The Covid-19 quarantine has given us time to reflect on the work we’ve done toward “creating capacity”, that is, resilience and resources for when “normal” breaks down. We’d like to share some thoughts about that work, and our focus going forward.

Author/archdruid John Michael Greer talks about “catabolic collapse“. That’s not the guns & ammo, post-apocalyptic-yet-still-powered-by-capitalism scenario favored in the media, but an ongoing process of societal disintegration. Looking at our mainstream institutions, economics or beliefs, it’s clear that we’ve been collapsing for a while. Events like pandemics punctuate the catabolic curve with sudden, eye-popping jumps set against the processes bedrocked as background, never foreground. Welcome to the apocalypse, we’ve saved you a seat.

The origins of the word “apocalypse” point to an “unveiling”, dropping illusion and finding revelation. As our global production systems and social institutions (eg. healthcare, education) are suddenly overwhelmed, their basic unsuitability is exposed. Just weeks ago so mighty, economies now sputter when faced with this latest adversity. As many have noted, this sudden spike in the process of collapse portends a larger undertaking in ecological and social entropy. And as Covid-19 takes its human toll worldwide, we’ve begun to see the best and worst that humanity can offer in its choice of loyalties, whether to human life or to economic systems, and the power struggles in finding the right balance (if such a thing exists). It’s another opportunity to consider, what is inherent in us as people, and what is the product of our systems? Growing up in systems preaching that “greed is good”, that “the only social responsibility of businesses is to increase profits”, or that “there is not alternative”, is it any wonder that the worst reactions to the crisis are marked by individualism, paranoia and accumulation?

Natural systems are rebounding because pollution and emissions are down, but it’s impossible to fist-pump about this while people are suffering, dying, or working beyond capacity to save lives. In fact, it’s a good time to question the very validity of work: which services are essential, how to use our “free time”. What solutions can the market offer to the health crisis, to overcrowded hospitals, to breaks in supply lines of essential goods and services? To those unable to meet their rent, mortgage or future expenses? Some claim our global, industrialized model is to blame for the virus, others cry that “the cure is worse than the disease“, that the economic effects of quarantining will create more destruction than the virus itself. 

We think these predictions are not endemic to economic science, but to a history of accumulatory, command and control dynamics which, via longstanding institutions including patriarchy and colonialism, have found their apex in capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Short a few weeks of predatory feeding, the growth-based model shows its weakness against the apocalypse. Another veil is lifting.

What else can we see? What will the world look like whenever “this is over” (and how will we know when it is)?

Could this be the herald of another political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed? We can help nature to restore itself, cut down emissions, our consumption of mass manufactured and designed-to-break-down crap. We can radically curtail speculative ventures and fictitious commodities. Slash inequality from the bottom up, spend our time away from bullshit jobs to reimagine the world. Use this free time to reconnect, cherish our aliveness, break out of containment, care for each other, grieve what we’ve lost and celebrate what we still have.

We do have the frameworks, we have been creating this capacity for quite a while. From localized, yet globally connected systems of production that can rapidly respond to urgent needs without depending on massive global chains, to ways to organize the workforce into restorative and purpose-oriented clusters of people who take care of each other. This new economy will need a new politics and a more emancipated relation to the State: we have tried it and succeeded. What new worlds (many worlds are possible) can we glimpse from under this lifted veil?

Here’s a question: did you already know about these potentials? Are we still having this conversation among ourselves, or have these terrible circumstances gifted us with an opportunity for (apocalyptic) clarity? The normal is collapsing, while our weirdness looks saner than ever before. 

Timothy Leary famously called for us to “find the others“. I think that the others are all of us, and this may be the moment where more of us can recognise that. A few years ago, we created an accessible, easy to use platform to share the potential of the Commons with everyone. Today it’s more relevant than ever. The projects we work on (Commons Transition and DisCO) are based on two simple precepts:

1. Everyone can become a commoner
2. Commoners can make more commoners

This is why we strive to create accessible and relatable frameworks for people to find the commoner within themselves. But we need to grow out of our bubbles, algorithmically predetermined or not; we need to rewild our message beyond the people who already know. Movements like Degrowth, Open Source software and hardware, anti-austerity, Social Solidarity Economy, Ecofeminism, Buen Vivir…we are all learning from each other. We must continue to humbly and patiently pass the knowledge on, listen to more voices and experiences, and keep widening the circle to include everyone, until there are no others.

Please share this article with anyone who may benefit from these “crazy ideas” that suddenly don’t look so crazy anymore. Start a conversation with people who, aghast at the rapid collapse and lack of reliable systemic support, are eager for new ideas, solutions, hope. The greatest enclosure of the commons is that of the mind: our capacity to imagine better worlds, to be kinder to each other and to the Earth. This will not be an easy or straightforward process. We need to hold each other through the loss and pain. We need to keep finding the others among all of us, until there are no more.

• Originally published in Stacco.works
• Cover art photograph by Antonio Marín Segovia
• “On Panic Buying” by the Sam Wallman and Miroslav Sandev
• “We Must Reimagine Everything” was originally published in Spanish by Miguel Brieva Clismón. It was translated to English by Guerrilla Translation

The post No New Normal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The invisible hand of the free market governs everything and the hardworking get prosperous while the lazy suffer poverty.

Sounds pretty familiar and very rational, doesn’t it…

But check it out again with the religious equivalents of the core terms replaced in:

God of the creation governs everything and the faithful get in heaven while the heathen suffer hell.

As you can easily notice, ‘Invisible Hand’ is a replacement for ‘God’, ‘free market’ is a replacement for ‘the creation’, ‘the hardworking’ is a replacement for ‘the faithful’ and ‘the lazy’ is a replacement for ‘the heathen’.

That’s because Capitalism is a Christianity replacement.

So much that it even replicates the Church organization of Medieval Christianity:

The economists (clergy) continually advocate (preach) free market economics (the faith) and interpret the economy (holy book) on behalf of the society (the believers). The critical economists (heretic priests) are outcast by the establishment, not given airtime, ridiculed or censored.

Whatever happens in the economy is interpreted and ‘somehow’ explained by the economists (clergy), and in those explanations, anything good that happens is due to free market economics (the faith), and anything bad that happens is due to straying away from free market economics (having any other faith).

According to the sermon, all that the hardworking (faithful) need to do is to work hard (have faith) and keep staying the course. Because ‘the invisible hand’ will fix all problems, crises, issues without them needing to do anything in particular. All they need to do is to have faith, and putting their trust in the religion by trusting the clergy of the church. Whose only solution to every single problem is more free market (more faith), and if a solution does not work at all, its because the society was not faithful to the free market enough.

Most interestingly, this setup also mirrors the development of Christianity and its Church from their inception to late modernity:

While the economist community that is comprised of economists sanctioned by the religion acts as the clergy of the religion, modern media which took the place of individual church buildings as a medium of communication acts as their medium to preach the religion to the society. This setup is amended by the education institutions and scientific institutions which act as the appendages to the Church, where children are educated/indoctrinated to the religion and its tenets from an early age by instilling them with ideas of competition, consumerism, materialism based success and in general a complete worldview that is created based on the religion’s tenets. The higher education and scientific institutions continue the education/indoctrination, creating the subsequent generations of clergy to preach the religion and run the institutions.

Incredibly, this arrangement also replicates the relationship of the medieval church and the nobility

Medieval church in middle ages acted as the opinion-shaper which molded the society’s opinion and beliefs to comply with then-existing feudal/aristocratic system.

The church advocated hard work and poverty, material conservatism to its faithful. Whereas clergy, especially higher members of the church lived much more comfortable and wealthy lives compared to average population, to the extent that highest members of the church being de facto princes in their own right.

The church also acted as the agent which rationalized the power of the minority rich, who were the feudal aristocratic nobility: While the faithful needed to suffer poverty and work hard, the nobility could enjoy material wealth, luxury and live extravagant lives because it was their god given right to rule.

So the medieval church basically acted as the propaganda/conditioning organ of the establishment by conditioning the public to accept the existing arrangement and rationalize the power of minority elite over them. The people worked hard to create economic value while the minority rich elite collected most of that economic production as theirs without doing any comparable work, because they were the property-owners of the region. Their ownership of that property was rationalized as a god given, holistic right.

Which is exactly the case with modern church of holistic economics: The economic church continually rationalizes the existing system and excuses/explains the power of a minority extreme rich segment who controls the system despite the suffering of a large majority to create the wealth that concentrates in the hands of a very tiny minority. Just because they have been able to concentrate ownership of entire economy in their hands.

Which results in dysfunctional, broken societies.

The above infographic is not even up to date with the latest state of affairs, since now one needs an income of $500,000 /year to be able to enter top %1 in US.

Americans now need at least $500,000 a year to enter the %1

The income needed to exit the bottom 99% of U.S. taxpayers hit $515,371 in 2017, according to Internal Revenue Service data released this week. That’s up 7.2% from a year earlier, even after adjusting for inflation.

Since 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied under the slogan “We are the 99%,” the income threshold for the top 1% is up an inflation-adjusted 33%. That outpaces all other groups except for those that are even wealthier.

The role of the church of holistic economics is to justify that situation by advocating that the owners of the economy who amass ever increasing amounts of wealth solely due to their ownership/control of the economy, have that much wealth and control because of their ‘hard work’. Whereas the Church is tasked with also keeping the system going by continually advocating for the policies which created this picture of dysfunctional inequality.

The recipe from the holy book is always the same: More deregulation, more ‘free market’ (faith), more hard work for the faithful. Despite this would inevitably end up making the dysfunctional situation worse, more faith is the only thing the faithful should do.

And the church even affects the believers’ behavior towards others

The believer of the system of Capitalism does not even want to entertain any other idea or system – because if he or she does that, s/he will have broken faith, which means that s/he wont be able to attain salvation (get rich). Because if he entertains any other idea or system, he will lose faith in the religion, therefore he is going to be lost and he is going become a heathen (poor). The only way to salvation (getting rich) is hard work (having faith).

This also explains how people who are basically exploited by the system still keep ‘voting against their own interests’ as it is said – its because they believe that this temporary suffering will pass and they will get rich only if they keep faith.

It doesn’t stop there – the exact behavior of the faithful in Middle Ages against heathens and heretic ideologies is also replicated:

Socialism and similar non-Capitalist systems are heresies – a lack of faith – and giving any thought to any non-Capitalist (non-Christian) system is a lack of faith in God.

Furthermore, the poor (heathen) deserve poverty because they were not hardworking (faithful) enough, while the rich (the faithful) deserve all the riches they have because they were hardworking (faithful) enough. So the believers believe if they also work hard enough, they will be saved as well – and become rich.

Hence the brutal, medieval attitude of the believers of the Church of Capitalism towards the downtrodden or the poor in the society in places like US: Its because they are heathens, they deserve what’s coming to them. If only they were faithful, they could also do much better.

Even if the believer himself is not doing any better, that is…

The believer justifies his situation by just believing that he is doing better even if he actually isn’t doing any better – because, since he is hardworking (faithful), he has to be doing better, right? Because the belief says hardworking is rewarded.

Because recognizing the situation and admitting that despite working hard, the promised riches and comforts did not materialize would be a giant blow to the believer’s psyche, the believer just rationalizes and elevates his situation even if he is not doing well. Look, he is hardworking among the flock of the Church, and therefore he has various small amenities – like a car, an air conditioner, a rented house or a house which was bought at an opportune time point when one could easily buy a house.

By attributing these amenities which are pretty much standard in entire developed world to Capitalism, the believer not only reinforces his religion in his mind, but also thwarts off any potential heresy and the subsequent cognitive dissonance by validating the religion.

He has these things because the god of his religion gave them to him for having faith…

This is the underlying motive behind the tendency of not only the Church clergy’s, but also the ordinary believers’ tendency to attribute anything good that happens to Capitalism. Even if Capitalism had nothing to do with it. Its a self-defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The Crusades

Because Capitalism is the ‘true religion’, and because the elite which benefits from Capitalism wants to increase their riches, the religion must be spread.

Hence, the establishment and its church undertake great effort to spread the religion to any place that is heretic: The clergy incessantly advocate the religion to those who don’t believe in it, and whenever possible and if necessary, the establishment itself directly subdues heretics by force and commands their wealth.

This takes the form of never-ending propaganda by the Capitalist establishment to propagate the system to any country that is outside the system or strays afar from the system, like the immense funding that the private think thanks and the US state apparatus spend in funding different foreign movements and foreign political parties which are in alignment with Capitalism.

The propaganda done to these countries takes the same shape that it takes at home: Anything bad that happens in a heretic country is because of their heresy. And anything good that happens somewhere is because of their faith.

Which materializes in anything bad happening in those countries being due to Socialism or other heresies, whereas anything good happening being due to their scarce observance of Capitalism, the faith. So even if the US sanctions a country to starvation, the ensuing starvation is Socialism’s fault.

And if a country or a society does not heed the call through ‘peaceful’ means like these, then the crusades happen: The foreign country is subjected to sanctions, economic warfare, regime change operations and coups, escalated in that order. And if the foreign country is still non-compliant, the final stage is invoked – the foreign country is attacked or invaded in order to force a compliant capitalist government, aka forced conversion to belief.

Do they really believe what they say?

Akin to the people of those times, it is certain that a large swath of the the believers actually believe in their religion.

And in a similar vein, a large swath of the lower and mid to upper segments of elite (clergy and nobility), do believe what they are saying.

However, just like those times, the upper elite in the Church and nobility are definitely aware of the game that is being played, what is false and what is true, and they participate in the game and do what they do only to keep their power and wealth going at the expense of their own people. Except, a small minority of easily influenced personas among them who actually do believe in what they are told.

That explains the phenomenon of highly educated, intelligent figures in establishment saying incredible things which do not make rational sense – things which sound like what a village idiot would say. Those things appeal to the emotions and beliefs of the believers and enable and rationalize the policies and power of the very elite which repeat those incredibly unreasonable talking points.

A segment of educated mid to upper class professionals also are true believers – because despite their rational, and even in certain cases, atheist outlook which does not accept actual religion, they have taken up Capitalism as a Christianity replacement in order to have a belief which explains the world and gives them promises of a better future that is in their hands. While at the same time rationalizing and explaining the suffering and poverty that they see around them, to ease their conscious.

As seen, Capitalism is a direct replacement for Christianity. It replicates not only the core beliefs and explanations of Christianity, but also replicates the church system and the feudal aristocracy. It functions as a vehicle to keep the power of a minority elite over the society while justifying and sanctifying their position of power and wealth at the expense of rest of their countrymen.

What’s the problem?

The problem is that medieval Christianity and Church kept the society stagnant, backwards, kept its people suffering and helped a non-working or minimally working elite hoard the society’s resources. They kept those resources from being used for betterment and prosperity of society and instead used those resources for their extravaganza. A waste. Modern religion of Capitalism does the same to modern society.

It keeps majority in poverty, in a state in which they are ever harder-working but are receiving little from the economic value they generate. Then it gives that economic value to those who own the economy, who will just hoard that wealth as personal power instead of actually investing it to better the society as was promised. On top of that the same elite use their control of the economy to subvert politics through election funding and corporate media, to take over government and implement more policies that will remove limits to their power and ownership of the economy. This further worsens the economic inequality, impacting entirety of the society.

In the end you end up with large segments of people – actually the majority – suffering in poverty, overworked, disenfranchised, uneducated, not even able to feed their children, not having any hope of breaking out of their situation through education because they cant even access education, dying if they cannot pay for exorbitant privatized healthcare, losing all trust in the society and hope for the future, feeling the need to put their faith in actual religious extremism, extremist movements, ultra-nationalism and in some cases, anything that will just shake the system even if it would be destructive.

Endless numbers of youth who could receive education to become scientists or researchers who could bring great advancements to society, to cure diseases, to fix problems, instead waste their talent away working underpaid jobs without being able to pay for their education…

Hard working people receive only a small fraction of the actual economic value they generate, with the majority of the value going to non-working majority shareholders as profit, ending up people having to overwork in stressed jobs and leaning on pharmaceuticals to keep themselves going, being able to get nowhere near what their parents’ generation was able to get in terms of life standards and security of future…

Even the small to medium businesses go bankrupt because population at large doesn’t have money to buy products or services. This is amplified by the pressure which large players that control concentrated wealth put on small and medium businesses because large players can easily out-compete them, and this pressure speeds up the devolving cycle of concentration of wealth…

This causes the system to start using actual religion and to propagate religious extremism in order to keep the society passive. This stems from the need of the people seeking a relief from their misery, but it greatly speeds up due to establishment’s efforts to use it to protect the status quo, bastardizing the religions and turning them into a tool and violating the sanctity of those actual religions’ core tenets to exploit them for self gain. This ends up in an increasingly radicalizing and reactionary populace which starts to become dangerous for the modern social fabric…

So much that the eventual result even hurts those who benefit from the system, with a religious or extremist segment rising from among the population and gaining power, and subduing or prosecuting anyone who does not fall in line. Including anyone from among the incumbent rich elite – forcing these people either to give up their beliefs, their lifestyle and obey the new dominant extremist societal worldview, or suffer the consequences…

The damages which a belief-based mechanic of societal control for self-aggrandizement does are varied and innumerable. Societies throughout history either fixed the economic injustice which created these, or they collapsed in a myriad of ways.

So what can be done?

The foremost thing to do is recognizing the above mechanics and behaviors and observing them at work in the society and daily actions of the ordinary people and the elite.

This brings in the necessary awareness to deal with the problem, independent of where the person is within the social strata.

The non-elite

If you are a member of lower segments of the society, you must realize that hard work will not bring prosperity in a system that was designed to work unfairly, and even if it brings some material rewards, the rewards will be much less than the actual hard work done. It is an unjust system – its not even ‘rigged’ in that way, the system is just what it is – unjust.

Instead, you must follow a route of pushing change through all means possible, voting for pro-people politicians and parties which fight against inequality to put them in positions of power in all levels of society ranging from municipal seats to parliaments, congresses to presidency. And if possible, you must also join grassroots people’s movements for effecting that change. Because grassroots movements, just work.

Anything to address the unfair system and change it to a more egalitarian system will make everything phenomenally better. Advocate change, criticize the existing unjust and destructive system. Help others see the unjust system as it is.

Buy from cooperatives, work in a cooperative if you can. Support organizations and groups which seek to address inequality, do your business with them and solve your problems through them. Become the change which the society needs.

If you are a member of higher segments of the society, especially as a member of educated white collar professional segment who works in private enterprises, you must realize that even with better, and in some cases noticeable compensation which you may be receiving, you are still getting only a fraction of the actual economic value you generate. The situation gets much better if you actually have a share in the company you work, like the stock options that are so popular in places like Silicon Valley, but even in that case the people who work in such enterprises are estimated to be receiving only up to 10% of the economic value they generate.

Increasing inequality and the lack of purchasing power of the general public not only hurt the prospects of the company where you currently work, but also they diminish the chances of the startup which you may attempt to start in future.

At the same time increasing inequality creates a rift in between you and your society, alienates them from you and pushes you into becoming a minority within the society you live. Even if different urban or suburban regions separate you from the disenfranchised majority, eventually the cows would come home when the society falls into extremism and seeks targets to persecute.

Therefore both for your own benefit and for the benefit of the society, you must fight against inequality by not falling to the trap of the religion that justifies this outrageous state of affairs.

Similar to other segments: Vote for politicians and parties that fight inequality. Take action and volunteer for groups that seek to bring change. Prefer to work in organizations that have less inequality or in organizations which seek to bring a more egalitarian distribution of generated economic value. In your workplace, use your technical knowledge and if possible and legal, the means of the organization you work for, in order to push for a more just economic system. Try to address and diminish the power of religious advocacy of the establishment in conditioning the masses.

Work in cooperatives, or in enterprises which have more egalitarian structures. Any company which gives its employees an acceptable share in the ownership of the company and a say in how it is run, is much better. Any company which does even at least a bit of that is a better choice compared to private organizations that are run as private tyrannies.

You as an educated professional, have a lot of impact when you attempt to change the society. Use it to full extent. Without your compliant cooperation, the existing system cannot continue, and with your participation in movements of change, a more egalitarian and futuristic system can rise.

THE ELITE

If you are a member of the current elite, though you are currently the beneficiary of the current system, you must realize that the system is self destructive, and no amount of self-reinforcing pseudo-religious philosophy can change the system’s internal mechanics.

As you can understand by researching the histories of societies which have fallen into extremism after the collapse of societal contract due to rampant inequality and disenfranchisement of the majority, the existing established elite rarely escapes the resulting fallout.

In the wave of rising extremism, the elite must either follow suit and subscribe to the extremist beliefs and practices, or suffer prosecution, even death. This happens the same even if you are an actual subscriber of such beliefs – as the society becomes more extremist, you are expected to follow suit, else you are perceived as non-compliant and eventually end up being targeted and getting persecuted.

There is little chance that your worldview and lifestyle will fit any potential extremist movement which may rise in your society. What’s worse, even if your worldview and lifestyle fit the philosophy of the rising extremist movement at the start, in the long run you would find out that you somehow ended up being viewed as a ‘moderate’ who is not compliant with the creed. You first get reviled by your non-compliance, then you get persecuted if you don’t comply.

Your choices would be either complying by dropping your current beliefs and lifestyle and obeying whatever the mainstream of the increasingly extremist society comes up with, or leaving everything behind and escaping abroad. That is, if you can find any reasonably developed society which escapes the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent social collapse which Capitalism is effecting on all developed countries…

The better choice is taking just a few steps back. Taking just a few steps back by allowing a percentage of the immense wealth that is concentrated in the hands of your minority to be channeled to address the rampant inequality through social programs, social services, investments, through putting concentrated wealth back into the economy by distributing it to majority of people in quantity, through distributing it to people who will spend that money to generate actual economic activity which will end up benefiting the businesses and organizations which you hold a stake in…

You don’t lose anything in the process either – you very well know that after a certain point, that kind of wealth cannot be used, cannot be spent for personal purposes in any meaningful manner, and it can only exist in the form of control of economic organizations through ownership of stocks and investments.

It’s a power scheme. It exists as the relative power which you have compared to other players in the form of wealth. And the relative power of the wealth you have compared to all other players would not tangibly change if every player loses a given percentage of their wealth. Even a large scale distribution of a fraction of that wealth would not upset the cards which the players among your segment hold.

So, choose the better option by taking a few steps back by merely not objecting to the political and social movements which seek to address this unworkable state of affairs, and even by directly supporting them to fix this chasm in the society together.

Conclusion

Leaving the self-reinforcing religious belief that enables and propagates the societal breakdown is in the interest of everyone in the society. There is no logic in insisting in continuing a self-destructive system which is destroying itself in front of your eyes in a predictable manner due to its internal mechanics.

No amount of justification, self-delusion or religious mythology, no amount of belief in the system will change the system’s internal mechanics. Its internal mechanics will continue dragging the system towards its eventual self-destruct, irreverent of the belief which you may put in the system. There are even worse potentials than societal collapse due to our civilization having very powerful weapons of mass destruction at this point in history. Extremism and different forms of societal collapse carry the potential of igniting conflicts which may destroy parts of the world or even human civilization.

Instead of believing in the pseudo-religion of holistic economics, we must believe in ourselves, the people.

We must work together to create a better society by putting our faith in ourselves, by putting our faith in our society, by putting our faith in a better future.

Because we can make such a future happen.

This article has been reprinted from Ozgur Zeren’s blog. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: “All-religions” by uttam sheth is licensed under CC0 1.0 

The post Capitalism is religion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Every now and then, history has a way of forcing ordinary people to face up to a moral encounter with destiny that they never expected. Back in the 1930s, as Adolf Hitler rose to power, those who turned away when they saw Jews getting beaten in the streets never expected that decades later, their grandchildren would turn toward them with repugnance and say “Why did you do nothing when there was still a chance to stop the horror?”

Now, nearly a century on, here we are again. The fate of future generations is at stake, and each of us needs to be prepared, one day, to face posterity—in whatever form that might take—and answer the question: “What did you do when you knew our future was on the line?”

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past few months, or get your daily updates exclusively from Fox News, you’ll know that our world is facing a dire climate emergency that’s rapidly reeling out of control. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a warning to humanity that we have just twelve years to turn things around before we pass the point of no return. Governments continue to waffle and ignore the blaring sirens. The pledges they’ve made under the 2015 Paris agreement will lead to 3 degrees of warming, which would threaten the foundations of our civilization. And they’re not even on track to meet those commitments. Even the IPCC’s dire warning of calamity is, by many accounts, too conservative, failing to take into account tipping points in the earth system with reinforcing feedback effects that could drive temperatures far beyond the IPCC’s worst case scenarios.

People are beginning to feel panicky in the face of oncoming disaster. Books such as David Wallace-Wells’s Uninhabitable Earth paint a picture so frightening that it’s already feeling to some like game over. A strange new phenomenon is emerging: while mainstream media ignores impending catastrophe, increasing numbers of people are resonating with those who say it’s now “too late” to save civilization. The concept of “Deep Adaptation” is beginning to gain currency, with its proponent Jem Bendell arguing that “we face inevitable near-term societal collapse,” and therefore need to prepare for “civil unrest, lawlessness and a breakdown in normal life.”

There’s much that is true in the Deep Adaptation diagnosis of our situation, but its orientation is dangerously flawed. By turning people’s attention toward preparing for doom, rather than focusing on structural political and economic change, Deep Adaptation threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, increasing the risk of collapse by diluting efforts toward societal transformation.

Our headlong fling toward disaster

I have no disagreement with the dire assessment of our circumstances. In fact, things look even worse if you expand the scope beyond the climate emergency. Climate breakdown itself is merely a symptom of a far larger crisis: the ecological catastrophe unfolding in every domain of the living earth. Tropical forests are being decimated, making way for vast monocrops of wheat, soy, and palm oil plantations. The oceans are being turned into a garbage dump, with projections that by 2050 they will contain more plastic than fish. Animal populations are being wiped out. The insects that form the foundation of our global ecosystem are disappearing: bees, butterflies, and countless other species in free fall. Our living planet is being ravaged mercilessly by humanity’s insatiable consumption, and there’s not much left.

Deep Adaptation proponents are equally on target arguing that incremental fixes are utterly insufficient. Even if a global price on carbon was established, and if our governments invested in renewables rather than subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, we would still come up woefully short. The harsh reality is that, rather than heading toward net zero, global emissions just hit record numbers last year; Exxon, the largest shareholder-owned oil company, proudly announced recently that it’s doubling down on fossil fuel extraction; and wherever you look, whether it’s air travel, globalized shipping, or beef consumption, the juggernaut driving us to climate catastrophe only continues to accelerate. To cap it off, with ecological destruction and global emissions already unsustainable, the world economy is expected to triple by 2060.

The primary reason for this headlong fling toward disaster is that our economic system is based on perpetual growth—on the need to consume the earth at an ever-increasing rate. Our world is dominated by transnational corporations, which now account for sixty-nine of the world’s largest hundred economies. The value of these corporations is based on investors’ expectations for their continued growth, which they are driven to achieve at any cost, including the future welfare of humanity and the living earth. It’s a gigantic Ponzi scheme that barely gets a mention because the corporations also own the mainstream media, along with most governments. The real discussions we need about humanity’s future don’t make it to the table. Even a policy goal as ambitious as the Green New Deal—rejected by most mainstream pundits as utterly unrealistic—would still be insufficient to turn things around, because it doesn’t acknowledge the need to transition our economy away from reliance on endless growth.

Deep Adaptation . . . or Deep Transformation?

Faced with these realities, I understand why Deep Adaptation followers throw their hands up in despair and prepare for collapse. But I believe it’s wrong and irresponsible to declare definitively that it’s too late—that collapse is “inevitable.” It’s too late, perhaps, for the monarch butterflies, whose numbers are down 97% and headed for extinction. Too late, probably for the coral reefs that are projected not to survive beyond mid-century. Too late, clearly, for the climate refugees already fleeing their homes in desperation, only to find themselves rejected, exploited, and driven back by those whose comfort they threaten. There is plenty to grieve about in this unfolding catastrophe—it’s a valid and essential part of our response to mourn the losses we’re already experiencing. But while grieving, we must take action, not surrender to a false belief in the inevitable.

Defeatism in the face of overwhelming odds is something that I, perhaps, am especially averse to, having grown up in postwar Britain. In the dark days of 1940, defeat seemed inevitable for the British, as the Nazis swept through Europe, threatening an impending invasion. For many, the only prudent course was to negotiate with Hitler and turn Britain into a vassal state, a strategy that nearly prevailed at a fateful War Cabinet meeting in May 1940. When details about this Cabinet meeting became public, in my teens, I remember a chill going through my veins. Born into a Jewish family, I realized that I probably owed my very existence to those who bravely chose to overcome despair and fight on in a seemingly hopeless struggle.

A lesson to learn from this—and countless other historical episodes—is that history rarely progresses for long in a straight line. It takes unanticipated swerves that only make sense when analyzed retroactively. For ten years, Tarana Burke used the phrase “me too” to raise awareness of sexual assault, without knowing that it would one day help topple Harvey Weinstein, and potentiate a movement toward transformation of abusive cultural norms. The curve balls of history are all around us. No-one can accurately predict when the next stock market crash will occur, never mind when civilization itself will come undone.

There’s a second, equally important, lesson to learn from the nonlinear transformations that we see throughout history, such as universal women’s suffrage or the legalization of same-sex marriage. They don’t just happen by themselves—they result from the dogged actions of a critical mass of engaged citizens who see something that’s wrong and, regardless of seemingly insurmountable odds, keep pushing forward driven by their sense of moral urgency. As part of a system, we all collectively participate in how that system evolves, whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not.

Paradoxically, the very precariousness of our current system, teetering on the extremes of brutal inequality and ecological devastation, increases the potential for deep structural change. Research in complex systems reveals that, when a system is stable and secure, it’s very resistant to change. But when the linkages within the system begin to unravel, it’s far more likely to undergo the kind of deep restructuring that our world requires.

It’s not Deep Adaptation that we need right now—it’s Deep Transformation. The current dire predicament we’re in screams something loudly and clearly to anyone who’s listening: If we’re to retain any semblance of a healthy planet by the latter part of this century, we have to change the foundations of our civilization. We need to move from one that is wealth-based to once that is life-based—a new type of society built on life-affirming principles, often described as an Ecological Civilization. We need a global system that devolves power back to the people; that reins in the excesses of global corporations and government corruption; that replaces the insanity of infinite economic growth with a just transition toward a stable, equitable, steady-state economy optimizing human and natural flourishing.

Our moral encounter with destiny

Does that seem unlikely to you? Sure, it seems unlikely to me, too, but “likelihood” and “inevitability” stand a long way from each other. As Rebecca Solnit points out in Hope in the Dark, hope is not a prognostication. Taking either an optimistic or pessimistic stance on the future can justify a cop-out. An optimist says, “It will turn out fine so I don’t need to do anything.” A pessimist retorts, “Nothing I do will make a difference so let me not waste my time.” Hope, by contrast, is not a matter of estimating the odds. Hope is an active state of mind, a recognition that change is nonlinear, unpredictable, and arises from intentional engagement.

Bendell responds to this version of hope with a comparison to a terminal cancer patient. It would be cruel, he suggests, to tell them to keep hoping, pushing them to “spend their last days in struggle and denial, rather than discovering what might matter after acceptance.” This is a false equivalency. A terminal cancer condition has a statistical history, derived from the outcomes of many thousands of similar occurrences. Our current situation is unique. There is no history available of thousands of global civilizations bringing their planetary ecosystems to breaking point. This is the only one we know of, and it would be negligent to give up on it based on a set of projections. If a doctor told your mother, “This cancer is unique and we have no experience of its prognosis. There are things we can try but they might not work,” would you advise her to give up and prepare for death? I’m not giving up on Mother Earth that easily.

In truth, collapse is already happening in different parts of the world. It’s not a binary on-off switch. It’s a cruel reality bearing down on the most vulnerable among us. The desperation they’re experiencing right now makes it even more imperative to engage rather than declare game over. The millions left destitute in Africa by Cyclone Idai, the communities still ravaged in Puerto Rico, the two-thousand-year old baobab trees suddenly dying en masse, and the countless people and species yet to be devastated by global ecocide, all need those of us in positions of relative power and privilege to step up to the plate, not throw up our hands in despair. There’s currently much discussion about the devastating difference between 1.5° and 2.0° in global warming. Believe it, there will also be a huge differencebetween 2.5° and 3.0°. As long as there are people at risk, as long as there are species struggling to survive, it’s not too late to avert further disaster.

This is something many of our youngest generation seem to know intuitively, putting their elders to shame. As fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg declared in her statement to the UN in Poland last November, “you are never too small to make a difference… Imagine what we can all do together, if we really wanted to.” Thunberg envisioned herself in 2078, with her own grandchildren. “They will ask,” she said, “why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act.”

That’s the moral encounter with destiny that we each face today. Yes, there is still time to act. Last month, inspired by Thunberg’s example, more than a million school students in over a hundred countries walked out to demand climate action. To his great credit, even Jem Bendell disavows some of his own Deep Adaptation narrative to put his support behind protest. The Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched a mass civil disobedience campaign last year in England, blocking bridges in London and demanding an adequate response to our climate emergency. It has since spread to 27 other countries.

Studies have shown that, once 3.5% of a population becomes sustainably committed to nonviolent mass movements for political change, they are invariably successful. That would translate into 11.5 million Americans on the street, or 26 million Europeans. We’re a long way from that, but is it really impossible? I’m not ready, yet, to bet against humanity’s ability to transform itself or nature’s powers of regeneration. XR is planning a global week of direct action beginning on Monday, April 15, as a first step toward a coordinated worldwide grassroots rebellion against the system that’s destroying hope of future flourishing. It might just be the beginning of another of history’s U-turns. Do you want to look your grandchildren in the eyes? Yes, me too. I’ll see you there.

FURTHER READING

Read Jem Bendell’s response to this article: Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation, April 10, 2019

Read Jeremy Lent’s follow-up response to Jem Bendell: Our Actions Create the Future, April 11, 2019.

The post Ecological Collapse: what will you tell your grandchildren? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

It’s not news that human civilization and ecosystems are at risk of collapse in our lifetime or that of our children. Biologists, sociologists, ecologists and others have been issuing dire warnings for easily half a century on all the big issues. We’re well aware of them: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, topsoil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising rates of species extinction, financial meltdown, poverty and wealth inequality, and nuclear war, to name a few. A recent headline captures the flavor: Plummeting insect numbers threaten collapse of nature.

What might be news is that we can do something to help change course, without waiting for governments to act, or even asking governments to act.

First, let’s clarify the goal. We wish to thrive, not just survive. We want healthy communities where collective wellbeing runs high and the environment is protected and restored. Among other things, this means access to quality and affordable education and health care, meaningful jobs, eradication of poverty and excessive income inequality, and systems of organization that are just, transparent, and deeply democratic.

I believe we can reach this goal, in our lifetime, if we think outside the box. The first step is to ask this seemingly obvious question: Out of all conceivable designs for systems of social self-organization, which ones might improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability the most?

It’s a scientific question at heart, begging for rigorous study, not mere opinions. And yet it’s also a question to be pondered by everyone on the planet.

It has a natural follow up: If we were to develop new, high quality systems, how could we best implement and monitor them? This too is a scientific question at heart.

These two questions have the power to change our world. At face value both are utterly sensible to ask. Why wouldn’t we want to know the answers? But beyond that, they embody several profound realizations.

First, if we want bold change, we should look to science for demonstration and assessment of the possibilities, more so than to politics. While science might not have all the answers, it would certainly have a tremendous amount to say. We need and could obtain clear evidence of which system designs might serve us best, and how and to what degree our lives might improve.

Second, our big problems are symptoms of a deeper defect. As societies, we could have long ago taken sensible actions to address pressing problems. But we didn’t. Why? Because the systems by which we self-organize — governance, legal, economic, financial, and more — are too often inadequate, even dysfunctional, when it comes to solving problems, especially big problems.

The dysfunction isn’t due to bad leaders in business or politics, although these exist. The rise to power of too many selfish, dangerous, or unqualified leaders is just another symptom. Rather, the dysfunction is due to the mechanics of our systems — their very designs, built-in motivations, concentration of power, and embodied world views. Because of these, they lack the capacity for solving today’s big problems.

This failing should not be a surprise. Our systems largely evolved to solve a different, older problem, which is how to maintain and concentrate wealth and power for those who already have it. In this they have been wildly successful. Consider how quickly the billionaire class is growing, and how fewer and fewer corporations control ever larger swaths of the world’s economy. Consider how the legal system favors the rich.

The last realization embodied in the question is that bold change is possible. Given advances in science and technology over the past 50 years, the hard work of many on issues of social and environmental justice, and the looming threat of collapse, we’re overdue for an evolutionary jump. We’re ripe for sweeping change.

You might think that universities or research groups would have long ago started work on such important questions. But almost no one has. Perhaps political pressures or funding realities have gotten in the way. Or perhaps it’s because core fields like complex systems science, cognitive science, and ecology needed to mature a bit before questions about societal self-organization could arise. Whatever the reason, the work has barely started.

So let’s get on with it. After all, it’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

If in this moment you’re thinking about comparing socialism to capitalism, I’d ask you to think bigger and further outside the box. Those are economic systems, not whole-system, integrated approaches to demonstrably improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability.

Rather than thinking of isms, it might be better to think of biology. Humans are highly social animals. Our communities and societies are akin to living organisms — metaorganisms, if you will, composed of many interacting individuals. Just like biological organisms, the natural purpose of a society is to learn, rise to challenges, adapt to changing conditions, and solve problems that matter. Learning requires information, and so also information processing. Action requires decisions and thus decision-making processes.

Start there. What kinds of designs for whole, integrated systems might best help us to perceive, process, communicate, learn, predict, make decisions, and orchestrate action, at scale, as communities and societies, in order to solve problems and thereby increase social and environmental wellbeing? And how would they be monitored and measured?

Keep an open mind. In this exploration, the very concepts of business, money, wealth, voting, governance and more might evolve into something new. Wealth, for example, might be understood not as personal financial gain but as the degree of shared wellbeing. Money might be understood not so much as a static store of value but as a transparent voting tool in economic democracy, valuable only through use.

A Viable Path to Development and Implementation

The task of developing and implementing new systems of organization might seem daunting at first glance. But on closer examination, a viable and affordable path can be seen. I’ve described it elsewhere, along with results of a computer simulation that illustrates potential benefits (including eradication of poverty, higher and more stable incomes, greater income equality, and economic democracy).

One bedrock characteristic of the approach is that it’s science based. An R&D program lies at its core. New systems would be thoroughly tested, similar to the way new designs for a jet airliner would be tested. This means simulations, field trials, and more, using various measures of quality that address wellbeing, resilience, sustainability, and problem-solving capacity.

Another key characteristic of the approach is that new systems are designed for implementation at the local, community level through a club model. This allows progress without waiting for governments to act. And it allows for rapid field testing of multiple systems in parallel. A club can be started with just a small percentage of an urban population, perhaps a thousand people, without any legislation. Participation in a club is voluntary and free.

Once field trials demonstrate that better systems are both possible and popular, interest will naturally spread and new clubs will form in new communities. As they do, networks of clubs will also form. Part of the R&D effort is to ensure that these display the same characteristics that make individual clubs successful — like rich communication, deep democracy, and high transparency.

The R&D program is affordable. The annual budget in the first decade would likely be no more than several tens of millions of dollars, which is modest enough that the world’s young adults could fund the program alone through donations, if sufficiently motivated to do so. So too could any other group or set of groups. A social investor could fund it, and receive reasonable economic returns — a social business model exists.

We could fund it — the collective we who are aware, concerned, willing to think outside the box, and willing to take action and try something new. For arguments sake, let’s say we’re 5 to 15 percent of the world population. We’re large enough and powerful enough to see this through to fruition. It doesn’t matter if the other 95 percent or so have no interest. Enough will, later. All that’s needed to start are early supporters; feedback, ideas, and assistance during bench scale and usability testing; and in time, early adopters who will participate in scientific field trials. The rest will follow naturally.

If we initiate this R&D program, much of the scientific community will be on our side. They’ll understand its potential and view the project as exciting and timely. Even the big players — the Harvards, MITs, and Stanfords of the world — might eventually join in.

The potential gains are large and downsides small. With better systems of self-organization we could increase our capacity to solve problems and improve conditions within our communities. Transparent and deeply democratic systems could build trust and engender a greater sense of shared purpose and hope.

If systems are well designed and deliver what they promise, worldwide participation will grow. At some point along the way, and it might take several decades, a tipping point will be reached where new systems spread like wildfire to become the norm. When that happens, communities almost everywhere, or maybe everywhere, will be enjoying greater wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability. They will cooperate, by design and by choice, in successfully solving problems that matter.

By John Boik, PhD. To learn more about the wellbeing centrality R&D program, the LEDDA economic democracy framework, or to download (free) Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being (2014), visit https://principledsocietiesproject.org.

Please share and republish.

The post Two Questions Could Help Save Us From Collapse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the shownotes to the video

Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: “We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system’s structural capacity to produce food,” she says. “People could starve and governments may fall.” Menker’s models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade — that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.

Transcript

00:12
Since 2009, the world has been stuck on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis and what we need to do to avoid it. How do we feed nine billion people by 2050? Every conference, podcast and dialogue around global food security starts with this question and goes on to answer it by saying we need to produce 70 percent more food.

00:45
The 2050 narrative started to evolve shortly after global food prices hit all-time highs in 2008. People were suffering and struggling, governments and world leaders needed to show us that they were paying attention and were working to solve it. The thing is, 2050 is so far into the future that we can’t even relate to it, and more importantly, if we keep doing what we’re doing, it’s going to hit us a lot sooner than that.

01:18
I believe we need to ask a different question. The answer to that question needs to be framed differently. If we can reframe the old narrative and replace it with new numbers that tell us a more complete pictures, numbers that everyone can understand and relate to, we can avoid the crisis altogether.

01:48
I was a commodities trader in my past life and one of the things that I learned trading is that every market has a tipping point, the point at which change occurs so rapidly that it impacts the world and things change forever. Think of the last financial crisis, or the dot-com crash.

02:12
So here’s my concern. We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system’s structural capacity to produce food. This means at this point supply can no longer keep up with demand despite exploding prices, unless we can commit to some type of structural change. This time around, it won’t be about stock markets and money. It’s about people. People could starve and governments may fall. This question of at what point does supply struggle to keep up with surging demand is one that started off as an interest for me while I was trading and became an absolute obsession. It went from interest to obsession when I realized through my research how broken the system was and how very little data was being used to make such critical decisions. That’s the point I decided to walk away from a career on Wall Street and start an entrepreneurial journey to start Gro Intelligence.

03:26
At Gro, we focus on bringing this data and doing the work to make it actionable, to empower decision-makers at every level. But doing this work, we also realized that the world, not just world leaders, but businesses and citizens like every single person in this room, lacked an actionable guide on how we can avoid a coming global food security crisis. And so we built a model, leveraging the petabytes of data we sit on, and we solved for the tipping point.

04:02
Now, no one knows we’ve been working on this problem and this is the first time that I’m sharing what we discovered. We discovered that the tipping point is actually a decade from now. We discovered that the world will be short 214 trillion calories by 2027. The world is not in a position to fill this gap.

04:34
Now, you’ll notice that the way I’m framing this is different from how I started, and that’s intentional, because until now this problem has been quantified using mass: think kilograms, tons, hectograms, whatever your unit of choice is in mass. Why do we talk about food in terms of weight? Because it’s easy. We can look at a photograph and determine tonnage on a ship by using a simple pocket calculator. We can weigh trucks, airplanes and oxcarts. But what we care about in food is nutritional value. Not all foods are created equal, even if they weigh the same. This I learned firsthand when I moved from Ethiopia to the US for university. Upon my return back home, my father, who was so excited to see me, greeted me by asking why I was fat. Now, turns out that eating approximately the same amount of food as I did in Ethiopia, but in America, had actually lent a certain fullness to my figure. This is why we should care about calories, not about mass. It is calories which sustain us.

05:58
So 214 trillion calories is a very large number, and not even the most dedicated of us think in the hundreds of trillions of calories. So let me break this down differently. An alternative way to think about this is to think about it in Big Macs. 214 trillion calories. A single Big Mac has 563 calories. That means the world will be short 379 billion Big Macs in 2027. That is more Big Macs than McDonald’s has ever produced.

06:37
So how did we get to these numbers in the first place? They’re not made up. This map shows you where the world was 40 years ago. It shows you net calorie gaps in every country in the world. Now, simply put, this is just calories consumed in that country minus calories produced in that same country. This is not a statement on malnutrition or anything else. It’s simply saying how many calories are consumed in a single year minus how many are produced.Blue countries are net calorie exporters, or self-sufficient. They have some in storage for a rainy day. Red countries are net calorie importers. The deeper, the brighter the red, the more you’re importing. 40 years ago, such few countries were net exporters of calories, I could count them with one hand. Most of the African continent, Europe, most of Asia, South America excluding Argentina, were all net importers of calories. And what’s surprising is that China used to actually be food self-sufficient. India was a big net importer of calories.

07:49
40 years later, this is today. You can see the drastic transformation that’s occurred in the world. Brazil has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse. Europe is dominant in global agriculture. India has actually flipped from red to blue.It’s become food self-sufficient. And China went from that light blue to the brightest red that you see on this map.

08:14
How did we get here? What happened? So this chart shows you India and Africa. Blue line is India, red line is Africa.How is it that two regions that started off so similarly in such similar trajectories take such different paths? India had a green revolution. Not a single African country had a green revolution. The net outcome? India is food self-sufficientand in the past decade has actually been exporting calories. The African continent now imports over 300 trillion calories a year. Then we add China, the green line. Remember the switch from the blue to the bright red? What happened and when did it happen? China seemed to be on a very similar path to India until the start of the 21st century, where it suddenly flipped. A young and growing population combined with significant economic growthmade its mark with a big bang and no one in the markets saw it coming. This flip was everything to global agricultural markets. Luckily now, South America was starting to boom at the same time as China’s rise, and so therefore, supply and demand were still somewhat balanced.

09:38
So the question becomes, where do we go from here? Oddly enough, it’s not a new story, except this time it’s not just a story of China. It’s a continuation of China, an amplification of Africa and a paradigm shift in India. By 2023,Africa’s population is forecasted to overtake that of India’s and China’s. By 2023, these three regions combined will make up over half the world’s population. This crossover point starts to present really interesting challenges for global food security. And a few years later, we’re hit hard with that reality.

10:24
What does the world look like in 10 years? So far, as I mentioned, India has been food self-sufficient. Most forecasters predict that this will continue. We disagree. India will soon become a net importer of calories. This will be driven both by the fact that demand is growing from a population growth standpoint plus economic growth. It will be driven by both. And even if you have optimistic assumptions around production growth, it will make that slight flip.That slight flip can have huge implications.

11:03
Next, Africa will continue to be a net importer of calories, again driven by population growth and economic growth.This is again assuming optimistic production growth assumptions. Then China, where population is flattening out,calorie consumption will explode because the types of calories consumed are also starting to be higher-calorie-content foods. And so therefore, these three regions combined start to present a really interesting challenge for the world.

11:36
Until now, countries with calorie deficits have been able to meet these deficits by importing from surplus regions. By surplus regions, I’m talking about North America, South America and Europe. This line chart over here shows you the growth and the projected growth over the next decade of production from North America, South America and Europe. What it doesn’t show you is that most of this growth is actually going to come from South America. And most of this growth is going to come at the huge cost of deforestation. And so when you look at the combined demand increase coming from India, China and the African continent, and look at it versus the combined increase in production coming from India, China, the African continent, North America, South America and Europe, you are left with a 214-trillion-calorie deficit, one we can’t produce. And this, by the way, is actually assuming we take all the extra calories produced in North America, South America and Europe and export them solely to India, China and Africa.

12:51
What I just presented to you is a vision of an impossible world. We can do something to change that. We can change consumption patterns, we can reduce food waste, or we can make a bold commitment to increasing yields exponentially.

13:09
Now, I’m not going to go into discussing changing consumption patterns or reducing food waste, because those conversations have been going on for some time now. Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened because those arguments ask the surplus regions to change their behavior on behalf of deficit regions. Waiting for others to change their behavior on your behalf, for your survival, is a terrible idea. It’s unproductive.

13:37
So I’d like to suggest an alternative that comes from the red regions. China, India, Africa. China is constrained in terms of how much more land it actually has available for agriculture, and it has massive water resource availability issues. So the answer really lies in India and in Africa. India has some upside in terms of potential yield increases.Now this is the gap between its current yield and the theoretical maximum yield it can achieve. It has some unfarmed arable land remaining, but not much, India is quite land-constrained. Now, the African continent, on the other hand,has vast amounts of arable land remaining and significant upside potential in yields. Somewhat simplified picture here, but if you look at sub-Saharan African yields in corn today, they are where North American yields were in 1940.We don’t have 70-plus years to figure this out, so it means we need to try something new and we need to try something different. The solution starts with reforms. We need to reform and commercialize the agricultural industries in Africa and in India.

15:02
Now, by commercialization — commercialization is not about commercial farming alone. Commercialization is about leveraging data to craft better policies, to improve infrastructure, to lower the transportation costs and to completely reform banking and insurance industries. Commercialization is about taking agriculture from too risky an endeavor to one where fortunes can be made. Commercialization is not about just farmers. Commercialization is about the entire agricultural system. But commercialization also means confronting the fact that we can no longer place the burden of growth on small-scale farmers alone, and accepting that commercial farms and the introduction of commercial farmscould provide certain economies of scale that even small-scale farmers can leverage. It is not about small-scale farming or commercial agriculture, or big agriculture. We can create the first successful models of the coexistence and success of small-scale farming alongside commercial agriculture. This is because, for the first time ever, the most critical tool for success in the industry — data and knowledge — is becoming cheaper by the day. And very soon, it won’t matter how much money you have or how big you are to make optimal decisions and maximize probability of success in reaching your intended goal. Companies like Gro are working really hard to make this a reality.

16:43
So if we can commit to this new, bold initiative, to this new, bold change, not only can we solve the 214-trillion gap that I talked about, but we can actually set the world on a whole new path. India can remain food self-sufficient and Africa can emerge as the world’s next dark blue region.

17:09
The new question is, how do we produce 214 trillion calories to feed 8.3 billion people by 2027? We have the solution. We just need to act on it.

17:25
Thank you.

17:26
(Applause)

The post A global food crisis may be less than a decade away appeared first on P2P Foundation.

More indications of how to restore a new balance towards egalitarian (or rather ‘equipotential’) outcomes come from David Graeber, who wrote a very important article summarizing the last 3 decades of findings from archaeology and anthropology, which have overturned many of our insights:

1) In the excerpt on Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures‎‎ he shows several examples of tribes and societies which combined more egalitarian and more hierarchical arrangements, according to context.

2) In the excerpt on the Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies‎‎, he shows that this was by no means a universal transition towards more hierarchy ; in fact, many agricultural societies and their cities had deep democratic structures (sometimes more egalitarian than their earlier tribal forms)

3) Finally in the last one, Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization, he gives several examples showing ‘size does not matter’

All this should give us hope, that the evolution towards the current hierarchical models are not written in stone, and that societies can be more flexible than they appear.

Seasonal Reversals of Hierarchical Structures

David Graeber: “From the very beginning, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. Anthropologists describe societies of this sort as possessing a ‘double morphology’. Marcel Mauss, writing in the early twentieth century, observed that the circumpolar Inuit, ‘and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.

Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.

Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.”

Transition from Foraging to Farming Societies

David Graeber: “Let us conclude, then, with a few headlines of our own: just a handful, to give a sense of what the new, emerging world history is starting to look like.

The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. Since there was no Eden-like state, from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of rank or private property. If anything, it is among those populations – the ‘Mesolithic’ peoples – who refused farming through the warming centuries of the early Holocene, that we find stratification becoming more entrenched; at least, if opulent burial, predatory warfare, and monumental buildings are anything to go by. In at least some cases, like the Middle East, the first farmers seem to have consciously developed alternative forms of community, to go along with their more labour-intensive way of life. These Neolithic societies look strikingly egalitarian when compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours, with a dramatic increase in the economic and social importance of women, clearly reflected in their art and ritual life (contrast here the female figurines of Jericho or Çatalhöyük with the hyper-masculine sculpture of Göbekli Tepe).

Another bombshell: ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. In China, for instance, we are now aware that by 2500 BC, settlements of 300 hectares or more existed on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, over a thousand years before the foundation of the earliest (Shang) royal dynasty. On the other side of the Pacific, and at around the same time, ceremonial centres of striking magnitude have been discovered in the valley of Peru’s Río Supe, notably at the site of Caral: enigmatic remains of sunken plazas and monumental platforms, four millennia older than the Inca Empire. Such recent discoveries indicate how little is yet truly known about the distribution and origin of the first cities, and just how much older these cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. And in the more established heartlands of urbanisation – Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Basin of Mexico – there is mounting evidence that the first cities were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, municipal councils retaining significant autonomy from central government. In the first two cases, cities with sophisticated civic infrastructures flourished for over half a millennium with no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies or other means of large-scale coercion, nor any hint of direct bureaucratic control over most citizen’s lives.”

Top-Down Structures of Rule Are Not the Necessary Consequence of Large-Scale Organization

David Graeber: “notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.”

Photo by autovac

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Is this the end of civilisation? We could take a different path

George Monbiot: It’s a good question, but it seems too narrow: “Is western civilisation on the brink of collapse?” the lead article in this week’s New Scientist asks. The answer is, probably. But why just western? Yes, certain western governments are engaged in a frenzy of self-destruction. In an age of phenomenal complexity and interlocking crises, the Trump administration has embarked on a mass de-skilling and simplification of the state. Donald Trump may have sacked his strategist, Steve Bannon, but Bannon’s professed intention, “the deconstruction of the administrative state”, remains the central – perhaps the only – policy.

Defunding departments, disbanding the teams and dismissing the experts they rely on, shutting down research programmes, maligning the civil servants who remain in post, the self-hating state is ripping down the very apparatus of government. At the same time, it is destroying public protections that defend us from disaster.

A series of studies published in the past few months has started to explore the wider impact of pollutants. One, published in the British Medical Journal, suggests that the exposure of unborn children to air pollution in cities is causing “something approaching a public health catastrophe”. Pollution in the womb is now linked to low birth weight, disruption of the baby’s lung and brain development, and a series of debilitating and fatal diseases in later life.

Another report, published in the Lancet, suggests that three times as many deaths are caused by pollution as by Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Pollution, the authors note, now “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”. A collection of articles in the journal PLOS Biology reveals that there is no reliable safety data on most of the 85,000 synthetic chemicals to which we may be exposed. While hundreds of these chemicals “contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested”, and the volume of materials containing them rises every year, we have no idea what the likely impacts may be, either singly or in combination.

As if in response to such findings, the Trump government has systematically destroyed the integrity of the Environmental Protection Agency, ripped up the Clean Power Plan, vitiated environmental standards for motor vehicles, reversed the ban on chlorpyrifos (a pesticide now linked to the impairment of cognitive and behavioural function in children), and rescinded a remarkable list of similar public protections.

In the UK, successive governments have also curtailed their ability to respond to crises. One of David Cameron’s first acts was to shut down the government’s early warning systems: the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Sustainable Development Commission. He did not want to hear what they said. Sack the impartial advisers and replace them with toadies: this has preceded the fall of empires many times before. Now, as we detach ourselves from the European Union, we degrade our capacity to solve the problems that transcend our borders.

But these pathologies are not confined to “the west”. The rise of demagoguery (the pursuit of simplistic solutions to complex problems, accompanied by the dismantling of the protective state) is everywhere apparent. Environmental breakdown is accelerating worldwide. The annihilation of vertebrate populations, insectageddon, the erasure of rainforests, mangroves, soil and aquifers, and the degradation of entire Earth systems such as the atmosphere and oceans proceed at astonishing rates. These interlocking crises will affect everyone, but the poorer nations are hit first and worst.

The forces that threaten to destroy our wellbeing are also the same everywhere: primarily the lobbying power of big business and big money, which perceive the administrative state as an impediment to their immediate interests. Amplified by the persuasive power of campaign finance, covertly funded thinktanks, embedded journalists and tame academics, these forces threaten to overwhelm democracy. If you want to know how they work, read Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money.

Up to a certain point, connectivity increases resilience. For example, if local food supplies fail, regional or global markets allow us to draw on production elsewhere. But beyond a certain level, connectivity and complexity threaten to become unmanageable. The emergent properties of the system, combined with the inability of the human brain to encompass it, could spread crises rather than contain them. We are in danger of pulling each other down. New Scientist should have asked: “Is complex society on the brink of collapse?”

Complex societies have collapsed many times before. It has not always been a bad thing. As James C Scott points out in his fascinating book, Against the Grain, when centralised power began to collapse, through epidemics, crop failure, floods, soil erosion or the self-destructive perversities of government, its corralled subjects would take the chance to flee. In many cases they joined the “barbarians”. This so-called secondary primitivism, Scott notes, “may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot.” The dark ages that inexorably followed the glory and grandeur of the state may, in that era, have been the best times to be alive.

But today there is nowhere to turn. The wild lands and rich ecosystems that once supported hunter gatherers, nomads and the refugees from imploding early states who joined them now scarcely exist. Only a tiny fraction of the current population could survive a return to the barbarian life. (Consider that, according to one estimate, the maximum population of Britain during the Mesolithic, when people survived by hunting and gathering, was 5000). In the nominally democratic era, the complex state is now, for all its flaws, all that stands between us and disaster.

Photo by RDW. Photography

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What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semi-compulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t imagine a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.

We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch. The first task is one of conceptual rigor, to note a problem in naming our new geological epoch the Anthropocene. The root, anthropos (Greek for “human”), suggests that it’s just humans being humans, in the way that kids will be kids or snakes will be snakes, that has caused climate change and the planet’s sixth mass extinction. It’s true that humans have been changing the planet since the end of the last ice age. A hunting rate slightly higher than the replenishment rate over centuries, together with shifting climate and grasslands, spelled the end for the Columbian Plains mammoth in North America, the orangutan’s overstuffed relative the Gigantopithecus in east Asia, and the giant Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus in Europe. Humans may even have been partly responsible for tempering a global cooling phase 12,000 years ago through agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Hunting large mammals to extinction is one thing, but the speed and scale of destruction today can’t be extrapolated from the activities of our knuckle-dragging forebears. Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene. Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.

Seven Cheap Things

In our new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press), we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans. “Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print. Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.

Yet at every step of this process, humans resist — from the Indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the source of genetic material for breeding through poultry and care workers demanding recognition and relief to those fighting against climate change and Wall Street. The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.

All this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbeque sauce. Yet the fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast — and mark the passage of — the humans who made them. That’s why we present the story of humans, nature and the system that changed the planet as a short history of the modern world: as an antidote to forgetting.

Civilizational Collapse

It’s not some genetic code — or some human impulse to procreate — that has brought us to this point. It’s a specific set of relationships between humans and the biological and physical world. Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers. The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier. What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.

The Perspective of World-Ecology

Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.

The afterlives of cheap things

There is hope in world-ecology. To recognize the webs of life-making on which capitalism depends is also to find new conceptual tools with which to face the Capitalocene. As justice movements develop strategies for confronting planetary crisis — and alternatives to our present way of organizing nature — we need to think about the creative and expanded reproduction of democratic forms of life.

A wan environmentalism is unlikely to make change if its principal theory rests on the historically bankrupt idea of immutable human separation from nature. Unfortunately, many of today’s politics take as given the transformation of the world into cheap things. Recall the last financial crisis, made possible by the tearing down of the boundary between retail and commercial banking in the United States. The Great Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act put that barrier in place to prevent future dealing of the kind that was understood to have knocked the global economy into a tailspin in the 1930s. American socialists and communists had been agitating for bank nationalization, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers offered the act as a compromise safeguard. When twenty-first-century liberal protesters demanded the return of Glass-Steagall, they were asking for a compromise, not for what had been surrendered to cheap finance: housing.

Similarly, when unions demand fifteen dollars an hour for work in the United States, a demand we have supported, a grand vision for the future of work is absent. Why should the future of care and food-service workers be to receive an incremental salary increase, barely enough on which to subsist? Why, indeed, ought ideas of human dignity be linked to hard work? Might there not be space to demand not just drudgery from work but the chance to contribute to making the world better? Although the welfare state has expanded, becoming the fastest-growing share of household income in the United States and accounting for 20 percent of household income by 2000, its transfers haven’t ended the burden of women’s work. Surely the political demand that household work be reduced, rewarded and redistributed is the ultimate goal?

We see the need to dream for more radical change than contemporary politics offers. Consider, to take another example, that cheap fossil fuel has its advocates among right-wing think tanks from India to the United States. While liberals propose a photovoltaic future, they can too easily forget the suffering involved in the mineral infrastructure on which their alternative depends. The food movement has remained hospitable to those who would either raise the price of food while ignoring poverty or engineer alternatives to food that will allow poverty to persist, albeit with added vitamins. And, of course, the persistence of the politics of cheap lives can be found in the return to supremacism from Russia and South Africa to the United States and China in the name of “protecting the nation.” We aren’t sanguine about the future either, given polling data from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which found that 35 percent of baby boomers feel blacks are lazier/less hardworking than whites and 31 percent of millennials feel the same way.

While maintaining a healthy pessimism of the intellect, we find optimism of the will through the work of organizations that see far more mutability in social relations. Many of these groups are already tackling cheap things. Unions want higher wages. Climate change activists want to revalue our relationship to energy, and those who’ve read Naomi Klein’s work will recognize that much more must change too. Food campaigners want to change what we eat and how we grow it so that everyone eats well. Domestic worker organizers want society to recognize the work done in homes and care facilities. The Occupy movement wants debt to be canceled and those threatened with foreclosure and exclusion allowed to remain in their homes. Radical ecologists want to change the way we think about all life on earth. The Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous groups and immigrant-rights activists want equality and reparation for historical injustice.

Each of these movements might provoke a moment of crisis. Capitalism has always been shaped by resistance — from slave uprisings to mass strikes, from anticolonial revolts through abolition to the organization for women’s and Indigenous peoples’ rights — and has always managed to survive. Yet all of today’s movements are connected, and together they offer an antidote to pessimism. World-ecology can help connect the dots.

We do not offer solutions that return to the past. We agree with Alice Walker that “activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet” and that if there is to be life after capitalism, it will come through the struggles of people on the ground for which they fight. We don’t deny that if politics are to transform, they must begin where people currently find themselves. But we cannot end with the same abstractions that capitalism has made, of nature, society and economy. We must find the language and politics for new civilizations, find ways of living through the state shift that capitalism’s ecology has wrought.

Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.

This essay is an abridged excerpt from the introduction of Moore and Patel’s new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published by University of California Press in the US, Verso Books in the UK and Black, Inc. in Australia and New Zealand.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

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In this series of podcasts, we explore pathways for climate justice in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch shaped by humans. Should we become stewards of our planet or live in harmony with nature to achieve a good life for all? We take our listeners on a journey to find out how we can reach the Paris goals. Through the lens of activists, experts, and scientists around the world, we reflect on this exciting challenge and explore paths that might lead us into a better future.

The pictures of our planet from a distance are beautiful and insightful. They show us a fragile marble in space that is ours to protect. But these pictures have also brought us another belief: that what happens on the ground is too small to count. We think that only global solutions can solve our global problems. But at the most local level, communities are already developing solutions. And this is why it’s time to zoom in again – back down to Earth.

In this podcast series, we’ve looked at different strategies to address climate change. We’ve discussed the risky ideas of geo-engineering and heard about climate cases in courtrooms around the world. We also considered the failures of carbon markets and talked about the links between climate change and agriculture.

In this final episode, we will take a look at the broader transformations that are necessary. Climate change is such a unique challenge that each and every sector of our society will have to change. At the same time, it is just one of the many urgent crises we face today. To get to the root of all of them, we need to consider a fundamental shift in thinking about our economies and lifestyles.

Do we need a master plan to get there? Maybe not. Because right now, people are already developing local solutions. They are experimenting with new paths toward just and sustainable lifestyles across the world. It’s a diverse set of approaches, but they share a common vision: The idea, that a good life for all is possible.

Do you know these moments when you reflect on your life and it feels like everything is accelerating?  We feel pushed to work more, to work harder and to always compete. Not because we want to move forward, but just because we want to keep up with everyone else.

This treadmill is part of a larger paradigm that we live in. It’s the logic of growth, says Barbara Muraca. Barbara lives in the United States and teaches Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University:

Modern, capitalistic societies are completely built around the idea of increasing economic growth. The retirement system in many countries, the taxation system, employment etc. So, if modern industrialized societies stop growing, they collapse. We call one year with reduced growth recession or crisis!

When you read the news, it may seem as if we’d be lost without an ever-growing economy. Growth is considered essential for a stable and booming society, and it comes with huge expectations. It’s supposed to guarantee employment, ensure peace, and provide wealth for everyone. We treat growth as the promise of a good life for all. But unfortunately, growth hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Now, the problem is that we have reached a point at which growth has turned from a means to improve quality of life to a goal of its own. Now, we can imagine what it means if we apply that to our own body. What would it mean if we grew every year 3 percent more than the year before? That would be completely crazy, and the balance of our body would indeed collapse, says Barbara Muraca

What seems crazy for our bodies is an accepted paradigm in economics: that we can grow and grow forever. In the process, our societies have become more and more divided. A few people get very rich, but the vast majority struggles. Growth doesn’t mean employment for everyone. And the financial market has stumbled into crisis. So why do so many of us still believe in the logic of growth?

I like the idea of mental infrastructures. You can imagine the highways that are built in our mind that we are used to take and stop seeing the side-roads and possible alternative paths, because we are used to take these highways, says Barbara Muraca

We want both: More energy, and clean energy. Can the two go together without doing harm to nature and other people? Technology is the focus of the so-called Green Economy, but it doesn’t come without side-effects. And while we green our energy systems, we are also consuming more and more resources. So if we really want to reduce our footprint, we need to change our lifestyles and habits. Like eating less meat for example, since breeding livestock produces high carbon emissions.

So, the good news is that especially in countries, like Europe and the US, meat consumption has been significantly reduced in the last years. The bad news however, is that, precisely because of the logic of growth and profit, the export of meat from Europe and the US has increased in the last years as well. And the OECD countries have really been celebrating the creation of new markets for meat in China and India and even issued dietary recommendation to increase meat consumption in these countries, says Barbara Muraca

This is just one example of how the logic of growth reproduces itself  against our best intentions. We are unable to simply stop growing no matter how much we try to size down. Sowe must change the basic structure of our societies in order to make them less dependent on economic growth.

Did you know that many rich countries have already hit their limits of growth? Their economies don’t grow as much as they used to anymore. This is the case in Germany, Canada or the U.S. In such countries economies grow only slowly by just one or two percent each year.

At the same time, many developing countries are growing quickly, like China and the Senegal. Their growth can be as high as five or six percent a year. The rate is much slower than it used to be but still high compared to some of the old industrialized countries. A big part of this boom happens in Asia.

In India’s, for example, the economy is expected to grow by up to eight percent each year. And this boom comes with huge changes. We reached out to AshEEsh Ko(h)thar(EE) to understand how such a fast-growing world looks like. Ashish is based in Pune in the West of India:

It’s a very large city, well small by Indian standards, about 4 million people.

Ashish is an environmental activist and co-author of the book “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India”. The miraculous growth of his country has come at a huge cost, he explained to us:

Well, in India, as I guess across the world, we have a model of development which essentially focuses on economic growth and industrialization and commercialization. You know, a uni-directional approach which says that we have to move from agriculture and pastoralism to industrialization to services to digital economy etc. etc. And what this has meant for very, very large sections of India’s population is dispossession, because this kind of an economy needs the land and the forest and the waters to be taken away from those who traditionally depended on them. It holds to be primitive and outmoded their own knowledge systems, very sophisticated ways by which people have dealt with or have lived within nature. All of that is considered to be out-modeled and is supposed to be discarded.

The city of Pune has become one of India’s tech centers. International companies working in information technology, agribusiness and renewable energy have set up camp in the region. The car industry here accounts for a third of the Indian market. More and more Indians are buying cars. And they are finding jobs in the tech sector – and not just in Pune:

In all the schools if you look at the kind of teaching that happens, people are taught that doing farming, and pastoralism or fisheries or forestry work is no longer cool. It’s not something that one needs, should be doing in the 21. Century, the 21. Century should be about computers, it should be about being in industries, it should be about learning sophisticated technologies, being savvy with gadgets and so on. So, what we’re seeing is a kind of dispriviledging and displacement of nature-based livelihoods, which in India, most of the population actually still is living that.

Half of India’s people still work on farms, in forestry or in fishing. But their numbers are decreasing. People are moving away from the rural areas and into the cities. They give up their traditional livelihoods, hoping to succeed in the new economy.

And from those livelihoods where people are being offered are what I call deadlihoods. Because essentially their mass jobs there, there is no dignity, there is no meaningfulness with this, people are just part of a much larger chain of production. They are subject to the whims and fancies of a small number of owners, whether it’s government or it’s capitalist. And even in the so-called modern sector, things like computers and all, most of the jobs that people have are extremely deadening, there is no liveliness and then there’s no passion. And so, really, the replacement is by jobs with actually what I call deadlihoods, says Ashish Kothari.

Oftentimes, this means repeating the same action in a factory over and over again for a tiny payout. As you heard, AshEEsh calls these jobs ‘deadlihoods’. They separate people from nature and from the products they make, and expose them to tough and toxic working conditions that can be extremely dangerous. Here, global companies can produce at a lower cost, because the rules for the protection of workers and the environment are still less stringent. In many cases, the products are then shipped abroad.

So, there is also then a significant impact on the environment. In India, we already know that we are on a very steep, unsustainable path, using twice the amount of natural resources that can be regenerated. We’re already seeing severe, very severe shortages of water, problems of deforestation, flooding, droughts. And, of course now, combined with all that, the impacts of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

India is both fueling climate change and suffering from its consequences. More and more cars are crowding the streets, and coal-fired power plants pollute the air. To AshEEsh, the current system perpetuates inequalities, to the benefit of a small elite. Simply greening the economy, he says, won’t solve the larger problem.

If one wants to change the situation we’re in, we have to tackle the system at its roots. We have to tackle the system in terms of the political concentrations of power in the state, the economic concentrations of power in capitalism, the gender concentrations of power and patriarchy. And depending on where we are in the world, in India for instance, castism, which is very old. These fundamental actors of society have to be challenged and changed, if we’re really want to try and solve this problem, says Ashish Kothari.

You’ve heard it from our guests in the United States and India: Ashish and Barbara are convinced that we need a new kind of thinking and a new way of doing. They say we need to work on creating a fundamentally different world. This might sound utopian. But there are already projects emerging that try to do just that. Take the concept of Degrowth:

The movement on Degrowth in Europe, is a very, very important one, because we have to really challenge and say that not only have we gone too far and too much, too big. Actually, we have to degrow, we have to scale down considerably our use of materials and energy. Especially if we are genuine about other parts of the world that have got left behind. Being able to at least meet their basic needs. I’m not saying they should be able to develop in the same pattern, but at least be able to do away with the kind of deprivation that there’s an unequal form of development has caused.

The Degrowth idea comes in many shapes. Initially, the movement formed in France, under the name décroissance. It was taken up in Italy and Spain, where Degrowth is called Descrescita, or Decrecimiento. And in Germany, economists are working on so-called post-growth societies. Barbara is among those who support this Degrowth movement.

I do not think that growth is in the long term possible at this rate and I think that if we don’t move on with a radical transformation, we will end up in recurrent crisis, even worse than the crisis of 2008. So, for me, Degrowth is not just a utopia, it’s a necessary path to transform society, says Barbara Muraca.

But Degrowth seems a rather vague term. So what would this transformation actually look like? The people working on Degrowth won’t be able to send you a copy of their master plan. They don’t claim that they even know how it’s going to work. Instead, they are all about leaving the beaten path, and venture into uncharted territory.

And for this we need spaces in which we can experience and experiment what the difference might be like.) We have to experience what it means to live differently. Not only to think about that, but to make the experience in our bodies, in our minds, and in our desires. And I don’t think that this is not just an abstract idea or wishful thinking. Around us, there are so many different projects, social experiments and initiatives, that are already embodying this perspective. And they are already creating spaces where we can experiment alternative futures and start working on them. And I think they are contagious and powerful, says Barbara Muraca.

One space in which such alternative worlds are being explored is the Transition Town movement. Barbara says this is a great example of how we could develop new solutions.

You have small towns or neighborhoods, where people get together and the leading idea is to develop a plan to make their community no longer dependent on fossil fuels. But it is more than that. People build learning networks and start from their potentials and the skills that are there at the local level and they start to re-imagine the place where they live. They really rethink the economy, they reimagine work, they re-skill in order to develop the competences that are necessary to implement a different way of living, but they are also very concerned about social justice for example, says Barbara Muraca.

One of the most well-known Transition Towns is Bristol in the United Kingdom. The people there have developed creative ideas like the Bristol Pound. It’s a local currency, and it cannot be accumulated like normal money in the bank. Instead of generating profit, the Bristol Pound sustains the local economy. There’s a food network and there’s a community-owned farm. In these projects, what’s also being tested are new models of ownership:

It’s not just about sharing the use of tools, but about really rethinking the way we produce stuff. If we can generate production which is independent from the logic of profit, we don’t have to keep going with the idea of mass production and mass consumption. We can produce things that are modular, that can be highly recycled by local communities, that can tackle and address the needs of communities, and that are completely independent from the necessity of generate, recreate and accumulate increasing profit – which is what is happening now with the standard model of production.

If we produce locally, share our stuff and repair things when they are broken, we can decrease our footprint on the planet. And we can defy the logic of growth, by taking back control over our local resources. An interesting example of this comes from Mendha Lekha in India.

And this village in the last 40 years has kind of declared that in its village and for all the ecosystems around it, the…nobody else will be taking decisions but the village assembly itself. So their slogan is that while we elect the government in New Delhi and Mumbai, in our village, we are the government. (Now, through all of this they have upturned 200 years of colonial and forced colonial history, where the forests have been taken control off by the state.) They’ve taken control back to themselves and they now manage the entire forest, 2000 hectares around them, and they manage it in such a way that it is sustainable, that the conservation is taking place, they also recently agreed communized all the agricultural land, which means there’s no private land on the village anymore. And this also helps them to control cropping patterns, to make sure what lands are not being sold off for mining or industries, and so on, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish calls it a form of direct and radical democracy. Around the world, communities have reclaimed control over important resources, such as water. In another case, in the Western Indian district of Kachchh (Kutch), local people are taking care of their water in a new way. It’s an area where water is extremely scarce. So one hundred villages have banded to collect and use rainwater in a local, equitable and decentralised way. They manage it through local committees. In this way, the system provides enough water for the basic needs of every village:

This becomes very important because when one is talking about  the mainstream model of water, creating a big dam somewhere and then transporting that water somewhere else,  we now know that large reservoirs can also be serious sources of emissions.

When a valley is flooded to build a dam, it buries the soil and vegetation. The plants start rotting and emit methane. This powerful greenhouse gas can warm the planet. The second issue is that big dams often change the agricultural practices around it. Farmers shift from dryland farming to irrigated farming and start using chemical fertilizers, says Ashish. So the people of Kutch are saving planet-warming emissions, as well as their traditional farming practice.

When they are able to do local water harvesting, they continue with mostly their dry land farming agriculture, which necessarily is more diverse, it’s more localized, has less emissions, it’s mostly organic – and because it is diverse it is also more adaptable and able to deal with aspects of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

Our addiction to growth has reached its limits. It’s threatening our environment as well as human dignity. Can we imagine a world beyond growth? Let’s look at our bodies when we get older.

After a certain threshold, our bodies stop growing physically, but do not stop being creative and learning and developing in a different way. And for the economy it’s similar, says Barbara Muraca.

Degrowth activists like Barbara are convinced that another world is possible. But she also says we need more than small reforms and green technologies. We need a fundamental change. What could this look like? There are many people already out and experimenting. Barbara says that the key is to build alliances among them:

So, stopping coal extraction in Germany for example, per se is not enough, because it leads to coal being imported now from Colombia. And in Colombia, pristine forests are destroyed and indigenous people are evicted for the coal mines. So, we to have to combine the blockage of coal mining in Germany with the things that the Transition Town people are advocating which is transforming the economy and society to make it less dependent on fossil fuels at the same time.

Modern culture tells us that we count mainly as individuals. We are divided into producers and consumers. This makes us easy to control. But if we reconnect as collectives, we can realize our power to shape the world:

If all goes well I think the world is moving towards what I call the radical ecological democracy, where the basic unit of decision-making is the collective, in the village or in the city neighborhood or in a school or college or wherever there are electives and communities are forming and being self-defined, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish tells us more about his vision for the future. It’s a world, where people take back the means of production from states and corporations, and organize locally. Here progress is not measured by growth, but in terms of happiness and relationships. His is a vision of justice without the great inequalities between genders and classes we know today. It’s a world where humans are much more in tune with nature, and their knowledge is a common good.

These are the sorts of things we are seeing already in hundreds of initiatives in India, thousands across the world. And I think the more we are able to network them, bring them together, the more we can actually practice, bring into practice, a very very different vision for what the world would look like in 2050, says Ashish Kothari.

Does it sound idealistic? Well, yes. But idealism is the start of any meaningful process of change. And it’s about time that we take our knowledge on crucial issues like climate change and social justice, and turn them into reality.

This is a radical change in the view that we have. So, in other words, moving from the globe to the home, to the Oikos which is the word that is in the word ecology and in the word economy. Starting to shape together an alternative house, an alternative home for us, and not considering the globe as an abstract thing that can be organized from above, and managed from above and reproduce the logic of management as the solution to our problems, says Barbara Muraca.

The first photograph of planet Earth was taken in the late 1960’s. It made us conscious of the fragile place that we share. But it also planted a bias into our minds: That any solution to a global problem must be global in scale as well. But maybe that’s not true. We can start on the ground now, and develop our own, local solutions. In this respect, climate change is a wake-up call, and a real opportunity: To change our world for the benefit of everyone.

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Behold today’s edition of Empire’s End—the biggest, best-ever 24/7 reality TV show! It’s been decades in preparation, with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions! Its hero-villain is far more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White. One day he and his team of oddball supporting characters appear to be winning bigly; the next, they’re crashing and burning. We’re all on the edges of our seats, alternately enraged, horrified, thrilled, or brought to tears in uncontrollable laughter. Who could bear to miss a minute of it?

Still, maybe at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news just now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us. They most assuredly will. Rather, I’d argue that there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.

I’ve invested as much attention in the outrage-of-the-day distraction machine as anyone, spending scores of hours reading news reports and analyses, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen essays about our current tweeter-in-chief. And I’m here to tell you that full immersion in the news cycle is just not healthy.

Some readers may find this conclusion too cynical. I propose it only after a great deal of thought, and on the basis of two premises.

First Premise: We are at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era. I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left will not, much longer, support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built. Further, in order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk. Yet our current economic and political systems require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss this situation—neither politicians nor economists. Therefore the general public is left mostly in the dark. Still, everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know that their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing a significant political shift such as we are seeing.

Second Premise: The new and current U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, and who promise to return the nation to its former glory. In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist—using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism. Here’s the thing: Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, there’s rarely a turning back. Fascist regimes ruthlessly hobble and destroy all opposition. Typically, it takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that has gone fascist.

Now, put these two premises together. Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there is still something we can do to make everything turn out okay—in the sense that life would return to “normal.” Just defeat the fascists, no matter what the cost. But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more “normal.” We’re headed into new territory no matter what.

Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?

It’s possible that the Trumpist insurgency will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in Executive-branch departments including the CIA and FBI. In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises, all against the backdrop of accelerating national decline. It’s just a guess, but the regime may have only two more months to somehow overcome resistance within the intelligence community; if it can do so, then the task of undercutting the judiciary and the media can be pursued at a more leisurely pace over the next year or two. But thanks to Premise One, short-term success probably will not lead to a regime that is stable over the long term. Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems. At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.

However, the short-term success of the current regime is not yet guaranteed. It is still entirely possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal that is too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump. This would not, however, guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but also on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided. In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might just continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes—as I explained in a previous essay, citing the conclusions of ecologist Peter Turchin, which he based on his comparative study of over a dozen ancient and modern societies in analogous circumstances.

It’s just a guess: if the regime is successful in the short term, we might get a slower crash; if it fails, we might get a faster one. In any case, there’s no national team to root for that is capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump, at least not for long, if that is even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average (more on that below), but the overall picture is pretty grim. A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. This is not a conclusion that I relish, but it’s one seemingly demanded by history and logic.

Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:

1. Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list.
2. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Where should you be living? Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have some food and water in storage? Have you reduced your energy usage to a minimum, and installed solar PV (with short-term battery backup) and hot water solar panels? Do you have some cash set aside?
3. Work to build community resilience. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to one another, institutions for resolving disputes are trusted, and people look out for one another. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches, civic government, non-profit organizations, food co-ops, energy co-ops, health co-ops, neighborhood safety groups, local investment clubs, or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. Yes, it takes a lot of time. But friends are more important than money in the bank—especially in times of social and political upheaval.
4. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. This might take the form of conservation work of various kinds. In my last essay, I discussed assisting the migration of forests in the face of climate change. Carbon farming and providing wild bird and insect refuges are other options—not (only) because they’re enjoyable hobbies but because they help maintain the biophysical resilience of the ecosystems we depend on. Again, this is work that proceeds best in the company of others.
5. Take some time for the conservation of culture—arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning.

While the legal and social functions of liberal democracy persist, vigorous and sustained protest efforts could help rein in the fascist tendencies of the new American government. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community. On the other hand, protest could further fragment your community if that community is already deeply divided politically—and it could eventually get you in a lot of trouble depending on how things work out, since protest under fascist regimes doesn’t produce the same result as protest in a liberal democracy.

Don’t obey the new leaders when they call for actions that undermine democracy and justice; instead, choose to actively disobey in ways that actually matter in the long term. Refuse to define yourself in terms of the regime. Yes, at certain moments in history it is necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue (such as the issue of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America), and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag. But this historical moment may be one when many real heroes and heroines choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

Photo credit: Michael Hogan/flickr.

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