Compilation 1

weekly Read
December 1, 2013
WEEKLY READ COMPILATION

December 1 2013

How To Stay Sane: The Art of Revising Your Inner Storytelling
by Maria Popova
Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting
impressions of everyday life.
[I] pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity, Jack Kerouac professed in
discussing his writing routine. But those of us who fall on the more
secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanitypreservation tool than prayer. Thats precisely what writer and
psychotherapist Philippa Perry offers in How To Stay Sane (public
library; UK), part of The School of Lifes wonderful series reclaiming
Compiled By: Prashant Patel
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the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet

immensely helpful guides to modern living.
At the heart of Perrys argument in line with neurologist Oliver
Sackss recent meditation on memory and how narrative truth,
rather than historical truth, shapes our impression of the world is
the recognition that stories make us human and learning to reframe
our interpretations of reality is key to our experience of life:
Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions
of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the
present to provide us with structures for working towards our goals.
They give us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to
integrate the feelings of our right brain with the language of our left.
[]
We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species
depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they
shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom of
those who went before. As we get older it is our short-term memory
that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we have
evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation
about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be
important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.
I worry, though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the
stories we hear are about greed, war and atrocity.
Perry goes on to cite research indicating that people who watch
television for more than four hours a day see themselves as far more
likely to fall victim in a violent incident in the forthcoming week than
their peers who watch less than two hours a day. Just like E. B. White
advocated for the responsibility of the writer to to lift people up, not
lower them down, so too is our responsibility as the writers of our
own life-stories to avoid the well-documented negativity bias of
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modern media because, as artist Austin Kleon wisely put it, you
are a mashup of what you let into your life. Perry writes:
Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.
[]
The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an impact
on how optimistic you are: its how we evolved. If you do not know
how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life, the neural
pathways you need to appreciate good news will never fire up.
[]
The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good
news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.
Yet despite the adaptive optimism bias of the human brain, Perry
argues a positive outlook is a practice and one that requires
mastering the art of vulnerability and increasing our essential
tolerance for uncertainty:
You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing
optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite
disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings
of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable
feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed
grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that
we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism
does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on
the negative. I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means
you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am
talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope
that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.
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Another key obstruction to our sanity is our chronic aversion to being
wrong, entwined with our damaging fear of the unfamiliar. Perry
cautions:
We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our
opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be
geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process further
evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only acknowledging
the evidence that backs up our original impression. It is too easy for us
to fall into the rap of believing that being right is more important than
being open to what might be.
If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe
them as though we are taking a birds eye view of our own thinking.
When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an older,
and different, story to the one we are now living.
Perry concludes:
We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves
[and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface
content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter
through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus
regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.
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Unsustainable Farming: From Bird Droppings to Corporate

Agriculture
The linkage between access to energy resources and the level of
social development and complexity of a given civilization was noted in
the work of Tainter, who states that Human societies and political
organizations, like all living systems, are maintained by a continuous
flow of energy More complex societies are more costly to maintain
than simpler ones, requiring greater support levels per capita. As
societies increase in complexity, more networks are created among
individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to regulate these
networks, more information is processed, there is more centralization
of information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not
directly involved in resource production, and the like.1Not only is a
given amount of energy required to support a given level of social
complexity, but that society may suffer diminishing returns on new
investments in complexity. The early societal cost for scientific
endeavour was very low, as most activities were carried out by
individuals or small groups of scholars who developed such things as
modern geometry and the theory of gravity. An extreme example of
modern science is the Large Hadron Collidor particle accelerator,
which took 16 years and $10 billion to build2. Tainter proposes four
concepts through which to understand why complex societies
collapse:
Human societies are problem-solving organizations;
Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita;
and
Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving
response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
The colonization of vast new land surfaces, but then much more
fundamentally, the utilization of non-renewable fossil fuels that
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provided new energy sources, allowed eighteenth century society

to temporarily overcome the limitations inherent in the above
concepts. These new fuels, with energy intensities many times greater
than previous energy sources, allowed for the rapid development of
societies with a level of complexity many times that of preceding
civilizations. This increased level of complexity also supported a much
greater level of consumption of ecosystem resources, which may have
pushed human society into ecological overshoot with respect to
overall planetary ecosystem capacity. As Catton identifies, the past
four centuries of magnificent progress were made possible by two
non-repeatable achievements: (a) discovery (sic) of a second
hemisphere, and (b) development of ways to exploit the planets
energy savings deposits, the fossil fuels3. Thetemporaryaddition to
the energy available to society has allowed human civilization to
overshoot the earths carrying capacity, and thus this period of greatly
increased societal complexity will eventually come to an end through
either ecological limits, or the exhaustion of the finite fossil fuel
resources in the absence of the discovery of a new source of energy.
The ability of modern societies to realistically deal with these dangers,
and take the actions required to become truly sustainable is greatly
reduced due to the dangerous set of hegemonic beliefs, such as the
possibility of endless exponential growth; the treatment of
environmental services as inexhaustible or replaceable with social
ones; and the efficacy of capitalism, which were developed during the
period of rapid growth facilitated by colonization and non-renewable
energy sources.
The discovery of new lands to exploit, and new energy sources,
helped reinforce the notion that human societies can always find a
way around limitations upon its growth. In the nineteenth century the
degradation of European soils due to modern intensive farming
practices and the separation of town and country (as human waste
products containing vital soil nutrients were not returned to the land),
which threatened lower yields, was at first remedied by the trade in
guano4.The impact of modern farming practices is well described by
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an advertising document for fertilizers, which states the small amount

of reactive nitrogen in the soil limits biomass production in natural
ecosystems. Agriculture further depletes reactive nitrogen from the
soil. Nitrogen is absorbed during plant growth and then exported
from the fields by harvesting. It needs to be restored by organic or
mineral sources of nitrogen. Fertilizers, whether applied as manure or
as mineral nitrogen, are therefore a key element of sustainable (sic)
agriculture. Lack of nitrogen results in declining soil fertility, low yields
and low crop quality.5
The highest quality guano deposits, located on islands off the
Peruvian coast, was the product of thousands of years of accumulated
droppings by the islands bird population. The trade in Peruvian guano
parallels the resource curse experienced by many less developed
countries with resources important to the industrial economy. Firstly,
the revenues were predominantly utilized for the benefit of the
Peruvian elite and to pay off national debts to the more developed
countries, with little or no benefit to the average Peruvian. Secondly,
the workforce utilized for the resource extraction were paid as little as
possible, with Chinese coolies, convicts, army deserters, and slaves
being used to dig up an average of five tons of excrement per person
per day from the huge mounds, using picks and shovels4. An inability
to meet this daily quota was met with physical punishment. One
visitor likened the workers to over-worked beasts of burden forced
to live and feed like dogs and another stated that the cruelties were
scarcely believable and very few, if any, Chinese survived more than a
few months.4 The metabolic rift that Marx identified as being
created by modern agriculture was matched by the human
riftbetween those that made great profits from the guano trade, and
those that worked in horrendous conditions to dig up that guano. The
demand for guano continuously escalated to replenish the nutrients of
European and North American soils. Between 1840 and 1880 it has
been estimated that Peru excavated over 20 million tons of guano for
export, and by 1909-10 Perus guano reserves were severely depleted
and could only yield 48,000 tons of guano that year6. As the guano
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fields started to be depleted in the 1860s, mining of Peru and

Bolivias natural nitrate fields started7. Attempts by Peru and Bolivia
to extract a greater percentage of the nitrate mining profits angered
the foreign interests that controlled the guano and nitrate trade.This
lead to the British-backed Chilean invasion of Peru and Bolivia, which
resulted in the annexation of the nitrate fields by Chile and the
continuing control of those resources by foreign (mostly British)
capital. This manipulation of other countries to gain access to required
ecological resources, and the uncontrolled depletion of those
resources, can be seen many times in recent history. The advanced
core industrialized countries escape their ecological limits, with little
or no benefit to the countries where the resources are located except
for small elites.
The dependence upon these natural sources of nitrate was then
superseded by the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation in the
early twentieth century, which has been used extensively ever since8.
Natural gas (methane) is the predominantly utilized source for the
hydrogen required by this process. This new process removed the
dependence upon rapidly depleting natural sources of nitrogen, by
replacing them with a seemingly endless source of nitrogen based
upon the supply of fossil fuels. The amount of nitrogen so supplied to
farming activities has increased exponentially since the inception of
this new process, with over 139 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer
forecast to be used in the 2011/2012 season. Added to this are 40
million tonnes of phosphates (from phosphate rock), and 36 million
tonnes of potash (mined potash)9. The utilization of inorganic
fertilizers was intensified in the post-WW2 period due to the impacts
of the Green Revolution in the lesser developed nations. This utilized
crops that could both thrive in the tropics and sub-tropics, while at the
same time being able to utilize high levels of inorganic fertilizer. Due
to this ability to respond to high levels of fertilizer, and to provide two
or even three crops a year, the Green Revolution seeds brought
substantial increases in food production. For instance, rice and wheat
production in developing countries increased 75% between 1965 and
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1980, with only a 20% increase in the area of cultivated land10. In the
past few decades the high yielding crop varieties and the related
intensive agriculture has displaced more traditional methods across
the developing world. For instance, in 1983 95% of the cultivated rice
area in China, and 82% of the cultivated wheat area in Latin America
used these crop varieties. In India less than 100 hectares of land was
used to grow these varieties in 1965, but by 1980 over 50 million
hectares had been converted with the Punjab utilizing 95% of the
cultivated area for such varieties11. The intensive mono-cropping of
the new genetically uniform plant varieties, also required the use of
pesticides and herbicides predominantly derived from oil products,
together with large amounts of water provided through hydrocarbon
fueled irrigation. Modern agriculture is also highly mechanized,
replacing manual labour with oil fueled tractors and other machinery.
Thus at all stages, modern crops has become totally dependent upon
non-renewable hydro-carbon resources, both as a fuel and as a
feedstock for the production of agricultural products. The Green
revolution increased the energy required for agriculture by a factor of
at least 50 times, and in some cases 100 times, when compared to the
previous agricultural methods12. The sources of energy available prior
to the discovery of fossil fuels could in no way have provided such
prodigious amounts of energy at an acceptable cost to be used in
such a way. Only the incredibly concentrated energy in non-renewable
fossil fuels can support such practices. At each stage greater and
greater amounts of energy have been utilized to overcome the threat
of food shortages.
Modern agricultural methods are open to the diminishing returns that
Tainter1identified. The use of herbicides and pesticides both drives
genetic mutations that are resistant through natural selection, and
indiscriminately kills the natural enemies of the weeds and pests that
are being targeted. As noted by Shiva12 research on DDT-induced
changes to pest population showed population increases up to
twelve-hundredfold. The aggravation of the problem is directly related
to the violence unleashed on the natural enemies of the pests. Such
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impacts require the heavier usage of pesticides and herbicides, and

the continual development of new ones. The logical outcomes of this
process are such things as Roundup Ready Corn which is genetically
modified to be resistant to herbicides containing glycophosphate,
allowing such herbicides to be sprayed on them, and bt-Corn which is
genetically modified to produce the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) delta
endotoxin. Over time the yields of the new crop varieties tend to fall,
as shown in an experimental plot where the same variety of high
yielding rice was grown and a 40% reduction in yield was
experienced10. Biotechnology is also being called upon to overcome
these problems, but the length of time to develop these new seed
varieties and the incremental increase are respectively significantly
longer and significantly less than for the Green Revolution varieties.
Thus, greater and greater inputs both on the farm, and in the research
and development facilities are required to gain smaller and smaller
incremental gains. For instance, an emerging feature of Indian
agriculture as requiring greater and greater inputs to produce a given
level of output has been noted by some researchers10, and thus a
phase of diminishing returns has been entered, threatening the
profitability of the Indian farming industry.
Soil erosion is also exacerbated by modern farming methods, with
topsoil eroding at 30 times its natural formation rate, resulting in
agricultural production declines in some parts of Africa by 50%.11 In
addition, soil becomes depleted of minerals resulting in the
continuous need to replenish those minerals. As Pfeiffer notes for
North America Much of the soil in the Great Plains is now little more
than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers
in order to produce crops.11 Only the minerals required for plant
growth are replenished though, resulting in food that may provide
relatively empty calories without the minerals required for human
health. An example is that of selenium, which has been shown to
reduce Prostate Cancer rates in men13, 14. With the products of
modern agriculture not containing such health supportive minerals,
separate industries are required to produce supplements containing
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those minerals and increased disease-treatment facilities are also

required to treat the increased cases of such malnourishment-induced
diseases. The negative health effects produced by pesticide and
herbicide residues on such food only adds to the resulting healthcare
cost. Again, greater and greater inputs are required to provide the
same, or even a reduced, overall output if overall health outcomes are
the measure.
The prodigious amounts of food produced have not reduced hunger
in the long term though, since the human population has increased as
food has become less scarce and rising income levels have changed
eating habits towards a greater dependence on less efficient produce
such as meat in the richer countries. The numbers of human beings
have grown at an exponential rate over the past few hundred years
due to the ability to continuously increase food production, together
with fossil fuel dependent water purification and antibiotics. In 1800
the human population reached 1 billion15, after centuries of very slow
and uneven growth marked by the impacts of repeated famines and
plagues which could kill significant percentages of the population in
relatively short periods of time. Then, in the next 150 years, the
human population advanced more than in all of previous human
existence, another 1.5 billion, to 2.5 billion. The population growth
rate then accelerated further with population increasing to 6.5 billion
in the next 55 years, again adding more than in all of the previous
human existence. Future trends are highly dependent upon the rate of
decline in the rates of birth, which tend to fall as rising per capita
wealth increases the cost of each child and the parents recognize the
increased survivability of each child. In addition, government
programs such as those that increase the availability and use of
contraceptives also play a part. The decreased birth rate offsets the
already decreased death rates, with the lag between the latter and
former effects being the reason for the rapid population increases.
United Nations projections assume that at some point the birth rate
matches, or falls slightly below, the replacement level in all
geographic areas. These projections show total human population
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reaching 9.2 billion in 2050, an increase of 2.7 billion in 45 years, with

still some increase after that. These projections assume that world
food production will continue to increase, both due to the number of
humans to feed and the increase in per capita consumption as per
capita income increases. The estimated high point for the human
population will be approximately 10 times that which was in place
prior to the successful societal utilization of fossil fuels.
Without ongoing increases in energy inputs into agriculture, and other
forms of food production, the current and future scales of human
population could not be supported within the modes of modern food
production and levels of economic wealth. Some studies have shown
that yields for organic farming can approach the yields for modern
agriculture16, and also a reduction in the consumption of animals
would improve the food calories available by removing the calories
lost in utilizing plant food to grow animals. The latter possibility is the
opposite of current trends, as increases in wealth produce increases in
animal food intake. Such changes would be resisted by populations
who currently enjoy, and who aspire to, the levels of affluence in the
more wealthy nations. The former would require a wholesale reversal
of the trends towards energy-intensive agriculture, and significant
increase in the population devoted to agriculture. In addition, a large
scale transition to organic agriculture would be hampered by the
ecosystem damages, such as soil degradation, created by modern
agriculture. The social resources for such a transition have also been
greatly denuded as traditional farming knowledge, and crop varieties,
being lost as modern agricultural methods have usurped the more
traditional forms of food production. During the period of ecosystem
regeneration the farmers would receive no, or greatly reduced
incomes, and thus without external support there would be a great
amount of economic inertial forces pushing farmers to stay with
modern agricultural techniques.
The scale of societal effort required to change from industrial to
organic agriculture was shown in the forced transition of Cuba, during
the Special Period in Time of Peace17after the removal of the
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Soviet bloc as a provider of fertilizers, pesticides, oil, and food imports

and a tightening of the United States regime of economic sanctions
against Cuba. Imports dropped overall by 75%, and oil imports by
53%. A large part of the success of the Cuban transition was the
breaking up of large state agricultural organizations into smaller
entities with a much greater level of local decision making and control,
together with the fostering of urban agriculture. The former facilitated
the intense local management required for more organic and nonmechanized types of agriculture, and leveraged the ability of smaller
farms to provide more output per area of cultivation. If productivity is
measured by the total output of a farm, instead of the yield of a single
monoculture, then smaller farms can be seen to have greater outputs,
Though the yield per unit area of one cropcorn, for examplemay
be lower, the total output per unit area, often composed of more than
a dozen crops and various animal products, can be far higher.17The
location of farms closer to, or even within, urban populations also
greatly reduced fossil fuel dependent transportation requirements.
The transition was also greatly aided by a government focused
scientific and infrastructural efforts to support and improve organic
methods. For example, Cuba is practically the only country in the
world to begin implementing on a national scale a biological pestcontrol program based largely on parasitoidsparasitic insects and
other biological agents that prey on pests that can damage crops. For
example, wasps in the genus Trichogramma have been used to
manage lepidopteran pests of tobacco and tomatoes. While this in
itself is innovative, the effort has been reinforced by the establishment
of Centers for the Reproduction of Entomophages and
Entomopathogens. Over 200 centers have been set up to provide
decentralized, small-scale, cooperative production of biocontrol
agents, which farmers can use instead of pesticides to protect their
crops. In addition to the above, the national diet was moved away
from animal sources to plant sources, thus boosting the efficiency of
food calorie production. This successful transition was forced upon the
Cuban nation by the external pressures of the Soviet-bloc collapse
and the United States directed economic sanctions, which meant that
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Cuba had no other way of moving forward. In addition, Cuba is a

communist society where the central government has the ability to
direct major social changes such as the breaking up of large farms and
changes to diets without resistance from democratic forces or other
large economic and socially powerful organizations such as private
corporations. The relatively small scale of the country, with a
population of approximately 11 million (smaller than many of the
major cities of the world), also aided a rapid centrally initiated and
planned change process. Without all of the above factors supporting a
successful transition, would Cuba have been able to move to its
current food system configuration? Even with all of the supporting
factors there was a significant period during the transition where food
calories per capita dropped significantly and there were severe
economic impacts. Only a number of years into the transition did
calories per capita return to previous levels. The sustainability of the
agricultural transition could also be threatened by the removal of one
or more of these supporting factors, for instance Warwick notes that
Ironically, Cubans worry about what would happen if the U.S.
embargo were to be lifted. In the event of a trade free-for-all, Cubas
tentative steps towards environmental sustainability could be
trampled under the feet of the Cuban exiles.
The Cuban example shows that a nation can move away from
industrial agriculture dependent upon non-renewable fossil fuels, but
what if such a transition was required on a global level because of
fossil fuel depletion and/or the need to reduce fossil fuel use to curtail
Climate Change? Such changes, especially if they required moves to
smaller locally managed farms with less dependency upon industrially
produced inputs, would greatly challenge large vested interests which
yield significant economic and social power. As Fitzgerald-Moore and
Parai point out the Green Revolution new high yielding crop varieties
require a package of inputs which includes not only chemical
fertilizers and irrigation, but also biochemical programs to control for
disease, insect and weeds, and increased mechanization10. Without
these inputs the new varieties would underperform the traditional
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seeds, which have been bred for the previous much less modified
ecosystems. The high level of investments required to provide the
required package of inputs for modern agriculture encourages a move
from subsistence to commercial agriculture, and a consolidation of
farms into larger entities. Thus, traditionally more self-sufficient
communities were integrated into the global market environment,
reliant upon the large conglomerates that provided the seeds, other
agricultural inputs, and the financing for the purchase of these inputs
together with modern agricultural machinery. The net result was a
wide dispersion in incomes, with the larger farms and the providers of
the new inputs and machinery taking the majority of the economic
benefits. This economically-driven Darwinian process removed both
the knowledge of, and the political support for, the traditional
agricultural processes. Within a matter of generations the traditional
ecological knowledge gained over centuries that supported the
previous low energy input farming methods was lost in one area after
another. Even the memory that proved that industrialized high energy
agriculture was not the only way of growing crops disappeared over
time. The separation of people from the land through the urbanization
that was facilitated by the labor-saving mechanization of food
production in general, also separated the vast majority of the
population from any first-hand knowledge of food production. In the
rich countries of today the average person is used to food magically
appearing on the shelves of the supermarket, disembodied from the
actual crops and animals that were the living inputs to the production
of that food. With populations disconnected from the actual processes
used to produce their food, questions about the current, and long
term impacts and sustainability, of the food industries rarely enters
into public discourse. On some occasions aspects of this industry do
burst into public consciousness, as in a significant case of food
poisoning, or an investigation of horrendous practices in
slaughterhouses. These instances quickly fade away from public
consciousness though, and do not trigger wider ranging and more
systemic questions. Limited scientific solutions are provided, such as
food irradiation, and working practices are changed to assuage public
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concern. All such actions are incremental changes to the hegemonic

industrial food production systems rather than any fundamental
change to them.
The production processes for many of the inputs required for
industrialized agriculture have large scale efficiencies which benefit
larger organizations. In addition, the large development of many new
agricultural products requires extremely large and lengthy research
and development activities, with a scale of investment only open to
larger organizations. These factors supported the consolidation of
supplying companies into a few very large organizations, with the
process of consolidation accelerating in the past few decades. The top
10 pesticide producing companies now control almost 90% of the
agrochemical business worldwide, the top 10 biotechnology
companies have 75% of industry revenue. There has also been
significant concentration in seed providers, with 6 of the leading seed
companies also being within the top 10 companies for pesticides and
biotechnology. With such significant concentration only a handful of
profit maximizing companies have control over the majority of plant
production that has been integrated into the world market
economy18. The fossil fuel inputs to the production processes for such
things as herbicides and fungicides, as well as the agricultural and
food transport machinery, are provided by the highly concentrated
fossil fuel industry which includes some of the largest private
corporations in the world, such as Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell,
and Gazprom together with huge state owned organizations such as
those of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Some of the producers of farm and
transportation equipment used by farmers are also very large
corporations. In addition to the above levels of economic
concentration, there are numerous industry associations that
concentrate the political weight of a given industry. An example is the
International Fertilizer Industry Association which has some 540
members in about 85 countries. About half of the membership is
based in developing countries. IFA member companies represent all
activities related to the production, trade, transport and distribution
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o f e v e r y t y p e o f f e r t i l i z e r, t h e i r r a w m a t e r i a l s a n d
intermediates. 19 These trade organizations, as well as individual
companies, employ large numbers of lobbyists and other staff to help
direct government policies, and international agency decisions, in
ways beneficial to them.
In addition, they actively attempt to affect societal discourses on such
things as the future course of agriculture through media contacts,
commercials extolling the benefits of the agricultural methods that
they support, and the funding of research supporting industrial
farming methods. The dependence of many media organizations upon
advertizing revenues as the major source of income, also allows for at
both passive control of media output through self-censorship, and
active control through the decisions of which media outlets and
content advertisers will support. For instance large agro-chemical
corporations are highly unlikely to sponsor media outlets, or specific
content, that is highly critical of industrialized farming methods.
Herman & Chomsky raise the example of a proposed documentary on
environmental problems to show the reality of such influence,
although at the time a great many large companies were spending
money on commercials and other publicity regarding environmental
problems, the documentary series failed for want of sponsors. The
problem was one of excessive objectivity in the series, which included
suggestions of corporate or systemic failure, whereas the corporate
message was one of reassurance.20
These large corporations tend to be publicly traded companies that
have the maximization of profits as their legally enshrined raison
detre, and are required to report on the continued allegiance to that
objective on a quarterly basis. As Bakan states corporate law compels,
corporate decision makers always to act in the best interests of the
corporation, and hence its owners. The law forbids any other
motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the
environment, or help consumers save money, and likens the modern
corporate structures to institutional psychopaths21. Such institutions
operate as the rationally self-interested actors that are assumed in
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Hardins formulation of the tragedy of the commons22, which is

very different to individual human beings which have been empirically
shown to act in unselfish altruistic ways. The actions of agro-chemical
companies such Monsanto in pressurizing governments and society in
general to support rapid deployment of new chemical products and
Genetically Modified Organisms, contrary to the precautionary
principal and in the absence of any long term studies of environmental
impacts, can be seen as an individual company placing the general
ecological commons that supports humanity at risk to drive short term
profit. As Bakan characterizes such behavior, these corporations are
excellent externalizing devices which internalize profit and externalize
the cost of the negative consequences of their actions21.
From the above exploration of the development of modern
agriculture over the past few hundred years certain overall patterns
can be seen. Firstly, the seeming ability of humanity to evade limits
through the extraction of ecological resources at rates far faster than
natural renewal processes, whether guano from Peruvian islands or
hydrocarbon fuels produced over millions of years. The success of this
limit evasion over a period of a few hundred years has embedded a
belief that continuing exponential growth is normal and sustainable.
The resulting development of industrialized agriculture has displaced
much of the societal resources and support required for previous
forms of agriculture while at the same time degrading their ecological
basis through soil degradation and pollution, making it extremely
difficult to resurrect the previous agricultural practices. The scale of
enterprises necessary for modern agriculture, and the supporting
industries, has produced economically and politically powerful entities
focused on the ongoing development and further spread of
industrialized farming practices which favor the larger corporations.
The example of Cuba does show that a transition to organic and low
energy input farming is possible, but only under extreme external
pressures and with a central authority able to drive rapid changes and
manage the impact of such changes in a relatively equitable fashion.
On a global scale humanity may be presented with the external
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pressure that forces change, either through a reduction in available

hydrocarbon supplies, or through the need to reduce hydrocarbon
usage to stem Climate Change. As Heinberg notes, global oil
production has been on stagnant since 2005 with new oil fields only
making up for the depletion of current ones, even as oil prices
doubled23. This inelasticity of demand in the face of rising prices may
show that geological limits may have trumped the demand and supply
assumptions of modern economics. Higher prices have not produced
increased supply. If the peak oil proponents are correct, this plateau
may soon turn into a decline, reducing the amount of oil available to
society and marking the beginning of a decline in available energy
from hydrocarbon extraction in general. Given the factors noted
above, it is hard to be optimistic about the ability of human civilization
to undergo the transition necessary to lower energy farming in a well
controlled and equitable manner.
References
1. Tainter, Joseph (1988), The Collapse of Complex Societies,
Cambridge
2. Mezriotti, Valerio (2011), Large Hadron Collidor, New York Times.
A c c e s s e d a t h t t p : / / w w w. n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 1 0 / 0 3 / 3 1 / s c i e n c e /
31collider.htmlApril 19th, 20112
3. Catton, William (1982), Overshoot The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press
4. Foster, Clark, York (2010), The Ecological Rift, Monthly Review Press
5. Accessed at http://www.yara.com/doc/33521_Nitrate__Pure_Nutrient.pdf April 19th, 2012
6. N/A (1997), Guano Trade, TED Case Studies. Accessed athttp://
www1.american.edu/TED/guano.htmApril 19th, 2012
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7. Blakemore, H. (2011), John Thomas North, the Nitrate King, History

Today. Accessed athttp://www.historytoday.com/h-blakemore/johnthomas-north-nitrate-kingApril 20th, 2012
8. N/A (N/A), New Chemicals: Ammonia, Making the Modern World.
Access athttp://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/
the_second_industrial_revolution/05.ST.01/?scene=5April 20th, 2012

9. N/A (2008), Current world fertilizer trends and outlook to 2011 and
2012, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Accessed atftp://ftp.fao.org/agl/agll/docs/cwfto11.pdf April 20th,
2012
10.Fitzgerald-Moore and Parai (n/a), The Green Revolution, accessed
athttp://people.ucalgary.ca/~pfitzger/green.pdfApril 20th, 2012
11. Pfeiffer, Dale Allan (2006), Eating Fossil Fuels, New Society
Publishers
12. Shiva, Vandana (2011), India Divided: Diversity and Democracy
Under Attack, Seven Stories Press
13. Clark et al (1998), Decreased incidence of prostate cancer with
selenium supplementation: results of a double blind cancer prevention
t r i a l , B r i t i s h J o u r n a l o r U r o l o g y. A c c e s s e d a t h t t p : / /
www.cardiocrusaders.com/assets/files/pdf/research_articles/
studies_britishjurology_selenoexcell.pdf April 19th, 2012
14. Yoshizawa et al. (1998), Study of Prediagnostic Selenium Level in
Toenails and the risk of Advanced Prostate Cancer, Journal of the
National Cancer Institute. Accessed athttp://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/
content/90/16/1219.full.pdfApril 18th, 2012.
15. Bongaarts, John (2009), Human population growth and the
demographic transition, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
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Society. Accessed athttp://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/

364/1532/2985.full.pdfApril 19th, 2012
16. Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?, World Watch Magazine May/
J u n e 2 0 0 6 , V o l u m e 1 9 , N o . 3 . A c c e s s e d a t h t t p : / /
www.worldwatch.org/node/4060April 19th, 2012
17. Warwick, Hugh (2001), Cubas Organic Revolution, Forum for
Applied Research and Public Policy Summer 2001. Accessed athttp://
forum.ra.utk.edu/Archives/Summer2001/cuba.pdfApril 19th, 2012

18. Various (2008), Who Owns Nature?, ETC group, accessed athttp://
www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/707/01/
etc_won_report_final_color.pdfApril 21st, 2012
19. International Fertilizer Association web site. Accessed at http://
www.fertilizer.org/ April 19th, 2012
20. Herman, Edward & Chomsky, Noam (1988), Manufacturing
Consent, Pantheon Books
21. Bakan, Joel (2004), The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of
Profit And Power, Penguin Canada
22. Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162,
1243-1248
23. Heinberg, Richard (2011), The End of Growth: Adapting to our
New Economic Reality, New Society Publishers
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Desert of the Real

The invitation to do this talk arrived around the time I was stopped in
my tracks by this perplexing sight (above) in one of those endless
corridors at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Who commissioned
such a thing, and why? What, if anything, was in their mind? Where
did they procure that cheesy stick-on foliage? Is that a robot digging
away behind the window or does it have a driver? What does he
make of the living wall thats not, in fact, alive?
I cant promise to answer all those questions in my talk this evening,
but I will discuss three perplexing issues which I believe are related.
First, Ill explore the notion that we are living in a desert of the real.
Second, Ill look at what the desert of the real has meant for
environmental communications. And thirdly, to conclude, I will explore
alternative ways of knowing and being in the world and ask what
these might mean for design.
Part 1: Desert of the Real
Although that weird airport corridor was disturbing for this travellers
peace of mind, in the greater scheme of things it was probably
harmless. Developments elsewhere are signs of a more alarming loss
of contact contact with reality. Consider, for example, the National
Security Agency, whose multi-billion dollar headquarters is nearing
completion. A vast black office box, clad in reflective glass, is the
degree zero of Big Data. The machine room for global surveillance is
down the road in Bluffdale (I kid you not) Utah where a vast server
farm has been built in the middle of a desert. The fact that the facility
needs three million gallons of fresh water daily, just to keep cool,
suggests that it has a way to go before achieving the Total Information
Awareness its charter prescribes. Ones doubts about the project are
amplified by the
control room, deep inside the NSA facility,
commissioned by the NSAs boss, General Alexander. A near-replica of
the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise, the control rooms design
especially the prominence of a solitary commanders seat reflects a
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command-and-control model of information sharing ill-suited to the

vast volumes of data the center is hoovering up.
Although the NSAs tunnel vision on Big Data is extreme, others are
not far behind. The consulting industry has issued a stream of reports
about the potential of Big Data to be the next frontier for innovation
that will afford business a 360 degree view of customers. Technology
firms are promoting the concept of the Smart City with particular
fervour: their rhetoric imagines the places where we live as a gigantic
train set whose operation, by a total coincidence, will stimulate a
$17bn market for Big Data back-end services.
Big Data have also enchanted the Quantified Self (QS) movement.
Adorned with wearable devices, QS enthusiasts track data on the
tiniest details of their physical and psychological status from sleep
patterns and blood pressure, to heart rate and mood. In extreme
cases, so-called body-hackers have surgically implanted sensors in
their bodies. Some of this data is useful, of course
- but the
development of
high-end me-meters for otherwise healthy 30somethings is unlikely to impact the pandemic of chronic illnesses in
the rest of the population.
If quantity counts, the Big Data craze is understandable. According to
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, the amount of data in the world has
doubled in last two years and we apparently create as much
information in two days, now, as we did from the dawn of man
through 2003.
Its a fair argument, I suppose, that with so much data about, it would
be wasteful not to use it. But how, and to what end?
For the Financial Times, Big Data signifies nothing less than the arrival
of a postmodern economy. Under the headline Welcome To The
Desert of the Real, the paper stated last year that todays market is
the most infinitely complex and impossible object ever imagined. In
order to prosper, the FT opined, the modern investor must be
adaptable to changing modes of acuity;
be able to imagine
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different realistic states of the world; and be able to think as both

the mathematician and the artist.
If frothy prose like this appeared in an undergraduates cultural studies
paper, one would not blink an eye. But these words adorned the
house journal of global finance. It is surely alarming that the worlds
economy is being shaped by people who are mesmerised by all things
digital but who are blind to a much larger reality: the analogue
knowledge accumulated in nature during 3.5 billion years of evolution.
In his book Collapse, Jarred Diamond argues that one reason societies
fail is that their elites are insulated from the negative impact of their
own actions. Diamond focuses on Easter Island, where the overuse of
wood products eventually destroyed its inhabitants survival
prospects. That lesson applies equally to us, today. We lust for speed,
perfection, control but, because we inhabit an abstract, digitially
diminished world, were blind to their true cost.
I do not pretend to be a cognitively superior observer, here. I spend
too much time myself in environments, such as airport lounges, that
are just as insulated from reality as the FTs news room, or a risk
traders console. But I also spend enough time outside the digital
bubble to know that the environmental impacts of the economy are
no less devastating just because they are out of sight.
The desert of the real, I suggest, isolates from literally vital knowledge
in four ways:
- because its invisible;
- because its somewhere else;
- because our sensory bandwidth is too narrow;
- because were educated.
Of the life-critical phenomena we dont see because theyre invisible,
the most important is energy intensity. Bradley Garrett on the right
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in the photograph above was lauded for his daring climb up The
Shard in London. But although his exploit was cool, Garrett and his
fellow Londoners lead super-heated lives. They we need sixty
times more energy per person, than pre-modern men and women
like the family on the left.
When you think about it, that sixty-fold difference is astounding. It
should be terrifying. The trouble is we dont think about it or not
clearly. Just this week, for example, scientists at Harvard reported,
with great fanfare, that the human mind, with its 86 billion neurones
and phenomenal computing power, runs on less energy than a
household light bulb. Well, maybe it does but this feat would be
more impressive if this amazing brain demonstrated blinding
intelligence. Au contraire: the human brain is so self-absorbed that it
seems unconcerned by the fact that its body, and its supporting
infrastructure, are gorging on non-renewable resources in a finite
world. Duh.
Then there are life critical developments that we ignore because
theyre happening somewhere else. Our economys ravenous appetite
for external nutrient supplies is a case in point. Although these flows
have grown 1,500 times in just fifty years an astounding rate of
increase their environmental and social costs hardly disturb us at all.
Why? Mainly because these costs are being paid by other people,
somewhere else. Without soil, for example, wed quickly starve but
the depletion of our soils by industrial agriculture is seldom in the
news. The same goes for the toxic rivers of slurry produced during
mining the rare metals that are used in all our cellphones. They dont
touch us directly, so we dont think about them.
Another deadly feature of the desert of the real is that we think too
much, and sense too little. Think back to that brain and its billions of
neurons. We only use a tiny fraction of those neurones for conscious
observation and rational thought: We use the rest to experience the
world unconsciously. Neuroscientists have discovered that the
boundary between mind, body, and world far more permeable than
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we had thought . The mind is hormonal, as well as neural. The

boundary between our bodies, and the environment, is porous. Twoway chemical communications not just verbal or pictorial ones
shape the ways we experience the world .
These startling scientific discoveries have breathed new life into an
ancient question: Where does the mind end and the rest of the
world begin? Until recently, scientists and philosophers tended to
think of the nervous system as a glorified set of data cables
connecting the body to the brain.
It now appears that the borders of mental embodiment cannot neatly
be drawn at the skull, nor even at the skin. For Teed Rockwell whose
work blows my mind in what I experience as a fruitful way mental
phenomena emerge not merely from isolated brain activity, but from
a single unified system embracing the nervous system, body, and
environment. The neuroscientist Andy Clarke, in a similar vein,
concludes that the environment shapes cognition: The human
organism, and the the external world, are a coupled and unified
cognitive system .
The importance of this new perspective is profound. If it turns out that
our minds are shaped by our physical environments and not just by
synapses clicking away inside our box-like skulls then the division
between the thinking self, and the natural world a division which
underpins the whole of modern thought begins to dissolve.
This understanding is startling to us but its old news in other
traditions than the western scientific one. In Buddhist thought, for
example, its been taken for granted for 2,600 years that the organism
and its environment are as one.
The insights of modern science also provoke a renewed respect for
indigenous peoples whose experience of the world is enriched by
perceptual diversity. Ive learned from
Tara Waters Lumpkin, an
environmental anthropologist, that perceptually diverse cultures are
better able to understand whole systems than scientific cultures that
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break things down into parts. Indigenous people understand life

more holistically than we do. Their aesthetic relations to the biosphere
have evolved over many thousands of years. Their everyday
experience being, in Lumpkins word, polyphasic enriches their
experience that
people and nature are interconnected.
Their
connected and holistic understanding of the world makes them better
stewards of their environments.
This re-evaluation of indigenous knowledge brings me to the fourth
defining feature of the desert of the real: the things we dont think
about because weve been educated.
For the philosopher John Zerzan, humanitys troubles did not begin
with with the industrial age, nor even with agriculture. Our problems
began when we embraced symbolic culture and placed language, art,
and number above other ways of knowing the world. Every
abstraction both simplifies, and distances, earthly reality. Abstraction
underpins a concept of progress in which the globe is perceived to be
a repository of resources to fuel endless growth. Abstract thought is
deeply embedded in our educational system with its narrow focus on
STEM subjects. STEM is such a misleading acronym when one of its
effects
is to disconnect us from nature both physically and
psychologically.
Part 2: Environmental communications
Its in the context of this long-standing and deeply rooted cultural
conditioning that I turn to the second part of my talk a reflection on
environmental communications and campaigns.
Its not as if scientists, designers and artists have been idle while the
biosphere suffers. On the contrary: The environmental movement has
been enriched by a dazzling array of maps, images, data sets, and
visualizations. A premise of Joseph Giacomins project, Thermal, for
example (see the image above) is that our promiscuous energy use
will be harder to ignore when the world is viewed through thermal
eyes. Giacomins research group at at Brunel University - Perception
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Enhancement Systems - uses advanced technology to leverage our

sensory systems and thereby enhance our understanding. Elsewhere,
the water footprinting movement has done some amazing work in
rendering complex data into clear and affective stories. Media artists
have used lasers to reveal the toxic emissions of power stations that
would otherwise be invisible.
Much of this creative and reporting work is impressive, even striking.
The trouble is that an unrelenting flow of gloomy news, on its own,
has proved at best ineffective at worst, counter-productive. Doomer
porn, as some call it, stubbornly resists empathy. It produces guilt
and denial rather than transformational change.
As a response to the denial dilemma, a new generation of behaviour
change campaigns has been crafted in recent years to accentuate the
positive. The strategic intent of Futerras creative work, for example
(above) is to leverage the personal, and the social. Their witty
storylines appeal to the values and attitudes of young people as they
are, not as we would like them to be.
Im sympathetic to the intent that lies behind this kind of work. In my
own work as a writer and event organizer I, too, try to focus on the
positive. I seek out people and projects that are grounds for
optimism. By choice, I spend as much time as possible with people
who embody a world thats getting healthier.
I nonetheless have a difficulty with the very concept of campaigns to
raise awareness. However positive and uplifting the stories may be,
they leave untouched the underlying narrative that we can have our
cake and eat it where cake means a perpetual growth economy.
To be blunt: a focus on the individuals personal contribution to a
problem and how to change that is an example of what cynical
politicians call bait-and switch. A simple example: if you or I take our
shopping home in a reused disposable plastic bag, and feel good
about doing so, the bag is typically responsible for about onethousandth of the footprint of the food it contains.
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Re-using a bag is easier ask than re-shaping a food system but

campaigns that make us feel good about ourselves deflect attention
from the underlying values and structures that shape our behaviour in
the first place.
If accentuating the positive is not, of itself, an answer, we are left with
a dilemma: What are we to do if, when people are exposed to
shocking stories and images, nothing seems to change in the system
as a whole? What are we to do as designers if we create a powerful
piece of communication and it has no impact? How do we reach a
TL;DR generation that survives the media blitz by filtering most of it
out?
In my search for guidance on this topic, Ive discovered these are not
new questions.
Saint Augustine, in City of God, attacked scenic games as being
responsible for the death of the soul and that was fifteen hundred
years ago.
A century ago, in 1908, the American philosopher John Dewey
decried the emergence of what he called a Kodak fixation- a
photographic attitude that reduces the citizens role to that of a
spectator, detached from that which is experienced.
Ivan Illich, writing in 1971, believed that our culture started to go off
the rails when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other, and
became solitary scholars- in 1120.

Twenty years ago Susan Sontags classic text Regarding the Pain Of
Others raised similar issues with particular reference to war
photography. Why is it she asked, that even when we are exposed
to shocking stories and images, nothing seems to change? Sontag
memorably alerted us to the danger that photographsand by
implication all visualizationshave a tendency, in her words, to
shrivel sympathy. Images shown on television, she wrote, are, by
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definition, images of which one sooner or later tires. Image-glut

keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content.
Compassion, Sontag concluded, is an unstable emotionit needs to
be translated into action, or it withers. [. . .] It is passivity that dulls
feeling.

Part 3: New ways of knowing
If its passivity that dulls feeling, as Susan Sontag concluded, the
question arises: what sort of activity is the necessary accompaniment
to environmental communications? If emitting messages. however
clever or evocative they may be, is ineffective without some kind of
follow-up action, what kinds of action do we need to take?
Before I turn to that question, let me remind you of the important
things that we miss by being stranded in the desert of the real:
We miss phenomena that are invisible, such as energy;
We are unaware of things that are somewhere else, such as resource
flows;
We miss all sorts of natural phenomena because we use so few of our
our senses;
And, because our education, we fail to experience the planet as a
living system of which we are a part.
If those are perceptual dead zones, it follows, for me, that the actions
we need to take are those that re-connect us viscerally, and
emotionally with the living systems weve lost touch with.
Its not about campaigns to raise awareness, or to change other
peoples behaviour. These approaches simply dont work or only
partially.

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Its not about making demands, of telling politicians what they must
do. The government must end our dependency on fossil fuels. We
must end this obsession with perpetual growth. They wont do any
such thing. They cant.
Its not even about finely crafted visions and the promise of a better
reality in some other place and time. Nature unfolds the future from
the present not from projections and plans. If nature can do it, so
can we.
The actions we need to take are those that facilitate a sense of
belonging and being at home in the world. As it is now. Actions that
focus attention on the positive qualities of often small, humble, living
things that surround us. Actions that create space for people to
experience relationships with living systems no matter how small the
scale.
This is where art and storytelling come in. Their task is to tweak our
interest, redirect our attention, and start conversations, about ways of
living that re-connect us with the natural world.
At a social level, we probably need to talk to each other more face to
face. Embodied, situated, and unmediated communications were the
norm before we invented writing and, later, mass media. The
philosopher and theologian Martin Buber counseled just such activity
in his book I and Thou of 1923. All knowledge is dialogic, wrote
Buber but he did not just advocate talk. Connection is not just about
words; its about encounter and community. Buber taught us that that
literally vital conversations needs to be embodied, and situated.
It follows from Martin Bubers insights suggest that the meeting
formats we design should enable us, quite simply, to breathe the same
air in a natural context. Over many thousands of years participatory
ritual, and performance, were the main ways that beliefs were shared
within a culture. In indigenous cultures the world over today,
communities use ceremonies, arts and stories to maintain harmony
between nature and culture, body and mind.
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The trouble started when we invented convention centres.

Convention centres are expensive, filled with hard surfaces, and
unless youre in the convention business somewhere else than the
subjects discussed in them. They are media, not the thing itself. I
should know: these words describe the early years of the Doors of
Perception conference. Doors started out in 1993 as a high energy
internet and design conference in which we , too, hung out in vast
darkened spaces marveling at the cleverness of our peers.
A realisation then dawned: people dont want more messages; they
want more interactions. This sparked a search which is still ongoing
for more interactive and less choreographed forms of encounter.
Weve nicknamed the elusive format xskool. Xskools are feral
encounters in the sense that they usually takes place outside or at
least, outside the disciplinary tent - and are shaped and energised by
their context, not by an abstract agenda. Being outside the tent also
brings us closer to people with first-hand about key social-ecological
systems: fishers, farmers, foresters, water stewards, ride-sharers, space
re-users. Their embodied and situated knowledge is rarely if at all
encountered in creativity and innovation events.
Our out-of-the-tent approach with xskools is not original. Time was,
not so long ago, when children didnt go to school: School
surrounded them. Nature was a living teacher. Every relative and
every plant and animal was a mentor. People soaked up the
language of plants and animals by immersion not by powerpoint,
and not by MOOC. Our modest ambition is to cherish and nurture
whats unique about each place, each moment, each group of people.
X means: Breathing the same air; Shoulder-to-shoulder learning;
The opportunity to be still; Only here, only now.
In a culture that is over-connected, but under-experienced, a good
number of people and groups have embarked on similar journeys. Our
collective search for new ways to meet, and to reconnect, has seen
the emergence of nomadic arts laboratories, low-tech festivals, food
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fairs, and learning journeys. (The photograph above is from the Secret
Garden Party festival in the UK). In California, school students are not
taught ecological literacy in so many words. Instead, theyre invited to
join a mission to help the endangered California Freshwater Shrimp.
Working with ranchers and professional restoration designers,
Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed (STRAW) plant native
willows to restore the shrimps streamside habitat. In Kerala, in India, K
B Jinan runs nature sensitization courses for young children that are
designed to reawaken the aesthetic sense we are born with. There is
no classroom teaching. The children spend their time searching for
medicinal plans, making whistles out of leaves, and story-telling. In
Turkey, hundreds of teachers across the country are being certified as
ecoliteracy instructors in a programme that spans subjects from soil
erosion to ethical forestry. Across the global south, La Via Campesina
has opened 40 agro-ecological schools that are independent of largescale commercial agriculture.
These are just a few examples. I could happily show you dozens more
projects, the world over, for young and old alike, in which people are
taking action to close the metabolic rift. But I need to draw things to a
close.
In 2009, the Mannahatta exhibit exposed New Yorkers to Manhattans
ecosystem in 1609 just before the first settlers arrived. The event
asked: What was it like here before we paved it over? Mannahatta
showed people which neighbourhoods were originally oak-tulip tree
forests, and which buildings had been built on the former homes of
masked shrews, and grey foxes. It posed a semi-rhetorical question:
could these ancient ecological functions shape the citys development
again?
As we adapt to the realities of energy and resource transition, that is
not such a fanciful question. The abundance of the oil age abundance
distracted us from the richness and wealth of natural life on earth.The
precarity of these new times reminds us that life in artificial
environments is not so secure as we thought - and that wed better
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December 1, 2013
get closer to the soils, forests, and fish stocks upon which all life,
including our own, depends.
These transitional times provoke a special respect for solutions
evolved by nature over the last 3.8 billion years. Other life forms than
our own, were reminded, are able, expertly, to move water, capture
the suns energy, provide shelter, store food, recycle nutrients, share
resources, build communities, control population, and manage
ecosystems all without human intervention.
Weve worked hard throughout the modern era, to lift ourselves
above nature only to be reminded by modern science that man and
nature are one, after all. The human mind is hormonal, as well as
neural. Our thoughts and experiences are not limited to brain activity
in the skull, nor are they enclosed by the skin. Our metabolism, and
natures, are inter-connected on a molecular, atomic and viral level.
Our nervous systems and our bodies co-exist within the same, lifefilled, environment.
As embodied creatures and like all other
organisms - we interact continuously with living systems that surround
us.
This is something that savage people have known all along.
We are born with an inherited aesthetic tendency to appreciate this
intimate connection with the world and then we go to school. There,
an unremitting focus on science and technology exacerbates our
dislocation from the earth. We manipulate symbols, abstractions, and
concepts but to what end? To earn money? To consume?
Reconnecting with nature is not about leaving home to live in a yurt.
For most of us, it means adapting in the places where we live now
re-imagining the urban landscape as a living ecology with the
potential to support us.
Re-wilding, in this sense, is not about looking. Its about reconnecting
in practise working with the plants, animals, and ecosystems that
occur naturally in our cities and bioregions.
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What lies ahead is like the picture in a jigsaw puzzle that slowly
emerges as we add each piece. The pieces, in this context, include
values and practices recovered from nature, other cultures, and other
times. This picture contains myriad details of an emerging economy
whose core value is stewardship, rather than extraction.
The more pieces we fit in each piece a new way to feed, shelter, and
heal ourselves in partnership with living processes the easier it
becomes.
Its our genes at work: Formed long before the industrial age, theyre
helping reconnect us with our wild side.
The savage mind is our mind said Claude Levi Strauss but can it
be the designers mind?
You tell me!
Thank you.
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What Are Radicals Good For? An Interview with George Scialabba

A few weeks ago, I sat down with George Scialabba, essayist, book
reviewer, and gradualist radical. We talked about For the Republic
(Pressed Wafer, 2013), his latest collection of essaysand how he
keeps his day job from swallowing him; whats terrifying about the
horizontalist tendencies of the hive mind; and why hes always
revisiting the titular question of his 2009 collection, What Are
Intellectuals Good For?
Lindsey Gilbert

Lindsey Gilbert: Ive heard it said that there arent a whole lot of
independent scholars and thinkers lefteither theyve been
swallowed by the academy or given up and started blogging about
their cats. Except you, youve been called an independent scholar,
havent you? What does that mean?
George Scialabba: I have been miscalled, I think. I certainly dont
consider myself a scholar. In fact, I mostly read magazines. But an
independent thinkerwell, if its true, its because I have a day job [at
Harvard]. The day job is a mixed blessing, of course. Its dull, but its
undemanding. It swallows half my time, but it doesnt swallow my
imagination, my reserves. I do feel lucky that I fell into a job like that;
just as I owe some of my independence to rent control in Cambridge,
I owe some of it to the fact that Harvard has a good union, at least for
my kind of employees, clerical and technical workers. But I really worry
about whether my good fortune is replicable for someone starting out
with the same aspirations.
LG: Why is that?
GS: Its all laid out very well and presciently by Russell Jacoby in The
Last Intellectuals. Its about why the kind of intellectual that flourished
in the thirties, forties, and fifties is a dying breed. That sounds a little
bit nostalgic, but its just that the situation is less and less tenable.
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Theres no cheap urban real estate, its hard to survive without a

regular salary, and academia has become professionalized in a way
that it wasnt in the thirties and forties. Its making independence
harder and harder. I dont think anybodys engineering it consciously,
but it almost seems as if theres a Geist of capitalismor at least that
all of capitalisms characteristics are converging toward a situation in
which everybody, both the overlords and the underclass, is
overworked and overstressed, and doing routinized and banal kinds of
work.
LG: What does that mean for the generalist? The death knell?
GS: Yes. Its true that knowledge is constantly expanding. A lot of it is
useless knowledge, but even useful knowledge, even in the arts, is
expanding. In the thirties, if you were particularly smart or audacious,
you could be an expertmaybe not on the level of a Meyer Schapiro
or Harold Rosenberg, but still an expert. But its not really possible to
be the kind of generalist that the New York intellectuals were now.
Expertise has become not only more difficult to acquire in the general
sense, but also more of a requisite. Back in the middle of the
twentieth century, literary intellectuals commanded the prestige and
authority to make political pronouncements. Now, by and large, they
dont. Jonathan Franzen writes critical grand salvos about the culture.
No one would take him seriously if he tried to write about American
foreign policy.
LG: Why is that? Why does no one take Jonathan Franzen seriously?
GS: People would say now, as they wouldnt then, Whats his
expertise? Whats his background? Nobody asked that about Camus.
Nobody said, Well, has he interviewed all of the relevant
policymakers? Has he read all of the secondary literature? Novelists
had the moral authority because the issues seemed less obscured by a
fog of conventional wisdom.

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LG: I saw that you had a spirited exchange recently on Crooked

Timber. About Franzen and sexist dillweeds, I believe. What
happened there?
GS: Like everybody, I suppose, I enjoy seeing things satirized and
ridiculed, except when I dont. And in this case, it started off with a
discussion of Jonathan Franzens essay on Karl Kraus and
contemporary culture. One of the bloggers said something like, I
think Franzens problem is that he wants to be the great male novelist
of our time. And I have to say that I havent been able to read great
male novelists for more than half a century. I think theyre all sexist
dillweeds, and its just impossible unless youre a sexist dillweed to
enjoy their books. I demurred.
LG: So say youre reading a nonfiction booka book of cultural
criticism. It advocates the most egalitarian of principles in the
strongest of terms. It is well written and convincing. Later you find out
the author has maybe a) spent his weekends with the Westboro
Baptist Church, and once picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, or
b) is a tyrant at home, and has been convicted of domestic abuse, or
c) donates money to white supremacist groups, or d) otherwise rejects
egalitarian principles in his or her day-to-day life. Would that
knowledge of the authors life change what you thought of the
authors book?
GS: Well, no. It would, of course, change what I thought of the author.
But it wouldnt affect the review, Im pretty sure. Not even if it were a
book advocating feminism and I found out that he really was a sexist
or worse. If the book itself were an eloquent, compelling defense of
feminism, I would cheer it on.
LG: Is there a distinction to be made here between fiction and
nonfiction?
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GS: Not to a book reviewer. In the Crooked Timber discussion, we got

to talking about Saul Bellow. Some people were saying, Really, how
can anyone think Herzog or Augie March, is a great novel, when the
women characters are just there for the man to feel betrayed by, or
impressed with his flair? Well, yes, thats an aspect of the book, and
Im glad that feminism has made me notice that kind of thing. But that
doesnt mean that in Augie March Saul Bellow didnt practically invent
a whole new prose style for American fiction. So yes, they have flaws,
but Im still capable of enjoying the books despite those flaws.
LG: This has something to do with the old saying that thinkers or
scholars cant be activists, or with the lingering idea that art and
politics must remain opposed. How have you taken up that debate in
your own work?
GS: My best thoughts about it are in the title essay of What Are
Intellectuals Good For? I still think any politics have to be invested
with moral imagination, and the moral imagination in our culture is, if
not most profoundly, then most influentially and resonantly expressed
in the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in nineteenth-century novels. Theyre
a kind of academy. I was going to say treasure house, though its not
as though we know what to look for and go to them and find those
things in a kind of useable formits that we are led through them at
an age when our moral imaginations are being formed. Theyre a
superior kind of pedagogy; they touch chords deeper in ones psyche
than most other experiences from which one might learn moral
lessons. So, in that sense, theyre profoundly political. The Sermon on
the Mount is I think where socialism starts. Its thrilling rhetorically and
morally as well.
My idea of the end of the world would be the hive mind. Nobody is
able to just sink deep into his or her own imagination or feelings.
But on the other hand, my heroes, the people I dedicated that book
to, the people we need at the moment, are the waders, the people
who wade into the facts, the details, in a way that I myself have no
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inclination to do. Chomsky, Nader, Greenwald, I. F. Stone, Alexander

Cockburn. Thats useful. Thats where political arguments ought to be
decided. But what side you join to begin with, what side you join the
political argument from, Id say depends a lot on your early literary
exposures.
LG: Is it okay for a social critic or thinker to identify a problem but not
offer a solution? Right now in the United States, do we have more
problem-flaggers than solution-generators?
GS: I once heard Chomsky say that Americans tend to come up after
talks and ask, What should we do? while in Central America and
India and the Caribbean, they came up and said, This is what were
doing, what do you think? For myself, Ive decided that the best form
of political activity is writing book reviews.
LG: From each according to ones own ability. . .
GS: Yes. But you know, you just have to start where you are. The
genius of the system is that its infinitely easier for people at the top
to coordinate than for the atomized, isolated, and insecure citizenry to
coordinate. Thats part of why business so consciously and relentlessly
destroyed unions. Because they knew that unions were almost a
prerequisite for any large-scale political organization among the 99
percent, many decades before it was conceived of as the 99 percent.
And its why they took over National Public Radio, because a lot of
people just talked to each other on the train, in the office, at the
coffee machine about things they heard, and they had discussion
boards on National Public Radio, and people could write in and find
other people . . . that had to be stopped.
The only president who kept Ralph Nader in his good books was
Jimmy Carter. It was just a couple years after hed written Unsafe at
Any Speed, which was the zenith of his prestige and authority. So he
had Carters ear and formulated for him a proposal for a department
of consumer protection, and it got within an ace of being passed. But
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce just wouldnt hear of it, and lobbied
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furiously against it . . . and it just missed. But that would have been
another way for isolated citizens to learn that lots of other people felt
the same way they did, and to have some way of contacting them and
organizing themselves.
Its hard, but thats how political change has to start. Of course it can
start any number of ways. Eventually there may be some Barack
Obama figure who really means it, and when he gets into office and
learns its going to be harder than he thought, wont just roll over. So
leaders are important, and grassroots action is important, and book
reviews even are important. Wherever one is, whatever one can do.
LG: Apropos of nothing then, do you think theres something
inherently conservative about book reviewing or criticism?
GS: Yes, I do, because books are one of the things that are in need of
conservation. Anyone for whom books have been an important part of
life is likely to feel that their survival cant be taken for granted. So
yes, in the sense that being a conservative is, as William F. Buckley
once defined it, standing athwart history and shouting, No! Of
course, Buckley was saying no to racial equality, and sexual equality,
and progressive taxation. That was his idea of the end of the world.
My idea of the end of the world would be the hive, the hive mind.
Sven Birkerts has a wonderful description of how the horizontal, linked
world is gradually evolving in that direction, to where nobody is ever
really alone, nobody is able to just sink deep into his or her own
imagination or feelings, the constant pressure of the horizontal
connections keeps you from descending below a certain depth. If hes
right about that, its the end of individuality as Ive known it and come
to admire and treasure it. And it may be that people who havent had
the formative experiences Ive had will find it perfectly satisfying, and
that I dont have the imaginative resources to either pity or envy them.
Their experiences may fall beyond my comprehension.

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LG: For you, is the rise of the hive mind tied to the decline of the
book?
GS:Yes. Because youre alone with the book. Other people may be
reading it somewhere else, but you dont know. I mean, you do know
that there are people out there, but to read a book, you cant be
paying attention to lots of other things. Things dont pop up on the
page. They do pop up on the screen. And books dont have
hyperlinks, so you cant run off and forget about the book for a bit.
LG: But they do have footnotes.
GS: They do.
LG: Which can send you down a wiki hole of an entirely different kind.
GS: True, if youre sitting in a library reading, then footnotes might
send you to the stacks. But if youre sitting at home reading, then you
just take notesI must look that up online or in the librarybut still
youre there, in the chair. It doesnt usually happen that you lose
yourself in a book, but it can happen. Its much harder to lose yourself
online, to lose yourself in the sense of losing consciousness of
everything else out there in the world. You can lose yourself online in
another way, by following one thing after another, moving from one
program or platform or site to another so constantly that you lose
your focus. But with a book, your focus can be so sharp, so deep, that
you can lose yourself in the other, benign sense . . . lose yourself
vertically rather than horizontally.
LG: Lose yourself in a good way. Although I do think that the hive
mind might be the endpoint of a certain kind of communitarian,
utopian vision. Is there anything about communitarianism that appeals
to you or tempts you?
GS: Well, I never really did have the communal temperament. I have
my little condo, I have my big record collection, my library, and my
routines, my habits, all of which Im very attached to. So no, I am not a
prime candidate or any kind of candidate for that kind of utopia. I
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guess the two best utopias Ive found so far, that I can imagine being
happy with, fitting into, that dont rouse any prickles of resistance to
me, are Edward Bellamys Looking Backward and Ernest Callenbachs
Ecotopia.
LG: And what appeals to you about those?
GS: Well, Looking Backward is a techno-utopia. But it really is
technology in the service of life. People work a few hours a day, and
the entire technology is designed to maximize individuation, to give
everyone the most possible opportunities to indulge their every
creative impulse.
Its a completely egalitarian society in the sense that there isnt a
hierarchy of privilege, except of course that real differencesreal
hierarchies of skill, judgment, and experienceare respected, and
people who have larger projects that the community has
democratically deliberated on will have more resources. It takes more
resources to experiment with a new energy-generation technology or
a new housing design than to write a novel. The whole society is
designed to give everybody the resources they need to follow their
inclinations. And technology figures crucially in that. It takes for
granted increasing technical progress.
Ecotopia is also friendly towards technology, but Callenbach was one
of the great environmentalists of the 20th century, and he really saw
how a sustainable society could be affluent, and laid it out in
extraordinary detail in that book. It was virtually self-published; it had
only a small cult following as far as I know, I wrote the only review of
it. But I think its politically astute and technically plausible. I would
defy anyone to say otherwise.
To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a disgruntled leftist
everything is capitalisms fault and inequalitys fault.

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LG: In For the Republic you mention in the course of discussing the
electoral college that many practices that now seem patently
indefensible once seemed perfectly natural to most peoplethe
divine right of kings, for example, or child labor. What dinosaur will be
next to fall? Which of todays naturalized practices will we be appalled
to remember one hundred years from now?
GS: Well, inequality obviously. It always comes down to unnecessary
suffering. I just cant believe that people in the 25th century are still
going to believe this garbage about not coddling the poor. What is it
that Paul Ryan said, The safety net is becoming a hammock,
Americans are becoming dependent? If anybody says that without
general ridicule immediately descending on them a hundred or two
hundred years from now, Ill be pretty darn surprised.
LG: Do you consider yourself a radical?
GS: Well, I like the word. I like it better than progressive. But although
Im a radical, I would be perfectly happy with a non-radical measure
like Obamacare. Millions of people will be able to get a check up, a
physical, more than once every five years or so. There are an awful lot
of people hurting very badly, so anything that helps Im happy with.
Im a gradualist; Im not a revolutionary. I think its essential to talk
about structures and constraints and class. Exactly what non-radical
journals like The New Republic and the Atlantic dont do. The whole
young generation of writers theyve spawnedEzra Klein, Jonathan
Cohn, Jonathan Chaitare all very smart. But their focus is rather
narrow. And their moral imagination is really on leave. I like them
better than I like whoever their conservative counterparts are, but Im
also frustrated that they can be wholly absorbed by the details of the
political process, the pros and cons of Dodd Frank. So, gradualist and
radical, thats how I think of myself.
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LG: Theres an essay in the book called Message from Room 101
after George Orwells Room 101 in 1984about writing (or not
writing) with depression. Where is this piece coming from?
GS: To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a disgruntled
leftist everything is capitalisms fault and inequalitys fault. I had, not
an obsession exactly, but a constant fear of being impoverished in my
middle age. There was one time when my job changed entirelywell
not entirely, but basically my job started involving software. I had been
on email, but I hadnt had to master any office software to do my job,
and I thought if I couldnt, then Ill lose my job and Ill never got
another job and Ill just sink into the abyss. So I fell into this
depression. And I kept thinking, if we had socialism, there would be
other reasons to get depressed but not exactly my current reasons.
Im sure the larger causes were my neurotransmitter imbalance or
whatever, physiological conditions. But my immediate demons were a
result of the system of wage labor, private property, competition,
inequality. So when I got better and was able to read and write and
think again, I hadnt forgotten. And I guess I wanted to salvage
something from this lifetime of personal clinical depression.
LG: You write that according to Camus, the soul is not only a
philosophical problem, but also, from a depressives point of view, a
political problem. Can you say what you mean by that?

GS: I mean that economic insecurity is stressful. It was obvious enough
before we had the technology to measure it, but now its actually
been proven by double-blind studies. And its also clear that whatever
the contributing causes of depression, one of them is almost always
stress, life stress. So, it just seems a no-brainer that if we could
eliminate one large source, one very widespread source of serious
stress for many people, than we would be slightly better protected
from depressive illness. And of course the reason why economic
security is not universal is wholly political.
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LG: Can I end with a broad question: With apologies to Orwell, why
do you write?
GS: It started when I discovered Noam Chomsky. I heard him mention
that he was coming out with a big book in a few months, and I
thought, in the first flush of my enthusiasm, wow this is really going to
take the culture by storm. Anyway, it didnt get single review for
months and months. So I wrote a review, put it in the mail to the
Village Voice and said, Look Im not a writer, I dont expect you to
publish this review, I wrote this just for you so you would know this
book is worth reviewing, and the books editor called me back and
said, Are you sure youre not a writer? Anyway were going to
publish your review, and by the way, wed like you to write another
one. So thats how I started, just a fluke really. Then, you know, you
just kind of get to liking seeing your name in print.
Its also because I am too lazy to be an activist, and I do have these
political emotions. It keeps me from just choking on them, and it also
allows me to avoid getting out and expending any actual physical
energy on political organizing. So it serves a lot of functions.
What did Orwell say anyway?
LG: He said a combination of sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm,
historical impulse, and political purpose, but in the end everyone is
vain, selfish, and lazy, with a demon behind them, and some
mysterious impulse is the ultimate driver.
GS: Exactly, couldnt have put it better.
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INVESTING LIKE AN ECOSYSTEM

November 20th, 2013 by Rob Avis
Over the last few years, I have been formulating my opinion on how to
approach investing and what do to with extra cash. And I cant believe
how many people have told me in the last few months that they are
anticipating another huge market correction basically any time now.
Mulling all of this over (and with the help of a good forest analogy)
Ive recently developed a few key principles that I believe will help to
guide good investment strategy.
How and where should I invest my money? is a question that I get
asked a lot and underlying that question is often fear. In some ways,
the subject of the fear is a giant elephant in the room. The elephant
can be any number of things = impending economic collapse is
usually the biggest elephant, but I would argue that he looks bigger
than he is because he is standing on top of other elephants, such as
collapse of the food system, peak oil, climate change and many more
(in fact, there is a whole herd of elephants in the room).
The initial reason people want to invest their money or wealth is
because they have generated a surplus. They want to see their
investment appreciate in value (i.e. make a return on their investment)
and have some security that they wont lose this surplus.
However, most present day investments schemes send the surplus
money into a far-away system that extracts non-renewable
resources and ultimately reduces ecosystem output and harms the
planet. Many people just end up feeling guilty and very anxious
because they know (or suspect) that this growth-game cant go on
forever (at least at its current growth rate). They do not feel secure nor
do they feel good about these investments.
So, the question I think that we need to ask is What is the real
purpose of investment and how can it be done in a way that makes
the planet a better place?.
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Well, first off, the third ethic in permaculture is Return of Surplus. This
refers to investing the surplus back into the original system that
generated the surplus. The desired result is to make the original
system stronger, more resilient, and ultimately anti-fragile.
Anti-fragility
A system is anti-fragile when it evolves and improves after dealing
with some sort of a shock. Grasslands and forests are examples of
anti-fragile systems. In order to improve and evolve, grasslands need
to be grazed aggressively and many types of forests need fire.
On the other hand, resilient systems resist change and resist
evolution. A fortress with a moat could be considered quite resilient.
However, with enough shock, it will eventually fail.
Lets start by thinking of investment in the context of an analogy
found in nature. How does a forest ecosystem deal with surplus.
Forests capture the sun, water and soil nutrient and use this energy to
grow trees and other biomass. A portion of the total biomass (leaves
and branches) fall back to the ground to decompose on site. This
could be considered the tree investing in its own systems. The
decomposing matter increases soil fertility and the whole forest
becomes stronger and ultimately, anti-fragile.
Typical investment practice is to invest surplus cash into other
companies and stock markets. The moment we do this, we lose
control of that surplus and, more often than not, it goes to destructive
ends. Because it is stuck in the conventional economy, we are then
susceptible to the swings of the economy a broken system in chaos.
This chaos permeates into our lives and creates anxiety that we aim to
avoid through investment.
Think about it if the forest always exported its leaves to a different
ecosystem the forest would, at the very least, become fragile, and in
the event of a natural shock, like a fire, it would not be able to
regenerate. Systems that dont re-invest into themselves, require
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resources from the outside. When the needs of a system are not met
from within we pay the price in energy and pollution.
Its as simple as this: for ecosystems, exporting biomass is
impoverishing.
We can view our surplus money in the same way as the leaves of the
forest. People that are smart with their money invest the surplus into
things that buttress them and the systems around them. This can
include tangible things like solar panels, perennial food plants,
greenhouses, passive solar buildings that heat and cool themselves,
gardens, books, soil and water harvesting equipment but they can be
as intangible as education, community and design. Ecosystems give us
a whole host of ideas we could consider as templates for investments
stacking assets (biomass, seedlings, new trees), buffer systems
(mother trees investing in surrounding trees), complementary options
(parachuting seeds into new, proximal microecosystems), attractants
(flowers).
A couple of years ago I went to a talk put on by Chris Martenson in
Edmonton. Chris is famous for his popular online Crash Course. Chris
gave his usual spiel on how most investment strategy is based on the
preceding 20 years of investment statistics and that this is
underpinned with the assumption that there will always be more
energy, soil, forest, air, and water that we can exploit. However, how
can the next 20 years be anything like the last 20 years if we have run
out of cheap oil, 50% of the forests are gone, the air is getting worse
and we are running out of water? His main point is that the next 20
years are not going to be anything like the last 20 years.
What really blew me away was the private conversation that I had with
Chris after his talk. He told me that he had given the same
presentation to Wall Street bankers the week prior. These bankers
gave Chris the following comment: We know all of this already. We
have our bug-out locations in the woods so that when the music stops
playing we can hide out while the world unwinds. They believe they
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need to keep dancing until the music stops everything will look
normal until the very last moment.
Wow! These folks Chris spoke with actually recognized that the system
is broken. They continue to sell their investment schemes with the
knowledge that things are very likely to come crashing down. And
they are prepared for this crash. Theyve invested their surplus into
off-grid cabins stocked with food and other supplies.
So how do you manage that information, not get freaked out and
preserve wealth in a way that allows you to ride out the storm? That is
the question that I have been asking myself for 10 years. Here is what I
have come to.
So, Where Should I Invest?
I believe that there are a few key areas where you can invest your
money that return the surplus, increase anti-fragility and that are not
subject to massive fraud. Here are a few core principles to help to
guide you to good investment strategy.

Can you wear it? This does not mean clothing necessarily it is stuff
that will provide you with value regardless of any economic route and
it will keep or increase in value in an economic downturn. Examples
include food, solar panels, generator, a home, heating fuel, perennial
food systems, water harvesting systems, and gardening tools. This is
similar advice that this very wealthy wall street investment manager
gives to his clients. While I do not admire or look up to people like
him, I do agree with his logic.
Can you store it in your brain? Education, especially anything that
teaches you how to take care of yourself is invaluable. Get some skills.
Start a garden (even a small one), learn to use a hammer, cook, build a
house (Dirt Craft Natural Building) or learn to keep bees (Apiaries and
Bees for Communities).
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Can you call on it? Community is the most important of these as it is

the relationships that form a web and it is the web that is anti-fragile.
Invest into your friendships and your community.
A lot of people recommend gold and silver, but I can not wear those
things and gain any value from them plus they require destructive
mining processes which I am fundamentally and ethically not aligned
with. In addition, it is a lot easier to manipulate these metals than the
proponents of them would have you believe.
One of the other interesting things that Chris Martenson said to me
was that he had his entire property designed by a local permaculture
designer. Finding and purchasing the right piece of property based on
your goals (the topic of a future blog) and then designing it and
building it out so that it will meet your goals and provide for your
needs is a perfect way to simultaneously hit all three principles above.
Having a piece of property that has a solar heated home that keeps
you warm, grows fuel, food, fibre, forage for livestock, harvests water,
grows topsoil, turns waste into resources and builds community is
probably one of the most anti-fragile investments that you can make.
If you get it right, it is investments like this that actually appreciate in
downturns!
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Is Capitalism in Trouble?
CEOS ARE GROWING NERVOUS. CAN THEY HELP SAVE OUR
SYSTEM FROM ITS WORST EXCESSES?
By Chrystia Freeland
On a Wednesday in mid-September, some 30 entrepreneurs from
around the world put on boots and blue jeans and spent four hours
digging out Namaste Solar, a solar-power company in Boulder,
Colorado, from under three feet of mud.
The international cleanup crew was in town for the annual conference
of B Lab, a global organization of for-profit businesses (known as B
Corps) that choose to legally bind themselves to meeting social and
environmental objectives. Namaste Solar is one of the worlds 830
certified B Corps, and after flooding of near-Biblical proportions,
some assembled peers decided to lend a hand.
As we were leaving, we got on the bus pulling away, and we saw six
or seven Namaste employees having a team hug, Andrew Kassoy, a
co-founder of B Lab and one of the diggers, told me. People said,
Thats what this community is aboutit is about businesses taking
collective action to serve society.
We are well into the age of Oprah, so there is nothing too remarkable
about corporate group hugs, particularly if your company has namaste
in its name. Nor is there anything too special about groups of
businesspeople building team spirit through volunteer work and
assertions of the social value their labors provide.
But the B Corp community is genuinely ambitious. And it is part of a
wider international movement of CEOs, investors, and business-school
professors who hope to transform the way business is done, creating a
more sustainable system of capitalism. Parts of the movement are
familiar. Environmentally friendly business practices have long been
mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with
organic foods. Humane treatment of the developing-world workers
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who sew our clothes or build our iPads isnt quite as popular a brand
promise, but it is hardly novel.
What is newer is the worry about the Western middle class and the
fear that capitalism as it currently operates isnt delivering for that
broad swath of society. In summing up the Colorado retreat, the B Lab
team emphasized this idea, touting the higher-quality jobs that B
Corps provide relative even to other socially minded businesses that
have subjected themselves to a review of their social impact:
employees are 45 percent more likely to be paid bonuses than people
at those firms, and 55 percent more likely to have at least some of
their health-care costs paid. B Corps are also 18 percent more likely to
choose suppliers from low-income communities.
We are going through a shift, said Marcello Palazzi, one of the
leaders of the B Corp movement in Europe. Society as a whole is
realizing the capitalist system itself is quite dysfunctional. We have
created an economy and corporations that in many ways have become
unethical. One response is to go out on the streets, like Occupy Wall
Street. Another is the B Corp movement.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has
become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder.
It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of
the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global
economy.
Dominic Barton, the global managing director at McKinsey, is one
critic: Capitalism, even 150 years ago, was more inclusive; there was
more of a sense of social responsibility, he told me. Today, trust in
business is declining. The system doesnt seem to be as fair or as
inclusive. It doesnt seem to be helping broader society.
Bartons concern is shared by David Blood, a former head of Goldman
Sachs Asset Management, who co-founded the investment firm
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Generation Investment Management with former Vice President Al

Gore a decade ago. Some people say income inequality doesnt
matter. I disagree, Blood said. We are creating a situation in which
only the elite of the elite can be successfuland that is not
sustainable.
Both men worry that if capitalism doesnt deliver for the middle class,
then the middle class will eventually opt for something else. Business
needs what Barton calls a license to operate, and without a new
approach, he fears, it risks losing that license.
We have so many people who are suffering, says Kurt Landgraf, the
former president and CEO of DuPont Merck, and now the CEO of
ETS, the nonprofit educational-testing company, where he is
championing an ambitious new project to study and try to reverse
declines in economic opportunity. (I consulted on the project.) If we
dont do something to change the trajectory of the economy, these
people will eventually become advocates for more-extreme change,
and we as a country will experience significant social upheaval.
Landgraf told me that most of the corporate executives and board
members he knows are beginning to share this concern.
Chief executives have been among the biggest financial beneficiaries
of unsustainable capitalism. But according to Roger Martin, the
head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto
(where I am a fellow), and a strategy consultant to CEOs, including
Procter & Gambles A. G. Lafley, their lavish pay doesnt fully
compensate for being part of a dysfunctional system. Too many CEOs,
Martin said, focus on the short-term, pump up stock prices, make a
bundle, and leave the company before it all comes crashing down.
That is not an ethical life, that is a miserable life. And its lack of
inherent rewards, he told me, is itself one reason why many CEOs
dont stay long in their positions.
For those CEOs who arent quite so troubled by leading an unethical
life, the sustainable capitalists have another argumentthat their
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approach is a better way to make money over the long term. At least
some evidence exists that companies that look beyond quarterly
earnings, and that make exceptional efforts to treat workers as
stakeholders, weather crises better and see higher long-term
profits.
People ask, What is the cost of being sustainable to your
portfolio?, Blood said. Actually, we think that by being sustainable,
it gives us a better chance of delivering returns to our clients.
Intellectual champions of this view now include Barton; Harvard
Business Schools Michael Porter, the father of the theory of national
competitive advantage; and Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of PIMCO, a
$2 trillion global investment-management company.

Barton precisely dates the moment Western capitalism started to go
off the rails: it was 1970, when Milton Friedman first advocated
maximizing shareholder value as the paramount duty of the chief
executive. That notionwhich reduced issues like employee wellbeing to externalities that shouldnt concern a companys manager
helped catalyze a divorce of business from society. As Friedman
said, the job of business was business, and that was it.
What made it possible to sell this version of capitalism to society was
the promise that if business were allowed to simply get on with the
job, all of us would be better off. Businesses were, as Mitt Romneys
2012 presidential campaign had it, job creators; burdening them
with additional responsibilities would be self-defeating.
It is easy to forget that this black-and-white view of the role of
companies replaced a very different philosophy. In the 1950s and 60s,
Americas business leaders widely believed they were responsible to
the community as a whole, not just shareholders. They led their
companies in a time when their workers wages increased faster than
their own salaries. And they collectively advocated policieslike
higher taxesthat went against their immediate class interests.
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That era, of course, had roots in a messier period that recalls our own.
Business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was red in tooth and
claw, and inequality surged. One consequence was tremendous
innovation. Two others were periodic financial crises and violent social
upheavalincluding the rise of communism. By the end of the Second
World War, smart capitalists throughout the West realized they had to
serve society as a whole, or be devoured by it. The communist specter
no longer haunts Europe, of course, but the leaders of the
sustainable-capitalism movement believe we are approaching a similar
tipping point in the relationship between business and society.
It is unclear to what extent sustainable business can solve the big
problems its leaders have set out to address. Treating workers
decently and paying them better would help ease the middle-class
squeeze and, within limits, might ultimately improve the bottom line.
But those limits, presumably, would be reached fairly quickly: Most
businesses are constrained by the way their competitors operate. The
decisions of individual CEOs wont stop whats new about capitalism
in the 21st centurythe job-hollowing impact of technological change
and globalization.
The sustainable capitalists dont claim to have all the answers to these
challenges. But one measure of their concern is the newfound
openness some of them have toward a greater role for the state. They
want the government to help themand their rivalsdo the right
thing, like raise wages or repatriate taxable profits. If the rules were
changed, everyone would have to behave differently, Kurt Landgraf
told me. If they believe that those changes are in the interests of
society, I dont think American CEOs and boards would go into a
massive revolt.
Of course, global markets and global competition constrain even
national action today, in a way they didnt in the 1950s. Solutions to
the problems of the middle class are neither obvious nor easy. But if
corporate culture is genuinely beginning to shift, that would doubtless
open new opportunities, and make room for new ideasas well as
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some old ones. What one increasingly hears in Western boardrooms

and corner offices is a twist on Saint Augustine: Lord, make me good,
but make my competitors and my investors good, too.
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How to Waste a Crisis

Philip Mirowskis Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste seeks to
discredit economic explanations of the crisis, but in so doing
discounts any possible political alternatives to neoliberalism
In 1978, in a series of lectures at the Collge de France, philosopher
Michel Foucault told the gathered students that they should start
reading University of Chicago economists. Almost 30 years before
management consultants like Tom Peters would start promoting the
value of people measuring their own human capital, Foucault walked
his audience through obscure journal articles on the economics of the
self by the idea of human capitals intellectual progenitor, Gary Becker.
Decades before neoliberalism would become a widespread
intellectual crutch word, Foucault declared, Neoliberalism is not
Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society. So what is it then?
What are the terms stakes? And why does the condition it describes
seem to lumber on despite the economic devastation of the past five
years, which might have spelled its definitive end? This question forms
the core of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the most recent
book by economic historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski.
Mirowskis book can be thought of as two long essays stitched
together. The first is about defining what neoliberalism is and what it
is not, as well as a background history on the institutions that have
come to be associated with it. The second documents where the
economics profession stands in the aftermath of the financial crisis:
how it has resisted reform and may even be beyond it, despite
economists embarrassing failures.
By now, the term neoliberal has likely been added to the avoid
jargon list on numerous graduate-school syllabi. But it has become
ubiquitous in left analysis because it has proved useful too useful, in
that it has been deployed in at least two distinct ways. One of these is
the version popularized by geographer David Harvey, particularly in A
Brief History of Neoliberalism. The upshot of his definition can quickly
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be summarized: class war. As Harvey writes, neoliberalism is a theory

of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being
can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by
strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. What
makes this liberation class war? Because the state that produces it
enshrines a view of freedom that prioritizes the interests of private
property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial
capital.
Philip Mirowski Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown Verso Books (384
pages)The idea that the past 30 years of economic policy have been
shaped by and for capital holders was the core of Naomi Kleins The
Shock Doctrine, a history of power grabs with neoliberal alibis in
places ranging from Iraq to Chile to Russia. It also undergirds Dumnil
and Lvys The Crisis of Neoliberalism, a heterodox economic reading
of the changes in business structure that lead to increased instability.
Theres also a version of this definition of neoliberalism that liberals
use as well, albeit in a less radical way. This story can be traced back
to an eight-page memo written in 1971 by corporate lawyer (and
future Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell, titled Attack on
American Free Enterprise System. Powell urges businesses to
consolidate their rhetorical and political strategies and bundle their
cash to attack their opponents from the college campus, the pulpit,
the media, the intellectual and literary journals There should be no
hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly
seek destruction of the system. This, according to many recent leftliberal economic narratives, like Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob
Hacker and Paul Pierson, prompted business interests to coordinate a
class strategy in the 1970s that was then unleashed in the 1980s with
the ascension of Reagan.
There is a seductive clarity to the class-war version of neoliberalism,
but it is not the one discussed by Mirowski. Instead, he draws on
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Foucaults notion of governmentality how political regimes make

subjectivity conditional on the subjects being able to be ruled to
argue that the neoliberal project is less about the rich imposing an
agenda from the top down and more a matter of forming subjects
from the bottom up.
For Mirowski, neoliberalism is first and foremost a political doctrine,
not a class strategy or commercial project. Unlike the classical
liberalism of the 18th century or todays waves of libertarianism and
anarcho-capitalism, neoliberalism though an anti-democracy
project nonetheless seeks to use the state rather than destroy it.
But despite its reliance on state power, it stands in contrast with
midcentury Keynesianism, which sought to assure full employment
and attempted to lean against the indifferent barbarism of market
economies. Neoliberals dont see corporate power or inequality as
problems to be checked through state intervention.
The neoliberal perspective, as Mirowski defines it, recognizes simply
that society and markets are constructed through regulation. They are
not self-organizing or spontaneous; they do not occur without
government intervention and some established rule of law. As
sociologist Loc Wacquant puts it, the neo in neoliberalism is the
remaking and redeployment of the state as the core agency that
actively fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective
representations suited to making the fiction of markets real and
consequential. This emphasis on making subjects who believe in
frictionless markets as mechanisms for revealing truth and the social
good is what distinguishes neoliberalism from so-called classical
liberalism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, paleo-conservativism,
and all the other reactionary, right-wing projects.
In neoliberal society markets dont serve the pre-existing needs of
subjects; subjects are fabricated to serve the market. The subjects
purpose in life becomes synonymous with the facilitation of economic
growth. Entrepreneurship becomes the ethical model of how to live.
For Mirowski, neoliberalism constructs a subject who has to
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somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator

the neoliberal self dissolves the distinction between producer and
consumer. The self thus becomes more a malleable set of economic
relationships than a coherent and continuous whole. This coincides
with policymakers calls for increased flexibility on the part of
individual workers when it comes to labors vulnerabilities to the
business cycle.
The individual is too fragmented to sustain broader forms of
belonging, If this is too theory heavy, consider Jennifer Silvas recent
Coming Up Short (2013), which interviews numerous working-class
young people in the wake of the economic crisis. Silva finds that they
define adulthood in the rejection of social groups and institutions and
an embrace of an individualized, therapeutic, self, matching the
theory remarkably welllet alone class solidarity, and this alienation
from collective identity is matched by an ontological, even religious
understanding of risk perceived as a given, one that isnt to be
mitigated but instead mastered. As economist Christopher Payne has
noted, this entrepreneurial view of risk as spiritual calling replaces the
Keynesian midcentury ideal of the worker-saver, for whom stability
and risk mitigation were a combination of rewards and political goals
rather than a presumed punishment.
Though Mirowski doesnt bring this up, the neoliberal self ends up
resembling the corporate firm as defined by Ronald Coase: an entity
articulated by a loose set of contracts, with the primary purpose of
minimizing its transaction costs. Like the Coasean firm, the
neoliberal subject makes a fetish of efficiency and aspires to be able
to reorient itself at a moments notice, to expedite the flow of goods,
though it has no ontological cohesion outside an imperative to
engage in the swirling needs of the marketplace. This is the self under
neoliberalism, an executive function carved out by the entrepreneurial
embrace of economic risk.

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***

The second half of Never Let a Serious Crisis, on the economics
profession, will be familiar to those who have watched economists
squirm in films like Inside Job. Their projects of ignoring any
possibilities that an unchecked financial sector could do anything but
help the economy while collecting generous paychecks imploded
alongside the rampant fraud and panic of the financial crisis. Pointing
out the sheer corruption of the economics fields elite is a worthy use
of anyones time, but Mirowski is hunting bigger game. He wants to
argue that the entire edifice of postWorld War II orthodox economics
policy is incapable of governing the economy without producing
perennial crashes and human misery. But he never makes the case
directly, perhaps because he has no path out of the dire situation he
seeks to prove.
According to Mirowski, there was a moment after the 2008 crash
when the economics profession could have performed some rigorous
self-criticism and made an honest assessment of what had gone
wrong. But the proposed technocratic fixes addressing the
efficient markets hypothesis in finance, adding so-called bounded
rationality to microeconomic models to make them behavioral, and
adding various bells and whistles to macroeconomic models were
particularly ineffective in reforming or even clarifying what is going on
in financial markets. And the various explanations of the crisis that
were brought up for debate in mainstream publications and through a
network of economic policy experts ended up not serving any
notion of scientific inquiry but instead were means of deflecting,
confusing, and delaying any progress toward uncovering truth or
consensus.

So how did the economists get away? According to Mirowski, they are
protected through a web of prestige that stretches across the
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academy to quasi-accountable offices of the government like the

Federal Reserve, as well as the network of policy think tanks that
provide so-called expertise. This miasma of prestige has become too
important to the actual logic of financial capitalism at this moment
elite economics dominates all these important international
institutions, and theres been a subtle wagon-circling at that level.
Thus, like the banks, economists themselves are too big to fail.
But while Mirowski is on point about that, he doesnt engage actual
narratives that could explain why we had a housing bubble, collapse,
and subsequent prolonged depression. His argument is predicated on
a complete absence of such a story being told, but that story is
developing. As a result of increased savings in Asia, likely due to harsh
austerity imposed on countries like Thailand and South Korea by the
IMF, a rush of capital flooded into the U.S. One part of financial sector
investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers used
dubious ways of managing risks for these investors that ended up
promising that their money was safe in housing, with other parts of
the financial sector reinsurers like AIG writing insurance on the
economy as a whole. When housing prices fell, defaults skyrocketed.
Between that and looming unemployment, creditors panicked, setting
off a crisis when they began withdrawing investment and demanding
collateral. Underwater homeowners started to hoard their earnings,
leading to a drop-off in aggregate demand.

You can think this story of the crisis is right or wrong, and different
people emphasize different parts of it. But for Mirowski it doesnt
exist, and he leaves the crisis as a giant question mark. Indeed the
financial crisis itself, on which Mirowski spends most of his time, has
become one of the least interesting aspects of our current economic
malaise. Gary Gorton pointed out that what happened in 2008 looked
a lot like a bank run out of Its a Wonderful Life, but instead of local
townfolks it was various financial entities like the overnight repo
lending market. (Mirowski dismisses Gorton for working for AIG when
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it was issuing credit default swaps. This should be no disqualification:

Irving Fisher and, in his own way, Keynes were both gambling high
right before the Great Depression and used their own experiences in
the market help them try to figure out what happened.)
The bigger issues, like why the economy has become so dependent
on bubbles to try to generate growth, sit on the sidelines. The parts of
this story he does address he dismisses far too quickly. (His trolling
tendency is to bring up such concepts only to scold you for showing
interest in them.) Paul Krugman and Gauti Eggerstons theory that a
crushing housing debt burden explains high unemployment is also
summarily rejected for not being a strong enough foundation to
relaunch Keynesian macroeconomics. Perhaps. But it does provide a
direction for the deeper empirical work that might lead there, or
wherever Mirowski thinks the alternative to neoliberalism lies. (He
notes that In this book, I hold no brief for Keynesian economics as an
automatic prescription for whatever ails us in the twenty-firstcentury.)
Mirowski seems to want the academy to find a salvation through a mix
of economic philosophy, history, and the political construction of
markets. While useful in some ways, this sadlyIts clear that Mirowski is
keen on bringing back a critique of how markets and economies are
created through political power, a consistently suppressed body of
knowledge he traces in endnotes and asides from early legal realists
like Robert Hale through Karl Polanyi to current arguments from legal
theorists like Bernard Harcourt over the illusion of free markets.
Though crucial for the left to recover and embrace, its not clear how
this tradition can guide us on the macroeconomic problems of
perpetual unemployment and unused capacity that happens when you
put all those markets together. misses the wave of post-Keynesian
thought that has been building in small heterodox departments,
amplified by blogs and comments sections, that has been given a new
life by those on the Internet looking for an alternative to the
mainstream. Ranging from debate about the nature of monetary
systems through looking at the sectoral balances of the economy, the
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dominant move for those challenging the mainstream has been to try
and reboot the macroeconomics of the first Keynesian era.
***
Given that Mirowski wants Never Let a Crisis to be a definitive
statement on where neoliberalism stands today, his dismissal of
Harveys version of the story (neoliberalism as the simple deployment
of class power over the unsuspecting masses) prevents productive
dialogue between his approach and that of more traditionally Marxist
approaches. Thats unfortunate, because a stronger imbrication of the
two might help us better understand what to make of neoliberalism
after the financial crisis. Mirowski is keen on watching a neoliberal
thought collective of interlocking institutions advancing an
ideological agenda, but this political project has evolved in odd
directions in recent years that are hard to assimilate to either
definition of neoliberalism alone.

Having successfully resisted either nationalization or a substantial
dismantling of finance after the 2008 bailouts, the American neoliberal
collective Mirowski identifies has focused on battles over subsidized
health care and fiscal austerity. From Mirowskis perspective,
Obamacare is entirely consistent with a neoliberal approach to
governance: It builds a quasi-universal system of health insurance
through the private market, with the governments role limited to
establishing the background conditions and compelling participation
in the market through legal force. It reorients the basic welfare-state
plank of social insurance toward individuals managing their own risks,
neutralizing its danger as a rallying point for resistance to a neoliberal
order while allowing the state to largely abdicate its role in mitigating
citizens health risks. It assures that we experience the process of
ensuring against the worst risks as an inherently market-driven
transaction rather than a right.
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Yet the entirety of right-wing think tanks and movement infrastructure

has spent the past several years assaulting this addition to health-care
policy. Its also called for hard money and austerity across the board in
the midst of a Great Depression, cutting government employment
and funding to a bare minimum while also calling for a dismantling of
federal government by rolling its various pieces to the states, where it
will be easier to starve.
Listening to the movements complaints, you see old-school reaction:
Undeserving people are getting free things they dont deserve, the
job creators need to have any pretense of a burden removed from
them to succeed. The rich do not want to pay higher taxes to improve
social well-being, and rank-and-file petit bourgeois dont want to see
the poor with the same type of social insurance they have.
In what sense is this neoliberal? Some of this could be viewed as an
attempt to create market citizens, and an ideological story can be told
about how the rights current program fully shifts risks to the individual
and makes them an even more conscious participant in managing
their own risks. But on its face, it looks a lot like class war, full stop.
Mirowski never explains why the ideological project of market
subjectivity serves any other purpose but class war, or why, even when
neoliberal tenets about embracing precarity as liberation have taken
hold broadly, the movement continues to fuel itself with reactionary
ressentiment. If neoliberalism is not class war, why hasnt it been
content with winning?
Mirowskis myopia, combined with a aggressive yet obtuse writing
style designed to alienate casual readers, cuts off discussions of
potential alternatives out of the current morass, and ironically paints
too positive a picture of where orthodoxy stands at the current
moment. Never Let a Crisis provides a detailed description of
neoliberal thought as it stands on the eve of the crisis. Yet its lack of
engagement with actually existing theories of what has happened and
what could happen going forward, as well as the conflicting
definitions of what a neoliberal project entails, would have moved the
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conversation much farther forward. Because the class war doesnt

show any sign of stopping soon. Elites are fighting on terms that, for
all their effect on subjectivities, are far more about dismantling what
remains of the public and taking what is left for themselves.
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Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?

The global pool of wealth is bigger than ever. Credit Suisses 2013
Global Wealth Report puts it at $241 trillion, or 68 percent bigger
than a decade ago. Thats not to say that it is being spread more
evenly10 percent of the worlds population possesses 86 percent of
the money. Wealth is being created and stockpiled so fast, the report
projects, that in just two generations time, there could be 1 billion
millionaires in the world. That means roughly 1 in 5 adults could soon
call themselves a millionaire.
Even billionaires arent the exotic species they once were. According
to Forbes, there are 1,426 of them today, with more than 200 of them
having reached 10-figure status in the last year alone. When Forbes
started its billionaire list 25 years ago, there were only 140. Its hard to
imagine the likes of Evan Spiegel, 23-year-old co-founder of Snapchat,
turning down multibillion-dollar offers from Google and Facebook
even a couple of years ago. Hitting the 10-figure mark: not as cool as
it used to be.
China has a virtual Rockefeller-like monopoly on rare Earth metals.
It wasnt always so easy. When John D. Rockefeller rose from a clerk
earning 50 cents a day at a produce company to become the worlds
first billionaire a century ago, the fortune he amassed would have
made Bill Gates swoon. In 1918, Rockefellers taxable income was a
staggering $33 million, or slightly more than $550 million in todays
dollars. That dwarfs Warren Buffetts 2010 tax bill, where he paid just
under $7 million on $40 million in taxable income. At the time,
Rockefellers fortune alone amounted to 1.53 percent of the U.S.
economy, the equivalent of some $350 billion today.
But even then, Rockefeller wasnt halfway to the next monetary
milestone: a trillion dollars. No one since has even come close. Heres
a clue to just how alien a concept of personal wealth this is: So far,
neither Merriam-Webster dictionary nor Oxford have acknowledged
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the word trillionaire. How does one become something that doesnt
exist yet?
Rockefellers rise to extreme wealth came from a familiar source: oil. In
1870, he founded the Standard Oil Company; by the end of that
decade, Standard Oil was refining 90 percent of the oil in the U.S. The
timing of Rockefellers ascendency was perfect: The post-war U.S. was
expanding westward and petroleum became the global currency of
industrialization. Rockefellers road to 10 figures wasnt paved with
good business sense alone; he also benefited from monopolistic
practices. When the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Standard
Oil in 1911, the company spun off oil predecessors into the titans of
the modern industry: Conoco, Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Rothschild family had built the
infrastructure of modern banking. The patriarch, Mayer Amschel
Rothschild, set the family on a path pioneering modern finance, acting
as a central bank to the continent, striking deals that helped finance
the infrastructure of European industrialization, and making them the
wealthiest family the world had ever seen.
Could the rise of Rockefeller and the Rothschilds be replicated to
create a trillionaire? First, you have to actually want to make that much
money. Rockefeller was driven by what he thought was a higher
calling to make more and more, but also to give it away. "I believe the
power to make money is a gift of God," Rockefeller said. "It is my
duty to make money and even more money and to use the money I
make for the good of my fellow men."
With his unimaginable wealth, Rockefeller pioneered a contradictory
pursuit: the art of giving it away. By the end of his life, he had given
away more than $500 million of his fortune, giving rise to modern
philanthropy. He invested heavily in education; from his wealth, the
University of Chicago was born. He poured funds into medical
research to cure diseases and medical schools to train doctors.
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Rockefeller strove for efficiency in giving just as in his business

pursuits, in order to solve the problem of giving money away without
making paupers of those who receive it." Its an instinct that two of
todays wealthiestBill Gates and Warren Buffettshare. The pairs
donations to Gates foundation made it a $40 billion juggernaut. And
they dont just want to give their own cash away; they want their
fellow billionaires to pledge to give the majority of their wealth to
philanthropy. That makes Gates, Buffett, and the many who wish to
emulate them all longshots for trillionaire status.
Following in Rockefellers footsteps in the extraction business isnt a
sure bet, either. There surely are still billions to be had in oil, but
trillions? In an already competitive industry, production has gotten
more complicated and expensive. Rockefeller built Standard Oil in the
early days of the commercial oil business and relentlessly absorbed
competitors to create a monopoly. So tight was his grip on the market
that it spurred the antitrust movement, which hinders his successors
from achieving the same sort of dominance. As Rockefellers oil
prepotency waned, global production flourished; in a frantically
developing industrialized world, oil reserves took on strategic
importance. That meant the countries resting atop oil reserves werent
going to let it go. Governments have become accustomed to
demanding a larger share of the profits for themselves.

Could a new wonder mineral arise to anoint a new Rockefeller? Its
certainly possible. With the explosion of mobile technology from
cellphones to laptops to hybrid cars, the insatiable need for batteries
has made rare Earth metals a hot commodity. But they, too, are found
within national boundaries. In fact, 97 percent of the worlds rare Earth
metals are found in China, giving the country a virtual Rockefeller-like
monopoly that it wont let slip away.
A century ago, the worlds wealthiest rode a wave of industrialization
in the U.S. that ushered in a Gilded Age. The explosion of
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communication technology and transportation transformed the

American economy into a truly national marketplace. It was a period
that created the American middle class, as well as setting the stage
for American industrialists to accumulate vast fortunes. Today, a similar
process is occurring on a global scale. Global communication and
transportation lines have now stretched beyond borders and fuelled
the growth of a global middle class. Programmers in India are now
part of the labor pool for American companies, which in turn makes
them new consumers. Thats not to say that the distribution of wealth
has gotten more equal, but more wealth than ever in more parts of
the world could set the stage for a trillionaire to emerge.
The two industries are best positioned to take a billionaire to the next
level are technology and retail, for the same reason: Both use a global
labor pool to make affordable products, inexpensive enough that
workers can soon become the consumers of the products they are
making. Of course, the tech industry is building on Internet
infrastructure to create billionaires faster than ever. In October 2010,
photo-sharing social network Instagram came into being; less than
two years and a mere 13 employees later, Facebook snapped up the
company for a cool billion. A look at the Forbes list of the worlds
wealthiest shows that the rise of technology and telecommunications
has made a big impact: Mexicos Carlos Slim, who vies with Gates for
the top spot on global-richest lists, made the bulk of his fortune in
telecom.

Lurking just below these technology magnates are Amancio Ortega,
the founder of Zara; the Walton family and their ubiquitous Walmart
chain; the Mars family of candy fame; Stefan Persson, chairman of
H&M; and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. The rise of these individuals and
families is perhaps more surprising than that of Gates, Slim, and their
peersand may be revealing about the clearest sustainable path to
10 figures. These magnates are best positioned, in different ways, to
find and use available labor no matter where it is. That will help them
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December 1, 2013
sell their products at prices that a wealthier world will be able to

afford most quickly. For that to happen, theyll need emerging
markets to continue emerging, creating not only employees but
customers, too. If that happens, in two generationsabout 60 years
Credit Suisse predicts there could be as many as 11 trillionaires
walking among us.
!72
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December 1, 2013
How Palm Oil in Everything From Food to Fuel Is Killing

Orangutans and Exacerbating Climate Change
by Mike Gaworecki, Leslie Moyer, originally published by Alternet |
NOV 21, 2013
Palm oil. Its the ubiquitous additive in everything from soaps and
lotions to cookies and diet foods. Its found in junk food like Cheez-Its,
Tootsie Rolls, and M&Ms, but its also found in the products of more
ecologically conscious companies like Ben & Jerrys, Natures Way, and
Toms of Maine. According to Rainforest Action Network (RAN), palm
oil can be found inalmost half of the products found in grocery stores.
The US consumes most of its 1.2 million metric tons of palm oil per
year through these products.
Click here to view the slideshow and take action. Photo: Paul Hilton
Photography
Palm oil is also used for fuel, specifically as a biofuel additive. The
European Union is the worst offender, thanks in part to a European
Union directive promoting the use of biofuels for transport. From
2006 to 2012, Europes use of palm oil as a biofuel additive increased
by 365 percent, and overall European consumption of palm oil is now
a whopping5.6 million metric tons.
To meet this huge (and growing) demand, palm oil is being produced
on vast industrial plantations, largely in Indonesia and Malaysia. Since
1990, the total area of Indonesia covered by palm oil plantations grew
600 percent to nearly 20 million acres (about the size of Maine).
Palm oil is the single biggest threat driving orangutans toward
extinction.PhotobyPaul Hilton Photography.
Beyond direct impacts of land use change from converting Indonesias
peatlands into energy crops, a significant, unaccounted source of
emissions comes fromindirect land use change. The consequences of
displacing food crops with energy crops in response to increased
global demand for biofuels are vast and mostly omitted from impact
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December 1, 2013
assessments. Clearing land for production of biofuels leads to

increased clearing in other regions to fill market demand for the
missing food crop, and accounts for pollution, loss of biodiversity, and
escalating food prices. As a result of direct and indirect land use
changes, the global area of farmland devoted to agrofuels production
is both massive and rapidly increasing. According to RAN,2009, at
least 29 million hectares (or 112,000 square miles, slightly greater than
the total amount of arable land in France and the United Kingdom
combined) are being used worldwide for agrofuels production.
Palm oil is now one of the leading causes of rainforest destruction
worldwide, and the single biggest threat driving orangutans toward
extinction; the best estimates place their population at just 60,600,
and its shrinking quickly. The palm oil industry is also responsible for
widespread human rights violations including displacement of
indigenous peoples, land conflicts with forest-dependent
communities, and forced and child labor. Hence palm oil from such
unsustainable sources has been dubbed "conflict palm oil" (read
morein the RAN report released earlier this year).
Deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia is also responsible for more
carbon pollution each year than all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and
ships in the United States combined. In fact, due to
deforestation,Indonesia has the worlds third largest greenhouse gas
e m i s s i o n s b e h i n d o n l y C h i n a a n d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s .
Indonesias peatlands hold at least 57 billion tons of carbon. This
peatland carbon, if released as CO2 in the atmosphere, would be
responsible for a large share of our remaining carbon budget if we are
to stay within the accepted 2C warming cap thats been set to avoid
dangerous climate change (although, even that limit has been
foundto be inadequate as we race toward it). It is a true carbon time
bomb.
Since 1990, the total area of Indonesia covered by palm oil plantations
grew 600%. PhotobyPaul Hilton Photography
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December 1, 2013
A new campaign from Rainforest Action Network aims to draw

attention to the threat to endangered orangutans caused by palm
oil.The Last Stand of the Orangutantargets twenty of the top snack
food companies using conflict palm oil in their products. The Snack
Food 20 are companies like Pepsi, Kelloggs, Hersheys, Kraft, Heinz
and Campbells Soupcompanies that produce some of Americas
most well-known household brands. Rainforest Action Networks goal
is to collect 60,600 #InYourPalm photo petitionsthats one person
standing for each orangutan remaining in the wildto be delivered to
each of the Snack Food 20 companies. RAN is demanding that these
companies only buy palm oil that can be traced back to its source and
is not driving human and labor rights violations, deforestation,
orangutan deaths, or expansion onto carbon-rich peatlands.
While environmental organizations in the US are building a case
against conflict palm oil, the EU biofuel subsidies are driving
destructive and unsustainable palm oil production. Robbie Blake,
biofuels campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE), said: It
is alarming to find that palm oil use in European cars is sky-rocketing,
and will only increase further, unless [members of the European
Parliament] put a halt to increasing biofuels. Drivers are unknowingly
being forced to fill up with a fuel that is destroying rainforests,
communities and the climate.
Arecent analysisby FOEE finds that palm oil use in Europes transport
system has increased much more quickly than predicted, and now
stands at 20 percent of the biodiesel mix. Overall, the EU consumes
40 percent more palm oil (for food, fuel and cosmetics) today
compared to 6 years ago, despite continual warnings about the
unsustainability of palm oil expansion.
The one piece of significant good news is that the US Environmental
Protection Agency ruled in early 2012 that palm oil does not meet
theUS Renewable Fuels Standard, which calls for 7.5 billion gallons of
renewable fuels to be blended into gasoline. The EPAs ruling came
after extensive lifecycle analysis of palm oil production, which showed
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December 1, 2013
that deforestation significantly undercuts the climate benefits of palm

oil as a biofuel source over fossil fuels. However, with global palm oil
production hitting 58 million metric tons in 2013, and with growing
markets in China and India (which account for more than a third of
palm oil imports), there is a long way to go.
Is the annihilation of orangutans or the threat of catastrophic climate
change sufficient to influence an industry this powerful? They might
not be, on their own. The hidden carbon liability of the palm oil
industry can no longer be ignored, nor its indisputable role in human
rights abuses, land grabs, and bringing endangered species to the
brink of extinction. It is time to stop filling our shopping carts and fuel
tanks with palm oil. We need to open our eyes, and we need to take
action. The most effective instrument we have to stand up against any
major industry is in our own hands.Heresa good place to start.
We're reaching out to you to speak up against the destruction of
Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests by sharing these images with
your friends, family, and colleagues, and by clicking on one of the calls
to action associated with each image.
!76
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December 1, 2013
Prof Cipolla codified the basic laws of human stupidity thusly:

First Basic Law: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the
number of stupid individuals in circulation.
Second Basic Law: The probability that a certain person be stupid is
independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who caused
losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself
deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Fourth Basic Law: Non-stupid people always underestimate the
damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people
constantly forget that at all times and places and under any
circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always
turns out to be costly mistake.
Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of
person.
Corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is more dangerous
than a bandit.
!77
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December 1, 2013
Pointers from "I Am That" modern spiritual classic by Nissargdutta

Mind stays in the - I AM - without moving you enter a state which
cannot beverbalised - Try this again and again.
It is enough to know what you are not. You observe - heart feeling,
mind thinking, body acting - very act of observing shows you are
different from what is observed.
How do you get That I:
You need not get it you are it
It will get at you if you give a chance
Let go attachment to unreal and real will come to you
Stop imaging yourself being or doing this or that
Life is succession of events - option is to attach to them or detach
from them
Sense of I AM is where you seek but not what to seek. Ultimately you
are not even the observer
Let life flow means acceptance - let what comes and let go what goes.
There is something unique about present moment - what makes it
unique is "my presence".
Nothing can happen unless entire universe makes it happen. Source
and ground of everything is the only cause of everything.

Take first step first. Turn within. Be with "I AM" as much as possible
until you revert spontaneouslythere is no simple way.
Be alert - question, observe, investigate learn all you can about
confusion
!78
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December 1, 2013
Book Page of the week:
Book Recommendation of the week:

Code Name God by Dr Mani Bhaumik
This is small biography of an Indian born scientist who has been at the
cutting edge research of laser technology. Here is a rags to riches
story told along with what science and spirituality teaches us and how
both can co exist. Not very in depth but decent overview of science &
spirituality.
!79
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December 1, 2013
!80

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weekly Read

WEEKLY READ COMPILATION

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the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet

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Unsustainable Farming: From Bird Droppings to Corporate

provided new energy sources, allowed eighteenth century society

an advertising document for fertilizers, which states the small amount

fields started to be depleted in the 1860s, mining of Peru and

impacts require the heavier usage of pesticides and herbicides, and

those minerals and increased disease-treatment facilities are also

reaching 9.2 billion in 2050, an increase of 2.7 billion in 45 years, with

Soviet bloc as a provider of fertilizers, pesticides, oil, and food imports

Cuba had no other way of moving forward. In addition, Cuba is a

concern. All such actions are incremental changes to the hegemonic

Hardins formulation of the tragedy of the commons22, which is

pressure that forces change, either through a reduction in available

Compiled By: Prashant Patel

7. Blakemore, H. (2011), John Thomas North, the Nitrate King, History

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Society. Accessed athttp://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/

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Desert of the Real

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command-and-control model of information sharing ill-suited to the

different realistic states of the world; and be able to think as both

Compiled By: Prashant Patel

we had thought . The mind is hormonal, as well as neural. The

break things down into parts. Indigenous people understand life

Enhancement Systems - uses advanced technology to leverage our

Re-using a bag is easier ask than re-shaping a food system but

definition, images of which one sooner or later tires. Image-glut

The trouble started when we invented convention centres.

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What Are Radicals Good For? An Interview with George Scialabba

Theres no cheap urban real estate, its hard to survive without a

LG: I saw that you had a spirited exchange recently on Crooked

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GS: Not to a book reviewer. In the Crooked Timber discussion, we got

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inclination to do. Chomsky, Nader, Greenwald, I. F. Stone, Alexander

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INVESTING LIKE AN ECOSYSTEM

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Can you call on it? Community is the most important of these as it is

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Generation Investment Management with former Vice President Al

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some old ones. What one increasingly hears in Western boardrooms

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How to Waste a Crisis

be summarized: class war. As Harvey writes, neoliberalism is a theory

Foucaults notion of governmentality how political regimes make

somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator

academy to quasi-accountable offices of the government like the

it was issuing credit default swaps. This should be no disqualification:

Compiled By: Prashant Patel

Yet the entirety of right-wing think tanks and movement infrastructure