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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Developed to Death
Even Ban Ki-Moon says that the rich nations have caused the food crisis, and that the biofuels craze is a big part of the problem:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/sgsm11541.doc.htm
Special Rapporteur on Food Jean Ziegler concurs and is now much-quoted as saying biofuels are a crime against humanity and that there should be a moratorium on the production of biofuels. Moon still sees "more trade" as the long term solution to the crisis. More exporting and importing the fruits of the earth this way and that, which is always concentrating them in some peoples' hands and grabbing them out of others'. Moon sees this as dissolving all the inequity in the not so distant future, redistributing wealth appropriately if only it would be done right...
Hopefully Ziegler does not forget what he knows. He should keep reminding Moon about the magnitude of these problems and about other facts he knows, such as that even non-food biofuels are mercilessly destroying livelihoods and dispossessing more and more peasants from their food-growing lands with promises of robust new cash crop incomes (as George Monbiot has pointed out). The gamblers that are promoting the biofuels market are running their investment experiments on living people and their communities and livelihoods, and on what used to be living ecosystems, and they are lying about who will benefit.
It may be that there is too much to say, too many illustrations to share, for this blog format to be helpful in understanding all these issues. We'll try anyway, guided by the idea that "just putting it out there" can have some positive effect. We'll start collecting the evidence here, sort it all out later. It's an open inquiry.
So on the topic of "more trade, more development equals endlessly more good things and higher living standards for all," here's a minority view: In the winter 2008 issue of dissent magazine Thomas Pogge took a look at the UN's Millennium Development Goals and the presumed good they would do, and showed that the recalibration of measures of poverty can allow governments (just like big polluters "offsetting" or "neutralizing" their carbon) to claim progress on alleviating all the bad in the world, while actually these governments are doing very little:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=990
Pop economists like Jeff Sachs would do well to listen to people like Pogge.
And for those who need their information on the effects of corn in our gastanks a little more audiovisual (and/or hilarious), watch The Colbert Report, episode 385, from April 29, 2008, The Word segment called Kernel of Truth:
http://thecolbertreport.com/
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/sgsm11541.doc.htm
Special Rapporteur on Food Jean Ziegler concurs and is now much-quoted as saying biofuels are a crime against humanity and that there should be a moratorium on the production of biofuels. Moon still sees "more trade" as the long term solution to the crisis. More exporting and importing the fruits of the earth this way and that, which is always concentrating them in some peoples' hands and grabbing them out of others'. Moon sees this as dissolving all the inequity in the not so distant future, redistributing wealth appropriately if only it would be done right...
Hopefully Ziegler does not forget what he knows. He should keep reminding Moon about the magnitude of these problems and about other facts he knows, such as that even non-food biofuels are mercilessly destroying livelihoods and dispossessing more and more peasants from their food-growing lands with promises of robust new cash crop incomes (as George Monbiot has pointed out). The gamblers that are promoting the biofuels market are running their investment experiments on living people and their communities and livelihoods, and on what used to be living ecosystems, and they are lying about who will benefit.
It may be that there is too much to say, too many illustrations to share, for this blog format to be helpful in understanding all these issues. We'll try anyway, guided by the idea that "just putting it out there" can have some positive effect. We'll start collecting the evidence here, sort it all out later. It's an open inquiry.
So on the topic of "more trade, more development equals endlessly more good things and higher living standards for all," here's a minority view: In the winter 2008 issue of dissent magazine Thomas Pogge took a look at the UN's Millennium Development Goals and the presumed good they would do, and showed that the recalibration of measures of poverty can allow governments (just like big polluters "offsetting" or "neutralizing" their carbon) to claim progress on alleviating all the bad in the world, while actually these governments are doing very little:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=990
Pop economists like Jeff Sachs would do well to listen to people like Pogge.
And for those who need their information on the effects of corn in our gastanks a little more audiovisual (and/or hilarious), watch The Colbert Report, episode 385, from April 29, 2008, The Word segment called Kernel of Truth:
http://thecolbertreport.com/
Coming Soon...
That "biopact" site ( http://biopact.com/ ) is a wealth of monumentally deranged ideas. We will definitely follow up some of those stories. What's this they say? Craig Venter, genome-research genius, promoting biofuels? With Norman Borlaug, "father of the Green Revolution"? Fantastic. Utterly fantastic, like the worst industrial-utopia monoculture ideas of H.G. Wells coming to pass. Now we'll refrain from making parallels with DNA discoverer James Watson's racism here, and let's leave conservationist E.O. Wilson's sociobiology debate out of this for the moment. Let us take a moment to think about what Venter and Borlaug, the Green Science vanguard, these great legitimizers of gene-manipulating hubris, have in common with old Joe Mengele and other eugenics-lovers...
Did Joe Mengele not think that he was doing what he did for the good of his people? By that logic, for the good of "all," at least the good of all beings that were "worth anything" in the Germany of his day? Mengele was in the Green Vanguard to be sure. These scientists need not be motivated by greed or sociopathic tendencies to do what some will call evil. "Progress" is a great motivator, a great excuse, something we can all get on board with, something we can all buy into. Take medical progress, which of course Venter promises (though his progress in this real may be more painless than Mengele's) -- doing experiments on living things no matter what pain or environmental destruction may come of such experiments -- can we not all agree that it's worth the costs and the risks, to make the world a better place for humanity (or at least "our" kind of humanity)?
Once we understand it's for our own good, won't we make our peace with the need for vivisection of cute little monkeys and with the violences of industrial animal "production"? It's tough love. It's necessary and even imperative for the future of humanity, the Green Vanguard say (as do those "on the frontlines of the Global War on Terror"), to torture answers out of living beings, so we can use the information so extracted to benefit ourselves and advance our interests.
Getting to the point now: We will manipulate all of life on this planet ("life forms," organisms, functioning ecosystems) to serve us and our grandiose ideas of what all of humanity should look like. Industrial civilization, the end-all be-all, will be justified in whatever it does to the non-industrialized peoples and non-industrialized environments of planet earth. A guy named Michael Novak wrote a book about this with surprisingly naked honesty ("with the cover left off," as Sam Clemens once wrote about the American imperial adventure during the Spanish-American war). We the developed are justified in undertaking any sort of manipulating and conniving to get at the resources under the feet of the "unreached people groups" (as the missionaries say), so that we can "help" them as we help ourselves to their wealth. How convenient, it works out for everybody! Everybody gets industrialized, now we're all in the same boat and have to do whatever the vanguard says we need to to get ourselves out of this ugliness.
Okay so this is digressing. Back to the parallels: If Mengele and his 1940's eugenicist buddies had the tools of Craig Venter and Norm Borlaug, what would they NOT have done with the all the unwanted humanity on planet earth? What would they have done to the humans that happened not to be "high-yielding," the humans that were not productive enough? The humans that did not serve the interests of the elite of that moment? For that matter, what would American scientists NOT have done? Patients at certain American hospitals were being sterilized in the name of eugenics even through the 1970's. Are we really actually over that phase of our hubris? Not at all.
Now for a modest proposal, and one that would have a certain familiar ring to Swift if he were around, except that the global elite's proposition is no joke at all: -(okay so this needs some refining, have mercy, it's a blog)-
We (the developed, the advanced, the saviors of humanity) are now undertaking what looks like a project to "retool" all of life on our planet to serve the ends and ideals of an ephemeral global elite. We are about to recklessly risk the continued existence of all the useful plants our ancestors so slowly adapted to feed us over thousands upon thousands of years (some landraces may survive in the doomsday vault at Longyearben, but we and our descendants will starve anyway due to either the greed of the life-technology patent-holders, or the total wipeout by super-pests of the weed-like monoculture we will have come to depend on thanks to life's patent-holders). We are about to risk the wholesale disruption of the ecosystems of this planet, entire "biomes," microclimates and all, so that we can plant plantations of engineered "fuel crops" to replace the existing "useless wilderness" and so continue to power our insane extraction and consumption. Don't worry, some of us will have jobs tending the plantations. We will be comforted with shiny baubles, the trinkets and beads and bread and circuses our employers provide us. The company will take care of us. The company = the economy = the all knowing, all-providing savior, the promise for tomorrow, Industrial Civilization and its most-contents (ok, bad pun on a Freud title, but it's staying). Of course we're in good hands. All will not be lost. We will only have lost our birthright of a living earth, an earth that was not a long arduous painful travail to live on (and we won't quite be able to put a finger on what's missing, we won't notice it's gone, just like we never noticed when we lost other birthrights we should have had as humans on earth, such as communities that were not defined by commercial transactions, or not having to trade our souls to earn our daily bread doing labor that was set up on someone else's terms [the terms of the owners of the planet], etc). And we will only have lost the poor losers that didn't have the foresight and wherewithal to patent life. Hey what can you say, the fit survive, yeah? Those losers will trouble our consciences no more when they're dead. Let's get on with it, what are we waiting for! Cut the dead weight, all that does not serve The Man and the Industrial Civilization he leads will be ancient history. Every thing under the sun shall be a commodity now, to be traded and profited from, for the good of Humanity of course. We'll all be "social entrepreneurs"! Everything is going to be okay.
Okay this is dumb, you get the picture. Swift did justice to this sort of grand vision the first time around:
http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/mdprp10.htm
Did Joe Mengele not think that he was doing what he did for the good of his people? By that logic, for the good of "all," at least the good of all beings that were "worth anything" in the Germany of his day? Mengele was in the Green Vanguard to be sure. These scientists need not be motivated by greed or sociopathic tendencies to do what some will call evil. "Progress" is a great motivator, a great excuse, something we can all get on board with, something we can all buy into. Take medical progress, which of course Venter promises (though his progress in this real may be more painless than Mengele's) -- doing experiments on living things no matter what pain or environmental destruction may come of such experiments -- can we not all agree that it's worth the costs and the risks, to make the world a better place for humanity (or at least "our" kind of humanity)?
Once we understand it's for our own good, won't we make our peace with the need for vivisection of cute little monkeys and with the violences of industrial animal "production"? It's tough love. It's necessary and even imperative for the future of humanity, the Green Vanguard say (as do those "on the frontlines of the Global War on Terror"), to torture answers out of living beings, so we can use the information so extracted to benefit ourselves and advance our interests.
Getting to the point now: We will manipulate all of life on this planet ("life forms," organisms, functioning ecosystems) to serve us and our grandiose ideas of what all of humanity should look like. Industrial civilization, the end-all be-all, will be justified in whatever it does to the non-industrialized peoples and non-industrialized environments of planet earth. A guy named Michael Novak wrote a book about this with surprisingly naked honesty ("with the cover left off," as Sam Clemens once wrote about the American imperial adventure during the Spanish-American war). We the developed are justified in undertaking any sort of manipulating and conniving to get at the resources under the feet of the "unreached people groups" (as the missionaries say), so that we can "help" them as we help ourselves to their wealth. How convenient, it works out for everybody! Everybody gets industrialized, now we're all in the same boat and have to do whatever the vanguard says we need to to get ourselves out of this ugliness.
Okay so this is digressing. Back to the parallels: If Mengele and his 1940's eugenicist buddies had the tools of Craig Venter and Norm Borlaug, what would they NOT have done with the all the unwanted humanity on planet earth? What would they have done to the humans that happened not to be "high-yielding," the humans that were not productive enough? The humans that did not serve the interests of the elite of that moment? For that matter, what would American scientists NOT have done? Patients at certain American hospitals were being sterilized in the name of eugenics even through the 1970's. Are we really actually over that phase of our hubris? Not at all.
Now for a modest proposal, and one that would have a certain familiar ring to Swift if he were around, except that the global elite's proposition is no joke at all: -(okay so this needs some refining, have mercy, it's a blog)-
We (the developed, the advanced, the saviors of humanity) are now undertaking what looks like a project to "retool" all of life on our planet to serve the ends and ideals of an ephemeral global elite. We are about to recklessly risk the continued existence of all the useful plants our ancestors so slowly adapted to feed us over thousands upon thousands of years (some landraces may survive in the doomsday vault at Longyearben, but we and our descendants will starve anyway due to either the greed of the life-technology patent-holders, or the total wipeout by super-pests of the weed-like monoculture we will have come to depend on thanks to life's patent-holders). We are about to risk the wholesale disruption of the ecosystems of this planet, entire "biomes," microclimates and all, so that we can plant plantations of engineered "fuel crops" to replace the existing "useless wilderness" and so continue to power our insane extraction and consumption. Don't worry, some of us will have jobs tending the plantations. We will be comforted with shiny baubles, the trinkets and beads and bread and circuses our employers provide us. The company will take care of us. The company = the economy = the all knowing, all-providing savior, the promise for tomorrow, Industrial Civilization and its most-contents (ok, bad pun on a Freud title, but it's staying). Of course we're in good hands. All will not be lost. We will only have lost our birthright of a living earth, an earth that was not a long arduous painful travail to live on (and we won't quite be able to put a finger on what's missing, we won't notice it's gone, just like we never noticed when we lost other birthrights we should have had as humans on earth, such as communities that were not defined by commercial transactions, or not having to trade our souls to earn our daily bread doing labor that was set up on someone else's terms [the terms of the owners of the planet], etc). And we will only have lost the poor losers that didn't have the foresight and wherewithal to patent life. Hey what can you say, the fit survive, yeah? Those losers will trouble our consciences no more when they're dead. Let's get on with it, what are we waiting for! Cut the dead weight, all that does not serve The Man and the Industrial Civilization he leads will be ancient history. Every thing under the sun shall be a commodity now, to be traded and profited from, for the good of Humanity of course. We'll all be "social entrepreneurs"! Everything is going to be okay.
Okay this is dumb, you get the picture. Swift did justice to this sort of grand vision the first time around:
http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/mdprp10.htm
mixing bleach and ammonia, wondering why we feel faint
It's 2008, the year The Green Death got so bad it even made the network news. All over the planet people are having extreme difficulties just finding even small portions of food for themselves and their families; so many more than ever are getting by just one day at a time, living on almost nothing. At the same time, and also all over the planet, people are being systematically pushed off of their food growing lands. Malnutrition and disease follows, emaciation and death. Why?
Even in the U.S., we can see something unusual is happening if we keep an eye on food and gas prices. We are all being affected by powerful forces most of us do not quite understand, forces many of us who are relatively well off haven't yet really tried to understand. Those of us paying attention are aware of the fact that these trends do not exist in isolation from one another. Oil prices are up, food prices are up too. We know we will at some point be just as desperate as the people eating mud cookies in Haiti if we stay on this course; we know something is wrong somewhere.
At the same time we have a great new global concern about climate change, and through the discourse on that topic we in the so-called developed world have come to understand that there is some sort of problem, some inequity, in the way we consume natural resources. We eat up the world's raw materials at an unsustainable rate; we burn some of the stuff and spew it into the air and we should start being responsible and cleaning up some of our mess. We, the developed, are starting to recognize that the way we're doing things is reckless and unfair and risking the future of life on the planet (wow, does this mean we're all "radical" now?). It seems admirable and appropriate that even heads of corporations are beginning to acknowledge this. We all now seem to sense that it is incumbent upon us to change, to address these inequities, perhaps to conserve energy, lower our carbon footprint, not consume quite so much, change our lifestyles in some way. Then things will all be better. So we think.
Here we will look into some of the solutions we have been offered. We'll look at the theory (public relations greenwashes) and practice (genocide-perpetrating) sides of biofuels and carbon markets. We'll monitor insane coercive development and reforestation schemes. We will watch for the ever-entertaining and disheartening signs of the great lengths industrial civilizations and their inhabitants will go to just to avoid admitting that drastic changes in their social orders and lifestyles may be necessary ("no such thing as climate change," "we're not running out of oil," maybe even, "they hate us for our freedoms"). We will take a look back at coercive (but "green") population control programs, among other things. Anything that illuminates our refusal to address the most basic and obvious unfairnesses inherent to our present global social and economic order. Double standards are so much fun to spot.
It is becoming clear to many of us that some of the remedies that have been offered to us as solutions to our greatest problems are far worse than just some harmless placebo snakeoil. Some of the remedies we have bought into are already compounding the problems, and in some cases they are even making things orders of magnitude worse then they would have been with business as usual. Let's think long and hard about it all.
In this blog we will try to learn from the stories of people who have already been badly hurt (or worse) by our overzealous (mostly well-meaning yet often subtly self-interested) attempts at fixing things, and we will look into and follow the cases of some of the largest-scale scam artists on earth, people and organizations who are pillaging our planet and our communities as all the while we congratulate them on what a great job they are doing providing us employment, bringing us cheap goods from far away, keeping The Economy (Our Economy) growing, and developing the backward and undeveloped regions and peoples of the earth "for the good of all." We hear the same rationales for destructive and utterly unfair forms of economic growth and development coming from politicians, oil companies, trade groups, humanitarian organizations (!), industrial interests and conglomerates of all sorts, agribusinesses, development banks, multilateral aid organizations; in short, the civilizers. They still wear a certain notorious mantle with pride (though they use different words for it these days); they carry on no less than the grand civilizing vision of Manifest Destiny. And they will, no matter what the human cost, until the machine stops.
Those of us not directing these schemes have been had. We may have been slow to catch on, but by paying attention we can get better at not letting the grand fallacies slide past our attention when the cheerleaders of an insistently self destructive industrial civilization try to conscript us into their grand projects. Figuring out how to stop their projects altogether is a different story.
So below, to kick things off, is one of the funniest, most absurd schemes yet. When by the sheer force of our instinctual irrepressible derisive laughter we are able to bring these grand destructive projects to their knees, or slap them down before they even get launched, this blog will gladly close up shop and say mission accomplished. Oh the folly:
Chevron and Weyerhaeuser form biofuels joint venture, Catchlight Energy LLC:
http://biopact.com/2008/03/chevron-and-weyerhaeuser-form-biofuels.html
And here's what the world's indigenous people have to say about the effects of biofuels, tree plantations, coercive development projects and the like. They are the canaries in this global coal mine, among the last canaries we are blessed to have, let's not ignore them:
http://www.un.org/apps/pressreleases -- see the comments from indigenous representatives at the forum on 4-22-08:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4946.doc.htm
Or see Evo Morales' comments on the opening day of the forum to get the gist, 4-21-08:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4944.doc.htm
This is the first entry for this blog, we'll get things more "refined" soon. Much more to come...
Even in the U.S., we can see something unusual is happening if we keep an eye on food and gas prices. We are all being affected by powerful forces most of us do not quite understand, forces many of us who are relatively well off haven't yet really tried to understand. Those of us paying attention are aware of the fact that these trends do not exist in isolation from one another. Oil prices are up, food prices are up too. We know we will at some point be just as desperate as the people eating mud cookies in Haiti if we stay on this course; we know something is wrong somewhere.
At the same time we have a great new global concern about climate change, and through the discourse on that topic we in the so-called developed world have come to understand that there is some sort of problem, some inequity, in the way we consume natural resources. We eat up the world's raw materials at an unsustainable rate; we burn some of the stuff and spew it into the air and we should start being responsible and cleaning up some of our mess. We, the developed, are starting to recognize that the way we're doing things is reckless and unfair and risking the future of life on the planet (wow, does this mean we're all "radical" now?). It seems admirable and appropriate that even heads of corporations are beginning to acknowledge this. We all now seem to sense that it is incumbent upon us to change, to address these inequities, perhaps to conserve energy, lower our carbon footprint, not consume quite so much, change our lifestyles in some way. Then things will all be better. So we think.
Here we will look into some of the solutions we have been offered. We'll look at the theory (public relations greenwashes) and practice (genocide-perpetrating) sides of biofuels and carbon markets. We'll monitor insane coercive development and reforestation schemes. We will watch for the ever-entertaining and disheartening signs of the great lengths industrial civilizations and their inhabitants will go to just to avoid admitting that drastic changes in their social orders and lifestyles may be necessary ("no such thing as climate change," "we're not running out of oil," maybe even, "they hate us for our freedoms"). We will take a look back at coercive (but "green") population control programs, among other things. Anything that illuminates our refusal to address the most basic and obvious unfairnesses inherent to our present global social and economic order. Double standards are so much fun to spot.
It is becoming clear to many of us that some of the remedies that have been offered to us as solutions to our greatest problems are far worse than just some harmless placebo snakeoil. Some of the remedies we have bought into are already compounding the problems, and in some cases they are even making things orders of magnitude worse then they would have been with business as usual. Let's think long and hard about it all.
In this blog we will try to learn from the stories of people who have already been badly hurt (or worse) by our overzealous (mostly well-meaning yet often subtly self-interested) attempts at fixing things, and we will look into and follow the cases of some of the largest-scale scam artists on earth, people and organizations who are pillaging our planet and our communities as all the while we congratulate them on what a great job they are doing providing us employment, bringing us cheap goods from far away, keeping The Economy (Our Economy) growing, and developing the backward and undeveloped regions and peoples of the earth "for the good of all." We hear the same rationales for destructive and utterly unfair forms of economic growth and development coming from politicians, oil companies, trade groups, humanitarian organizations (!), industrial interests and conglomerates of all sorts, agribusinesses, development banks, multilateral aid organizations; in short, the civilizers. They still wear a certain notorious mantle with pride (though they use different words for it these days); they carry on no less than the grand civilizing vision of Manifest Destiny. And they will, no matter what the human cost, until the machine stops.
Those of us not directing these schemes have been had. We may have been slow to catch on, but by paying attention we can get better at not letting the grand fallacies slide past our attention when the cheerleaders of an insistently self destructive industrial civilization try to conscript us into their grand projects. Figuring out how to stop their projects altogether is a different story.
So below, to kick things off, is one of the funniest, most absurd schemes yet. When by the sheer force of our instinctual irrepressible derisive laughter we are able to bring these grand destructive projects to their knees, or slap them down before they even get launched, this blog will gladly close up shop and say mission accomplished. Oh the folly:
Chevron and Weyerhaeuser form biofuels joint venture, Catchlight Energy LLC:
http://biopact.com/2008/03/chevron-and-weyerhaeuser-form-biofuels.html
And here's what the world's indigenous people have to say about the effects of biofuels, tree plantations, coercive development projects and the like. They are the canaries in this global coal mine, among the last canaries we are blessed to have, let's not ignore them:
http://www.un.org/apps/pressreleases -- see the comments from indigenous representatives at the forum on 4-22-08:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4946.doc.htm
Or see Evo Morales' comments on the opening day of the forum to get the gist, 4-21-08:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4944.doc.htm
This is the first entry for this blog, we'll get things more "refined" soon. Much more to come...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)