"Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon!"
- Bertolt Brecht
Espresso Machine Makes Books In No Time!
POSTED: Friday, May 1, 2009
The Blackwell Bookstore in Great Britain has found a way to offer it's customers almost any book they want to read. Even if it's been out of print for decades. It's the espresso book machine. It can print, cut and bind a book in about five minutes. It currently has a catalog of almost 400-THOUSAND titles -- and expects to get up to a million. Blackwell says the machine has doubled the size of its inventory. The machine cost 175-thousand dollars and the store thinks it paid for itself in six months.
The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons
Ian Angus August 25, 2008
Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism [www.climateandcapitalism.com]. This article was originally published by Socialist Voice -- http://www.socialistvoice.ca -- and is posted here with the author's permission.
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http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=316
Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer "yes" -- and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.
Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of the Commons" has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found "about 302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons."
For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, "the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues." (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6) It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations 'tradable permits' to pollute the air and water, and much more.
Noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the article "has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge."
Like most sacred texts, "The Tragedy of the Commons" is more often cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.
Garrett Hardin hatches a myth
The author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best-known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for "control of breeding" of "genetically defective" people. (Hardin 1966: 707) In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.
He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.
(The term "commons" was used in England to refer to the shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still exist today in various forms around the world, particularly in indigenous communities.)
"Picture a pasture open to all," Hardin wrote. A herdsmen who wants to expand his personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be divided among all, but he alone will get the benefit of having more cattle to sell.
Inevitably, "the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd." But every "rational herdsman" will do the same thing, so the commons is soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no animals at all.
Hardin used the word "tragedy" as Aristotle did, to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character's actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."
Where's the evidence? Given the subsequent influence of Hardin's essay, it's shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the "tragedy" was inevitable -- but he didn't show that it had happened even once.
Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels' account of the "mark," the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:
"The use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community ... "Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the 'common mark.' The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. ...."At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark." (Engels 1892)
Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels' description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:
"What existed in fact was not a 'tragedy of the commons' but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years -- and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era -- land was managed successfully by communities." (Cox 1985: 60)
Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as "stinting" -- establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such "stints" protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.
The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much poorer neighbours' position in disputes over the enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson 1993: 156)
Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad.
Why does the herder want more? Hardin's argument started with the unproven assertion that herdsmen always want to expand their herds: "It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. ... As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain."
In short, Hardin's conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. "It is to be expected" that each herdsman will try to maximize the size of his herd -- and each one does exactly that. It's a circular argument that proves nothing.
Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who don't care about the impact of their actions on the community. The same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic theory.
All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for centuries "rational herdsmen" did not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin's most fundamental assumptions -- but that hasn't stopped him or his disciples from erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.
Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin described, he couldn't do so unless certain conditions existed.
There would have to be a market for the cattle, and he would have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local consumption. He would have to have enough capital to buy the additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. He would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger barns, etc. And his desire for profit would have to outweigh his interest in the long-term survival of his community.
In short, Hardin didn't describe the behaviour of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities -- he described the behaviour of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behaviour of corporations.
Will private ownership do better? That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin's argument: in addition to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion that privatization would save it. Once again he simply presented his own prejudices as fact:
"We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin."
The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of cases in which the division and privatization of communally managed lands had disastrous results. Privatizing the commons has repeatedly led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.
As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.
"The entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less corresponding to the interests of society as a whole..." (Marx 1998: 611n)
Contrary to Hardin's claims, a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community's survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don't maximize short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.
This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better returns, more quickly.
Community management isn't an infallible way of protecting shared resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-based community has capitalism's built-in drive to put current profits ahead of the well-being of future generations.
A politically useful myth
The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not its lack of evidence or logic -- badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.
Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.
The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus.
Hardin's essay has been widely used as an ideological response to anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world. "Hardin's fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the 'scientific' foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons and privatization of public property. ... The message is clear: we must never treat the earth as a 'common treasury.' We must be ruthless and greedy or else we will perish." (Boal 2007)
In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin's political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations' reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser Institute urges privatization of reserve land:
"These large amounts of land, with their attendant natural resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada's native people as long as they are held as collective property subject to political management. ... collective property is the path of poverty, and private property is the path of prosperity." (Fraser 2002: 16-17)
This isn't just right-wing posturing. Canada's federal government, which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will "develop approaches to support the development of individual property ownership on reserves," and created a $300 million fund to do just that.
In Hardin's world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and clinging to self-destructive collectivism.
The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth -- a scientific-sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant world order.
Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin's essay asserted, without proof, that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market. Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we can do to make the world better or more just.
In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument as a "repulsive blasphemy against man and nature." Those words apply with full force to the myth of the tragedy of the commons.
Works Cited
Appell, G. N. 1993. "Hardin's Myth of the Commons: The Tragedy of Conceptual Confusions."
Boal, Iain. 2007. "Interview: Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse." Counterpunch, September 11, 2007.
Bromley, Daniel W. and Cernea Michael M. 1989. "The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies." World Bank Discussion Paper.
Cox, Susan Jane Buck. 1985, "No Tragedy on the Commons." Environmental Ethics 7.
Engels, Friedrich. 1892. "The Mark."
Engels, Friedrich. 1844. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.
Fraser Institute. 2002. Individual Property Rights on Canadian Indian Reserves.
Hardin, Garrett. 1966. Biology: Its Principles and Implications. Second edition. San Francisco. W.H. Freeman & Co.
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons."
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1998. Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 37 (Capital, Vol. 3). New York: International Publishers
Neeson, J.M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge University Press.
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You may also be interested in a follow-up article in which Ian Angus responds to questions and criticisms: Once Again: ‘The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons’ at http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=576
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Big dumb oil
Author and journalist William Marsden rips the Alberta tar sands projects and the stupidity behind it
by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU
‘In recent weeks, debate over the environmental destruction caused by the extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands has intensified once again. This month’s issue of National Geographic magazine caused a stir with a multi-page spread depicting in disturbing detail the environmental impact of the tar sands, and the House of Commons environment committee announced this week that it will investigate the effect on fresh water resources.
William Marsden, the award-winning author and investigative journalist for The Gazette, raised the hackles of the oil industry back in 2007 with his expose of the oil sands, Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care). The Mirror talked to Marsden in advance of a Wednesday, March 11, speaking engagement at Concordia.
Interview at: http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/030509/news3.html
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An Invertebrate Left
London Review of Books - Vol. 31 No. 5 · 12 March 2009
Perry Anderson: Italy’s Squandered Heritage
‘The Italian Left,’ Perry Anderson writes in the current issue of the LRB, ‘was once the largest and most impressive popular movement for social change in Western Europe.’ In the second of two essays surveying the Italian political scene, Anderson charts the way that both the Socialist and Communist parties, unprepared for either ‘the inrush of a completely secular, fully Americanised mass culture’ or ‘no less decisive changes in the workplace’, too willing to compromise with Christian Democracy and fatally compromised by their own cowardice, wasted the promise of the immediate postwar years.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3105
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Pandora: Hay fever: Rebellion in Booth's kingdom
By Henry Deedes
Thursday, 5 March 2009
The pitched battle between the booksellers of Hay-on-Wye and the renowned literary town's self-styled "King" Richard Booth is threatening to get ugly.
Booth is widely credited with putting Hay on the map, turning it into a global attraction for second-hand book lovers as well as pioneering its famous literary festival.
Earlier this year, however, some of the town's booksellers began to blame Booth for collapsing sales, arguing that he was no longer capable of attracting the sort of publicity the town needs.
Full: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/pandora/pandora-hay-fever-rebellion-in-booths-kingdom-1637728.html
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John Updike Le lièvre ne court plus
Disparition . John Updike, l’auteur de Rabbitt et de Couples, est mort.
Le chantre sarcastique des espoirs et des désillusions de la classe moyenne américaine est mort à l’âge de soixante-seize ans d’un cancer du poumon. Le double prix Pulitzer, chroniqueur tendre ou féroce du New Yorker, est né le 18 mars 1932, dans une ferme de Shillington, une petite localité de Pennsylvanie. Il y grandit, solitaire, auprès d’une mère démangée par le démon de l’écriture. Boursier pour Harvard, il étudie également les arts plastiques à la Ruskin School d’Oxford. Très tôt, à vingt-sept ans, il publie Coeur de lièvre (Rabbit Run), qui connaît un énorme succès. C’est le premier d’une série de cinq romans consacrés à Harry « Rabbit » Angstrom, l’Américain moyen atteint de bovarysme qui tente de fuir la médiocrité de son existence. Il se résignera, deviendra riche, et connaîtra la paix aux approches de la mort. Deux épisodes narrés dans Rabbit est riche et Rabbit en paix, qui lui vaudront deux prix Pulitzer, en 1971 et 1990.
complet: http://www.humanite.fr/2009-01-29_Cultures_John-Updike-Le-lievre-ne-court-plus
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Denmark's oldest bookseller saved by brothers
Thursday, 05 March 2009 15:40 RC Two students are swapping studying books for selling them and keeping an important piece of Copenhagen cultural history alive in doing so.
Denmark’s oldest bookseller, C. A. Reitzel's, has been pulled from the jaws of oblivion by two student brothers, 26-year-old Jesper Christian Bruun and 22-year-old Martin Willum Bruun.
Founded in 1819, the bookseller at 20 Nørregade street in the city centre had been run by Svend Olufsen until last summer, when he was forced to consider giving up the business due to financial difficulties.
Full: http://www.cphpost.dk/business/119-business/44974-oldest-bookseller-saved-by-brothers.html
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Barbara Ehrenreich: My Role in the Torture of Binyam Mohamed
I like to think that some of the things I write cause discomfort in those readers who deserve to feel it. Ideally, they should squirm, they should flinch, they might even experience fleeting gastrointestinal symptoms. But I have always drawn the line at torture. It may be unpleasant to read some of my writings, especially if they have been assigned by a professor, but it should not result in uncontrollable screaming, genital mutilation or significant blood loss.
With such stringent journalistic ethics in place, I was shocked to read in the February 14th Daily Mail Online a brief article headed "Food writer's online guide to building an H-bomb...the 'evidence' that put this man in Guantanamo." The "food writer" was identified as me, and the story began:
A British 'resident' held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a 'joke' website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night. Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the 'instructions' after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail.
While I am not, and have never been, a "food writer," other details about the "joke" rang true, such as the names of my co-authors, Peter Biskind and physicist Michio Kaku. Rewind to 1979, when Peter and I were working for a now-defunct leftwing magazine named Seven Days. The government had just suppressed the publication of another magazine, The Progressive, for attempting to print an article called "The H-Bomb Secret." I don't remember that article and the current editor of The Progressive recalls only that it contained a lot of physics and was "Greek to me." Both in solidarity with The Progressive and in defense of free speech, we at Seven Days decided to do a satirical article entitled "How to Make Your Own H-Bomb," offering step-by-step instructions for assembling a bomb using equipment available in one's own home.
The satire was not subtle. After discussing the toxicity of plutonium, we advised that to avoid ingesting it orally, "Never make an A-bomb on an empty stomach." My favorite section dealt with the challenge of enriching uranium hexafluoride:
First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235, which is lighter, will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10 pounds of uranium. (Safety note: Don't put all your enriched uranium hexafluoride in one bucket. Use at least two or three buckets and keep them in separate corners of the room. This will prevent the premature build-up of a critical mass.)
Full:
http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2009/02/my-role-in-the-torture-of-binyam-mohamed.html
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What you read can land you in Guantanamo
(even if it's satire)
Food writer's online guide to building an H-bomb...the 'evidence' that put this man in Guantanamo
By Jason Lewis
Last updated at 12:07 AM on 08th February, 2009
A British 'resident' held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a 'joke' website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.
Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the 'instructions' after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail.
It was this confession that apparently convinced the CIA that they were holding a top Al Qaeda terrorist.
But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the offending article - called How To Build An H-Bomb - was first published in a US satirical magazine and later placed on a series of websites.
Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication's food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made 'using a bicycle pump' and with liquid uranium 'poured into a bucket and swung round'.
Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its 'extraordinary rendition programme'.
During his eight-year imprisonment, Mohamed has allegedly been flown to secret torture centres in Pakistan, Morocco, an American-run jail known as the Dark Prison near Kabul in Afghanistan and, finally, to Guantanamo Bay.
The Foreign Secretary is refusing to release classified documents relating to Mohamed's detention. Last week, the High Court ruled that the 42 intelligence papers must remain secret.
However, the judges insisted they had no choice because the Government had informed them of a 'threat' by the US to withdraw all intelligence co-operation with Britain if the papers were published by the court.
Full:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138845/Food-writers-online-guide-building-H-bomb--evidence-man-Guantanamo.html
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Naomi Klein wins Warwick Prize
Peter Scowen
Naomi Klein has won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing
Klein won for her much-praised lefty tome The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin). Chair judge China Mieville called it "a brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time. It has started many debates, and will start many more..."
The new prize, handed out every two years, is funded and administrated by the University of Warwick. It is "an international, cross-disciplinary award open to any genre or form of writing," according to the university.
Full:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090224.WBBooksblog20090224102753/WBStory/WBBooksblog
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Afghans: 'Death to Canadians'
THE CANADIAN PRESS February 23, 2009
Murray Brewster
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Angry Afghan villagers chanted "Death to the Canadians" and paraded the blood-spattered bodies of two young children through the streets of Kandahar city today after a tribal elder accused Canada of firing the shell that killed them.
Residents of the village of Salehan, about 15 kilometres southwest of the city, staged an angry protest outside the white gates of the Kandahar provincial council office after an elder in the war-racked district of Panjwaii laid the blame for the tragedy at the feet of Canadian forces.
Full: http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/591646
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Amnesty Calls On US To Suspend Arms Sales To Israel
The Guardian (UK) February 23, 2009
Hellfire missiles and white phosphorus artillery shells among weapons used in 'indiscriminate' attacks on civilians, says human rights group
Detailed evidence has emerged of Israel's extensive use of US-made weaponry during its war in Gaza last month, including white phosphorus artillery shells, 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.
Full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/23/israel-arms-embargo-gaza
[Link to video:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/23/israel-arms-embargo-gaza]
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Writer Alice Walker on Gaza: We Can Offer What We Are
Code Pink February 20, 2009
During the recent ruthless assault on the people of Gaza when so many people were injured or murdered, I lost my own sister; she had been ill for many years. The loss of this one person, whose death was anticipated, was such a blow, that when I considered the losses to the people of Gaza - of mothers, children, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, and friends, I wondered how the anguish of so much tragic loss could be sustained. Housing, hospitals, nurseries, libraries, schools, were also lost. Surely the blow to the human spirit would be intolerable for many, and there would seem little reason for continuing to live.
Continues: http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2009/02/alice-walker-we-can-offer-what-we-are/
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Review: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918
A new review of "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" by Scott McLemee recently featured on the front page of Barnes and Noble Review.
It has been moved to:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=21332263&cds2Pid=22471
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For those of you who know Richard Orlandini, here's something we've all been waiting for. To order a copy please email or telephone us at menecraj@shaw.ca (204-452-8082).
The Oaxaca Letters of Richard Orlandini
Boonieliving Press
280pp, 15 in colour
$25 + $17 shipping from Mexico (US & Cdn. residents)
These 166 letters reveal an untethered (and untether-able) personality.
Rich:
- prowls the Tlacolula market and investigates Teotitlán textile production (6 letters, Feb., '05)
- discusses the landscape with 12-yr-old shepherd boys (and learns a thing or two about archaeology in the process) (31 July, '07)
- comes within an inch of dying from a centipede bite to his neck (1 Sept., '05)
- discusses Zapotec-Mixtec interaction (4 April, '06)
- suggests how pre-historic man "goosed" the slow process of Darwinian evolution (a view only recently accepted) (28 Sept., '07)
- figures out a low-tech way to kill a mastodon (and personally tests it in quicksand) (5 Sept., '07)
- takes us inside a real (not "touristy") Muertos celebration (Preface, 3 Nov., '05)
- hikes every meter of the Mitla Valley and discovers the oldest pre-ceramic site in North America (2 March, '05, Appendix)
- supports the maximalist view of pre-Columbian population (28 July, '07) and the minority view of how they got here (16 August, '06)
And there are still 151 more letters in the collection. Enjoy.
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The Defining Moment for Climate Change
http://tinyurl.com/6bfvav
posted May 11, 2008 08:40 am
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Defining Moment for Climate Change
Already climate change -- in the form of a changing pattern of global rainfall -- seems to be affecting the planet in significant ways. Take the massive, almost decade-long drought in Australia's wheat-growing heartland, which has been a significant factor in sending flour prices, and so bread prices, soaring globally, leading to desperation and food riots across the planet.
A report from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia makes clear that, despite recent heavy rains in the eastern Australian breadbasket, years of above normal rainfall would be needed "to remove the very long-term (water) deficits" in the region. The report then adds this ominous note: "The combination of record heat and widespread drought during the past five to 10 years over large parts of southern and eastern Australia is without historical precedent and is, at least partly, a result of climate change."
Think a bit about that phrase -- "without historical precedent." Except when it comes to technological invention, it hasn't been much part of our lives these last many centuries. Without historical precedent. Brace yourselves, it's about to become a commonplace in our vocabulary. The southeastern United States, for instance, was, for the last couple of years, locked in a drought -- which is finally easing -- "without historical precedent." In other words, there was nothing (repeat, nothing) in the historical record that provided a guide to what might happen next.
Now, it's true that the industrial revolution, which led to the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at historically unprecedented rates, was also, in a sense, "without historical precedent"; but most natural events -- unlike, say, the present staggering ice melt in the Arctic -- have been precedented (if I can manufacture such a word). They have been part of the historical record. That era -- the era of history -- is now, however, threatening to give way to a period capable of outrunning history itself, of outrunning us.
The planet in its long existence may have experienced the extremes to come, but we haven't. The planet, unlike much life on it, may not -- given millions or tens of millions of years to recover -- be in danger, but we are.
When you really think about it, history is humanity. It's common enough to talk about some historical figure or failed experiment being swept into the "dustbin of history," but what if all history and that dustbin, too, go. well, where? What are we, really, without our records? Once we pass beyond them, beyond all the experience we've collected, written down, and archived since those first scratches went on clay tablets in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates -- now being stripped of their cultural patrimony -- at least two unanswerable questions arise. Once history has been left in the dust, where are we? -- and, who are we?
Let the indefatigable environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has a powerful urge to stop us just short of the cliff of the post-historical era, take it from here. - --Tom
The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben
Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.
It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem. how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front. In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.
And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.
And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.
Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: ".if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)
We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.
And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.
If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.
More likely, though, we're the Coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation.(Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.
It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.
That's possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway many voters). And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.
We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not. Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That's the limit we face.
Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.
Copyright 2008 Bill McKibben
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A World to Win
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