape. In the past, governments have been concerned by the concentration of too much power in one state, as in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. But today it is failing states that provide the greatest threat to global order and stability.

States fail when national governments lose control of part or all of their territory and can no longer ensure the personal security of their people. When governments lose their monopoly on power, the rule of law begins to disintegrate. When they can no longer provide basic services such as education, health care, and food security, they lose their legitimacy. A government in this position may no longer be able to collect enough revenue to finance effective governance. Societies can become so fragmented that they lack the cohesion to make decisions.

Failing states often degenerate into civil war as opposing groups vie for power. Conflicts can easily spread to neighboring countries, as when the genocide in Rwanda spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an ongoing civil conflict has claimed more than 5 million lives since 1998. The vast majority of these deaths in the Congo are nonviolent, most of them due to hunger, respiratory illnesses, diarrhea, and other diseases as millions have been driven from their homes. Within the Sudan, the killings in Darfur quickly spread into Chad.

Failing states can also provide possible training grounds for international terrorist groups, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, or as a base for pirates, as in Somalia. They may become sources of drugs, as in Myanmar (formerly Burma) or Afghanistan, which accounted for 92 percent of the world’s opium supply in 2008, much of which is made into heroin. Because they lack functioning health care services, weakened states can become a source of infectious disease, as Nigeria and Pakistan have for polio, derailing efforts to eradicate this dreaded disease.

Among the most conspicuous indications of state failure is a breakdown in law and order and a related loss of personal security. In Haiti, kidnappings for ransom of local people lucky enough to be among the 30 percent of the labor force that is employed are commonplace. In Afghanistan the local warlords, not the central government, control the country outside of Kabul. Somalia, which now exists only on maps, is ruled by tribal leaders, each claiming a piece of what was once a country. In Mexico, drug cartels are taking over, signaling the prospect of a failed state on the U.S. border.

The most systematic ongoing effort to analyze failed and failing states is published annually in each July/August issue of Foreign Policy magazine. This analysis ranks countries according to “their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration.” Based on 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, it puts Somalia at the top of the list of failed states for 2008, followed by Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Three oil-exporting countries are among the top 20 failed states—Sudan, Iraq, and Nigeria. Pakistan, number 10 on the list, is the only failing state with a nuclear arsenal. North Korea, number 17, is developing a nuclear capability.

Scores for each of the 12 indicators, ranging from 1 to 10, are aggregated into a single country indicator: the Failed States Index. A score of 120, the maximum, means that a society is failing totally by every measure. In the first Foreign Policy listing, based on data for 2004, just 7 countries had scores of 100 or more. By 2008 it was 14—doubling in four years. This short trend is far from definitive, but higher scores for countries at the top and the doubling of countries with scores of 100 or higher suggest that state failure is both spreading and deepening.

Ranking on the Failed States Index is closely linked with key demographic and environmental indicators. Of the top 20 failed states, 17 have rapid rates of population growth, several of them expanding at close to 3 percent a year or 20-fold per century. In 5 of these 17 countries, women have on average more than six children each. In all but 6 of the top 20 failed states, at least 40 percent of the population is under 15, a demographic statistic that often signals future political instability. Young men, lacking employment opportunities, often become disaffected, making them ready recruits for insurgency movements.

In many of the countries with several decades of rapid population growth, governments are suffering from demographic fatigue, unable to cope with the steady shrinkage in cropland and freshwater supplies per person or to build schools fast enough for the swelling ranks of children.

Sudan is a classic case of a country caught in the demographic trap. It has developed far enough economically and socially to reduce mortality, but not far enough to quickly reduce fertility. As a result, women on average have four children and the population of 41 million is growing by over 2,000 per day. Under this pressure, Sudan—like scores of other countries—is breaking down.

All but 3 of the 20 countries that lead the list of failing states are caught in this demographic trap. Realistically, they probably cannot break out of it on their own. They will need outside help—and not just a scattering of aid projects but systemic assistance in rebuilding—or the political situation will simply continue to deteriorate.

Among the top 20 countries on the failing state list, all but a few are losing the race between food production and population growth. Close to half of these states depend on a food lifeline from the World Food Programme. Food shortages can put intense pressures on governments. In many countries the social order began showing signs of stress in 2007 in the face of soaring food prices and spreading hunger. Food riots and unrest continued in 2008 in dozens of countries, from tortilla riots in Mexico to breadline fights in Egypt. In Haiti, soaring food prices helped bring down the government.

Another characteristic of failing states is a deterioration of infrastructure—roads and power, water, and sewage systems. Care for natural systems is also neglected as people struggle to survive. Forests, grasslands, and croplands deteriorate, generating a downward economic spiral. A drying up of foreign investment and a resultant rise in unemployment are also part of the decline syndrome.

Countries like Haiti and Afghanistan are surviving because they are on international life-support systems. Economic assistance, including food lifelines, is helping to sustain them. But there is not enough assistance to overcome the reinforcing trends of deterioration they are experiencing and replace them with the demographic and political stability need to sustain economic progress.

In an age of increasing globalization, the functioning of the global system depends on a cooperative network of functioning nation states. When governments lose their capacity to govern, they can no longer collect taxes, much less be responsible for their international debts. More failing states means more bad debt. Efforts to control international terrorism depend on cooperation among functioning nation states, and these efforts weaken as more states fail.

As the number of failing states grows, dealing with international crises becomes more difficult. Actions that may be relatively simple in a healthy world order, such as maintaining monetary stability or controlling an infectious disease outbreak, could become difficult or impossible in a world with numerous disintegrating states. Even maintaining international flows of raw materials could become a challenge. At some point, spreading political instability could disrupt global economic progress, suggesting that we need to address the causes of state failure with a heightened sense of urgency.

Further Reading:

• The Peasants Are Revolting
• Rich Nations Buying Up Land in Poor Countries at Escalating Rate

And another along similar lines for good measure:

Further Reading:

• The Mathematics that Contemporary Economics Ignores
• The Crash Course
• Money Literacy
• Our Moral Dilemma – Because We Don’t Live on an Inflatable Earth