Searching "green genocide" or "green death" you will run into several interesting perspectives but at least two of them are really strange ego-trip sorts of authors that seem more interested in getting their names out there as leaders of movements than working with people to really get humane and ethical movements going.
So after only a few days at this blog, we realize the name itself (and its associations) may be poison to the message. We only settled for it because there was no appropriate Soylent Green-related address or screenname left. But it is also clear that one cannot confront this new challenge that Jean Ziegler has called Green Genocide without creating new language around it. Cliches will never work to confront this. For language to have any meaning it cannot be tainted like this terminology is; language about such an alarming new plague, a new mass murderer, should not be burdened with such dead weight.
So we may or may not continue posting here. We'll leave you with this:
http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/10/genocide-in-name-of-clean-energy-un.html
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Whitey on the Moon
From the evening news: turns out you can't recycle everything that has the three-arrow recycling symbol on it. Only "bottles, jugs and dairy tubs," they say at the recycling facilities. So most of what you think you're recycling, if you even bother, is still getting trashed. Isn't it wonderful all the ways we have found to waste petroleum?
The news today reminds us of another way: look up in the sky and you will be able to see several spacecraft on clear nights. One you will see is the international space station. Another few you'll be seeing are the "genesis one" prototype inflatable space hotels. Wonder how many trees these sick rich bastards will feel obliged to plant to offset the rocket fuel exhaust from their trips to the space hotel?
The news today reminds us of another way: look up in the sky and you will be able to see several spacecraft on clear nights. One you will see is the international space station. Another few you'll be seeing are the "genesis one" prototype inflatable space hotels. Wonder how many trees these sick rich bastards will feel obliged to plant to offset the rocket fuel exhaust from their trips to the space hotel?
Friday, May 2, 2008
the problem with sedentarization
People should know better. This may as well be the theme of this blog. It may be that more often than not, genocides are perpetrated by "people who should know better."
Today's featured man-who-should know-better is Nick Kristof, whose own father escaped Romania in a time of not-so-humanitarian tendencies.
Kristof had an article in the Times supporting what appears to be yet another genocidal green relocation and sedentarization policy, done going by the old standby, "slash and burn is bad, anybody growing food using a practice that resembles it must be forced to change."
Almost never is a distinction made in these pop media accounts of "deforestation" or "slash and burn" cases between lands where: 1. homeless peasants just trying to survive are pushed to the frontiers of agriculture land because there are agribusiness monopolies on all other land; 2. Illegal loggers or other commercial interests are clearcutting these forests mercilessly for profit; 3. State or private oil (or "hydrocarbon") companies or mining interests or development projects have cleared the land; or finally 4. Indigenous people are simply farming in their traditional manner, not selling the forest, and they are not encroaching, they are the ones who have been encroached on. Overpopulation? There are how many indigenous in all of the Amazon? No, these people are just inconvenient. They are in the way of someone's "interests."
If the indigenous happen to be in a spot where any of the other cases is in effect, they will be the ones blamed for the actions of the commodity-hungry opportunists, they will be targeted for assimilation and population control measures, they will be quarantined in some ghetto of a reservation until they can pick up some of the dominant language and customs of the local commercial culture, then they'll be fit to enjoy the fruits of global industrial capitalism. And all the land they used to live on will be off limits to them, perhaps turned into a national park, or an area they can visit with the eco-tourists for an "authentic" indigenous experience. Most likely it will have been surveyed by an extractive industry after the indigenous were pacified, and by the time the indigenous have learned the dominant language it will have been legally taken from them. They or their children will only much later, after they learn to read, be able to read about precisely how their land was stolen from them "fair and square," even when they were supposed to be protected by certain international laws their government was signatory to. They'll want their land back, but most likely it will be poisoned by the extractive activity or locked up in a legal status which excludes them forever.
Kristof enthusiastically buys into the willful breaking of this particular group people, and he also contributes to the same sort of treatment of other groups when he promotes fundamentalist assimilationist missionaries as being selfless humanitarians even with their harmless "ulteriors." Almost none of these "humanitarians" are doing a single thing to help preserve the traditional territories of these indigenous groups. They are actively pacifying and coercively assimilating them, with the encouragement of the national governments. Economic hitmen one and all. Someone should look into the original economic hitman himself, John Perkins, to see if his projects with the Shuar or Achuar check out. If he's not working to protect their whole traditional territory he's no friend of the indigenous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Now the term genocide does tend to be thrown around quite a bit, but if one goes by the article 4 Geneva definition, any sort of forced sterilization or assimilation or language change or other form of systematic elimination of a distinct people qualifies. There is literally genocide happening in most nations on earth. This is no overstatement.
An example of what is not genocide is the Hillary Clinton statement from her May 08 globalization campaign talk wherein she says, "First they came for the auto manufacturers, and I didn't speak up. Then they came for the high-tech companies, and I didn't speak up...." so on. Loss of your manufacturing jobs is not genocide. That's just the neoliberal capitalism you are the beneficiary of. Genocide and its attendant language has become a cliche, and will soon lose all meaning. After Rwanda, then Darfur, "never again" is obviously not having its intended effect. As a matter of fact, we are all willing and conscious sponsors of many genocides right now, we just prefer not to think about it.
Today's featured man-who-should know-better is Nick Kristof, whose own father escaped Romania in a time of not-so-humanitarian tendencies.
Kristof had an article in the Times supporting what appears to be yet another genocidal green relocation and sedentarization policy, done going by the old standby, "slash and burn is bad, anybody growing food using a practice that resembles it must be forced to change."
Almost never is a distinction made in these pop media accounts of "deforestation" or "slash and burn" cases between lands where: 1. homeless peasants just trying to survive are pushed to the frontiers of agriculture land because there are agribusiness monopolies on all other land; 2. Illegal loggers or other commercial interests are clearcutting these forests mercilessly for profit; 3. State or private oil (or "hydrocarbon") companies or mining interests or development projects have cleared the land; or finally 4. Indigenous people are simply farming in their traditional manner, not selling the forest, and they are not encroaching, they are the ones who have been encroached on. Overpopulation? There are how many indigenous in all of the Amazon? No, these people are just inconvenient. They are in the way of someone's "interests."
If the indigenous happen to be in a spot where any of the other cases is in effect, they will be the ones blamed for the actions of the commodity-hungry opportunists, they will be targeted for assimilation and population control measures, they will be quarantined in some ghetto of a reservation until they can pick up some of the dominant language and customs of the local commercial culture, then they'll be fit to enjoy the fruits of global industrial capitalism. And all the land they used to live on will be off limits to them, perhaps turned into a national park, or an area they can visit with the eco-tourists for an "authentic" indigenous experience. Most likely it will have been surveyed by an extractive industry after the indigenous were pacified, and by the time the indigenous have learned the dominant language it will have been legally taken from them. They or their children will only much later, after they learn to read, be able to read about precisely how their land was stolen from them "fair and square," even when they were supposed to be protected by certain international laws their government was signatory to. They'll want their land back, but most likely it will be poisoned by the extractive activity or locked up in a legal status which excludes them forever.
Kristof enthusiastically buys into the willful breaking of this particular group people, and he also contributes to the same sort of treatment of other groups when he promotes fundamentalist assimilationist missionaries as being selfless humanitarians even with their harmless "ulteriors." Almost none of these "humanitarians" are doing a single thing to help preserve the traditional territories of these indigenous groups. They are actively pacifying and coercively assimilating them, with the encouragement of the national governments. Economic hitmen one and all. Someone should look into the original economic hitman himself, John Perkins, to see if his projects with the Shuar or Achuar check out. If he's not working to protect their whole traditional territory he's no friend of the indigenous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Now the term genocide does tend to be thrown around quite a bit, but if one goes by the article 4 Geneva definition, any sort of forced sterilization or assimilation or language change or other form of systematic elimination of a distinct people qualifies. There is literally genocide happening in most nations on earth. This is no overstatement.
An example of what is not genocide is the Hillary Clinton statement from her May 08 globalization campaign talk wherein she says, "First they came for the auto manufacturers, and I didn't speak up. Then they came for the high-tech companies, and I didn't speak up...." so on. Loss of your manufacturing jobs is not genocide. That's just the neoliberal capitalism you are the beneficiary of. Genocide and its attendant language has become a cliche, and will soon lose all meaning. After Rwanda, then Darfur, "never again" is obviously not having its intended effect. As a matter of fact, we are all willing and conscious sponsors of many genocides right now, we just prefer not to think about it.
we are monsters
The news said GM has a new project where they are processing wood chips and waste paper to make biofuel now. Chevron and Weyerhaeuser formed a new company to put trees in your gas tank. With the new push for cellulose and lignin biofuels, waste is to be profitable like it never was before, so it will be okay to make more of it. Be a good citizen, help us be energy independent. Burn TREES in your GAS TANK. We'll sell you corn stalk compost from our fields to put in your gas tank, and next year since the soil is dead on account of our removing all organic content from it, we'll amend the soil with fossil fuel to fertilize our next crop of cellulose for the ethanol we'll sell you. Farmers, Monsanto, Standard Oil, and YOU, one big life cycle, a good team. Good for the earth, good for each other.
Petroleum companies that apparently used to oppose ethanol are now fully on the bandwagon, even driving the wagon now, and they are acting like oil companies always have. They are starting a new global land grab the likes of which we have never seen. And we thought it was bad before. It used to be what was under the soil that they wanted to get at. Now they will grab up any open land at all, as long as it will grow something we can put in our gas tanks, whatever it is, switchgrass, hemp, whatever. And as oil companies have traditionally done, they are pushing off anybody who stands in their way. Using forestry policies and militaries controlled by corrupt officials in developing countries, they have been removing poor people from lands for years now already and because nobody wealthy or powerful has noticed they have plans for more of the same.
So it looks like will burn every life form on earth until all we relatively wealthy "developed" people (wealthy people code for "whole" or "advanced") have left to burn or to eat is each other. Clearly it doesn't phase us that people are dying because of us, and it won't phase the most wealthy of all "consumers" when we ourselves turn into the victims of their consumption. We will never stop; it seems as long as people are relatively wealthy they can never really care what happens to the rest of the living beings. Oh yes, you see, the wealthy have higher values, they pursue something greater only others of their godlike stature can conceive of. They will direct our collective aggregated wealth to the moon where they will farm with moonbeams and laser precision and mine asteroids; they will fund grand the particle physics projects at CERN in Switzerland that risk swallowing the earth in a black hole, for the grand ends only these mighty souls have the capacity to imagine. What resplendent utopian futures they must have in store for us, these gods on earth. They must know what they are doing, right? They would't exploit all of humanity and destroy and consume all living things on earth just for fun, would they? Poor people just have to trust the rich, it turns out. Not much can be done about it if a god happens to have sadistic appetites, after all.
As for all us regular privileged earthlings without any idea of any wise master plan, we will keep feeding our cows (don't worry, they eat the byproduct from the ethanol process too, so it's all okay) and feeding our automobiles with food or things grown on land that could have made people-food; we already do all this, and we will continue, without shame, to power our huge new ethanol switchgrass fuel plants with coal burning power plants; we will use people-food to power our luxury conveniences-- more of the things the people currently starving around the world have never had-- as millions of human bodies are becoming emaciated, having nothing to eat but their own flesh. We will burn food. We will burn food in our cars. We are doing this now, why quit if we're doing fine?
This system is so far beyond any cannibalism in its monstrosity it is hard to find the words to call it what it is. Jean Ziegler was right about biofuels being a crime against humanity, but let us take this to its logical conclusion. If we drive vehicles that are fueled in part by ethanol --which we do, because it was mandated by congress-- then we are complicit in this crime. If the congress does not abolish this mandate and all ethanol incentives right now, they are without doubt criminal. The information is available to all of us. There is no excuse not to know. Regardless of what the corn-grower lobbyists say, and regardless of how the die-hard farm state ethanol congresspeople vote, the rest of us should know better.
If you ever wondered how genocides can go on under the noses of--or on behalf of-- perfectly decent and humane people, take a look at the one you are perpetrating on most of the world at this very moment. This is death we will never admit we are responsible for, if we are like most executioners and perpetrators of genocide. Either the life that is dying is just taking its natural course, it has nothing to do with us, it is beneath us, it is inconsequential; or they deserve it, it's them or us, it's a necessary evil, the least of the evils, it's a tradeoff," not our fault, not our problem, carry on, life here is fine, ignore the ashes coming from that smokestack over there, and do not ask about that smell of burning flesh. It is nothing. Put it out of your mind.
Watch the national discourse on food prices right now. The Washington Post series by Dan Morgan from this past week, the New York Times series, the discussions carried on in the C-SPAN hearings. It is shocking and horrifying to see the way the burning of food crops is addressed, as well as to see the general casual detachment with which these issues are discussed. The facts are there, but somehow logical conclusions are not drawn.
Yes, to reiterate again, natural gas-derived anhydrous ammonia is used as fertilizer for these biofuel crops. Yes, we are using fossil fuels to produce "clean" biofuels. Or what do they call them? Sustainable? Or renewable? It is hard to keep all the lies straight. This is all so absurd. When we run out of fossil fuels, uh, how do we keep fertilizing these "renewables"?
Petroleum companies that apparently used to oppose ethanol are now fully on the bandwagon, even driving the wagon now, and they are acting like oil companies always have. They are starting a new global land grab the likes of which we have never seen. And we thought it was bad before. It used to be what was under the soil that they wanted to get at. Now they will grab up any open land at all, as long as it will grow something we can put in our gas tanks, whatever it is, switchgrass, hemp, whatever. And as oil companies have traditionally done, they are pushing off anybody who stands in their way. Using forestry policies and militaries controlled by corrupt officials in developing countries, they have been removing poor people from lands for years now already and because nobody wealthy or powerful has noticed they have plans for more of the same.
So it looks like will burn every life form on earth until all we relatively wealthy "developed" people (wealthy people code for "whole" or "advanced") have left to burn or to eat is each other. Clearly it doesn't phase us that people are dying because of us, and it won't phase the most wealthy of all "consumers" when we ourselves turn into the victims of their consumption. We will never stop; it seems as long as people are relatively wealthy they can never really care what happens to the rest of the living beings. Oh yes, you see, the wealthy have higher values, they pursue something greater only others of their godlike stature can conceive of. They will direct our collective aggregated wealth to the moon where they will farm with moonbeams and laser precision and mine asteroids; they will fund grand the particle physics projects at CERN in Switzerland that risk swallowing the earth in a black hole, for the grand ends only these mighty souls have the capacity to imagine. What resplendent utopian futures they must have in store for us, these gods on earth. They must know what they are doing, right? They would't exploit all of humanity and destroy and consume all living things on earth just for fun, would they? Poor people just have to trust the rich, it turns out. Not much can be done about it if a god happens to have sadistic appetites, after all.
As for all us regular privileged earthlings without any idea of any wise master plan, we will keep feeding our cows (don't worry, they eat the byproduct from the ethanol process too, so it's all okay) and feeding our automobiles with food or things grown on land that could have made people-food; we already do all this, and we will continue, without shame, to power our huge new ethanol switchgrass fuel plants with coal burning power plants; we will use people-food to power our luxury conveniences-- more of the things the people currently starving around the world have never had-- as millions of human bodies are becoming emaciated, having nothing to eat but their own flesh. We will burn food. We will burn food in our cars. We are doing this now, why quit if we're doing fine?
This system is so far beyond any cannibalism in its monstrosity it is hard to find the words to call it what it is. Jean Ziegler was right about biofuels being a crime against humanity, but let us take this to its logical conclusion. If we drive vehicles that are fueled in part by ethanol --which we do, because it was mandated by congress-- then we are complicit in this crime. If the congress does not abolish this mandate and all ethanol incentives right now, they are without doubt criminal. The information is available to all of us. There is no excuse not to know. Regardless of what the corn-grower lobbyists say, and regardless of how the die-hard farm state ethanol congresspeople vote, the rest of us should know better.
If you ever wondered how genocides can go on under the noses of--or on behalf of-- perfectly decent and humane people, take a look at the one you are perpetrating on most of the world at this very moment. This is death we will never admit we are responsible for, if we are like most executioners and perpetrators of genocide. Either the life that is dying is just taking its natural course, it has nothing to do with us, it is beneath us, it is inconsequential; or they deserve it, it's them or us, it's a necessary evil, the least of the evils, it's a tradeoff," not our fault, not our problem, carry on, life here is fine, ignore the ashes coming from that smokestack over there, and do not ask about that smell of burning flesh. It is nothing. Put it out of your mind.
Watch the national discourse on food prices right now. The Washington Post series by Dan Morgan from this past week, the New York Times series, the discussions carried on in the C-SPAN hearings. It is shocking and horrifying to see the way the burning of food crops is addressed, as well as to see the general casual detachment with which these issues are discussed. The facts are there, but somehow logical conclusions are not drawn.
Yes, to reiterate again, natural gas-derived anhydrous ammonia is used as fertilizer for these biofuel crops. Yes, we are using fossil fuels to produce "clean" biofuels. Or what do they call them? Sustainable? Or renewable? It is hard to keep all the lies straight. This is all so absurd. When we run out of fossil fuels, uh, how do we keep fertilizing these "renewables"?
the road to Green Hell is paved with yellow corn?
Sorry for the long url here, but you can't know what's being referred to in this post unless you watched this testimony. Here's the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress having a hearing on food prices:
http://jec.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.HearingsCalendar&ContentRecord_id=a092ba11-fffc-7fd5-9312-644bbe74704c
This was very entertaining to watch. Farm trade group lobbyist (Buis) goes after oil companies and denies the ethanol push is a big deal, denies corn takes acreage away from wheat or rice etc. (ask a tofu maker, they'll tell you corn acreage certainly does compete with soy). Bakery man (Reinwald) tells committee that he has heard that GMO corn is taking wheat land because it is more hardy and being planted further north now, and he insists the congress revisit ethanol mandates and find a "balance." Farm state senator (Brownback) says wheat acreage mostly doesn't compete with corn and so it's no biggie, no worries.
Some really odd positions are being maintained here. Watch as they either crumble or get clung to with ever-more-desperate rationalizing over time. Several on the committee (including Sununu and Brady) seemed to believe that diverting 25 or 30 percent of the US corn crop (yellow corn [?], thanks Buis) into gas tanks was an issue, but that what it meant was the US needs to drill for oil in the arctic. Brady thinks we should keep up with the biofuel and drill. Several on the committee suggested the US import ( repeat, import ) more ethanol rather than continue to mandate the growing of it in the US. Oh so endearing how they try to be so helpful, shifting domestic problems to foreign populations, how well-meaning of them, our beloved representatives and these death sentences they so nonchalantly and dispassionately propose... Brownback of all people one would expect to know better than this, but republican doctrine and farm-state loyalty can apparently blind even the most ardent humanitarian to the chaos they are touching off. With all this discussion around these food issues though, the most fundamental problems are still being rigorously avoided.
They'll do anything but ask Americans to change their behavior. Anything but say bluntly and honestly that we need to learn to live in a world without cheap energy. As unthinkable and unspeakable as it sounds to many in May 2008 (actually a UN and peer-reviewed scientists just put out a major report in April saying all this - needless to say it was promptly ignored and forgotten), it will of course become increasingly more obvious as time goes by, we will need to retrofit cities, we and all nations and peoples will need to grow our own food, as much as possible less oil-intensively, domestically and locally. Whether we want to or not, we are going to have to end all the "food miles" our daily bread travels, whatever controversy there is about the "greenness" of economies of scale and carbon savings entailed by such systems of distribution. Our chemical dependency in agriculture will come to an end, as will the age of throwaway plastics and other things you have in your trash can right now. These are elementary facts any kid can see, and all clearly contained in the concepts "non renewable" and "un sustainable." Expensive petroleum is only one of the reasons things will change. But the fact is, this resource-devouring system cannot go on forever, and that is a hard truth to accept for anybody, but the hardest fighers for squeezing the system to its last drop, it seems are the "Hard Greens" (more on them in later posts). The rationalizations used to argue in its favor get more and more self-contradictory.
Besides calling off the whole ethanol mad-crowd-tulip-speculation frenzy, we need to initiate a dead-serious movement to eliminate petroleum "inputs" in our agriculture. The committee (specifically Klobuchar, farm state rep.) brought up high oil prices when discussing farmers' "input costs" several times, but only in the context of keeping diesel prices low for combines and tractors and product distribution vehicles (keeping large agribusiness commercial farming cost-effective and profitable), meaning, "yes we should amend our fuel with cellulosic ethanol or imported palm oil, and we should continue depending on fertilizer made from un-renewable natural gas as if it were renewable." Worst of both worlds. To their credit, everybody remembered that fertilizer costs are up because they are made with un unrenewable resource (maybe they read the Times. It had a story the same day about high fertilizer costs). They just conveniently forget the implications. In the discourse of political economy in the US, nobody is allowed to think that drastic change and monumental new political will could possibly be necessary to deal with these challenges we face. They are so very Fabian about things...
It sounds like cellulosic ethanol and non-food biodiesel crops (especially if both are imported) still seem like a win-win to these committee members, but these people need to take a lesson from the corn ethanol craze (thanks for the term, Ban Ki-Moon) and contain their enthusiasm while they do some research. Can you imagine how funny their discourse would look from the position of a subsistence farmer (as opposed to commercial or cash-cropping farmer) in Swaziland or India or Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines who has had their food-growing land confiscated with zero compensation so that some company could grow and inedible biofuel feedstock there to export to the United States? Can you imagine being in that position yourself? How would you feel?
It bears repeating over and over how tragic it is what happens to the subsistence farmer as oil companies and agribusiness companies cash in on all the free land concessions (costs externalized to those evicted of course) provided by "developing nation" governments in exchange for the companies' highly valued "investment" money, as the companies get to claim that they have offset carbon by creating these plantations of "clean alternative fuel" which they call "carbon sinks" (Remember this all allows the companies to literally get away with murder while nearly everyone back home where they are incorporated thinks they are such great global citizens).
How would you feel if you were the dispossessed farmer whose rice lands got "eminent-domained" by the government and the company, who ends up homeless, in a slum or squatter camp or "reserve," you and your family being pushed around from place to place, starving, while rice is being exported from your nation to wealthier countries? Or while your old land is sending its fruits, in the form of some biofuel feedstock like palm or jatropha, to the Americans? What would that feel like? What would you feel like doing to the people who took your land if you could identify those responsible? Remember how the Joad family reacted to the landlord coming to evict them in The Grapes of Wrath? "Who do we shoot?"
http://jec.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.HearingsCalendar&ContentRecord_id=a092ba11-fffc-7fd5-9312-644bbe74704c
This was very entertaining to watch. Farm trade group lobbyist (Buis) goes after oil companies and denies the ethanol push is a big deal, denies corn takes acreage away from wheat or rice etc. (ask a tofu maker, they'll tell you corn acreage certainly does compete with soy). Bakery man (Reinwald) tells committee that he has heard that GMO corn is taking wheat land because it is more hardy and being planted further north now, and he insists the congress revisit ethanol mandates and find a "balance." Farm state senator (Brownback) says wheat acreage mostly doesn't compete with corn and so it's no biggie, no worries.
Some really odd positions are being maintained here. Watch as they either crumble or get clung to with ever-more-desperate rationalizing over time. Several on the committee (including Sununu and Brady) seemed to believe that diverting 25 or 30 percent of the US corn crop (yellow corn [?], thanks Buis) into gas tanks was an issue, but that what it meant was the US needs to drill for oil in the arctic. Brady thinks we should keep up with the biofuel and drill. Several on the committee suggested the US import ( repeat, import ) more ethanol rather than continue to mandate the growing of it in the US. Oh so endearing how they try to be so helpful, shifting domestic problems to foreign populations, how well-meaning of them, our beloved representatives and these death sentences they so nonchalantly and dispassionately propose... Brownback of all people one would expect to know better than this, but republican doctrine and farm-state loyalty can apparently blind even the most ardent humanitarian to the chaos they are touching off. With all this discussion around these food issues though, the most fundamental problems are still being rigorously avoided.
They'll do anything but ask Americans to change their behavior. Anything but say bluntly and honestly that we need to learn to live in a world without cheap energy. As unthinkable and unspeakable as it sounds to many in May 2008 (actually a UN and peer-reviewed scientists just put out a major report in April saying all this - needless to say it was promptly ignored and forgotten), it will of course become increasingly more obvious as time goes by, we will need to retrofit cities, we and all nations and peoples will need to grow our own food, as much as possible less oil-intensively, domestically and locally. Whether we want to or not, we are going to have to end all the "food miles" our daily bread travels, whatever controversy there is about the "greenness" of economies of scale and carbon savings entailed by such systems of distribution. Our chemical dependency in agriculture will come to an end, as will the age of throwaway plastics and other things you have in your trash can right now. These are elementary facts any kid can see, and all clearly contained in the concepts "non renewable" and "un sustainable." Expensive petroleum is only one of the reasons things will change. But the fact is, this resource-devouring system cannot go on forever, and that is a hard truth to accept for anybody, but the hardest fighers for squeezing the system to its last drop, it seems are the "Hard Greens" (more on them in later posts). The rationalizations used to argue in its favor get more and more self-contradictory.
Besides calling off the whole ethanol mad-crowd-tulip-speculation frenzy, we need to initiate a dead-serious movement to eliminate petroleum "inputs" in our agriculture. The committee (specifically Klobuchar, farm state rep.) brought up high oil prices when discussing farmers' "input costs" several times, but only in the context of keeping diesel prices low for combines and tractors and product distribution vehicles (keeping large agribusiness commercial farming cost-effective and profitable), meaning, "yes we should amend our fuel with cellulosic ethanol or imported palm oil, and we should continue depending on fertilizer made from un-renewable natural gas as if it were renewable." Worst of both worlds. To their credit, everybody remembered that fertilizer costs are up because they are made with un unrenewable resource (maybe they read the Times. It had a story the same day about high fertilizer costs). They just conveniently forget the implications. In the discourse of political economy in the US, nobody is allowed to think that drastic change and monumental new political will could possibly be necessary to deal with these challenges we face. They are so very Fabian about things...
It sounds like cellulosic ethanol and non-food biodiesel crops (especially if both are imported) still seem like a win-win to these committee members, but these people need to take a lesson from the corn ethanol craze (thanks for the term, Ban Ki-Moon) and contain their enthusiasm while they do some research. Can you imagine how funny their discourse would look from the position of a subsistence farmer (as opposed to commercial or cash-cropping farmer) in Swaziland or India or Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines who has had their food-growing land confiscated with zero compensation so that some company could grow and inedible biofuel feedstock there to export to the United States? Can you imagine being in that position yourself? How would you feel?
It bears repeating over and over how tragic it is what happens to the subsistence farmer as oil companies and agribusiness companies cash in on all the free land concessions (costs externalized to those evicted of course) provided by "developing nation" governments in exchange for the companies' highly valued "investment" money, as the companies get to claim that they have offset carbon by creating these plantations of "clean alternative fuel" which they call "carbon sinks" (Remember this all allows the companies to literally get away with murder while nearly everyone back home where they are incorporated thinks they are such great global citizens).
How would you feel if you were the dispossessed farmer whose rice lands got "eminent-domained" by the government and the company, who ends up homeless, in a slum or squatter camp or "reserve," you and your family being pushed around from place to place, starving, while rice is being exported from your nation to wealthier countries? Or while your old land is sending its fruits, in the form of some biofuel feedstock like palm or jatropha, to the Americans? What would that feel like? What would you feel like doing to the people who took your land if you could identify those responsible? Remember how the Joad family reacted to the landlord coming to evict them in The Grapes of Wrath? "Who do we shoot?"
Thursday, May 1, 2008
scorched-earth acres is the place to be...
Here's a perplexing issue, brought up by the Christian Science Monitor. People in Mozambique are trying out a new practice of letting the "leftover biomass" in their fields rot after harvest rather than burning it off. Now here once again you see aid agencies acting as saviors, and they need to be careful with that attitude, but they seem to be following the lead of the small farmer and seeing what works rather than coming in with expensive new soil amendments or relocation schemes:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0430/p13s01-sten.html
Joao Jongue is essentially Masanobu Fukuoka except in Mozambique.
In the same CS Monitor they featured people in China going organic. That is great news. Let's hope they can keep it up.
And here from the next edition of the same paper, the US congress is finally going to try to say no to ethanol...sort of:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p03s03-usec.html
But they are doing a half-assed rollback of ethanol production mandates and tax credits, so the problem is still there. And switching to cellulosic ethanol is still going to turn into a land-eating policy in the end. It will either make food-growing land more scarce, or it will rob the soil of "crop residues" that keep the soil fertile. In the end it will be a petroleum-based-fertilizer-intensive project. And let's not even get into what could happen if our forest lands are turned into cellulosic ethanol plantations on a scale that's supposed to replace imported petroleum!
From the article:
"We're not downplaying the fact that there are folks having a tough time buying groceries, but to scare those folks to death [by saying it's] because we're making ethanol is an injustice," says Jon Doggett, vice president of public policy for the National Corn Growers Association in Washington."
You would think he would recognize that this should not be primarily about "the american consumer," but about the people outside the US affected by these high food prices who are not scared to death, they are starving to death. I don't think he intetionally starves people, I think he is oblivious and negligent. But hey, he doesn't make the incentive policies, he only lobbies for them, so let's not place all the blame on him and the corn growers. Remember to watch how Monsanto behaves as their cash cow is threatened, and if ex-sponsors of incentive bills in congress get defensive if their projects are threatened.
What did the guy in the article mean when he said that at 14 billion gallons of ethanol production per year (currently it's 6.5 billion) the "tradeoffs would get too severe"? Are they not severe enough yet? He should try going to find something to eat in Haiti without big wads of money in his pockets. Not severe?
Another thing. The CSM site has a good map about rice production and exports. How odd it is that Thailand produces so very much rice and exports it to where it can be bought at higher prices, when that nation has hill tribes starving due to confiscation of their "slash and burn" rice lands:
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/rice/
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0430/p13s01-sten.html
Joao Jongue is essentially Masanobu Fukuoka except in Mozambique.
In the same CS Monitor they featured people in China going organic. That is great news. Let's hope they can keep it up.
And here from the next edition of the same paper, the US congress is finally going to try to say no to ethanol...sort of:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p03s03-usec.html
But they are doing a half-assed rollback of ethanol production mandates and tax credits, so the problem is still there. And switching to cellulosic ethanol is still going to turn into a land-eating policy in the end. It will either make food-growing land more scarce, or it will rob the soil of "crop residues" that keep the soil fertile. In the end it will be a petroleum-based-fertilizer-intensive project. And let's not even get into what could happen if our forest lands are turned into cellulosic ethanol plantations on a scale that's supposed to replace imported petroleum!
From the article:
"We're not downplaying the fact that there are folks having a tough time buying groceries, but to scare those folks to death [by saying it's] because we're making ethanol is an injustice," says Jon Doggett, vice president of public policy for the National Corn Growers Association in Washington."
You would think he would recognize that this should not be primarily about "the american consumer," but about the people outside the US affected by these high food prices who are not scared to death, they are starving to death. I don't think he intetionally starves people, I think he is oblivious and negligent. But hey, he doesn't make the incentive policies, he only lobbies for them, so let's not place all the blame on him and the corn growers. Remember to watch how Monsanto behaves as their cash cow is threatened, and if ex-sponsors of incentive bills in congress get defensive if their projects are threatened.
What did the guy in the article mean when he said that at 14 billion gallons of ethanol production per year (currently it's 6.5 billion) the "tradeoffs would get too severe"? Are they not severe enough yet? He should try going to find something to eat in Haiti without big wads of money in his pockets. Not severe?
Another thing. The CSM site has a good map about rice production and exports. How odd it is that Thailand produces so very much rice and exports it to where it can be bought at higher prices, when that nation has hill tribes starving due to confiscation of their "slash and burn" rice lands:
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/rice/
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
save the world from carbon by...burning more stuff?
The biofuel cheerleaders who maintained the website of Biopact have called it quits, they say, to go do a "humanitarian" project (oh and they wouldn't think of benefiting from the project by pulling land into carbon credit markets of course...), under the name "the Biochar Fund," ostensibly "improving" the agricultural practices of small "slash and burn" farmers by putting charcoal in the soil (And they get this charcoal how again? Charcoal pyrolysis? Burning things, just at a lower temperature, or with zapping them with high temps with electricity...generated by what again? Perhaps burning things these farmers hadn't burnt before? Which provides fertilizer and electricity they say. Creating new demands and bringing modern conveniences to the ignorant heathen who must thirst for such help and succor. More internal combustion must be the answer.). Seems Biopact wore out their welcome and ducked out of the range of criticism when they realized they may have had a large role in the starvation crisis hitting people all over the globe right now.
http://biopact.com/2008/03/biopact-creates-biochar-fund.html
Scratch the surface of these kinds of projects when you smell a rat. It would be fine if the small farmers had asked for help, and they knew fully what they were in for, and could read the fine print. But in cases like this, when you can sense the arrogant Green contempt for the "slash and burn" agriculture of the know-nothing traditional farmers, you can bet that this scheme is not the idea of the farmers themselves. It is no doubt the idea of some conservationists who want that land not to be available for traditional subsistence needs, and who, whether or not they are christians, act with that missionary zeal which is just a symptom of that same conceit that you will see in the most dogmatic missionaries. There are well-documented cases of western NGOs doing the bidding of coercive government land confiscation ministries in the area where Biochar will be working. That is not to say we have the facts in yet, but it is worth looking into.
The past two years, Special Rapporteurs have been assigned by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to research the effects of carbon mitigation efforts and tree plantations on indigenous peoples worldwide. In the resulting documents, they cited a case of relocations assisted by "aid organizations" in Africa that was shocking, but unfortunately not an isolated incident.
The World Rainforest Movement did a very good report on the maneuvering that has gone into kicking so-called "slash and burn" farmers off of their land in southeast Asia. The rotational agriculture these "slash and burn" farmers have done for ages is quite sound (land lies fallow and retains its fertility again) if they are not pushed off traditional lands into new frontier areas by agribusiness interests and plantations and such enterprises. The maneuvering to grab land for plantations in Asia and elsewhere has been done by large pulp and paper companies and consultants that stood to profit handsomely by setting down monocrop tree plantations all over the world in the name of "reforestation," "afforestation," and "carbon sinks." The "peasants" and the indigenous in SE Asia have now been resettled to make room for the corporations and according to the World Food Programme they are starving to death right NOW. Yet with the new road from Thailand through Laos to China, "development" is the word of the day, and huge land concessions are evidently being granted to China to plant more plantations in the region. Larry Lohmann at the Cornerhouse has also shown the sinister mechanics of this process of dispossession. We can see what is going on. It is no secret, we are just not paying attention, and that is the only reason we are not intervening.
This absurdity needs to stop.
"Indigenous peoples were facing a growing crisis as climate change, unchecked economic growth and discriminatory national laws forced them from their lands into urban areas that offered them insufficient social services, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues heard today."
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/hr4951.doc.htm
Ever since Standard Oil started doing its work promoting the green revolution in the midwestern US back in the 20th century, we have seen energy companies playing this convoluted game of land grabbing through their self-interested "helpfulness" (The tentacles of that particular Standard Oil brand of "helpfulness" then proceeded to go choke all sorts of different indigenous peoples throughout Latin America and the world. See Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done).
Corporations find all sorts of ways to create new markets and new needs (you can bet the green revolution was a good thing for petroleum based fertilizer, and therefore good for the sales of the energy company in the Rockefeller case too, not just in the case of this new Biochar charcoal-carbon Green scheme). All the while they'll get the serfs to foot the bill, for example by lobbying governments to subsidize corn farmers to grow more genetically modified corn for ethanol to go in our gastanks. Often the public will make their projects more profitable by providing the infrastructure, the rails and roads on the specious theory that more commerce is equivalent to a net gain for all of the public. What's good for GM is good for us, yes? So yes, we pay for that development. And we pay to take away any infrastructure, too, if that can be good for the company, as in the case of the conspiracy between GM and firestone (and what was it, Ford?) to get rid of efficient mass transit in L.A. (See Kunstler's book). Austerity measures, structural adjustment, all sorts of those "externalities" come to mind, where the public absorbs the costs or the risks, or the pollution or gets kicked off their frickin' land.
Monsanto and Cargill and other such rackets ARE using the food crisis they helped create to sell us MORE of their products. "Only our higher-yielding brand of genetically modified organism can feed the world, now that there's a Food Crisis," they say. And they will get their products sold, whatever they have to resort to. Did you know this? We haven't been asked whether we want to support these corporations financially. They have fought off legislation that would mandate the labeling of GMO beet sugar in your breakfast cereal, for example. Oh that cheeky mischievous Cargill, sneaking their product into our food again without our consent. Monsanto getting their corn into your gas tank without you even knowing it. We pay these transnational corporations to take advantage of us. And just think what they are willing to do abroad if they're willing to cheat "their own people" this way.
Point is, look into what the humanitarian philanthropist scam artists are doing in far away places. Whenever you see offers to preserve rainforests on cereal or milk boxes, find out who the corporation has displaced off their lands before you leap to the conclusion that they are doing good in the world. "Buyer beware," "who benefits?" and all that.
http://biopact.com/2008/03/biopact-creates-biochar-fund.html
Scratch the surface of these kinds of projects when you smell a rat. It would be fine if the small farmers had asked for help, and they knew fully what they were in for, and could read the fine print. But in cases like this, when you can sense the arrogant Green contempt for the "slash and burn" agriculture of the know-nothing traditional farmers, you can bet that this scheme is not the idea of the farmers themselves. It is no doubt the idea of some conservationists who want that land not to be available for traditional subsistence needs, and who, whether or not they are christians, act with that missionary zeal which is just a symptom of that same conceit that you will see in the most dogmatic missionaries. There are well-documented cases of western NGOs doing the bidding of coercive government land confiscation ministries in the area where Biochar will be working. That is not to say we have the facts in yet, but it is worth looking into.
The past two years, Special Rapporteurs have been assigned by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to research the effects of carbon mitigation efforts and tree plantations on indigenous peoples worldwide. In the resulting documents, they cited a case of relocations assisted by "aid organizations" in Africa that was shocking, but unfortunately not an isolated incident.
The World Rainforest Movement did a very good report on the maneuvering that has gone into kicking so-called "slash and burn" farmers off of their land in southeast Asia. The rotational agriculture these "slash and burn" farmers have done for ages is quite sound (land lies fallow and retains its fertility again) if they are not pushed off traditional lands into new frontier areas by agribusiness interests and plantations and such enterprises. The maneuvering to grab land for plantations in Asia and elsewhere has been done by large pulp and paper companies and consultants that stood to profit handsomely by setting down monocrop tree plantations all over the world in the name of "reforestation," "afforestation," and "carbon sinks." The "peasants" and the indigenous in SE Asia have now been resettled to make room for the corporations and according to the World Food Programme they are starving to death right NOW. Yet with the new road from Thailand through Laos to China, "development" is the word of the day, and huge land concessions are evidently being granted to China to plant more plantations in the region. Larry Lohmann at the Cornerhouse has also shown the sinister mechanics of this process of dispossession. We can see what is going on. It is no secret, we are just not paying attention, and that is the only reason we are not intervening.
This absurdity needs to stop.
"Indigenous peoples were facing a growing crisis as climate change, unchecked economic growth and discriminatory national laws forced them from their lands into urban areas that offered them insufficient social services, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues heard today."
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/hr4951.doc.htm
Ever since Standard Oil started doing its work promoting the green revolution in the midwestern US back in the 20th century, we have seen energy companies playing this convoluted game of land grabbing through their self-interested "helpfulness" (The tentacles of that particular Standard Oil brand of "helpfulness" then proceeded to go choke all sorts of different indigenous peoples throughout Latin America and the world. See Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done).
Corporations find all sorts of ways to create new markets and new needs (you can bet the green revolution was a good thing for petroleum based fertilizer, and therefore good for the sales of the energy company in the Rockefeller case too, not just in the case of this new Biochar charcoal-carbon Green scheme). All the while they'll get the serfs to foot the bill, for example by lobbying governments to subsidize corn farmers to grow more genetically modified corn for ethanol to go in our gastanks. Often the public will make their projects more profitable by providing the infrastructure, the rails and roads on the specious theory that more commerce is equivalent to a net gain for all of the public. What's good for GM is good for us, yes? So yes, we pay for that development. And we pay to take away any infrastructure, too, if that can be good for the company, as in the case of the conspiracy between GM and firestone (and what was it, Ford?) to get rid of efficient mass transit in L.A. (See Kunstler's book). Austerity measures, structural adjustment, all sorts of those "externalities" come to mind, where the public absorbs the costs or the risks, or the pollution or gets kicked off their frickin' land.
Monsanto and Cargill and other such rackets ARE using the food crisis they helped create to sell us MORE of their products. "Only our higher-yielding brand of genetically modified organism can feed the world, now that there's a Food Crisis," they say. And they will get their products sold, whatever they have to resort to. Did you know this? We haven't been asked whether we want to support these corporations financially. They have fought off legislation that would mandate the labeling of GMO beet sugar in your breakfast cereal, for example. Oh that cheeky mischievous Cargill, sneaking their product into our food again without our consent. Monsanto getting their corn into your gas tank without you even knowing it. We pay these transnational corporations to take advantage of us. And just think what they are willing to do abroad if they're willing to cheat "their own people" this way.
Point is, look into what the humanitarian philanthropist scam artists are doing in far away places. Whenever you see offers to preserve rainforests on cereal or milk boxes, find out who the corporation has displaced off their lands before you leap to the conclusion that they are doing good in the world. "Buyer beware," "who benefits?" and all that.
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