tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11487977557314446302024-03-13T20:10:16.595-03:00Ecological SociologyTheorizing the relationship between the natural and the social.Garyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01594415948430315779noreply@blogger.comBlogger452125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-85276801863275743252013-08-31T13:29:00.004-03:002013-08-31T16:22:55.113-03:00Commons Enabling InfrastuctureThis two-part series explores the physical, technical and governance infrastructures that are needed to create and sustain a commons. It takes "the commons" beyond the realm of utopian ideology and into the physical reality of how to make a commons work.<br />
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by <a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1153933-silke-helfrich" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Silke Helfrich</a>, originally published by <a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/commons-enabling-infrastructures-12/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Commons Blog</a> <span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #f6891f; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"> | AUG 29, 2013</span></div>
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<b><a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/chicago-transit-authority-control_loop_junction-on-wikimedia-commons.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="Chicago Transit Authority Control_loop_junction on Wikimedia Commons" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-7184" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/chicago-transit-authority-control_loop_junction-on-wikimedia-commons.jpg?w=300&h=199" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" vspace="5" width="300" /></a>Commons and Infrastructure.*</b> This is, IMHO, one of THE issues we have to deal with if we want to expand the commons. The following is a personal summary of the debates at the <b>Economics and the Commons Conference</b> (ECC, Berlin, May 2013). It will be published in two parts. The first one is based on the <a class="external" href="http://commonsandeconomics.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Keynote of the Infrastructure Stream</a> at ECC (presented by <a class="external" href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Miguel_Said_Vieira" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Miguel Said Vieira</a>; prepared by him & <a class="external" href="http://meretz.de/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Stefan Meretz</a>). While re-listening the keynote, summarizing their ideas and paging through my notes from the <a class="external" href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Europe_Commons_Deep_Dive" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">European Deep Dive</a>, I added some of my own ideas and a few examples that came into my mind. The second one will be based on the discussions during the stream sessions.</div>
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Let’s start with a few quotes from the (pretty compelling) framing of the respective stream at ECC, which was called. <a class="external" href="http://p2pfoundation.net/ECC2013/Infrastructure_Stream" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">„New Infrastructures for Commoning by Design“:</a></div>
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„Commons, whether small or large, can benefit a lot from dependable communication, energy and transportation, for instance. Frequently, the issue is not even that a commons can benefit from those services, but that<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;"> its daily survival badly depends on them</strong>. … When we look at commoning initiatives as a loose network, it does not make sense that multiple commons in different fields or locations should have to repeat and overlap their efforts in obtaining those services (infrastructures) independently…“</div>
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We need to sensitize commoners about the urgent need for<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;"> <strong>Commons Enabling Infrastructures (CEI)</strong>. That is, we need infrastructures that</strong></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">can “by design” foster and protect new practices of commoning;</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">help challenge power concentration and individualistic behavior</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">are based on distributed networks (as extensively as possible)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">provide platforms which enable non-discriminatory access and use rights (for instance: a “ticket-free public transport system” is not cost-free, but it is designed in such a way, that the funding of maintanance is not tied to the traveller’s individual budget)</li>
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The good news is, that we don’t need to start from scratch (as we’ll see). Such infrastructures have always existed. They clearly CAN enable the creation and maintenance of commons,<em> if</em> they are designed for and <em>if</em> they are run by communities or networks. The problem is, that this crucial point is often dismissed – even amongst commons-sensitive communities. The talk delivered by Free Software advocate <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Eben Moglen</a> at Re:publica 2012 <a class="external" href="http://12.re-publica.de//panel/why-freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media-and-why-free-media-require-free-technology/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">shows in an almost dramatic way </a>how even in the digital world we lose the fight on infrastructures.</div>
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„But Freedom of Thought needs free media and free media needs free technologies.“ (Moglen).</div>
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It’s that simple. In other words:<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;"> </strong>It is not enough to use free software and protect it by the <a class="external" href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">General Public License.</a> Legally protected Free Software remains technically and structurally vulnerable. If everything is run on enclosed platforms sooner or later these platforms (and those who run them) will cannibalize the freedom of users. Free Software needs <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">free hardware</a> and community controlled infrastructures. If not, cooptation is right around the corner. (The <a class="external" href="http://freedomboxfoundation.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Freedom Box</a>project deals with this.)</div>
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To build commons enabling infrastructures,</div>
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„there are at least <strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">four critical factors</strong> that must be properly structured for the infrastructures to succeed: the social organization of management systems, technical issues, system protocols and legal governance regimes. […] However, conventional economics discourse barely recognizes this distinction and usually treats infrastructure as a resource, pure and simple, with little regard for the actual or potential role of commoning.“ (from the <a class="external" href="http://p2pfoundation.net/Europe_Commons_Deep_Dive" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Deep Dive protocol</a>)</div>
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There are plenty of questions that arise when we think about Commons Enabling Infrastructures, questions such as:</div>
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* What could be the roles of the state – currently the main provider of infrastructures – and the market?</div>
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* How those actors conflict with commoning initiatives, and how could they be useful in infrastructures provisioning?</div>
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* While some emerging infrastructures have progressive dimensions (using distributed networks, promoting local access), they may be minor parts of larger, regressive infrastructures that still depend upon individual transportation, centralized power grids and concentrated industrial structures. Is this avoidable, and how so?</div>
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<b>* </b>Why is the issue so challenging?<b> –> </b>Because it is rather unexplored and because it transcends the issue of limits / size / scale.</div>
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* … and many others, feel free to add in the comments.</div>
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But first and foremost the question is<b>: What is infrastructure at all?</b></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It is not a given, but historically/ <b>socially constructed</b>.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It is a system that <b>enables</b> activities of multiple actors, just as our veins, neuronal networks and musculature allow all parts of our body and elements within to act and interact.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">„Why don’t we think of a single car as infrastructure?“ Because infrastructure is about something that lies <i>infra</i> > latin „beneath“ the single thing or activity p.e roads, traffic signals and traffic rules, that can by <b>used by many actors</b> –> Infrastructures are social systems.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It is usually too <b>expensive</b> to be paid by an individual.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It can be related to layers/ systems/ resources we all use (spectrum), or to things we value collectively (health, sanitation, education).</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It is something we share, it has a social character and therefore, the <b>potential</b>to be commons.</li>
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Today, most existing infrastructures are <b>related to commodity production,</b>that is: they are market-logic driven, but the market provides only indirect (and very imperfect) indicators of societal needs; thus; many of the current infrastructures foster environmentally harmful and individualistic behaviour. The<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">lack of certain infrastructures</strong> does as well; just think about the public transport system vs the highway system in Germany.</div>
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<a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/stau-by-wikimedia-commons.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="Stau by Wikimedia Commons" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-7185" height="199" hspace="5" src="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/stau-by-wikimedia-commons.jpg?w=300&h=199" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" vspace="5" width="300" /></a>Most of these commodity driven and commodity reproducing infrastructures were built by states and not by private actors. In fact there is a trend towards<a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">mega-infrastructures (pushed by States and corporations),</strong></a>many of them related to energy-supply, mining and agribusiness companies.</div>
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„These large energy, mining and infrastructure investments are frequently cross-border“ (<a class="external" href="http://www.bakermckenzie.com/energymininginfrastructure/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Baker &Mc Kenzie</a>) and set up as <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partnership" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><b>Public Private Partnership</b></a>. This kind of infrastructure usually <b>promotes and enables dispossession.</b></div>
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Therefore, the question is (again): How can the infrastructures be related to commons production? How can we promote and build commons enabling infrastructures? And how can we deal with the following challenges:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>to turn existing infrastructures into commons:</b> → via appropriating existing, state provided infrastructures or (re-)designing CEI with the State? What are the limits of such infrastructures? (example: Does car-sharing spur the change of the underlying infrastructures?)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>to turn commons into infrastructures on a wider societal level</b>, so that society is less dependent on commodities. Here the problem is the current ties of many commons to a region/ a territory within given boundaries.</li>
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To, both, show where we are at and show what’s possible, here are a few<b>alternative approaches (practices) to infrastructures:</b></div>
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<a class="external" href="http://guifi.net/en" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">1. Guifi.net</strong> </a>– „the open, free and neutral network; Internet for Everybody“, which is a large and successful community built, shared and controlled internet infrastructure; an example of it’s application: <a class="external" href="http://guifi.net/maps" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">guifi.net.map.</a> It is</div>
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“based on a peer to peer agreement that lets anyone join the network by providing her/her connections, which in turn extends network connectivity to others. Guifi.net is an independent network owned by commoners, but also constituted as a foundation that lets it dialogue with the state and market in order to have access to other infrastuctures (such as the electro-magnetic spectrum) and grow.”<b></b></div>
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There are other such networks based on common WLAN hotspots and a bit of antennas and software programming in Athens, Barcelona or Vienna. The European Union is funding research projects about their potential. Because, if</div>
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“many of such community networks are set up together they can form a distributed network, based on so called »Linux-Containers« (LXC). This would be a new and light-weighted, community-controled p2p form of enabling communication beyond the big corporations and based on computers of relatively low performance. ( CONFINE »<a class="external" href="http://confine.blog.pangea.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Community Networks Testbed for the Future Internet</a>«</div>
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Indeed, in post-Snowden times an infrastructure of free, distributed networkes to enable our (digital) communication seems more important than ever (see also<a class="external" href="http://communitylab.blog.pangea.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Community-lab.net).</a></div>
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<b><a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">2. Smart Grids</a>:</b></div>
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They could help spur commons based, distributed energy production by many countless projects and initiatives. But there is a similar problem as in the case of telecommunication: if those initiatives would like to exchange energy among themselves, they would need to use the market based grid → which makes them vulnerable. Moreover, the current trend favoring Smart Grids is not driven by commons but by the<a class="external" href="http://www.boell.de/publications/publications-critique-of-the-green-economy-14826.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> Green Economy</a> idea which basically ignores the factor of excessive consumption.</div>
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<b>3. Education:</b> <b><a class="external" href="http://www.ruralmaraba.ifpa.edu.br/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Marabá Rural Campus</a></b></div>
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<a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/crmb_corrected.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="crmb_corrected" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-7188" height="225" hspace="5" src="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/crmb_corrected.jpg?w=300&h=225" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" vspace="5" width="300" /></a>This is an example of a Public Higher Education Institute that offers technical and undergrad degree in agroecology and rural education. It is an interesting case that shows how communities appropriate themselves of usually state run infrastructures. Peasant movements involved with land reform, indigenous people or<a class="external" href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilombo" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">quilombos</a> are involved in student selection mechanisms, that is: extremely diverse communities, but usually pro commons and some of them even strictly commons based, sharing and producing collectively. Along with trade unions they pressured the State to set up the Campus. The land was donated by the Movement of landless people, <a class="external" href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bewegung_der_Landarbeiter_ohne_Boden" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">MST. </a>The location choosen for the campus was particularly relevant as it is close to El Dorado dos Carajás where in 1996, 19 people were <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldorado_dos_Caraj%C3%A1s_massacre" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">murdered by the police.</a></div>
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In a way the place of the Marabá Rural Campus is a battle ground between commons based initiatives and <a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/commons-territoriality-and-comunal-ethos-vs-commodity-consensus/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">neo-extractivists.</a></div>
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<a class="external" href="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/eldorado_dos_carajas_massacre_by_latuff2.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="Eldorado_dos_Carajas_massacre_by_Latuff2" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-7189" height="189" hspace="5" src="http://commonsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/eldorado_dos_carajas_massacre_by_latuff2.jpg?w=300&h=189" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" vspace="5" width="300" /></a>Carlos Latuff Cartoon about the massacre in El Dorado do Carajás; Images from <a class="external" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:555/Latuff" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Carlos Latuff are copyright free</a>).</div>
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Marabá Rural Campus has small scale family farming, agroecology and food sovereignty as principles and blends them with research focused on the community's needs. One of their strategies is called: <strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">alternation pedagogy</strong>, that is students spend one third of their time in their respective communities; this allows for a process orientied learning and research, it minimizes rural exodus etc.</div>
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Btw; there is an interesting conceptual link to a recent article by Prof. Uwe Schneidewind (Director of the Wuppertal Institute) who calls for a <a class="external" href="http://nachhaltigewissenschaft.blog.de/2013/08/19/plaedoyer-buergeruniversitaet-beitrag-uwe-schneidewind-deutschen-universitaetszeitung-16321374/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">citizen university concept </a>in Germany. We need to commonify education. Pioneer work we can build upon is done in many places; one example is the <a class="external" href="http://www.zukunftsstiftung-bildung.de/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Future-Foundation Eduction of the GLS-Trust</a>) This will be the main pillar of commonifying public services and infrastructures.</div>
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<b>4. Transportation and Urban Planning:</b></div>
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… infrastructure as a commons can include car-pooling and car-sharing, achieved through a distributed sharing of transportation needs and routes. Shared cars could have preferred access to key roads. In <a class="external" href="http://www.tallinn.ee/eng/tasutauhistransport/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a system of free public transport</a> was recently instituted that lets registered residents of the city use the system at no cost, while visitors from other parts of the country and foreigners must pay. The idea is that citizens have already paid via their taxes for the transportation.</div>
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“To be entitled to freely use public transport in Tallinn, citizens of Tallinn have to purchase the so-called ‘green card’ (EUR 2) and personalise it. People from outside Tallinn can also buy the ‘green card’ which enables them to load the needed amount of money to use public transport. Since the implementation of free public transport, a significant increase of the number of registered Tallinners can be observed.”</div>
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So, it seems to help densifying urban spaces which to a certain degree is desperately needed to leave the urban surroundings untouched.<b></b></div>
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Urban planning and public spaces can be considered infrastructure as well. And from that perspective, urban gardening or urban agriculture are attempts to reclaim spaces that have been taken over by development and/or abandoned. Other approaches to convert urban infrastructure into Commons Enabling Infrastructures (CEI) are social housing projects or Community Land Trusts. To mention just two examples out of many: The<a class="external" href="https://www.calafou.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> Ca La Fou</a> in Spain (Catalunya) – “Colonia Ecoindustrial Postcapitalista – is an industrial colony that has built low-cost housing that is owned, managed and governed by the community. And the<a class="external" href="http://gtne.org/?q=node/599" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Community Land Trust in Brussels</a> developed organizational forms (the trust) to convert urban land and housing into something used and stewarded by the communities themselves on a pretty ambitious scale.<b></b></div>
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Obviously in all those areas there are plenty of <strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">t</strong><b>ensions:</b></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">the government shows a lack of committment to land reform</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">guaranteeing participatory management is a constant struggle</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">corruption is not unknown in the commons, nor is conflict</li>
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But once we conceive Commons Enabling Infrastructures in a clearer way, once we understand, why they are so crucial to expand the Commons and how many thrilling initiatives can be (already) connected to each other, once we have a more commons-friendly environment in which these experiments evolve, each project can focus with major strength on these issues which won’t disappear but can be commonly addressed and resolved.</div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Fotos:</strong></address>
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Chicago Transit Authority, Control Loop Junction Control Tower on the Chicago L; Wikimedia Commons by <a class="external" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Daniel Schwen</a>; GNU Free Documentation Licence</address>
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Stau: by Alexander Blum</address>
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Marabá Rural Campus, Brazil by Sanderlei Cruz</address>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-24024083278347582732013-08-26T17:01:00.002-03:002013-08-26T17:01:42.719-03:00A Short History of Progress: Book Review<br />
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<em><strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; font-style: normal; line-height: 22px;">A Short History of Progress</strong></em></div>
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by Ronald Wright (2004 Caroll and Graf)</div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Book Review</strong></div>
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The theme of <em>A Short History of Progress</em> is social collapse. In it, Canadian historical archeologist Ronald Wright summarizes humankind’s biological and cultural evolution, as well as tracing the role of ecological destruction in the collapse of the some of the most significant civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Easter Island and the Mayan civilization). Exhaustively researched, the book advances the theory that many of colossal blunders made by modern leaders are very old mistakes made by earlier civilizations. Wright starts with the mystery of the agricultural revolution that occurred around 10,000 BC, when <em>homo sapiens</em>ceased to rely on hunting and berry-picking and began growing their own food. Twelve thousand years ago, the global population was still small enough that there was more than ample wild food to feed them. Yet for some reason, a half dozen human settlements in widely separated regions simultaneously domesticated plants and animals. Why?</div>
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<b>The Importance of Stable Climate</b></div>
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Citing extensive geological and archeological evidence, Wright suggests plant and animal domestication may have been triggered by unprecedented climate stability. Prior to 10,000 BC, the earth’s climate was wildly unstable, with ice ages developing and abating over periods as short as a decade or so. These sudden periodic changes in climate forced our hunter gatherer ancestors to continually migrate in search of food. The climate stabilization that occurred following the last ice age (around 10,000 BC) enabled them to settle in larger groups, save seeds to cultivate crops that took months to harvest, and engage in trade for other basic necessities.</div>
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Wright goes on to describe a number of diverse civilizations that arose and collapsed between 4,000 and 1,000 BC – and their unfortunate tendency towards mindless habitat destruction and runaway population growth, consumption, and technological development. In each case, an identical social transformation takes place as resources become increasingly scarce. As prehistoric peoples find it harder and harder to feed themselves, inevitably a privileged elite emerges to confiscate communal lands and enslave their inhabitants. They then install a despotic tyrant who hastens ecological collapse by wasting scare resources on a spree of militarization and temple or pyramid building. This process is almost always accompanied by wholesale murder, torture, and unproductive wars.</div>
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Wright relates this typical pattern of ecological destruction and collapse to a series of “progress traps,” in which specific human inventions turn out to have extremely negative unintended consequences. Instead of fixing the underlying problem they’re meant to solve, the inventions create an even worse environmental mess. It’s a pattern so common in prehistory that it’s become enshrined in the Adam and Eve and similar creation myths. All describe how the quest for knowledge ended humankind’s access to freely available and abundant food and forced them to produce their own.</div>
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<b>Our Ancestors Wipe Out the Neanderthals and Mammoths</b></div>
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According to Wright, the first of these “progress traps” was the invention of weapons (for hunting) by early <em>homo sapiens</em>. Wright blames this early invention of weapons for the first (archeologically) recorded instance of genocide – namely the wiping out of <em>homo Neanderthalis</em> (Neanderthal man) by Cro-Magnon man between 40,000 and 30,000 BC. This was followed by other important mass extinctions as homo sapiens spread out across the globe between 30,000 and 15,000 BC. The most recent archeological evidence suggests the mammoth, camel and horse became extinct in North America during this period because of perfected hunting techniques that allowed homo sapiens to carry out mass slaughters (involving as many as 1,000 mammoths or 100,000 horses simultaneously).</div>
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Some archeologists attribute the end of hunting as a predominate food source (in numerous regions simultaneously) and the rise of plant-based diets to the decline in game animals stemming from this indiscriminate slaughter. The birth of agriculture, in turn leads to widespread deforestation and soil erosion in all the ancient civilizations, accompanied by soil salinization from over-irrigation. According to Wright, the entire cycle takes around a thousand years, which happens to be the average lifespan of most historic civilizations.</div>
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<b>Turning Iraq Into a Desert</b></div>
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The first civilization to collapse in this way was Sumer (in southern Iraq, which flourished between 3,000 and 2,000 BC. The Sumerians invented irrigation, the city, the corporation (in the form of priestly bureaucracies), writing (for trade purposes), hereditary kings and slavery. By 2,500 BC, soil salinization (from irrigation) had caused a massive drop-off in crop yields. Instead of implementing environmental reforms, the ruling elite tried to intensify production by confiscating communal lands, introducing slavery and human sacrifice and engaging in chronic warfare.</div>
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From Sumer the cradle of civilization moved north to Mesopotamia(Babylon, in the region of northern Iraq and Syria, and humankind created one of the first man made deserts out of a region lush in date palms and other native vegetation.</div>
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Around 1,000 BC, similar civilizations also appeared in India, China, Mexico, Peru and parts of Europe. The Greeks (around 600 BC) were the first with any conscious awareness that they were destroying their own habitat. Plato writes a vivid description of the dangers of erosion and runoff from deforestation. The Athenian leader Solon tried to halt increasing ecological devastation by outlawing debt serfdom, food exports, and farming on steep slopes. Pisistratus offered grants to farmers to plant olive trees for soil reclamation.</div>
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Wright makes a good case for similar environmental destruction, rather than barbarian invasion, causing Rome to collapse. By the time of Augustus, Italian land had become so degraded that Rome was forced to import most of their food from North Africa, Gaul, and other colonies.</div>
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<b>The Role of the New World</b></div>
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The most interesting section of the book concerns the role the New World played in rescuing the environmentally decimated European civilization. According to Wright, it was mainly New World gold and silver that capitalized the industrial revolution. However he also stresses the importance of the New World foods that were added to the European diet at a point where the population had outstripped their food supply. Maize (sweet corn) and potatoes are twice as productive (in terms of calories per acre) as wheat and barley, the traditional European staples. He also makes the point – ominously – that, despite all our apparent technological progress, humankind hasn’t introduced one new food since the Stone Age. In fact, homo sapiens hasn’t evolved culturally or intellectually since our ancestors failed to confront resource scarcity in a way conducive to their survival.</div>
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If anything, given mass extinctions, potentially catastrophic climate change, and a growing scarcity of energy, water and fertile soil, we seem to be repeating the old maladaptive pattern. As examples, Wright cites the idiotic war on terrorism, which has ironic parallels with the chronic warfare the Sumerians launched 4,000 years ago. He also cites the rise of the New Right and the folly of trying to address resource scarcity by consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.</div>
Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-34312702124075155502013-08-14T11:40:00.001-03:002013-08-14T20:03:29.446-03:00Foucault, Power, Truth and EcologyDan Bednarz brings together Foucault's theory of power with an ecological theory of power. I tried to do the same in my DOE (demonstration of expertise), with equally limited success. Aside from his crazy run-on sentences, Bednarz stab at this synthesis is worth read through.<br />
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by <a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1007068-dan-bednarz" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dan Bednarz</a>, originally published by <a class="external" href="http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/power-identity-and-social-change-as-we-enter-degrowth/#_edn2" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Health after Oil</a> <span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #9b7d30; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"> | TODAY</span></div>
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<img align="right" alt="" height="300" src="http://www.resilience.org/articles/General/2013/08_Aug/shutterstock_112970044-sun-field.jpg" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="300" />Understanding the interplay of power<sup>[i]</sup>,<sup>[ii]</sup> identity, and social change is critical to those who recognize that modern societies are at the limits to growth, in ecological overshoot<sup>[iii]</sup> and undergoing a first phase reaction of economic contraction;<sup>[iv]</sup> disintegration of modern finance, as evidenced by massive corruption and wealth destruction;<sup>[v]</sup> and political upheaval<sup>[vi]</sup>. While responses to these dilemmas can take the form of involvement in community localization, disengagement from modernism, studying yoga and Zen Buddhism, shrugged shoulders, political activism, or focusing on one institution –like health care, education, transportation, public banking, or the food supply, they all contain layers of nuance involving the relationships among power, identity (personal and collective) and social change. </div>
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I want to speak to those who feel, as the cultural, thermodynamic and biophysical clocks enter the eleventh<sup>[vii]</sup> hour,<sup>[viii]</sup> either confounded or bludgeoned and “powerless” facing the deep-seated cruelty, incapability and intransigence of modern civilization to recognize overshoot and the limits to growth. I speak also to those who have a seemingly contrary reaction: flickers of intrepidness and hope despite recognition of enormous obstacles and dilemmas. This essay in addition is addressed to health professionals, most of whom do not comprehend overshoot and the limits to growth but find themselves in hierarchical bureaucratic systems that will increasingly malfunction and are susceptible to punctuated collapse<sup>[ix]</sup> or “failure cascade”<sup>[x]</sup> –which will present the best opening for fundamental change- as the world lunges into degrowth.</div>
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Almost all contemporary governments are ignoring or misinterpreting economic contraction, resource scarcities and biophysical crises and dilemmas by intensifying their servility to the neoliberal<sup>[xi]</sup> model of society, which operates in terms of debt-based economic growth; class exploitation; and fundamentalist faith in “The Market,” where individuals are told “there’s no such thing as society” and, therefore, they are free to be “entrepreneurs of [themselves]”<sup>[xii]</sup><sup>[xiii]</sup> –and are personally to blame if they fail to climb an economic ladder of opportunity<sup>[xiv]</sup>. Those cognizant of ecological dilemmas realize this system cannot be resuscitated and is in fact beginning to break apart. They realize that modern culture remains captive to the neoliberal<sup>[xv]</sup>political/economic/cultural paradigm as it produces further ecological destruction, increasing socioeconomic inequality – allegedly to revive the economy, a side “benefit” is the spoils of class warfare- and proceeds with the temporarily successful privatization of public goods and services, social control measures of secrecy in government policy<sup>[xvi]</sup> making<sup>[xvii]</sup> and embracing embryonic<sup>[xviii]</sup> totalitarianism<sup>[xix]</sup> in the guise<sup>[xx]</sup> of protecting<sup>[xxi]</sup> the homeland.<sup>[xxii]</sup></div>
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Simultaneously, neoliberal governments delude themselves<sup>[xxiii]</sup> and propagandize their citizens that this corporatocracy<sup>[xxiv]</sup> is not just the best option, but also the only feasible model of governance in the modern world. Since they believe the status quo offers the only way forward, corporatocracy members regard themselves<sup>[xxv]</sup> as the select evolutionary elite<sup>[xxvi]</sup> to manage<sup>[xxvii]</sup> 21<sup>st</sup> century society.<sup>[xxviii]</sup> The opposite is the case;<sup>[xxix]</sup> and this will become manifest even to them as, for example, the power of climate change, water scarcity, ocean acidification, nuclear disaster<sup>[xxx]</sup>, bee population die-off, peak oil (immediately and directly through its impact on the economy and finance), etc. mounts and proceeds to undermine neoliberal shibboleths –as well as the neoliberal “Masters of the Universe” collective identity- about how the world works.</div>
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Neoliberal ideological hubris is built upon the modernist mythology that human’s ability to fashion the social world is infinite, the earth’s resources are essentially limitless and its biophysical systems are passive and resilient vassals absorbing industrial society’s wastes and toxins. This is a colossal conceit as the further we go into overshoot and hit against resource limitations the more inept, desperate and downright socially and ecologically destructive neoliberal policies become<sup>[xxxi]</sup> and the fewer options modern culture has to reconcile its practices with ecological realities.</div>
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As things look, neoliberal governments will continue to do their utmost<sup>[xxxii]</sup> –that is, use their waning but still potent power- to preserve the current political/economic hierarchy and ecologically destructive social order.<sup>[xxxiii]</sup>However, their power is not stable, nor is it insurmountable and -this must be stressed- it does not derive exclusively or primarily from cultural and historical phenomena, such as media propaganda and other forms of rhetoric and symbol manipulation, institutional inertia, incentives and rewards, tradition, appeals to fear and xenophobia, vested interests, and the implicit threats of surveillance and state sanctioned violence.</div>
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To make my argument requires a brief tour of how social science has reflected cultural ideas about power and how Michel Foucault, in his mid to late career writings, challenged the conventional view, arguing “power is everywhere,”<sup>[xxxiv]</sup> regarding the location and function of power in society. Foucault’s concept of power is then synthesized with ecological theory to recognize resource scarcity and biophysical forces as agents (of power) shaping personal and collective identity and proscribing the possibilities for social change.</div>
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From the conventional behavioral viewpoint, Max Weber<sup>[xxxv]</sup> writes, “Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance…” from another actor. Simply put, power is the ability of actor A to compel actor B to do something actor B would prefer not to do, all things being equal. “Authority” connotes legitimate power; “coercion” indicates the illegitimate use of power, ultimately through the threat or application of harm or violence.<sup>[xxxvi]</sup> In Weber’s view power is a force that actors and institutions possess and at times use to assert their will upon others with less or no power. The implication is that power is a tool or resource, not a constitutive feature of all interaction.</div>
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Foucault challenges the received understanding of power, where it exists and how it functions. He writes,</div>
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<i>We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production<sup>[xxxvii]</sup>.</i></div>
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Cole summarizes in plain English Foucault’s “power is everywhere” thesis:</div>
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<i>Foucault explains that all social relations -between persons and between people and institutions- are imbued with power relations. Wherever there are points of contact between persons, or between persons and institutions, power relations -which is to say, force relations -exist. Power exists in the spaces between us. It is present in all our interactions. Power, as it exists in power relations, is dynamic. Power is not permanently possessed by any one actor or institution. It cannot be protected or guarded. Rather, power is constantly in circulation -always in adjustment, as our interactions with one another take place in time. <sup>[xxxviii]</sup></i></div>
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Critically, in this conception power is unstable and is –theoretically- up for grabs whenever people interact. Social reality is, after all, merely a contingent human arrangement; that is, socially shared definitions of situations where people are expected to behave in terms of the established “rules of the game” of social organization and human interaction.<sup>[xxxix]</sup> In short, an actor’s sense of power -or powerlessness- and, also, the individual’s identity –identity motivates people<sup>[xl]</sup>- rests upon the rules she believes to be governing social interaction. Change the rules<sup>[xli]</sup> and you change the power relations and identities among actors. Admittedly, changing the rules that define the situation is in many social interactions not at all easy, and in any given instance it may prove all but impossible to do. Nonetheless, Foucault’s point is that the essence of power is a socially constructed definition of the situation with –again, simplified- negotiable and unstable rules.<sup>[xlii]</sup></div>
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The rules of a social situation define what identities are acceptable to display, that is, what an individual can (openly) think, feel, say and do. So when people challenge or resist rules, they take on an oppositional identity, which undermines social reality and established power relationships; and this is why seemingly trivial indiscretions or objections to authority or rules are often severely punished. Put differently, the instability of the definition of the situation -something voicing protest, offering criticism, satire or “inappropriate behavior” can expose (think of George Carlin’s humor)- explains why governments and all large organizations engage in propaganda and severe punishment: Is Edward Snowden -and Bradley Manning- a criminal and a traitor? Is he a whistleblower doing a public service by exposing unconstitutional activities by the US government? Is he something else?<sup>[xliii]</sup>Or is the question of his character itself not the right one to be asking?<sup>[xliv]</sup></div>
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Pickard notes,</div>
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<i>Insofar as those [definitions] can never be fixed, then, power relations are not and cannot ever be inevitable, unchanging, or unalterable … Power is not seen to radiate in a single direction [as with Weber’s conception] from a specific source, and is not solely a matter of force or coercion, but permeates every aspect of social life, exercised from an infinite multiplicity of positions.</i><i> </i><i>People, then, are not so much victims of power, as vehicles…[of its application].<sup>[xlv]</sup></i></div>
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<i> </i>From this insight that power is relational, not fixed in roles or institutions, Foucault argues that cultural “truth”-which in his view is always associated with dominant, legitimated knowledge- is socially constructed. That is, the relationship of “power/knowledge/discourse” (derived from an episteme or paradigm which organizes collective thought) like neoliberalism has power relationships encoded in its dogma. So “a rising tide lifts all boats” connotes the legitimacy of massive disparities in wealth distribution, and “There Is No Alternative” implies the Borgism “all resistance is futile.” And if people believe all resistance is pointless then power appears absolute, ones identity is subservient and tightly constrained and political opposition need not be considered.</div>
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Foucault writes:</div>
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<i>Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true<sup>[xlvi]</sup>.</i></div>
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Rainbow adds: <i>“These ‘general politics’ and ‘regimes of truth’ are the result of scientific discourse and institutions, and are reinforced [and always threatened by the possibility of resistance] constantly through the education system, the media, and the flux of political and economic ideologies.”<sup>[xlvii]</sup></i></div>
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Again for emphasis, this is why the use of propaganda, control of narratives, and the suppression or exclusion of counter-narratives and bodies of knowledge/discourses -like realistic discussion of peak oil or the limits to growth- from consideration in mass media, businesses, medicine and higher education is critical to perpetuation of established regimes of truth (which are rules for the definition of situations) and power relationships. Dominant institutions are not seekers of truth, they are in charge of allocating imprimatur to “legitimate discourses” and fields of knowledge, which also means isolating or suppressing bodies of knowledge that threaten established constructions of social reality and power relations. (This explains the cluelessness of government, business, medicine, the media and higher education as we enter degrowth –fear of the unknown, vested interests and the decadence evidenced by massive corruption pretty much round out the model.)</div>
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Foucault’s thoughts on power developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and, according to Pickard, are tinged with anthropomorphism and modernism, and therefore lack the contributions of ecological theory. For example, Cole’s summary of Foucault’s work, cited above, holds that power is present in all “contact between persons, or between persons and institutions…” Put differently, Foucault’s view, for all its departure from convention, begs the question, “Where do the rules come from?”</div>
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To supplement this social construction of reality perspective, Pickard argues that all ecological science –which he refers to as complexity theory- shares the premise that humans, nonhumans and environments are interconnected. That is, they are networked agents exercising power -force- in the construction of social reality. This suggests, argues Pickard, that power in human affairs should be thought of as social, a la Foucault, <i>and </i>ecological.</div>
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Pickard writes:</div>
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<i>Modern notions of agency are not only insufficient to the task of acknowledging that humans exist within material, ecological environments, but because their binary construction [power seen as zero sum] serves to limit access to agency [power], they also reinforce Modern power relations that have legitimized the discrimination of those who are constituted as non-agential [e.g., women, ethnic minorities, animals, children, low wager earners, “the environment,” and so forth] (see footnote 45).</i></div>
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<i>Because a relational power is necessarily dispersed throughout every relationship, and because it constitutes nonhumans and environments as well as humans, such a relationality implies a radicalness that even Foucault did not acknowledge. In this sense, a more radical relational agency recognizes that humans, nonhumans and environments are all participants within relations of power [they all contribute to the definition of the situation and identity formation]. Foucault’s thought both implies a radical relational agency, and yet, does not quite acknowledge it (see footnote 45). </i></div>
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At this point we can ask, so what? Is this merely academic autoeroticism? It’s that and more.</div>
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For example, Pickard’s formulation helps us ask questions (readers will think of others, and may reject these) as degrowth tightens its grip on society:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The differences between a growth-based modernist identity and a sense of self that is rooted in an understanding of ecological theory are many and profound.</li>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How can it guide us to develop strategies to both overcome neoliberalism –a negation of the present- and live within ecological boundaries –an affirmation of what is emerging?</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How can this narrative help to ameliorate identity crises and enable personal and collective identity transformations?<sup>[xlix]</sup> In other words, taking care of oneself is not narcissistic but healthy<sup>[l]</sup>.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What does entering into degrowth mean for the possibility of some form of genuine political/economic democracy<sup>[li]</sup>?<ol style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How to prevent neoliberalism from transforming into a neo-feudal, totalitarian, authoritarian, or non-egalitarian dystopia?</li>
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Pickard goes on,</div>
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<i>The importance of recognizing that humans exist in relationships with nonhumans and environments is that it extends a relational agency to include not only the limits imposed by [human] power relations, but also recognizes that there are material, ecological limits on human power relations [e.g., peak oil, climate change, and so forth]. While Modern systems of thought are characterized by the recognition that Man is a natural being, such systems of thought nonetheless constitute human beings as superior to Nature [faith in technological fixes, regarding Nature as passive, whether to be exploited or protected] and, hence, as distinct from Nature. In this sense, the emergence of Man [the Enlightenment] did not include a recognition that humans are bound by ecological limits. (See footnote 45)</i></div>
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For illustration, let’s ponder the current cultural hegemony of neoliberalism and the biophysical reality of degrowth. This reveals two diametrically opposed forces at work in the social world, the first of which pales in strength to the second:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">However, the “amassed power” of neoliberalism is merely a social construction of reality –or collection of definitions of situations. Indeed, peak oil and other ecological forces, following Pickard’s thesis, are undermining neoliberalism’s cultural and political power and producing degrowth –the situations in Greece and Egypt are illustrative. This juxtaposition is well known among those who understand the limits to growth and ecological overshoot, but baffling to those unaware of ecological theory.</li>
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Briefly, neoliberalism is capable of tremendous devastation as it succumbs to its many contradictions and arrant incompatibility with a social world entering degrowth.</div>
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Let’s consider an historical case to demonstrate Pickard’s thesis, which I hope will be eye opening for those readers unaware of the ecological dimension of power in shaping human society.</div>
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Thomas Mitchell, in <b>Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil<sup>[lv]</sup></b>argues that the use of coal to build industrial society fashioned a social context for the diffusion of political power and the spread of democracy, while the exploitation of oil has had the opposite effect of fostering a social construction of reality that concentrates political power, neoliberalism is the current manifestation. Mitchell’s analysis shows how the fact that coal had to be dug from the earth and shipped via rail set up a relationship between capitalists, labor and coal which allowed workers to exercise significant control over the extraction and shipment of coal (the primary source of energy at the commencement of the industrial revolution). Resistance to capital exhibited labor’s ability to align with the physical force, which labor could provide, needed to extract and use coal. This in turn enabled labor to make successful economic demands of capitalists for a more politically and economically democratized life. In contrast, the fact that oil is pumped out of the earth and then sent through pipelines onto giant tankers allowed power to be concentrated in the clutches of political/economic elites, both governments and corporations, who typically worked in tandem.</div>
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Today, the supremacy of neoliberalism ultimately rests, if one accepts Pickard’s thesis and my interpretation of Mitchell’s book, upon the flow of oil,<sup>[lvi]</sup> not on the ephemera of “accumulated power,” which treats a fragile contingent social construction of reality as virtually immutable.</div>
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One astonished reviewer, whom I quote because he is not a peak oiler or otherwise steeped in ecological theory, summarizes<b> Carbon Democracy</b> this way. He describes this book as:</div>
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<i>a history of the relationship between carbon-based fueling sources and modern political systems… and after reading it, it’s hard to imagine thinking about political power the same way again.</i></div>
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<i>Everything in our politics flows through dense carbon-based energy sources, and has for three to four hundred years.<sup>[lvii]</sup></i></div>
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Carbon Democracy, combined with Pickard’s synthesis on power confirms what those who grasp overshoot and limits to growth already know, either implicitly or explicitly about power and politics. And it opens the door for mainstreamers and fence sitters to understand what is occurring in the social world in a radically different manner that can give them new identities and strategies to simultaneously accept degrowth and overcome neoliberalism.</div>
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Let me close with a caution. First, at present everyone’s identity is subject to crisis. Numerous surveys indicate growing numbers of Americans suffering from high stress, depression, and other mental illnesses, which sociologically indicates identity crisis. We see that collective and personal identities are subject to significant modification as degrowth unfolds. Marshall McLuhan, always good for a reprise, wrote years:</div>
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<i>When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. Anybody moving into a new world loses identity…So loss of identity is something that happens in rapid change.<sup>[lviii]</sup></i></div>
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Awareness that natural forces are changing society is a great advantage, yet it places those who know it on a psychological tightrope. They are living in two social worlds: one that is passing and the other inchoate and to varying degrees unknown and potentially threatening. The passing of the growth-based system cannot be halted –this is where the neoliberal identity is trapped in morbid resistance and denial. Those living in two worlds are tasked to fashion “truthful existence”<sup>[lix]</sup> identities, which ideally are characterized by lucidity, flexibility and strength in sync with degrowth, while simultaneously using strategic –perhaps pseudo- identities to triumph over neoliberalism<sup>[lx]</sup>,<sup>[lxi]</sup> as it continues to demand privilege<sup>[lxii]</sup> for the 1% despite a shrinking economic pie.</div>
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<b>Notes and References</b></div>
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[i] Power is a part of all interaction among humans. This is a controversial claim to conservatives and many liberals, who find the discussion of power disturbing to their consensus –as opposed to conflict- conception of how society works.</div>
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[ii] To be sure, this examination of sociological power and social change is a minute contribution, if that, to the topic. The hope here is to reorient and open thinking to possibilities and perceptions dimly visible. Many readers will be familiar with my argument.</div>
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[iii] Catton, William. <b>Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.</b> Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1982.</div>
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[iv] Short, Doug. “Vehicle Miles Driven And the Ongoing Economic Contraction.”<i>Business Insider,</i> July 25, 2011. <a class="external" href="http://www.businessinsider.com/vehicle-miles-driven-and-the-ongoing-economic-contraction-2011-7#ixzz2XhEhoD9o" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.businessinsider.com/vehicle-miles-driven-and-the-ongoing-economic-contraction-2011-7#ixzz2XhEhoD9o</a>.</div>
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[v] Financial chaos is actually the expected outcome of the end of a debt-based system.</div>
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[vi] <i>Egypt Oil and Gas.</i> “Egypt and its looming energy crisis.” ND. <a class="external" href="http://egyptoil-gas.com/read_article_issues.php?AID=26" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://egyptoil-gas.com/read_article_issues.php?AID=26</a>.</div>
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<a class="external" href="http://www.aawsat.net/author/sharif-yamani" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Sharif Yamani</a>. “Egypt endures fuel crisis.” <i>Asharq Al-Awsat,</i><i> </i>June 27, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.aawsat.net/2013/06/article55307370" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.aawsat.net/2013/06/article55307370</a>.</div>
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[vii] Emmott, Stephen. “Humans: the real threat to life on Earth.” <i>The Guardian,</i>June 29, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth</a>. Emmons writes:</div>
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“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it has been for 20 years to ensure the stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere: Failed. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification, whose job it’s been for 20 years to stop land degrading and becoming desert: Failed. The Convention on Biological Diversity, whose job it’s been for 20 years to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss: Failed. Those are only three examples of failed global initiatives. The list is a depressingly long one.”</div>
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[viii] I add that those who see their response as that of localization and the avoidance of politics are misunderstanding the nature of power and the fact that the present indifference of the dominant system to localization efforts is likely to change as we go further into overshoot and the ramifications of hitting the limits to growth. See footnotes 60 and 61, below, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement for the threat to the localization of economies it may pose.</div>
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[ix] Tainter, Joseph. <b>The Collapse of Complex Societies.</b> New York: Cambridge University Press. 1988.</div>
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[x] Fabius Maximus. “Is America experiencing a failure cascade?” <i>Fabius Maximus</i>, July 10, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/07/10/failure-cascade-52317/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/07/10/failure-cascade-52317/</a>.</div>
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Wikipedia, “Cascading failure.” <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure</a>.</div>
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[xi] This doubling-down is not an exclusive feature of neoliberalism. Barbara Tuchman, in <b>A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14<sup>th</sup> Century.</b> (NYC: Ballantine Books, 1978) writes, “<a class="external" href="http://izquotes.com/quote/274158" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states.</a>”</div>
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[xii] Foucault, Michel. <b>The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79.</b> Translated by G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008: Pg. 252-253. Foucault viewed this self-entrepreneurship as at the core of neoliberalism’s attachment to “rational-choice” theory and faith in “free markets.” Parenthetically, it explains Margaret Thatcher’s, “There is no such thing as society,” remark. In fact, from Foucault’s perspective it makes far more sense to argue, “There is no such thing as an individual.”</div>
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[xiii] For an example of this we turn to the always-reliable weathervane of the neoliberal worldview, Tom Freidman. His July 28, 2013, <i>New York Times</i> Op-Ed, “Welcome to the Sharing Economy,” illustrates this “you’re an entrepreneur of yourself” because “there is no society” to bear responsibility for the fact that there are 15-20 million un and under-employed souls in contemporary America. In short, he encourages people to become “micro-entrepreneurs” earning money “In a world where, as I’ve argued, <i>average is over</i> — the skills required for any good job keep rising — a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids’ rooms, their cars or their power tools.”</div>
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[xiv] President Obama’s latest rhetorical turn of phrase to craftily blame individuals can be found here: “Building Ladders of Opportunity.” <i>The White House</i>. <a class="external" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/factsheet/building-ladders-of-opportunity" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/factsheet/building-ladders-of-opportunity</a>.</div>
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[xv] I respect the views of those who feel neoliberalism is the latest bogyman in what they see as the never-ending conflict: humans inevitably dominate one another. This requires elaborate ideological cover to make the dominated willingly internalize the rules that oppress them. On the other hand, humanity’s problem may be that of hierarchy. See:</div>
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Thayer, Frederick C. <b>An End to Hierarchy! An End to Competition! Organizing the Politics and Economics of Survival</b><b>. </b>New York: New Viewpoints, 1973.</div>
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[xvi] Ahmed, Nafeez. “Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks.” <i>The Guardian,</i> June 14, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism</a>.</div>
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[xvii] Smith, Yves. “<a class="external" href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/sherrod-brown-wimps-out-on-secret-trade-negotiations-in-ustr-vote-elizabeth-warren-takes-risk-in-bucking-obama.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Sherrod Brown Wimps Out on Secret Trade Negotiations In USTR Vote; Elizabeth Warren Takes Risk in Bucking Obama</a>.” <i>Naked Capitalism,</i>June 20, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/sherrod-brown-wimps-out-on-secret-trade-negotiations-in-ustr-vote-elizabeth-warren-takes-risk-in-bucking-obama.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/sherrod-brown-wimps-out-on-secret-trade-negotiations-in-ustr-vote-elizabeth-warren-takes-risk-in-bucking-obama.html</a>.</div>
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[xviii] Post by “b.” “NSA – Recording One Billion Phone Calls Per Day.” <i>Moon of Alabama,</i> June 29, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/06/nsa-recording-one-billion-calls-per-day.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.moonofalabama.org/2013/06/nsa-recording-one-billion-calls-per-day.html</a>.</div>
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[xix] Augstein, Jakob. “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” <i>Spiegel Online,</i> June 17, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.html</a>.</div>
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[xx] Miller, Tom. “Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex: How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone.” <i>TomDispatch</i>, July 11, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175723/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175723/</a>.</div>
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[xxi] Dougherty, Danny. “Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.” McClatchy News, June 20, 2013. This story is about Obama’s Insider Threat Program, which is reminiscent of how East Germany’s State Security, The Stasi, had citizens spying on each other.<a class="external" href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.UdBKkRZ3vw4" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.UdBKkRZ3vw4</a>.</div>
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[xxii] The NSA’s collecting of phone and internet records of Americans is a violation of the 4<sup>th</sup> Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; this is why the traditional left-right political divide is not a guide to reactions to this conduct.</div>
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[xxiii] In the parts of the United States capitol city of Washington, D.C. frequented by federal government employees, lobbyists and tourists all appears to be booming and prosperous. The fact that the child poverty rate in the city surpasses that of Mexico is, I propose, an irrelevancy to Congress and the President.</div>
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See: “The Poverty Factor.” <i>Capital Kids Report. </i><a class="external" href="http://capitalkidsreport.org/the-poverty-factor/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://capitalkidsreport.org/the-poverty-factor/#</a>.</div>
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[xxiv] Wikipedia. “Corporatocracy.”<a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy</a>.</div>
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[xxv] For a good read on fault lines in the workings of “Trans-partisan Permanent Washington,” see:</div>
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Sirota, David. “GOP insurrection heats up over surveillance.” <i>Salon.com,</i> July 22, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/gop_civil_war_leaders_target_rising_star/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/gop_civil_war_leaders_target_rising_star/</a>.</div>
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[xxvi] Tett, Gillean. “Stop worrying and breathe the zeitgeist in America.”<i>Financial Times,</i> July 4, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c5ff7470-e4be-11e2-875b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2YB1FfLUs" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c5ff7470-e4be-11e2-875b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2YB1FfLUs</a>.</div>
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Tett observes, of the economic optimism she found at the Aspen Ideas Festival: “Now this zeitgeist … is that of an ultra highly privileged elite – and one that is becoming increasingly detached from the poorer parts of America, as economic polarisation grows.”</div>
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[xxvii] McCoy, Alfred W. “Surveillance dystopia looms.” <i>Asia Times, </i>July 15, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-150713.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-150713.html</a>. McCoy writes about the Pentagon’s plans for total control: “In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance, the Pentagon is planning to launch an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones – each equipped with high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flight.</div>
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“Within a decade, the US will likely deploy this aerospace shield, advanced cyber-warfare capabilities, and even vaster, more omnipresent digital surveillance networks that will envelop the Earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield, atomizing a single suspected terrorist, or monitoring millions of private lives at home and abroad.”</div>
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Comment: I’m not concerned about this totalitarian mentality succeeding; but it can do untold damage and destruction before it fails. Instead, I think this passage illustrates that neoliberal elites will rely on the tools of repression and oppression, as they remain ignorant of the significance of the increasing power of biophysical, thermodynamic and resource scarcity forces in human societies.</div>
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[xxviii] Chicherio, <a class="external" href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/barbarachicherio" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Barbara. </a> “Trans-Pacific Partnership and Monsanto.” <i>Z-Net,</i>June 26, 2013, <a class="external" href="http://www.zcommunications.org/trans-pacific-partnership-and-monsanto-by-barbara-chicherio" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.zcommunications.org/trans-pacific-partnership-and-monsanto-by-barbara-chicherio</a>.</div>
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[xxix] Rich, Frank. “The Stench of the Potomac.” <i>New York Magazine,</i> August 6, 2013. Rich writes of Washington as if it were the court of Louis XVI: “Washington may be a dysfunctional place to govern, but it’s working better than ever as a marketplace for cashing in. And that’s thanks, more than anything, to the Democratic Establishment.”</div>
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[xxx] McKeating, Justin, “Fukushima crisis rolls on as TEPCO admits radiation leaks.” <i>Greenpeace,</i> July 24, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/fukushima-crisis-rolls-on-as-tepco-admits-rad/blog/46051/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/fukushima-crisis-rolls-on-as-tepco-admits-rad/blog/46051/</a>.</div>
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BBC News. “Fukushima radioactive water leak an ‘emergency’.” <i>BBC News.</i>August 5, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23578859" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23578859</a>.</div>
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[xxxi] At present Greece and Detroit serve as the archetypes for class-based as opposed to utilitarian policy-making in response to entering degrowth. The Greek people and citizens of Detroit are to be driven into poverty to maintain the wealth, status and power of the upper echelon of the economic elite. In Detroit the recent bankruptcy filing by the city’s emergency manger outlines a $.75 on the dollar repayment for the banks and $.10 on the dollar to pensioners. In fact, the Michigan constitution appears to prohibit this virtual wiping out of pension obligations, while the loans owed to banks are treated as sacred. (Indeed, there is an issue of lender fraud regarding many of these loans, especially those made in 2005, which could be explored.) In Greece, meanwhile, the economic hits just keep on commin’ from the European Troika. See the website <i>Keep Talking Greece</i> for daily updates of punitive economic and financial policies imposed upon the Greek people:<a class="external" href="http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/tag/greece/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/tag/greece/</a>. And we can include Cypress, which recently endured a “bail-in”. See:</div>
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Reuters Staff. “Cyprus, lenders set Bank of Cyprus bail-in at 47.5 percent, sources say.” <i>Reuters</i>, July 28, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/28/uk-cyprus-bank-idUKBRE96R03Y20130728" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/28/uk-cyprus-bank-idUKBRE96R03Y20130728</a>.</div>
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DeMartino, George and Ilene Grabel. “Fiscal Crisis Coming to a City Near You?”<i>Triple Crisis: Global </i><i>Perspectives on Finance, Development and Environment, </i>July 29, 2013.<i> </i> <a class="external" href="http://triplecrisis.com/fiscal-crises-coming-to-a-city-near-you/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://triplecrisis.com/fiscal-crises-coming-to-a-city-near-you/</a>.</div>
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[xxxii] President Obama is in his fifth years in office and during this time wealth disparities in the Unites States have increased, as has the number of people receiving food stamps; and all manner of indices of poverty have risen. For example, a recent Associated Press story informs, “Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives.” In July of 2013 Obama turned his attention to social inequality, saying, “This administration’s highest priority is to rebuild ladders of opportunity, and reverse income inequality.” One snarky commentator remarked: “Rock on, Barry. By the way, what were you doing during the last five years – reversing ladders of opportunity and doubling income equality? Why are 50% more Americans on food stamps than before you came into Office, Mr. First Black President Yes We Can Obama?” See: Ward, John. “<a class="external" href="http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/breaking-real-life-under-the-obaman-recovery/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">BREAKING….Real life under the Obaman ‘recovery’</a>.” <i>The Sloglink.</i> July 28, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/breaking-real-life-under-the-obaman-recovery/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/breaking-real-life-under-the-obaman-recovery/</a>.</div>
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See also: Yen, Hope. “80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment: Survey.” <i>Huffington Post,</i> July 29, 2103.<a class="external" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/poverty-unemployment-rates_n_3666594.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/poverty-unemployment-rates_n_3666594.html</a>.</div>
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Brown, Ellen. “The Detroit Bail-In:<i> </i>Fleecing Pensioners to Save the Banks.”<i>Counterpunch</i>, August 6, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/06/fleecing-pensioners-to-save-the-banks/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/06/fleecing-pensioners-to-save-the-banks/</a>.</div>
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Baker, Scott. “Detroit Is Not Broke.” <i>OEN Op-Ed News.</i> August 5, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Detroit-is-Not-Broke-by-Scott-Baker-130805-986.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Detroit-is-Not-Broke-by-Scott-Baker-130805-986.html</a>.</div>
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[xxxiii] These include economic and social inequality, corruption, psychological comfort and inertia, and faith in perpetual economic growth and the technological mastery of Nature.</div>
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[xxxiv] Foucault, Michel. <b>The</b> <b>History of Sexuality.</b> New York: Vintage Books. 1990.</div>
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[xxxv] Weber, Max.<b> The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.</b> New York: The Free Press. 1947. Pg. 156.</div>
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[xxxvi] Many are familiar with Chairman <b>Mao’s Little Red Book</b> aphorism, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This overlooks the role of natural resources in determining the availability of guns, bullets, gunpowder, etc. In our current era it is accurate to say political power has flowed from cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, in particular oil.</div>
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[xxxvii] Foucault, Michel. <b>Discipline and Punishment.</b> 1994, Pg. 194. New York: Vintage Books.</div>
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[xxxviii] Cole, Kathleen. “Power is Everywhere: Social Inequality From Discursive Formations to Patterns of Activation.” December 17, 2012.<a class="external" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2233473" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2233473</a>.</div>
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[xxxix] Wikipedia. “Pierre Bourdieu.”<a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu</a>.</div>
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[xl] Foote, Nelson. “Identification as a Basis for a Theory of Motivation.”<i>American Sociological Review, </i>Vol. 16, No. 1, Feb, 1951.</div>
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[xli] For an example of how incompatible, poorly enacted or conflicting definitions of the situation are disruptive, see:</div>
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Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” <i>American Journal of Sociology,</i> Vol. 63, # 3, Nov, 1956: 264-272.<a class="external" href="http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/Readings/GoffmanEmbarrassment.pdf" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/Readings/GoffmanEmbarrassment.pdf</a></div>
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[xlii] A way to think of rituals is as techniques to stabilize power relations through the internalization of mythology and religion. They instill and sacrilize sets of rigid rules in individuals and groups.</div>
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[xliii] Ames, Mark. “Edward Snowden’s Half-Baked Revolution.” <i>nsfwcorp,</i> June 28, 2013. <a class="external" href="https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/half-baked-revolution/954f9cf7064a285ace452273be244f74ffa4bf11/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/half-baked-revolution/954f9cf7064a285ace452273be244f74ffa4bf11/</a>.</div>
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[xliv] Inside the United States the media has made this about Snowden’s character and motivations; in other nations it’s more often about what he has exposed.</div>
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[xlv] Pickard, E. Kezia. <b>A Radical Relational Agency:<br />Foucault, Complexity Theory and Environmental Resistances</b>. Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. JULY 2010. <a class="external" href="http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/1450/1/Thesis.pdf" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/1450/1/Thesis.pdf</a>.</div>
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[xlvi] Foucault, Michel. <b>The Foucault Reader.</b> Paul Rainbow, Ed. New York: Random House. 1984.</div>
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[xlvii] Rainbow, Paul, Ed. <b>The Foucault Reader.</b> New York: Random House. 1984.</div>
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[xlviii] Levine, Bruce E. “Living in America will drive you insane — literally.”<i>Salon,</i> July 31.2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/living_in_america_will_drive_you_insane_literally_partner/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/living_in_america_will_drive_you_insane_literally_partner/</a>.</div>
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[xlix] Lopez, Ricardo. “Most workers hate their jobs or have ‘checked out,’ Gallup says.” <i>LA Times.</i> June 17, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employee-engagement-gallup-poll-20130617,0,5878658.story" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employee-engagement-gallup-poll-20130617,0,5878658.story</a>. “In its ongoing survey of the American workplace, Gallup found that only 30% of workers are “were engaged, or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace.” Ones work, of course, is a master identity. And 15-25 million Americans are un or under-employed, be rift of a master identity.</div>
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[l] Frank, Arthur. “Stories of illness as care of the self: a Foucauldian dialogue.”<i>Health</i> (London) July 1998, Vol. 2. Frank writes: “Michel Foucault’s idea of the ‘care of the self’ challenges whether ill people can be empowered by telling their own stories in the attempt to reclaim their own experiences from the medical appropriation of illness. This paper explores the ambiguity in what Foucault meant by care of the self and suggests that empowerment through narrative formulations of identity remains possible, though Foucault teaches us that telling our ‘own stories’ is never straightforward.”</div>
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Dilts, Andrew. “From ‘entrepreneur of the self’ to ‘care of the self’: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics.” <a class="external" href="http://ptw.uchicago.edu/Dilts10.pdf" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://ptw.uchicago.edu/Dilts10.pdf</a>.</div>
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[li] Jimmy Cater recently commented at a conference in Germany that the United States does not have a functioning democracy.</div>
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Schmitz, Gregor Peter. “NSA affair: Ex-President Carter condemned U.S. snooping.” <i>Spiegel Online</i> (Translation from German). July 17, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2Fnsa-affaere-jimmy-carter-kritisiert-usa-a-911589.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2Fnsa-affaere-jimmy-carter-kritisiert-usa-a-911589.html</a>.</div>
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[lii] Robinson, William I. “Global capitalism and 21st century fascism.” <i>AlJazerra,</i>May 8, 2011.<a class="external" href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142612714539672.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142612714539672.html</a>.</div>
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[liii] Peters, Michael. A. “The Crisis of Finance Capitalism and the Exhaustion of Neoliberalism.” <i>Truthout</i> July 21, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17536-the-crisis-of-finance-capitalism-and-the-exhaustion-of-neoliberalism" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17536-the-crisis-of-finance-capitalism-and-the-exhaustion-of-neoliberalism</a>.</div>
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[liv] Vakulabharanam, Vamsi. “Why Does Neoliberalism Persist Even after the Global Crisis?” <i>Triple Crisis,</i> December 19, 2012. <a class="external" href="http://triplecrisis.com/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-global-crisis/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://triplecrisis.com/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-global-crisis/</a>.</div>
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[lv] Mitchell, Timothy. <b>Carbon Democracy: </b><b>Political Power in the Age of Oil.</b>London: Verso Press. 2011. <a class="external" href="http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1844677451" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1844677451</a>.</div>
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[lvi] Despite all manner of propaganda and misunderstanding, the world is entering the post-peak oil era.</div>
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See: Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose. “Commodity supercycle in rude health despite shale.” The Telegraph, July 31, 2013.<a class="external" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10214989/Commodity-supercycle-in-rude-health-despite-shale.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10214989/Commodity-supercycle-in-rude-health-despite-shale.html</a>.</div>
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‘A new Eos report by the American Geophysical Union, “Peak Oil and Energy Independence: Myth and Reality”, argues that <b>global crude output has been stuck on a plateau of around 75m barrels per day (bpd) since 2005 despite enticing returns</b>. “Global net oil exports from oil-exporting countries have peaked and are in decline.”</div>
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<b>‘The output of the big five oil majors – Exxon, BP, Total, Chevron and Shell – has fallen by 26% over the past nine years …</b></div>
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‘Theoretical reserves are meaningless. What matters is the break-even cost.</div>
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‘Eos said <b>flows from the world’s existing fields are falling at 5% a year</b>, and it is questionable whether shale or tar sands can easily step into the breach. “Production from these unconventional sources is difficult and expensive, and has a very low energy return on investment. Simply stated, it takes energy to get energy,” it said.</div>
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‘<b>The depletion rate on rigs at the Bakken field</b> in North Dakota – the biggest US shale field – is precipitous. <b>Output falls 30% within two years, and a third is leaking into the air</b>. Shale bears say average declines are nearer 70% in the first year …’</div>
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[lvii] Stoller, Matt. “How Coal Brought us Democracy, and Oil Ended It: Lessons form the New Book ‘Carbon Democracy’”. <i>Naked Capitalism, </i>September 13, 2012. <a class="external" href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-democracy-and-oil-ended-it-lessons-from-the-new-book-carbon-democracy.html" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-democracy-and-oil-ended-it-lessons-from-the-new-book-carbon-democracy.html</a>.</div>
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[lviii] McLuhan, Marshall. <b>Forward Through The Rearview Mirror:<i> </i></b><b>Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. </b>Toronto: Prentice-Hall. 1992.</div>
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[lix] Robinson, Bob. “Michel Foucault: Ethics.” <i>International Encyclopedia of Philosophy,</i> September 26, 2011. <a class="external" href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/#SH4a" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.iep.utm.edu/fouc-eth/#SH4a</a>.</div>
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[lx] The “Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement” (TPP) is currently being negotiated by the Obama administration in virtual secrecy from the American people and the US Congress. The Americans involved in these negotiations are several hundred employees of corporations; they, corporate employees, have security clearance to be involved in these negotiations. This is the personification of the corporatocracy. Little is known definitively about the content of these negotiations because of the secrecy at play. However, if you listen to the first few minutes of this video overview by an interest group, the speaker refers to the TPP placing restrictions on the “Buy Local” phenomenon. This makes sense and exposes the desperation and hypocrisy of neoliberalism. By this I mean that while cloaking itself in free markets and open competition rhetoric, neoliberalism in fact uses government to suppress or eliminate competitive forces so as to charge economic rents. Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch. <a class="external" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wytq5cPk3Y" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wytq5cPk3Y</a>.</div>
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[lxi] Office of the United States Trade Representative. <b>Outlines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.</b> “On November 12, 2011, the Leaders of the nine Trans-Pacific Partnership countries – Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States – announced the achievement of the broad outlines of an ambitious, 21st-century Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement that will enhance trade and investment among the TPP partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs.”<a class="external" href="http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/fact-sheets/2011/november/outlines-trans-pacific-partnership-agreement" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/fact-sheets/2011/november/outlines-trans-pacific-partnership-agreement</a>.</div>
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[lxii] Kostko, ADAM. ‘“Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.’ <i>An und für sich,</i>AUGUST 10, 2013. <a class="external" href="http://itself.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/privilege-and-the-rhetoric-of-austerity/" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">http://itself.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/privilege-and-the-rhetoric-of-austerity/</a>.</div>
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<i><a class="external" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-112970044/stock-photo-sunset-over-meadow-with-flowers.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Sunshine and flowers</a> image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.</i></div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-69134573301454858512013-08-08T14:25:00.002-03:002013-08-08T14:25:35.279-03:00Democratizing Capital at Scale: Cooperative Enterprise and Beyond<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">by</span><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;"> </span><a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1452846-joe-guinan" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Joe Guinan</a><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">,</span><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;"> </span><a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1811659-thomas-m-hanna" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Thomas M. Hanna</a><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">, originally published by</span><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;"> </span><a class="external" href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/joe-guinan-thomas-m-hanna/democratising-capital-at-scale-cooperative-enterprise-and-beyon" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Open Democracy</a><span style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;"> </span><span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #f6891f; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"> | TODAY</span></h1>
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Faced with spiralling social, economic and environmental problems, many people are turning to economic democracy for solutions. But what shape should this democracy take? And how can it establish an effective process for the distribution of wealth?</div>
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<span class="wysiwyg_imageupload image imgupl_floating_none 0" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a class="external" href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_preset/wysiwyg_imageupload/549405/99toone.jpeg" rel="lightbox[wysiwyg_imageupload_inline]" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="imagecache wysiwyg_imageupload 0 imagecache imagecache-article_large" height="300" src="http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/article_large/wysiwyg_imageupload/549405/99toone.jpeg" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span class="wysiwyg_imageupload image imgupl_floating_none 0" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em><span class="image_meta" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flickr/*eddie. Some rights reserved</span></em></span></div>
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Last year, total private wealth worldwide stood at $135 trillion. Of this, $52.8 trillion – <a class="external" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/richest-1-control-39-worlds-wealth-growing-6C10141007" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">almost 40 per cent</a> – was held by the wealthiest one per cent, the true beneficiaries of three decades of upwards-distributing neoliberalism. Even through the locust years of economic difficulty and self-defeating austerity, the colossal wealth of this tiny global elite continues to grow. Over half of all bank assets are now routed offshore. Given such staggering concentrations, the capacity of governments around the world to hold the line against rising inequality through taxation and redistributive spending – <em>even when they actually wish to do so</em> – is ever more reduced. Faced with a downward spiral of debt, poverty and climate destruction, it is unsurprising that more and more people are embracing economic alternatives in which new wealth is built collectively and from the bottom up. After Keynesianism, after neoliberalism, serious thinking about the next economic paradigm is increasingly converging on the overriding principle of economic democracy, with the remaining questions being about what form it should take. For many, the jumping off point into alternative political economy is cooperative enterprise – and, in particular, employee ownership of the firm.</div>
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The five years since the financial crisis have been good to cooperatives. Today they are one of the few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy overall picture of stagnation, <a class="external" href="http://www.tuc.org.uk/economy/tuc-22286-f0.cfm" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">falling real wages</a>, rising inequality, public retrenchment and social and environmental decay. Against such a tide, more than a billion people now stand as members of one or another form of cooperative in which producers, consumers and stakeholders in various combinations are the collective owners and principal beneficiaries. Since 2008, the UK’s co-op sector has grown a whopping 19.6 per cent while the economy as a whole contracted by 1.7 per cent. In 2011, <a class="external" href="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2012/06/27/UKcooperativeeconomoy2012.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the cooperative economy</a> grew by 1.5 per cent, more than double the rate of the overall economy (0.7 per cent). Even judged against narrow capitalist criteria of economic efficiency, many cooperatives are outperforming the rest of the private sector. A 2013 International Labour Organisation (ILO) <a class="external" href="http://www.ilo.org/empent/Publications/WCMS_207768/lang--en/index.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">report</a> found that, during the crisis, financial co-ops and mutuals outperformed traditional banks by almost every measure.</div>
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Political support for cooperatives is concomitantly on the rise. From the Archbishop of Canterbury to the United Nations Secretary General, “all the Powers of old” – to borrow a line from the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> – “have entered into a holy alliance” in their favour. Even the retrograde Coalition government has climbed on the bandwagon, with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg calling for a ‘<a class="external" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nick-clegg/9016800/Nick-Clegg-plans-a-John-Lewis-economy.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">John Lewis society</a>’ of worker-owners: ‘The 1980s was the decade of share ownership. I want this to be the decade of employee share ownership’.</div>
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On the left, cooperative ownership has an agreeable horizontality that endears it to a new generation of activists suspicious of hierarchy and centralisation. Crisis-driven worker-led transitions of previously capitalist enterprises into collective ventures in countries as diverse as Argentina, Greece, Italy and the <a class="external" href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174252/new-era-windows-opens-business-chicago" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">United States</a>offer hope for a new future rising out of the ashes. The growing sophistication of co-op networks in the Basque region of Spain and Italy’s Emilia Romagna (as well as of lesser-known examples in Venezuela, Quebec and elsewhere) have proven the viability of such models over time and at scale.</div>
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<span class="wysiwyg_imageupload image imgupl_floating_none 0" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a class="external" href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_preset/wysiwyg_imageupload/549405/marx.jpeg" rel="lightbox[wysiwyg_imageupload_inline]" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title=""><img alt="" class="imagecache wysiwyg_imageupload 0 imagecache imagecache-article_large" height="266" src="http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/article_large/wysiwyg_imageupload/549405/marx.jpeg" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span class="wysiwyg_imageupload image imgupl_floating_none 0" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em><span class="image_meta" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flickr/[Duncan]. Some rights reserved.</span></em></span></div>
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These are welcome developments. As Frances Fox Piven <a class="external" href="http://new.bostonreview.net/BR21.6/foxpiven.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">has argued</a>, worker-owners – because their interests are “multifaceted, going beyond a singular preoccupation with the bottom line and the short-term to include concerns with, for example, job security and community well-being” – will “likely be better corporate decision-makers”. Marxian economist Richard Wolff sees “worker self-directed enterprises” as a solution to the problem of surplus value and alienated labour. Such thinking has an impressive lineage. For Karl Marx, inaugurating the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, the ‘value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated’:</div>
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“By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of domination over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart”.</div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium', sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Some Problems</strong></div>
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There is no question that co-ops, together with kindred ownership forms, are a powerful tool for democratising wealth. But because many people are now gravitating toward them it is important to recognise their limitations. Some of the problems can be seen in the <a class="external" href="http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/1428/john-lewis-cleaners-to-strike-for-the-living-wage" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">recent strike</a> of out-sourced cleaning staff at John Lewis and the ongoing <a class="external" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jun/17/co-operative-bank-stock-market-listing" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">financial tribulations</a> of the Co-operative Bank. We must interrogate these difficulties to identify problem dynamics built into the institutional forms themselves.</div>
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To begin with, there is the familiar problem of externalities – the interests of the worker-owners of a given enterprise are <em>not</em> completely identical to those of the community as a whole. While they may not relocate overseas, what is to stop worker-owners, any more than traditional capitalists, from maximising profit by passing on pollution costs and other negative externalities to the wider community? For firms free-floating in capitalist markets, this is often not a matter of choice, but of necessity: the pressures of competition force behaviour detrimental to wider social and environmental purposes.</div>
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Distributional problems, too, will persist. Markets, left to their own devices, are powerful engines of inequality and likely to overwhelm economic models based solely on worker ownership, producing undesirable outcomes and power relationships. As Gar Alperovitz <a class="external" href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15680-the-question-of-socialism-and-beyond-is-about-to-open-up-in-these-united-states" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">has pointed out</a>, “workers who “own” the garbage companies are clearly on a different footing, for instance, than specific groups of workers lucky enough to “own” the oil industry”. What limited evidence we have suggests that workers in ‘democratised’ firms can easily develop narrow ‘worker-capitalist’ attitudes. Edward Greenberg’s classic studies of the plywood cooperatives in America’s Pacific Northwest found that, far from potential recruits for Marx’s International, worker-owners were more likely to adopt the petit bourgeois mind set of the conservative small business owner – hardly the stuff of Gramscian counter-hegemony.</div>
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Also discouraging is a tendency toward capitalist recidivism. In the absence of preventative legal structures, co-ops can display the unfortunate habit of pulling up the ladder after themselves, setting extremely high standards for future participation and hiring new workers on a wage basis rather than an ownership one. The SACMI cooperative in Italy, as John Restakis has shown, is “still owned and directed by its 390 members … but [its] operations include control of 60 capitalist firms, 37 of them abroad, and sales in 100 countries”. All told, it employs around 3,000 non-member employees, making worker-owners a tiny fraction of the total workforce. Potential new members must have worked for the company for five years, be nominated and assessed by other members and pay a membership cost of around $300,000, made as a loan and paid back over fifteen years though salary deductions. Mondragón’s use of “non-member wage labour” and “external non-voting capital stakes” raises <a class="external" href="http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">similar issues</a>. Far from economic democracy, all this is reminiscent of the exclusionary practices of medieval craft guilds.</div>
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Accompanying regulatory strategies could constrain such dynamics. But relying on ‘after-the-fact’ interventions in political economy is a risky proposition – witness the crisis of social democratic redistributive taxation. To achieve genuinely different outcomes we must look to the deeper engineering of institutional arrangements. It is time to get much more serious about <em>systemic design</em>. </div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium', sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Systemic Design</strong></div>
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Fortunately, there <em>are</em> solutions (or the beginnings of them). In Cleveland, Ohio, the<a class="external" href="http://democracycollaborative.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Democracy Collaborative</a> has been helping develop a linked group of worker co-ops embedded in overarching community structures. The companies are nested under a community-serving non-profit corporation and return 10 per cent of their annual profits to a revolving fund, the purpose of which is to develop additional co-ops and thereby grow the network. Moreover, the ‘<a class="external" href="http://community-wealth.org/content/cleveland-model-how-evergreen-cooperatives-are-building-community-wealth" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Cleveland Model</a>’ seeks to incorporate a quasi-public community planning system using the partially protected market of massive purchasing power (over $3 billion a year in goods and services) by large local ‘anchors’ (hospitals, universities) that are themselves beneficiaries of considerable public support.</div>
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Such innovations incorporate worker ownership, but also <a class="external" href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/goodsociety.22.1.0001" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">reach beyond</a> to “the democratisation of wealth and community building in general”. The ills of capitalism do not all reside at the level of the ownership of the firm. Capitalism also operates and impacts at the level of the city, the region, the nation and internationally. Alternatives must do so as well and must include mechanisms and transition strategies for the democratisation of capital at a variety of scales.</div>
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There has been a great deal of innovative new thinking along these lines in recent years, spurred in part by the failure of traditional social democratic solutions. Alternative system models (or partial models) are now on offer from an array of thinkers, including David Schweickart, Richard Wolff, Gar Alperovitz, Michael Albert, Herman Daly and Erik Olin Wright. For example, in place of the traditional elements of capitalism – private ownership of the means of production with markets in capital, labour, goods and services – Schweickart proposes worker self-management of enterprises and social control of investment. His model has neither capital markets nor labour markets in the usual sense, for the good old-fashioned reason that "when the market extends beyond goods and services to capital and labor, it begins biting the neighbors, urinating on the carpet, and worse”. Alperovitz sets out the lineaments of a system based on different ownership and growth paradigms he calls the “Pluralist Commonwealth”:</div>
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““Pluralist” to emphasise the priority given to democratic diversity and individual liberty; “Commonwealth” to underscore the centrality of new public and quasi-public wealth-holding institutions that take on ever greater power on behalf of the community of the nation as a whole”</div>
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This conversation is increasingly sophisticated, but must grow even more so. Such models point past the embrace of one economic institution or another to crosscutting themes of systemic design. Take investment: “control over investment”, as Adam Przeworski has reminded us, “is the central political issue under capitalism precisely because no other privately made decisions have such a profound public impact”. At present, decisions about what portion of society’s resources should be set aside from consumption and how they should be allocated are treated as private prerogatives. This is particularly objectionable given that finance – the <em>rentier</em> province of the economy <em>par excellence</em> – has been the site of major crises at catastrophic economic, social and human cost.</div>
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<span class="wysiwyg_imageupload image imgupl_floating_none 0" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em><span class="image_meta" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flickr/Kake Pugh. Some rights reserved.</span></em></span></div>
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One solution, of course, is cooperative finance. Globally, more than 50,000 credit unions already serve nearly 200 million members in 100 countries. Europe’s cooperative banking sector <a class="external" href="http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---emp_ent/---coop/documents/publication/wcms_207768.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">comprises</a> almost 4,000 co-op banks with 50 million members. But there is probably also the need for a strong public utility function in banking. Retaining community control over investment through public banks, or even community control over fixed capital in enterprises (in effect renting out the means of production to self-managing groups of workers), could help internalise externalities, the community being the ultimate universal owner.</div>
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Public ownership more generally, should be reclaimed from its fate as a bailout mechanism for private capital. Andrew Cumbers, Professor of Geographical Political Economy at the University of Glasgow, argues convincingly for a democratised public ownership that is “not only an increasingly urgent requirement but also a practical possibility in the years ahead”. His “preliminary sketch” of a system designed around public ownership extends the definition of “public” to encompass “all those attempts, both outside and through the state, to create forms of collective ownership in opposition to … capitalist social relations”. Overall, he concludes, “we should aspire towards examples of democratically controlled forms of public ownership that are technically necessary at higher levels while relinquishing control of other activities as far as possible to the local level”.</div>
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Finally, after three decades of market expansionism and the impoverishment of the public domain, a strong dose of decommodification should be included in any model with regard to public space, the environment, health care, education and all the other crucial ingredients of a flourishing commons. “Only this”, Robin Blackburn argues, “can ‘neutralise’ the floating electric charge of capital by tying it to the ‘earth’ of mutual or public property, which can no longer be bought and sold”.</div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium', sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Democratising Capital at Scale</strong></div>
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Part of the intuitive appeal of co-ops is their practicality and immediacy, such that it is easy to imagine an economy in which cooperative forms proliferate. But there are plenty of other real-world examples of democratic wealth-holding institutions and strategies that work in practice and can also be taken to scale. </div>
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Take public banking: the US federal government currently operates <a class="external" href="http://new.bostonreview.net/BR34.1/pollin.php" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">around 140</a>different banks and quasi-banks, from the Import-Export Bank to agricultural lending programs. At the state level, the Bank of North Dakota has contributed<a class="external" href="http://www.ilsr.org/rule/bank-of-north-dakota-2/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">more than $300 million</a> to public revenues over ten years and has been highly successful in promoting community lending by local banks and developing the state economy. In Germany, in addition to more than a thousand cooperative banks there are <a class="external" href="http://annualreport2012.dsgv.de/the-savings-banks-finance-group/strong-together.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">over 400 <em>Sparkassen</em></a>, publicly owned savings banks that together have nearly 250,000 employees and 50 million customers. Unlike some of the larger banks (private and public), these two pillars of the German banking system have, according to <a class="external" href="http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21566013-defending-three-pillars-old-fashioned-favour" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the <em>Economist</em></a>, “come through the crisis with barely a scratch”.</div>
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Other opportunities for democratic control over investment <a class="external" href="http://community-wealth.org/strategies/index.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">abound</a>. City and local government economic development programs increasingly lend to – or make direct investments in – local businesses. Economically targeted investments channel public pension assets into job creation and community economic development. Venture capital funds give public authorities an equity stake in local investments. Municipal enterprises build infrastructure and provide services, raising revenue and promoting employment and economic stability, diversifying the base of locally controlled capital. New experiments with participatory budgeting allow for direct citizen engagement in the allocation of public funds. ‘Commons management systems’ cover everything from the Internet to public libraries, parks and blood banks. Public trusts receive revenues from timber and mineral rights to grazing and oil production, in turn providing funding streams that (as with the <a class="external" href="http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index4.aspx?id=2147485578&menu_id=2147483695" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Texas Permanent School Fund</a>) underwrite public spending or (as with the <a class="external" href="http://www.apfc.org/home/Content/aboutFund/aboutPermFund.cfm" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Alaska Permanent Fund</a>) issue a citizen dividend. </div>
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Two additional intermediate strategies are suggestive of possibilities for a transition to economic democracy: mobilising ‘labour’s capital’ in the form of workers’ vast pension assets, and enacting a share levy on major corporations.</div>
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‘Pension fund socialism’ may not be emblazoned on many banners, but proposals going back to the seventies and eighties have called upon the trade union movement to ‘harness pension power’ by taking command of the huge pools of capital amassed by workers’ retirement funds as a critical first step toward a democratic investment agenda based on the premise that workers generate capital and should also direct its uses. As Tony Benn has argued, pension funds “belong to the workers, they are their own deferred earnings. Workers want them not only as income when they retire, but to sustain and create jobs while they are at work, and so to guarantee that they will retire in a buoyant economy”. </div>
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Any such strategy by trade unions or public agencies should be focussed on “the potential for using pension capital as an opening wedge in the development of basic economic alternatives”, shifting the power that flows from control of pension assets to advance “a worker-owner view of value in the allocation of capital by firms and markets”. </div>
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Lastly, there is the example of the Meidner Plan. Rudolf Meidner, chief economist at the <em>Landorganisationen</em>, the Swedish trade union federation, outlined his visionary proposal as a radical response to the strategic challenges facing the labour movement in the 1970s. He wrote: “how to increase the level of savings but not inequality of wealth, and how to ensure that an increase in savings would translate into the kinds of investment that would sustain full employment, real-wage growth, and continued welfare-state expansion”. Against the backdrop of a solidaristic wage policy, and based on the moral claim that corporate profits derived in part from hidden public subsidy, the Meidner Plan required that corporations return a percentage of their profits to workers as equity. These shares would be entrusted to regional public bodies – ‘wage-earner funds’ – which would direct the eventual returns to meet agreed-upon social purposes. </div>
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Companies with over 50 or 100 employees (depending on the version) would thus have been transferred to collective ownership as the funds increased their holdings through the receipt of new shares. Meidner estimated that it would have taken wage-earner funds 35 years to acquire 49 per cent of the equity of a corporation operating at an annual rate of profit of 10 per cent. But the real beauty of the scheme was that the higher the profits, the faster the socialisation: the mirror-opposite of the various instances of ‘lemon socialism’ which have seen public ownership extended only to those sectors of the economy where enterprises were operating at a loss. </div>
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With transition strategies, what matters are the broader political consequences of institutional reforms. “From a democratic socialist perspective”, Jonas Pontusson points out, the issue “is not the immediate results of a given reform, but what possibilities it opens up for further reforms by altering the terms of public debate or encouraging popular mobilization”. This is critical. A re-emboldening vampire capitalism is seeking a return to profitability through the extraction of every last drop of value from the public domain. In our “loaned out” economy, as Michael Hudson <a class="external" href="http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue64/Hudson64.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">has warned</a>, a “neo-feudal <em>rentier</em> class” is turning to outright ownership, forcing debt-burdened governments into sell-offs in order to extract monopoly rents. Almost everywhere, supine political classes are inclined to surrender.</div>
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This need not be the case. There are real alternatives capable of moving us away from neoliberal austerity and in the direction of democratised ownership of the economy. Many of these alternatives – which go beyond cooperatives to public and quasi-public capital strategies – are already being put into practice in states and localities around the world. As the wave of asset-stripping privatisation comes crashing in, threatening to engulf schools, hospitals and public services, we must resist the sly voices of resignation and hold instead to the simple determination that, whatever else may happen, they shall not impoverish our imaginations too.</div>
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium', sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;"><em>This piece is part of the <a class="external" href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/collections/democratic-wealth-building-citizens-economy" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Democratic Wealth series</a>, hosted by OurKingdom in partnership with <a class="external" href="http://politicsinspires.org/category/democratic-wealth//" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Politics in Spires</a>.</em></strong></div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-19454935043584241552013-08-03T12:39:00.001-03:002013-08-03T12:40:43.129-03:00Stanford: Climate Change Ten Times Faster than Previous 65 Million Years<h4>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #575653; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Climate change on pace to occur 10 times faster than any change recorded in past 65 million years, Stanford scientists say</span></h4>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #575653; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5em; font-style: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.1px; line-height: 1.4em;">Not only is the planet undergoing one of the largest climate changes in the past 65 million years, </span><a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/climate-change-speed-080113.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5em; font-style: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.1px; line-height: 1.4em;" target="_blank">Stanford climate scientists Noah Diffenbaugh and Chris Field report</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #575653; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5em; font-style: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.1px; line-height: 1.4em;"> that it's on pace to occur at a rate 10 times faster than any change in that period. Without intervention, this extreme pace could lead to a 5-6 degree Celsius spike in annual temperatures by the end of the century.</span><br />
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BY <span class="byline" style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">BJORN CAREY</span></div>
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<span class="citation" style="border: 0px; color: #666666; display: block; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 1em 0px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: baseline;">Courtesy of Stanford University</span><a class="lightbox" href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/images/12919-climatemap_news.jpg" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="The top map shows global temperatures in the late 21st century, based on current warming trends. The bottom map illustrates the velocity of climate change, or how far species in any given area will need to migrate by the end of the 21st century to experience climate similar to present. (Click image to enlarge) "><img alt="Two 'heat maps' depicting aspects of climate change " class="photolarge" src="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/images/12919-climatemap_news.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(230, 228, 219); font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 300px;" /></a><br />
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The top map shows global temperatures in the late 21st century, based on current warming trends. The bottom map illustrates the velocity of climate change, or how far species in any given area will need to migrate by the end of the 21st century to experience climate similar to present. (Click image to enlarge)</div>
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The planet is undergoing one of the largest changes in climate since the dinosaurs went extinct. But what might be even more troubling for humans, plants and animals is the speed of the change. Stanford climate scientists warn that the likely rate of change over the next century will be at least 10 times quicker than any climate shift in the past 65 million years.</div>
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If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.</div>
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Although some of the changes the planet will experience in the next few decades are already "baked into the system," how different the climate looks at the end of the 21st century will depend largely on how humans respond.</div>
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The findings come from a review of climate research by <a href="https://pangea.stanford.edu/people/faculty/noah-diffenbaugh" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Noah Diffenbaugh</a>, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, and <a href="http://dge.stanford.edu/people/cfield" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Chris Field</a>, a professor of <a href="http://biology.stanford.edu/" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">biology</a> and of <a href="http://pangea.stanford.edu/eess/" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">environmental Earth system science</a> and the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution. The work is part of a special report on climate change in the current issue of<em>Science</em>.</div>
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Diffenbaugh and Field, both senior fellows at the <a href="http://woods.stanford.edu/" style="border: none !important; color: #663333; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment</a>, conducted the targeted but broad review of scientific literature on aspects of climate change that can affect ecosystems, and investigated how recent observations and projections for the next century compare to past events in Earth's history.</div>
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For instance, the planet experienced a 5 degree Celsius hike in temperature 20,000 years ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age. This is a change comparable to the high-end of the projections for warming over the 20th and 21st centuries.</div>
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The geologic record shows that, 20,000 years ago, as the ice sheet that covered much of North America receded northward, plants and animals recolonized areas that had been under ice. As the climate continued to warm, those plants and animals moved northward, to cooler climes.</div>
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"We know from past changes that ecosystems have responded to a few degrees of global temperature change over thousands of years," said Diffenbaugh. "But the unprecedented trajectory that we're on now is forcing that change to occur over decades. That's orders of magnitude faster, and we're already seeing that some species are challenged by that rate of change."</div>
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Some of the strongest evidence for how the global climate system responds to high levels of carbon dioxide comes from paleoclimate studies. Fifty-five million years ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was elevated to a level comparable to today. The Arctic Ocean did not have ice in the summer, and nearby land was warm enough to support alligators and palm trees.</div>
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"There are two key differences for ecosystems in the coming decades compared with the geologic past," Diffenbaugh said. "One is the rapid pace of modern climate change. The other is that today there are multiple human stressors that were not present 55 million years ago, such as urbanization and air and water pollution."</div>
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<strong>Record-setting heat</strong></h3>
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<strong></strong>Diffenbaugh and Field also reviewed results from two-dozen climate models to describe possible climate outcomes from present day to the end of the century. In general, extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, are expected to become more severe and more frequent.</div>
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For example, the researchers note that, with continued emissions of greenhouse gases at the high end of the scenarios, annual temperatures over North America, Europe and East Asia will increase 2-4 degrees C by 2046-2065. With that amount of warming, the hottest summer of the last 20 years is expected to occur every other year, or even more frequently.</div>
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By the end of the century, should the current emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked, temperatures over the northern hemisphere will tip 5-6 degrees C warmer than today's averages. In this case, the hottest summer of the last 20 years becomes the new annual norm.</div>
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"It's not easy to intuit the exact impact from annual temperatures warming by 6 C," Diffenbaugh said. "But this would present a novel climate for most land areas. Given the impacts those kinds of seasons currently have on terrestrial forests, agriculture and human health, we'll likely see substantial stress from severely hot conditions."</div>
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The scientists also projected the velocity of climate change, defined as the distance per year that species of plants and animals would need to migrate to live in annual temperatures similar to current conditions. Around the world, including much of the United States, species face needing to move toward the poles or higher in the mountains by at least one kilometer per year. Many parts of the world face much larger changes.</div>
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<strong>The human element</strong></h3>
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<strong></strong>Some climate changes will be unavoidable, because humans have already emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere and oceans have already been heated.</div>
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"There is already some inertia in place," Diffenbaugh said. "If every new power plant or factory in the world produced zero emissions, we'd still see impact from the existing infrastructure, and from gases already released."</div>
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The more dramatic changes that could occur by the end of the century, however, are not written in stone. There are many human variables at play that could slow the pace and magnitude of change – or accelerate it.</div>
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Consider the 2.5 billion people who lack access to modern energy resources. This energy poverty means they lack fundamental benefits for illumination, cooking and transportation, and they're more susceptible to extreme weather disasters. Increased energy access will improve their quality of life – and in some cases their chances of survival – but will increase global energy consumption and possibly hasten warming.</div>
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Diffenbaugh said that the range of climate projections offered in the report can inform decision-makers about the risks that different levels of climate change pose for ecosystems.</div>
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"There's no question that a climate in which every summer is hotter than the hottest of the last 20 years poses real risks for ecosystems across the globe," Diffenbaugh said. "However, there are opportunities to decrease those risks, while also ensuring access to the benefits of energy consumption."</div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-91296055295480336162013-07-30T16:39:00.001-03:002013-07-30T16:39:27.699-03:00Beyond Market and State: The Renaissance of the Commons<br />
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The “peer to peer” and commons-oriented vision for a new type of civilization and economic system starts from an analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the current economic system. Rather than put forward a utopian ideal, the P2P vision is based on generalizing the already emerging forms of peer production, peer governance, and peer property.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote1_nn80mnp" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote1_nn80mnp" id="footnoteref1_nn80mnp" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="See also the essay by Michel Bauwens on peer-to-peer production on pp. 375–378.">1</a> It makes three primary critiques of the dysfunctions of the present system:</div>
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<li><em>The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance.</em>We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote2_z0e5xzs" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote2_z0e5xzs" id="footnoteref2_z0e5xzs" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="See also the conversation between Davey, Helfrich, Hoeschele and Verzola in Part 1.">2</a></li>
<li><em>The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”</em>It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote3_mwu0ns0" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote3_mwu0ns0" id="footnoteref3_mwu0ns0" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="Beatriz Busaniche, among other authors, describes how this happens in Part 2.">3</a> Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits.</li>
<li><em>The pseudo-abundance that destroys the biosphere, and the contrived scarcity that keeps innovation artificially scarce and slow, does not advance social justice.</em>Although people may have a formal legal equality of civil and political rights, serious and increasing material inequalities make those rights more nominal than real. At the other extreme, the polity explicitly grants human rights to the artificial legal construct of the for-profit corporation, a pathological institution that is solely beholden to its shareholders, and is constitutionally unable to take into account the common good.</li>
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The present corporate form is a machine designed to deny and ignore negative environmental and social externalities as much as possible. Because it is driven by profit-maximizing corporations, capitalism is not just a scarcity-allocation mechanism, but a mechanism for engineering artificial scarcities, as epitomized in the sterile Terminator Seeds developed by Monsanto.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote4_boo6m1z" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote4_boo6m1z" id="footnoteref4_boo6m1z" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology">4</a> Such seeds are specifically designed so that they can’t reproduce themselves, which not only kills cycles of abundance in nature, it also makes farmers permanently dependent on a corporation.</div>
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The above analysis suggests that any solution to contemporary capitalism needs to address these three issues in an integral fashion, i.e., production that allows the continued survival, sustainability and flourishing of the biosphere; protecting and promoting the free sharing of social innovations and knowledge; and the recognition that social and economic justice will not be achieved unless we first recognize the actual scarcity of nature and the actual abundance of knowledge and innovation.</div>
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<strong>Vision, values and objectives</strong></h3>
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Contemporary society is generally seen as consisting of a public sphere, dominated by the state and public authorities; a private sphere, consisting of profit-maximizing corporations; and a subordinated civil society where the less privileged sectors have great difficulties in ascertaining and asserting their rights and interests.</div>
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The peer-to-peer vision relies upon the three major sectors of society – the state, market and civil society – but with different roles and in a revitalized equilibrium. At the core of the new society is civil society, with the commons as its main institution, which uses peer production to generate common value outside of the market logic. These commons consist of both the natural heritage of mankind (oceans, the atmosphere, land, etc.), and commons that are created through collective societal innovation, many of which can be freely shared because of their immaterial nature (shared knowledge, software and design, culture and science). Civil society hosts a wide variety of activities that are naturally and structurally beneficial to the commons – not in an indirect and hypothetical way, as claimed by the “Invisible Hand” metaphor, but in a direct way, by entities that are structurally and constitutionally designed to work for the common good. This sphere includes entities such as trusts, which act as stewards of physical resources of common use (land trusts, natural parks), and for-benefit foundations, which help maintain the infrastructure of cooperation for cultural and digital commons.</div>
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The Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains the funding for Wikipedia’s technological development is a well-known example in the domain of open knowledge. In like fashion, the Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation support two leading software development communities. It is important to note that these entities do not function as classic NGOs that use “command and control” management and salaried personnel to allocate resources to projects; rather, they use their resources and credibility to help paid and unpaid contributors continue to develop their commons according to their own consensus judgments.</div>
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Around this new core is a private sphere, where market entities with private agendas and private governance can still create added-value around the commons by producing relatively scarce goods and services. However, because of the pathological and destructive nature of profit-maximizing corporations, in the P2P economy this private sphere is reformed to serve more ethical ends by using proper taxation, revenue and benefit-sharing modalities to help generate positive externalities, e.g., infrastructure, shareable knowledge, and by using taxation, competition, and rent-for-use to minimize negative externalities, e.g., pollution, overuse of collective resources.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote5_al7nz5n" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote5_al7nz5n" id="footnoteref5_al7nz5n" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="See also Gerhard Scherhorn’s proposal in Part 5 to design a commons-based competition law.">5</a></div>
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Cooperative enterprises are the more prominent and developed form of private organization in this new economy. While corporations continue to exist, their operating logic is made to serve the values of the commons. Once the commons and the commoners are at the core of value creation, commoners can be expected to opt for those types of entities that maximize the value system of the commons itself. Today, the open source economy of shared innovation commons and the “ethical economy” of reformed market entities exist as separate spheres. Both need to develop and mature. An early example of this dynamic is IBM’s adaptation to the norms and regulations of the Linux community, which showed that even large, old-style corporate entities are capable of transforming themselves.</div>
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We believe that new forms of cooperative and distributed property will emerge along these lines, a trend explained by Matt Cropp in his article, “The Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution.”<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote6_ci53i9w" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote6_ci53i9w" id="footnoteref6_ci53i9w" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="//cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-micro-ownership-revolution.html">6</a> Cropp’s article explains the direct link between P2P-driven declines in transaction costs and the shift to more distributed forms of ownership. The new corporate forms will no longer be based on shareholder-based ownership, but on common capital stock, held by the commoners themselves. These new entities constitute the “third commons” of “created materiality,” i.e., humankind’s productive machinery (in other words, capital), which joins the first two commons, the inherited material commons of nature and created “immaterial” cultural commons. The new forms of distributed individual property, which can be freely aggregated into collectives, emulate the free aggregation of effort already dominant in peer production rather than the older forms of collectivized and socialized public property.</div>
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<strong>How commons “out-compete” by “out-cooperating”</strong></h3>
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It can be argued that the collaborative economy is hyperproductive in comparison to the traditional industrial-capitalist modality of using a private company, wage labor, and proprietary controls such as patents and copyrights. Commons-based peer production allows rapid sharing of innovation and very low cost mutual coordination on a global scale. It also elicits passionate, voluntary engagement from large networks of contributors as well as rapidly established quick connections between emerging problems and valuable expertise. It is this hyperproductivity of commons-oriented practices and solutions that has led some observers to see commons as “out-competing” or “out-cooperating” conventional capitalism, and peer production as an attractive alternative to investments of shareholder and venture capital in private ventures. IBM is a well-known example of the realignment of a classic for-profit enterprise to the new modality of value creation. The company not only decided to use and contribute to Linux, but also to abide by the open development process of Linux, as well as the norms and rules of that community.</div>
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Obviously, when we use the concept of <em>out-competing</em>, we stress the role that emergent peer production plays in the capitalist, for-profit system; we stress that incorporating community dynamics in the overall production process is a better and more efficient way of doing business. This is exactly the argument of the open source movement, which stresses efficiency. The free software movement, by contrast, stresses the ethical imperative of freedom in both its creative and political sense. To talk about “out-competing” allows one to build bridges to the existing mentalities prevalent in the older institutional forms of corporations and government. By contrast, to talk about “out-cooperating” stresses the “transcendent” aspects of peer production, those aspects which are non-capitalist, perhaps even post-capitalist. It stresses the open and free cooperation of producers who are creating a commons together and its transformative potential.</div>
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<strong>Civic, market and public spheres</strong></h3>
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How do we distinguish civil entities from private entities that choose to engage in some sort of social mission? On the one hand, civil entities are dedicated to the commons as a whole and exercise responsibility for its maintenance as an entity or institution, essentially based on non-market-based cooperation, and are organized as nonprofits; on the other hand, the private entities are voluntary associations of commoners that use market activity to create goods and services using a commons in order to guarantee their own individual and communal social reproduction. What joins both of these “sectors” is a common concern for maintaining the commons.</div>
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Over and above the civic and market spheres is a public sphere that is responsible for the overall collective good of the whole of society (as even commoners are primarily concerned with “their” commons). The public sector establishes the general parameters and supports in which the commons operates and by which commoners can thrive. The public sector of the P2P economy is neither a corporate welfare state at the service of a financial elite,<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote7_6yfij2i" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote7_6yfij2i" id="footnoteref7_6yfij2i" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="See Antonio Tricarico’s essay on the financialization of natural resources in Part 2. 8. In peer production and shared innovation commons, the value is created in a common pool by the contributors, and not by individuals and corporations acting in a private capacity to sell commodities in a marketplace.">7</a> nor a welfare state that has a paternalistic relation to civil society, but a Partner State, which serves civil society and takes responsibility for the metagovernance of the three spheres. The Partner State is dedicated to supporting “the common value creation of the civic sphere”;<sup>8</sup> the “market” and the “mission-oriented” activities of the new private sphere; and all the public services that are necessary for the common good of all citizens.</div>
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It is very important here to distinguish the market from capitalism. Markets predate capitalism, and are a simple technique to allocate resources through the meeting of supply and demand using some medium of exchange. The allocation mechanism is compatible with a wide variety of other, eventually dominant systems. It is compatible with methods of “just pricing,” full or “true cost accounting” (internalization of all costs), fair trade, etc. It does not require that labor and money be considered as commodities nor that workers be separated from the means of production. Markets can be subsumed to other logics and modalities such as the state or the commons.</div>
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Capitalism, on the other hand, considered by some as an “anti-market” (Braudel 1986), requires amongst other features: 1) the separation of producers and the means of production; and 2) infinite growth (either through competition and capital accumulation, as described by Karl Marx, or through compound interest dynamics, as described by Silvio Gesell).</div>
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In the vision of a commons-oriented society, the market is subsumed under the dominant logic of the commons and regulated by the Partner State. It is just one of the hybrid modalities that is compatible with the commons. This vision does not preclude an evolution of society through which the market may become entirely marginal, and be replaced by resource-based economics, for example.<a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote8_ykhzzxu" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnote8_ykhzzxu" id="footnoteref8_ykhzzxu" style="color: #3c2bb6;" title="In resource-based economics, resources could flow directly to the place of need, or be exchanged through barter or ledger systems, i.e., without recourse to money. It could be argued that a combination of networked cooperation, with open book management and transparency in accounting and production, makes the use of money for the exchange of resources obsolete. Feudal tribute systems are an older example of such money-free exchanges.">8</a> The important feature is to give commoners and citizens the freedom to choose amongst different mechanisms, and to arrive experimentally at the best solutions for the allocation of scarce resources.</div>
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The essential characteristic of the new system is that the commons is the new core, and a variety of hybrid mechanisms can productively coexist around it, including reformed market and state forms.</div>
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<strong>Individuality, relationality and collectivity</strong></h3>
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A commons-oriented society is not a return to premodern holism, in which the individual is subsumed to the whole, but rather a society that is based on the recognition of the need for relationality and collectivity of the free and equal individual. It is a society based on cooperative individualism rather than collectivism. Already today, in peer production, we can see how individuals can freely aggregate their contributions in a common project. This is possible because peer producers are much more in control of their own means of production, i.e., their personal creativity, computers, and access to networks. We propose to extend this vision and reality to the totality of the means of production. It should extend to citizen-peer producers so that they can aggregate the resources they need, including physical and financial capital stock, as well as coordinate their management practices and goals. This aggregation process will be guided by the need to guarantee good living conditions in a sustainable way. In this context, distributed property is a guarantee against the possible misuse of socialized common property, since the individual can also disaggregate and “fork” both his immaterial and material contributions. Most likely, the future commons society will give citizens an equal share of necessary natural resources to draw from, as well as some form of equitably distributed productive capital, giving them a certain independence from concrete and localized physical resources.</div>
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<strong>How to get from here to there</strong></h3>
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The animating social force of the commons-based, P2P society is that of citizen-workers seeing themselves as autonomous producers of shared knowledge and value. This is the great contribution of knowledge workers and the hacker class to the history of the modern labor and social movements. The innovations of this new sector can and should merge with the historical traditions of resistance, creation and emancipation of the traditional working class and peasantry, as well as the progressive sectors of the other classes.</div>
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One way to envisage alliances is to see merging of new constructive peer production communities in all areas of social life – which are producing the seeds of the new society within the old – with the remobilization of mass movements focused on a positive political program that is often lacking in this time of deep capitalist crisis. In other words, the convergence of the communities dedicated to the “construction of the new” and “resistance to the old” provides the energy and imagination for a new type of policy formulation, one that can recreate a global reform and transformation movement.</div>
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Another way to envisage future political and cultural alliances is to see them as a confluence of various global forces: 1) those working against the enclosure and the privatization of knowledge, which are simultaneously constructing new knowledge commons; 2) those working for environmental sustainability, including the protection of existing physical commons; and 3) those working for social justice on a local and global scale. In other words, we need a global alliance between the new “open” movements, the ecological movements, and the traditional social justice and emancipatory movements, in order to create a “grand alliance of the commons.”<br />
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<strong>References</strong></h3>
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<li>Bollier, David. 2009. <em>Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. </em>New York, NY. New Press.</li>
<li>Botsman, Rachel and Roo Rogers. 2010. <em>What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. </em>New York, NY. HarperCollins.</li>
<li>Brown, Marvin. 2010. <em>Civilizing the Economy. A New Economics of Provision.</em>Cambridge, MA. Cambridge University Press.</li>
<li>De Ugarte, David (no date). “Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century.” <a data-mce-href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf" href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf" style="color: #3c2bb6;" target="_blank">http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf</a>.</li>
<li>—————. (no date), “The Power of Networks.” <a data-mce-href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf" href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf" style="color: #3c2bb6;" target="_blank">http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf</a>, Retrieved, October 20, 2011.</li>
<li>—————. (no date), and Pere Quintana, Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes. “From Nations to Networks.” <a data-mce-href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf" href="http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf" style="color: #3c2bb6;" target="_blank">http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf</a>.</li>
<li>Gansky, Lisa. 2010. <em>The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing</em>. New York, NY. Penguin Group.</li>
<li>Greco, Thomas. 2009.<em> The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. </em>White River Junction, VT. Chelsea Green.</li>
<li>Hecksher, C. and Adler, P. 2006. <em>The Firm as a Collaborative Community – Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy. </em>New York, NY. Oxford University Press.</li>
<li>Helfrich, Silke, ed. 2009. <em>Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong?</em> Heinrich Böll Foundation.</li>
<li>Hoeschele, Wolfgang. 2010. <em>The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability.</em> Gower Publishing.</li>
<li>Hyde, Lewis. 2010. <em>Common as Air. Revolution, Art, and Ownership.</em> New York, NY. Farrar Straus Giroux.</li>
<li>Kane, Pat. 2003. <em>The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living.</em>London, UK. Macmillan.</li>
<li>Kleiner, Dmytri. 2010. <em>The Telekommunist Manifesto.</em> Institute for Network Cultures.</li>
<li>Krikorian, Gaelle and Kapczynski, Amy, eds. 2010. <em>Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property. </em>New York, NY. Zone Books.</li>
<li>Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. <em>Free Culture</em>. New York, NY. Penguin.</li>
<li>O’Neill, Mathieu. 2009. <em>Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes</em>.London, UK. Macmillan/Pluto Press.</li>
<li>Raymond, Eric. 2001. <em>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</em>. Sebastopol, CA. O’Reilly.</li>
<li>Schor, Juliet. 2010. <em>Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth</em> New York, NY. Penguin.</li>
<li>Stallman, Richard. 2002. <em>Free Software, Free Society. </em>Boston, MA. GNU Press.</li>
<li>von Hippel, Eric. 2004. <em>Democratizating Innovation.</em> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</li>
<li>Walljasper, Jay. 2010. <em>All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons</em> New York, NY: New Press.</li>
<li>Wark, McKenzie. 2004. <em>A Hacker Manifesto </em>Cambridge, MA. Harvard UniversityPress.</li>
<li>Weber, Steve. 2004. <em>The Success of Open Source</em>. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.</li>
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<li id="footnote1_nn80mnp"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref1_nn80mnp" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref1_nn80mnp" style="color: #3c2bb6;">1.</a> See also the essay by Michel Bauwens on peer-to-peer production on pp. 375–378.</li>
<li id="footnote2_z0e5xzs"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref2_z0e5xzs" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref2_z0e5xzs" style="color: #3c2bb6;">2.</a> See also the conversation between Davey, Helfrich, Hoeschele and Verzola in Part 1.</li>
<li id="footnote3_mwu0ns0"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref3_mwu0ns0" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref3_mwu0ns0" style="color: #3c2bb6;">3.</a> Beatriz Busaniche, among other authors, describes how this happens in Part 2.</li>
<li id="footnote4_boo6m1z"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref4_boo6m1z" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref4_boo6m1z" style="color: #3c2bb6;">4.</a> See, e.g., Wikipedia entry on genetically modified organisms, at<a data-mce-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology" style="color: #3c2bb6;" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology</a></li>
<li id="footnote5_al7nz5n"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref5_al7nz5n" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref5_al7nz5n" style="color: #3c2bb6;">5.</a> See also Gerhard Scherhorn’s proposal in Part 5 to design a commons-based competition law.</li>
<li id="footnote6_ci53i9w"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref6_ci53i9w" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref6_ci53i9w" style="color: #3c2bb6;">6.</a> See: <a data-mce-href="http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-micro-ownership-revolution.html" href="http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-micro-ownership-revolution.html" style="color: #3c2bb6;" target="_blank">http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-micro-ownership-revolution.html</a></li>
<li id="footnote7_6yfij2i"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref7_6yfij2i" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref7_6yfij2i" style="color: #3c2bb6;">7.</a> See Antonio Tricarico’s essay on the financialization of natural resources in Part 2. 8. In peer production and shared innovation commons, the value is created in a common pool by the contributors, and not by individuals and corporations acting in a private capacity to sell commodities in a marketplace.</li>
<li id="footnote8_ykhzzxu"><a data-mce-href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref8_ykhzzxu" href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-30/how-the-new-peer-to-peer-economy-can-lead-to-the-renaissance-of-the-commons#footnoteref8_ykhzzxu" style="color: #3c2bb6;">8.</a> In resource-based economics, resources could flow directly to the place of need, or be exchanged through barter or ledger systems, i.e., without recourse to money. It could be argued that a combination of networked cooperation, with open book management and transparency in accounting and production, makes the use of money for the exchange of resources obsolete. Feudal tribute systems are an older example of such money-free exchanges.</li>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-72839540067789071912013-07-22T19:30:00.002-03:002013-07-23T18:50:26.180-03:00What Then Must We Do? The Next American Revolution<br />
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by <a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1152546-justin-ritchie" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Justin Ritchie</a>, <a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1154564-seth-moser-katz" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Seth Moser-Katz</a>, originally published by <a class="external" href="http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/2013/07/18/episode-63-revolution/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Extraenvironmentalist</a> <span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #f6891f; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"> | TODAY</span></div>
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"Revolutions are as common as grass in world history, if you look at the long pattern. . . Systems try to generate, and they must generate, the idea that they are inevitable and that they will last forever. Turns out, anyone who’s an historian knows, that is simply not true. Not only in our own era, but in history, systems come and go."</div>
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<img align="right" alt="" height="139" src="http://www.resilience.org/articles/General/2013/07_Jul/ee63.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 10px 20px 10px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="300" />With a media ecosystem focused almost entirely the corporate system, burgeoning elements of a new economy revolution escape the mainstream eye. As our political systems stagnate in the face of ecological, energy and social crises, can an alternative to capitalism develop over the next few decades? Do ongoing experiments in money, society and energy have the ability to coalesce into a broader cultural shift?</div>
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In <strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Extraenvironmentalist #63 </strong>we<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;"> </strong>talk about the growing network of institutions and businesses that are forming the new economic revolution in the United States with historian and political economist <a class="external" href="http://neweconomy.net/content/gar-alperovitz" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Gar Alperovitz</a>. Gar describes the ideas in his new book, <a class="external" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603585044/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1603585044&linkCode=as2&tag=theextraenv-20" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">What Then Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution</a>. Then we hear from two of Italy’s leading economists <a class="external" href="http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/2013/07/18/episode-63-revolution/www.jhubc.it/OUR-FACULTY/profprofile.cfm/profid=62" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Stefano</a> and <a class="external" href="http://www.jhubc.it/OUR-FACULTY/profprofile.cfm/profid=63" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Vera Zamagni </a>about the civil society model of a market economy.</div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-56168995450762441682013-06-30T17:18:00.001-03:002013-06-30T18:45:01.252-03:00John Thackery: Limits to Resilience<br />
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by <a href="http://www.resilience.org/author-detail/1007663-john-thackara" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">John Thackara</a>, originally published by <a class="external" href="http://www.doorsofperception.com/infrastructure-design/john-thackara/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Doors of Perception</a> <span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #b7a131; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"> | JAN 15, 2013</span><br />
<span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #b7a131; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span class="article_date" style="border: 0px; color: #b7a131; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: #cccccc; color: black; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-transform: none;">The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up with the growth of the the modern economy. Could the growth of bioregionalism, and research into ‘social-ecological systems’, be signs that the rift may be healing? And if so, what are the opportunities for design to contribute? - See more at: http://www.doorsofperception.com/infrastructure-design/john-thackara/#sthash.ZDC98t9m.dpuf</span></span></div>
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<em>The Stockholm Resilience Centre investigates</em><i> </i><em><a class="external" href="http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/3-26-2012-cracking-the-social-ecological-code.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the governance of social-ecological systems</a>. Shown here is a rural agricultural system in Madagascar</em><br />
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Spare a thought for global business leaders as they prepare for this year’s World Economic Forum, in Switzerland. Instead of a guide to <em>apres-ski</em>eateries, their host has sent them <a class="external" href="http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2013.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em>Global Risks 2013</em></a><em>.</em><br />
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Highlights of this <a class="external" href="http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/view/section-one/executive-summary/#read" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">guide to possible futures</a> include a killer virus pandemic; unmanageable deflation; a geomagnetic storm that wipes out the internet; global food shortages; and ‘unprecedented geophysical destruction’. Taken together, says the WEF, their top-trending risks “are a health warning regarding our most critical systems”.<br />
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The WEF is not alone in its somber outlook. What their <em>Global Risks</em><i> </i>does for the economy, <a class="external" href="http://www.acus.org/files/global-trends-2030-nic-lo.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em>Global Trends 2030</em></a><i> </i>does for geopolitics and security. The latter report, just published by the US National Intelligence Council, aggregates the research of 17 intelligence agencies with a collective <a class="external" href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/national_intelligence_council_u_s_is_a_global_security_provider/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">budget of $75 billion</a> and several hundred advising professors.<br />
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Having digested all this input, the NIC report concludes that ‘natural disasters might cause governments to collapse’ and warns that ‘we are at a critical juncture in human history.’</div>
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And those are the known risks. More alarming still is the possibility of a so-called <a class="external" href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/07-0965.1?journalCode=ecol" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘ecological surprise’</a> – a transformational change in one or more natural systems that can be sudden, non-linear, and catastrophic. We know they can happen – but we don’t know when; they cannot be predicted.<br />
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To add to the uncertainty there’s no consensus on how risks should be weighted. Trends that signal ‘risk’ to one researcher are perceived as ‘opportunity’ by others.<br />
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<em>Wired</em> founder <a class="external" href="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post-produc.php" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Kevin Kelly,</a> for example, thinks that the increased interdependency of systems, and the compound growth connectivity, are good news: They signify, he says, that our economy is in an ‘evolutionary uplift’ on its way to a ‘post-productive’ mode.<br />
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Reflecting on the same phenomena that Kelly celebrates, c<a class="external" href="http://news.noahraford.com/?p=48" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">omplex systems researcher Noah Raford</a> draws a different conclusion: Too much inter-connectivity makes systems vulnerable to <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_transition" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘phase transition’</a> – a word that sounds more benign that it probably is.<br />
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When a system reaches a critical state, Raford explains, ‘even a tiny change can lead to massive fluctuation and collapse.’ The sheer <a class="external" href="http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/3-26-2012-cracking-the-social-ecological-code.html%20%E2%80%A6" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">complexity of interacting social and ecological systems</a> makes it impossible to forecast with certainty how they will evolve – catastrophically or otherwise.</div>
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Given that uncertainty, what is our best course: Plough on regardless – or take a different route?</div>
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For climate scientists and <a class="external" href="http://www.resalliance.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">ecologists</a>, the consequence of unknowability is clear: we must <a class="external" href="http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol6/iss1/art14/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">live within the known carrying capacity of the earth’s living systems </a>rather than grow the economy regardless.</div>
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To guide us on this cautious path, climate scientists have delineated a set of nine <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘planetary boundaries’ </a>(shown in the graphic above) that describe living systems that are systems essential for human survival.</div>
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The chart includes the scientists’ estimate of systems that have been pushed post their safe limits already – the point at which there is a risk of such ‘irreversible and abrupt environmental change’ that our own survival is threatened.<br />
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As <a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">conservation ecologist Gretchen Daily</a> concludes, “We cannot go on treating nature like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”<br />
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Boundaries? What Boundaries?</strong></div>
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Boundaries and limits are anathema, however, to the World Economic Forum. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit;">Its founder, Klaus Schwab, seems almost to relish the global risks identified in this year’s report: He describes them as opportunities ‘that we should grab with relish to ’improve the state of the world’ and to pursue the ‘critical goal…of future growth.’</span></div>
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Under the banner of a virile new concept called <a class="external" href="http://forumblog.org/tag/resilient-dynamism/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘resilient dynamism’</a>, Schwab’s implicit advice to business leaders is to focus less on the causes of global risks and more on learning ‘how to adapt to changing contexts’ and ‘how to withstand sudden shocks.’</div>
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There is no acknowledgement – not a word – that compound economic growth could possibly be the <em>cause</em><i> </i>of the biosphere-threatening trends described in the <em>Global Risks</em>. <span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit;">As for the fact that exponential economic growth on a physical planet contravenes: That is simply ignored.</span></div>
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This is not to deny that resilience – ‘the capacity to bounce back’ as <a class="external" href="http://resiliencethebook.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Andrew Zolli‘s book</a> so well explains it – is a desirable condition. The trouble is that a lot of people perceive resilience – dynamic or otherwise – to be <a class="external" href="http://www.doorsofperception.com/energy-and-design/oil-powered-thinking/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">a new variety of risk management </a>that gives them the opportunity to carry on with business-as-usual.<br />
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Chris Anderson, for example, editor in chief of <em>Wired,</em><i> </i>states that ‘in an increasingly complex world, we can’t avoid shocks - <a class="external" href="http://resiliencethebook.com/category/press/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">we can only build better shock absorbers</a>.<br />
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But wait a minute: Anderson’s metaphor would just about work if the world around us were indeed a tarmac track disfigured by potholes. But it’s not: Those ‘bumps’ we’re driving over are better understood as the bodies, metaphorical or otherwise, of living systems.<br />
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Why would anyone even <em>consider</em><i> </i>driving over them?<br />
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Metabolic Rift</strong></div>
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Paved surfaces and shock absorbers have a lot to answer for. By shielding us both from the weather, and from the state of the soil, they act as psychological barriers to empathy with the living systems that support us.<br />
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For as long as people have moved into cities – with their paved roads, and media-cultural shock absorbers – they’ve lost physical contact with nature and therefore stopped worrying how their actions might be affecting it.<br />
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Cities are like intensive care units in which the screens have been covered over, and the audio warnings turned off.<br />
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The term <a class="external" href="http://www.green-blog.org/2010/02/19/karl-marx-and-the-metabolic-rift-theory/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em>metabolic rift</em> </a>was coined by the environmental sociologist <a class="external" href="http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb2181/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">John Bellamy Foster </a>to describe the alienation between humans and nature that has opened up with the growth of the modern economy.</div>
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Building on Karl Marx’s critique of how soil nutrients in the countryside are depleted to feed the towns, Foster argues that the capitalist economy, by distracting us from the condition of natural systems, enables us to exploit them without consideration of the consequences.</div>
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For so-called ‘dark ecologists’, the metabolic rift is a fundamental driver of our rush to ecological disaster.<br />
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The Kevin Kellys, Chris Andersons and Klaus Schwabs of this world can contemplate the destruction of living systems in the interests of the economy not because they evil bad guys, they argue, but because our whole society has been rendered cognitively blind.</div>
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In that sense, as Timothy Morton put it so memorably in 2008, ‘<a class="external" href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.fr/2008/07/catastrophe-has-already-occurred.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">the ecological catastrophe <em>has already occurred</em></a><em>.’</em><br />
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Limits of resilience</strong></div>
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The widespread embrace of resilience in this context – both as scientific practice, and as a cultural meme – is a mixed blessing.<br />
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For bodies such as the WEF, resilience is being used as a welcome diversion from the underlying causes of our difficulties – namely, our growth-addicted economic system.<br />
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The ‘risks’ scattered on the WEF’s charts are better described as disasters-in-progress: Resource depletion, water stress, malnutrition, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction are not possibilities to be guarded against – they are the known and actual consequence of the economic system we have now.</div>
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In much the same way that ecological disaster moves like <em><a class="external" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Day After Tomorrow </a></em>suggest, misleadingly, that the worst problems lie ahead of us – so too does WEF-style risk management.</div>
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Hollywood is not alone in its use of the eco-bogeyman card to distract our attention from catastrophes already under way. Hypothetical future disasters have also been used by scientists to promote their projects.<br />
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The <a class="external" href="http://cser.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em>Cambridge Project for Existential Risk,</em></a> for example - a joint initiative between a philosopher, a scientist, and a software entrepreneur – begins with the proposition that ‘developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole’.</div>
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Wow, that’s scary – and it’s not even a film. It’s almost as scary as the professors’ conclusion that the best response to the ‘threat of human extinction by science and technology’ is (wait for it) ‘a great deal more scientific investigation’.<br />
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But I digress. In other respects, resilience has enormous potential.</div>
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We know, for example, that extreme weather events are set to increase – so it is of course a good thing to be better prepared to respond effectively to these events – and to do so in new ways.</div>
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The <a class="external" href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/11/building-resilient-cities-conversation-andrew-zolli-and-jonathan-rose/3839/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">most inspiring chapter in Zolli’s book</a>, for example, is about the way new forms of crisis mapping and response that emerged in response to the catastrophe in Haiti. And San Francisco has been taking practical steps to turn itself into a<a class="external" href="http://www.spur.org/initiative/resilient-city" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> resilient city </a>since 2008.<br />
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<strong style="font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Medium'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 22px;">Cultural surprise</strong></div>
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But what about the <em>causes</em> of the future events we must be resilient to?</div>
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What about the <em>metabolic rift</em>: Can it be healed?<br />
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In his 1962 book <em>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</em> Thomas Kuhn introduced the term ‘<a class="external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">paradigm shift</a>‘ to describe the ways that scientific world views periodically undergo radical change in what appears at the time to be a sudden leap.<br />
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Kuhn explains that these ‘sudden’ paradigm shifts in world view follow years, sometimes decades, in which scientists have encountered anomalies that don’t fit in with the dominant paradigm of the time.</div>
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Could a paradigm shift in our understanding of ‘progress’ and ‘the economy’ be imminent? Are there grounds for optimism that the modernist myth – that the biosphere is a repository of resources to fuel endless growth – will be supplanted by something new?<br />
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The conditions are surely ripe for a new narrative to emerge. According to the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WGBU), the heavyweight scientific body that advises the German Federal Government on ‘Earth System Megatrends’, a ‘global transformation of values’ along these lines has already begun.<br />
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As <a class="external" href="http://www.doorsofperception.com/transition-and-resilience/german-government-think-tank-supports-fringe-change-agents/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">reported here last month</a>, this post-materialist thinking is not limited to the well-off. In South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, and China, the WGBU also found, a significant majority ‘supports ambitious climate protection measures’ and would ‘welcome a new economic system’ to achieve that.</div>
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Many people despair, however, that utopian visions and ‘latent values’ are no substitute for positive change in the real world.<br />
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Whatever values we might wish the world to hold, they say, the obstacles to real-world change are insurmountable. These obstacles include system-wide <a class="external" href="https://www3.amherst.edu/~cgkingston/Comparing.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">‘path dependencies’</a> (such as the financial system, and debt); the ‘lock-in effect’ of existing laws; and all-round <a class="external" href="https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/1393-greening-the-academy.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">institutional inertia</a>.</div>
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These obstacles are real, of course – but this is where the National Intelligence Council’s <em>Global Trends</em><i> </i>gets interesting. It plots a variety of ways in which political and social change on the ground could undermine these institutional ‘path dependencies’.<br />
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Its report anticipates, for example, that power ‘could shift to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.’ Enabled by new technologies, the NIC speculates, so-called ‘non-state actors’ – along with subnational actors such as cities, and city-regions – could play ‘important governance roles’. It describes this scenario as ‘political multi-polarisation’.<br />
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The NIC’s scenarios raise an interesting question: if profound paradigm shifts are possible in the world views of science, as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated; if ‘ecological surprises’ can transform natural systems, as ecologists have shown; and if today’s monolithic states could be transformed by the NIC’s ‘multi-polarisation’; in that case could a profound phase-shift in <em>cultural</em><i> </i>belief systems also be on the cards?</div>
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It is surely plausible that a convergence of latent value change, as described by the WGBU, and the political fragmentation, as anticipated by the NIC, could unpave the way for a mosaic of globally-linked but <a class="external" href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/cafard.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">self-governing bioregions.</a><br />
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On the ground, examples of a transformation along these lines are already emerging. As Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network, explains in this short video, regional food economies, local currencies, and community energy projects are <a class="external" href="http://transitionculture.org/2013/01/03/welcome-back-and-a-vision-for-2013/" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">no longer fringe.</a><br />
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As these local food, water and soil projects mature, and connect with each other, we are seeing see examples appear in urban contexts of the <a class="external" href="http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/3-26-2012-cracking-the-social-ecological-code.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">social-ecological innovation</a> that, until now, has only been studied in places like the Great Barrier Reef or tropical rain forests.<br />
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For the Stockholm Resilience Centre, cornerstone of what it calls ‘successful common-pool resource management’ is innovative forms of social connectivity among the people who are stewarding the land.</div>
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Based on its initial findings, the SRC recently published <em><a class="external" href="http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/12-17-2012-most-requested-publications-2012.html" style="border: 0px; color: #6d8d3b; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Seven Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services</a><u>. </u></em>These are:<br />
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1 maintain diversity and redundancy<br />
2 manage connectivity<br />
3 manage slow variables and feedbacks<br />
4 foster an understanding of social ecological systems as complex adaptive systems<br />
5 encourage learning and experimentation<br />
6 broaden participation<br />
7 promote polycentric governance systems</div>
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Those principles pose a number of challenges for design. These will be the focus of future posts on this blog, and of forthcoming Doors of Perception encounters with our partners.</div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-2660641214833282222013-06-28T15:08:00.000-03:002013-06-29T13:12:49.226-03:00Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy<br />
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<a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/peak-oil-and-the-new-carbon-boom#23anchor" target="_blank">Dissent Magazine has an article by Timothy Mitchell</a>, Prof. of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, on the political-economy of peak oil. I suggest reading the article, which is a lead-up to his book <i>Carbon Democracy</i>. The article walks through several recent trends on energy, climate change and economics that most of you are already familiar with. But it's pieced together in way that builds toward a penetrating analysis culminating in the issue of the <i>politics</i> of energy. The critical factor that Mitchell adds to the discussion is the role of Labour and its associated politics.The point of the book is stated in the last three paragraphs:</div>
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"The post-2009 energy boom that seemed to pull the United States out of a financial collapse and global recession caused by the excesses of speculative capital is not the antidote to that world of excess and speculation. The claim that the shale revolution represents a path to a “potential re-industrialization of the US” was published in the <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Wall Street Journal</em> by the head of global commodities research at Citigroup. The same banks and newspapers that helped organize and profit from the system of exponentially growing consumer debt and the overvalued derivatives built on it were now creating the unsustainable expectations of a carbon-fueled future. Few people seemed to notice that the decline in U.S. oil imports that signaled the new age of energy independence was, to a significant degree, due not to increased oil production but to a shrinking demand for gasoline, as the doubling of the number of the unemployed and other economic hardships forced people to find ways of reducing the number of miles driven.</div>
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As we move, with a dangerous slowness, towards the increased use of renewable sources of energy that do not require the combustion of carbon and its further accumulation in the atmosphere, it is sometimes assumed that the post-carbon world will inevitably be more democratic. More cogently, it is argued that the European model of distributed and networked renewable energy production, based on transforming every household and business into a producer of its own energy and a generator of small surpluses, has a greater democratic potential than U.S. plans for utility-scale generation of renewable power distributed through a conventional long-distance grid. The democratizing potential of the Internet is offered as a model of the political benefits of a localized, distributed and intelligently networked design.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1148797755731444630" name="34anchor" style="color: #0991fa; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"></a><a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/peak-oil-and-the-new-carbon-boom#34" style="color: #0991fa; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><sup style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">34</sup></a> The lesson from <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Carbon Democracy</em> is that one cannot predict democratic possibilities directly from the design of socio-technical systems—as the internet itself demonstrates, with its capacity for open communication always threatened by the monopolistic commercial powers of the largest software, computer and internet businesses. The point, rather, is that in battles over the shape of future energy systems the possibilities for democracy are at stake.</div>
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There is, however, a considerable campaign to be undertaken before we reach a post-carbon world, especially in the United States. A larger lesson from <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Carbon Democracy </em>is that such democratic struggles depend not on future designs but upon identifying in current socio-technical systems their points of vulnerability. This postscript has traced the peculiar vulnerability of oil companies dependent on flows of equity investment that must increase as rapidly as the costs of producing oil are rising. Yet those rising costs reflect a world in which cheap, conventional oil is more and more scarce and the technical expense and environmental costs of producing unconventional oil are escalating. These risks and costs reveal a world at odds with the optimistic scenarios on which accelerating flows of equity depend. Meanwhile, capital that long ago began losing interest in organizing—and thus becoming vulnerable to—large-scale productive labor, tried the easier route of organizing lives around the making and servicing of debt. The problems of peak oil hastened the collapse of the debt machine. The recent U.S. energy boom offers only a temporary and equally vulnerable diversion."</div>
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<strong style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Timothy Mitchell</strong> teaches at Columbia University. His books include <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Colonising Egypt</em>, <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Rule of Experts</em>, and <em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Carbon Democracy.</em><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">More on</span><em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Carbon Democracy</em><br />
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<em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong>How oil undermines democracy, and our ability to address the environmental crisis.</strong></em></div>
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<em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. <em>Carbon Democracy</em> tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.</em></div>
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<em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.</em></div>
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<em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.</em></div>
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<em style="line-height: 1.45; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, <em>Carbon Democracy</em>rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.</em></div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-23997606592159768802013-06-05T08:54:00.000-03:002013-06-05T08:55:43.632-03:00The Informal Economy Blog<a href="http://www.theinformaleconomy.com/" target="_blank">A new blog, The Informal Economy,</a> has an interesting take on new, chaotic, grassroots businesses:<br />
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HOW CAN INFORMAL ENTERPRISE HELP BUSINESS ADAPT TO A PERMANENT STATE OF CHAOS?</h4>
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We live in turbulent times of rapid change, increased interconnectivity and rising socio-economic complexity. Ambiguity is our new constant. It is clear that top-down organizations optimised for efficiency need to shift towards more adaptive structures and platforms. They are not built for ambiguity.</div>
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Yet, amidst this chaos, informal enterprises are proliferating -- in both emerging and declining markets. Makeshift start-ups, sharing networks, and micro-businesses are expanding, and respond more nimbly to immediate opportunities and needs. We believe these are not fringe alternatives, but socially and economically desirable choices for an ambiguous world. Our aim is to find ways to create more adaptive businesses that harness the elasticity of informal enterprise, as well as to find ways to learn from, enable, and share value with them.</div>
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<br />Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-36435360932125549492013-06-04T22:37:00.000-03:002013-06-05T08:25:01.278-03:00Michael Pollan: What Ecology Teaches Us About Human Health<a href="http://ecowatch.com/2013/michael-pollan-links-biodiversity-health/" target="_blank">In this interview with Michael Pollan</a> on his new book, <i><a href="http://michaelpollan.com/books/cooked/" target="_blank">Cooked</a>,</i> Michael talks about the transference of terminology developed in the field of ecology into the science of medicine, how these new concepts and terminology are changing how we think about the human body and human health. Niklas Luhmann called this transference of terminology "ecological communication." When we transfer language and codes derived from studies of the environment (though not solely the <i>natural</i> environment) and import that terminology into other fields of knowledge, Luhmann proposes that by this process 'the social system' develops the capacity to respond and adapt to the environment.<br />
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Hitt:</strong> At one point you referred to “the impoverished westernized microbiome,” and you posed the question of whether the human body needs what some microbiologists call “restoration ecology.” So you’re applying environmental metaphors to the human body. How might this kind of language make us think in a new way about our bodies?</strong></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pollan:</strong> I think when you bring the concepts of ecology into your body, that’s a revolutionary new paradigm for medicine and for the philosophy of human identity. It breaks down the “us and them” attitude we bring to nature. It’s a very direct implication of the natural world in the body. We know when we eat, we’re always taking nature into us. But the idea that we’re a host to an ecological community and that that ecological community is obviously shaped by what’s going on in the world—whether we’re talking about toxins, antibiotics—you’re really breaking down that barrier between us and nature out there. Nature is passing through us. I didn’t tease out these implications, but I think it does have important implications for how you think about nature. It definitely brings it home.</strong></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Hitt:</strong> And also how you think about what you eat?</strong></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pollan:</strong> Yes. If it doesn’t necessarily change your diet, it does change your attitude toward the various chemical compounds that poison this environment. We’ve understood that <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2012/court-orders-fda-to-address-antibiotic-overuse-in-livestock/" style="color: rgb(245, 130, 33) !important; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">feeding antibiotics to livestock</a> is a public health risk because of the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant microbes, and that’s the reason people have campaigned to remove them. But it turns out there’s another reason to remove them and that is that these antibiotics are poisoning and cutting down on the biodiversity inside you. So there are implications of knowing this that go beyond diet.</strong></div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Hitt:</strong> How was it that scientists recently came to start talking about the human microbiome?</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pollan:</strong> There are two tools that have allowed for this wilderness to be explored. One is this new sequencing technology. But the other was theories of ecology. It was when scientists began thinking, “Hey, what if we ask the questions that ecosystems scientists ask?” Which was radical for medicine. Medicine doesn’t usually think that way. And that really opened it up. And they started using terms like community dynamics and invasion resistance. And exotic species. And resilience. So there was an intellectual tool and there was a technical tool. And they were both required to make the breakthroughs we’re starting to make.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Hitt</strong>: Wow, that’s cool. So, there really was a kind of theoretical borrowing?</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pollan:</strong> Yes. And this may be prove to be a key legacy of ecology—what it teaches us about health. Who would have thought?</div>
<br />Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-20017310051848249742013-05-20T01:40:00.002-03:002013-05-20T01:41:17.473-03:00Just 20 Minutes from Downtown Montreal—The Valhalla Movement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-14653647715848919602013-05-16T09:38:00.001-03:002013-05-16T09:52:09.300-03:00More Movement Convergence: Climate Camp Takes on the BanksIn another example of movement convergence, and a reprise of the Occupy movement, Climate Camp UK has decided on a summer campaign targeting the Banks. While Occupy has moved into climate and ecology issues through Occupy the Pipeline, Climate Camp has moved into economic issues by targeting the banks that finance mining and fossil fuel industries. When the movements against the banks arose in the UK in 2008 following the first financial collapse, the Climate Camp movement appeared to recede into the background. As the riots ramped up in the UK, Climate Camp suspended all its activities. They seemed to struggle with how to make climate issue relevant in the face of an economic crisis. But by targeting the Banks, they have found a way to link climate issues to the financial crisis and make their movement relevant again. Climate Camp make their first attack on the banks in 2010 with a campaign against RBS.<br />
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Occupy itself has become an even more interesting phenomenon in the US because of its ability to morph and converge with many different movements and issues. Having begun in Zuccotti Park with virtually no agenda, the movement has been able to adapt to and take on a number of social issues as they arise: foreclosures, Hurricane Sandy relief, student debt; and now the ecology movements: food security, fracking and pipelines. This ability to morph and converge with other movements and issues has extended the life of Occupy far beyond it's initial ambitions.<br />
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"In summer 2010, environmental direct action group Climate Camp targeted a week long action camp at the headquaters of the Royal Bank of Scotland. As part of the communications strategy in advance of the Camp, the Agency was tasked with creating a video which would express the rationale for the chosen target.</div>
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Hijacking imagery from and satirising the storyline of the years biggest box-office hit Avatar, the Agency created a uniquely cheeky and humorous video. Making fun of banks is like shooting fish in a barrel, but explaining the link to climate change while still being funny was just the kind of challenge that we relish."</div>
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<br />Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-29404887926164693512013-05-11T16:55:00.001-03:002013-05-11T18:10:14.061-03:00Prof. Calvin Jones on Post-Growth EconomicsWelsh Economist Calvin Jones has a very interesting take on post-growth economics. He theorizes that instead of one dominant economic form, the global economy will devolve to a multitude of diverse forms, some localized and less hierarchal, some centralized and highly autocratic. There will be a wide range of adaptation strategies, successes and failures. He theorizes that 'humans as a species will be groping toward something that vaguely works' rather than a carefully planned economy. Interestingly, he also thinks that forms of the household economy will revive in a degrowth situation.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F90602256" width="100%"></iframe>Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-25860285469025807422013-05-06T22:34:00.002-03:002013-05-06T22:34:48.334-03:00Eco-Movement ConvergenceAn article in The Nation magazine contains the story of the convergence of three social movements: the Occupy, anti-pipeline and anti-fracking movements. I have seen these kinds of convergences before and noted one on this blog two years ago. In 2011, Climate Justice Heathrow, a movement to stop the expansion of London's Heathrow airport, and Transition Heathrow, came together to form Grow Heathrow. The two groups took over an abandoned greenhouse that would have been torn down by the airport expansion, and turned it into a productive social enterprise. <div>
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In The Nation article, the Occupy movement has worked it's way into the anti-pipeline movement, but in this case, it's a proposed methane gas pipeline to bring fracked shale gas from the Marcellus Shale plays to New York City. </div>
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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/174193/occupy-pipeline-fracking-threat-comes-nyc">http://www.thenation.com/blog/174193/occupy-pipeline-fracking-threat-comes-nyc</a></div>
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A massive new pipeline that will carry hydrofracked gas is being constructed in New York City. The pipeline, built by subsidiaries of Spectra Energy, will carry the gas from the Marcellus Shale, a bed that lies under Pennsylvania and New York State, into New York City’s gas infrastructure. Naturally, the construction of such a pipeline, carrying controversial highly pressurized gas, has been met with resistance.</div>
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In the spring of 2012, <a href="http://occupythepipeline.com/" style="color: #496a8b; text-decoration: none;">Occupy the Pipeline</a> emerged, raising health and safety concerns about the pipeline.</div>
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For starters, the group states the Marcellus shale has <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/occupy-pipeline-battles-fracking-threat-new-york" style="color: #496a8b; text-decoration: none;">seventy times the average radioactivity of natural gas and possesses extremely high radon content</a>. Worse, monitoring radon content doesn’t appear to be a priority for federal regulators. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stated radon risk assessment is “outside their purview.” High radon levels have been linked to increases in the risk of lung cancer among non-smokers, a claim Occupy the Pipeline restates in a video that was recently picked up by Upworthy (the video currently has been viewed over 470,000 times.</div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-17230477989719754892013-04-02T19:32:00.002-03:002013-04-08T19:30:22.797-03:00Ivan Illich: Energy and EquityI just discovered (through Resilience.org) Ivan Illich's masterpiece, 'Energy and Equity', first published in 1973 (84 pages). It should be required reading for anyone interested in sociology of the environment.<br />
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<a href="http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/energyEquity/node1.html">http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/energyEquity/node1.html</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1148797755731444630" name="SECTION00001000000000000000">THE ENERGY CRISIS</a></h2>
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.<br />
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The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.<br />
The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.<br />
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At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.<br />
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The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.<br />
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What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.<br />
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The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.<br />
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Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.<br />
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In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order. . .<br />
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Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis.<br />
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A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy.<br />
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Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward ``progress.'' Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office.<br />
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Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit.<br />
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-83808410761173608692013-03-30T14:30:00.003-03:002013-03-30T14:30:50.333-03:00Communicating sustainability: lessons from public health<br />
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Experts in public health have struggled with enabling behaviour change for years. The sustainability sector should learn what it can from their experiences<span style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.25;">Steven Johnson</span></div>
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Lessons for sustainability: having travelled the long-hard road of tobacco control, public health knows that behaviour change is a journey, not an event. Photograph: Frank Whitney/Brand X/Corbis</div>
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Consumer behaviour change is the challenge of our time. As governments and brands are beginning to realise, upstream improvements are relatively easy to make compared with the herculean task of shifting consumer behaviours downstream.</div>
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While the sustainability community is just beginning to get to grips with the gravity of this challenge, our colleagues in public health have been wrestling with it for decades. Great progress has been made, but hard lessons have been learned – costly, time-consuming lessons that we can all learn from.</div>
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People need more information</h2>
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No they don't. They need practical tools. Public health has spent decades firing messages and health information at target audiences with little demonstrable impact on behaviour. With message fatigue reaching epidemic proportions and behavioural science clear on the limitations of rational appeals, public health has finally drawn back from its relentless campaigning to focus more on clear, actionable steps, combined with practical support to implement them.</div>
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Information is necessary for change, but is not sufficient. It will only contribute to behavioural outcomes if it is integrated with consideration of how we create conditions in which the information can be acted on.</div>
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We need to inspire people</h2>
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No we don't. We need to take them on a journey. Having travelled the long-hard road of tobacco control and smoking cessation, public health knows this all too well. Behaviour change is a journey, not an event. It happens over time, it goes through different stages, encounters different obstacles and doesn't necessarily move forward all the time.</div>
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One off, tactical interventions may trigger temporary, symbolic behaviours – give up X for a day; turning off Y for an hour etc – but sustainable change requires long-term strategic approaches based on robust behavioural theories and models of change.</div>
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Attitudes drive behaviours</h2>
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No they don't. Contexts drive behaviours. For decades, public health laboured under the common sense assumption (supported by the more traditional social psychology literature) that the attitudes we hold determine the behaviours we manifest: if people agree that excessive alcohol consumption is a bad thing, they won't drink to excess. This radical reductionism is not only wasteful (it doesn't work), but also unethical.</div>
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An exclusive focus on internal psychological constructs (such as attitudes) places disproportionate emphasis on the individual as the locus for change, and removes due consideration of the social and structural influences that surround them. Effective and ethical behaviour change interventions take a holistic approach that influence at the social and structural levels, not just the individual.</div>
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Market research will give us the answers</h2>
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No it won't. But collaboration will drive innovation. While the intention-action gap is relatively new to sustainability, it has been public health's arch nemesis for decades. In both cases, it is rooted in the simple fact that what people say and what they do are often two very different things, especially when it comes to issues that have a normative or moral dimension... such as health and sustainability behaviours.</div>
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Despite this, most market research is still built around methodologies that drag people out their natural context, sit them in a room and ask them what they think. While some would say that public health has only just started to listen to citizen perspectives, considerable work has been done recently under the banners of co-design, co-creation and co-production to base public health behaviour change efforts on collaboration rather than consultation.</div>
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The surge of quantitative, survey-based data demonstrating how consumers intend to recycle more, buy more ethically, base purchase decisions on brand behaviour etc have a role to play in building our insight and establishing baselines. However, sustainability behaviour change needs to quickly begin moving on from the neat rows of tick boxes to the messy complexity of people's real lives as the primary source of inspiration for effective intervention.</div>
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We need a hard-hitting approach</h2>
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No we don't. We need an empowering approach. The use of shock or fear appeals is a public health addiction that is hard to shake: the tumours growing out of cigarettes, the drunk people flying off buildings, the graphic car crashes. However, while these approaches generate widespread publicity and evaluate well for recall, the spike in awareness rarely correlates with any sort of sustainable behaviour change.</div>
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Thanks to the recent popularisation of behavioural economics, and particularly the work of Daniel Kahneman, we know how adept the human cognitive system is at protecting itself from emotions that it would rather not have to deal with. Dramatic depictions trigger defence mechanisms just as quickly, if not more quickly, than they trigger emotions and the viewer has recall to a range of strategies to distance themselves from the message.</div>
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For sustainability behaviour change, this means moving away Armageddon and extinction as motivators to more positive depictions of a future built from the behaviours we seek to bring about.</div>
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We need a TV ad to reach the masses</h2>
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No we don't. We need tailored strategies based on the particular needs of specific segments. The entire preventive health agenda in the UK over recent years has been defined by challenge of health inequalities: the fact that certain sections of society consistently display poorer health outcomes.</div>
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The long hard lesson that public health has learned is that one-size-fits all approaches to behaviour change, such as mass-media campaigns, run the risk of actually widening health inequalities. That is, they accelerate change among those who are already considering it or implementing it – almost invariably the whiter, better educated, and more affluent – while ignoring those who could benefit most from intervention.</div>
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Segmentation is nothing new to sustainability, but it generally isn't applied with anything like the same rigour as it is in public health. There is clearly much to learn from this. Specifically a shift to thinking in terms of sustainability inequalities would focus resources on sections of society that are most in need of intervention, rather than those that are easiest to engage, and it would facilitate the development of more effective interventions, based on the real needs of real people.</div>
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But this issue is really important</h2>
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No it's not. Work, money and family are important. The rudest of all awakenings for public health was the realisation that it's not really that important to most people's lives. Yes, people value "health" in the abstract, but especially when it come to preventive health and lifestyle-related illness, it's simply not proximate or relevant enough to influence day-to-day life.</div>
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This has led to the recognition that if we are to effectively drive behaviour change, we need to locate our issue within people's existing value sets and priorities, rather than seek to extend their values sets to encompass our issue. In very basic terms, we make healthy eating about being able to play football with your son, rather than about preventing heart disease; we make being smoke-free about attracting the opposite sex, rather than preventing lung disease.</div>
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Culturally, sustainability is a scientific issue and most behaviour change work is built on the assumption that people will attach as much importance to climate change, species diversity and resource depletion as the scientists do. It is essential therefore that when it comes to consumer behaviour change, we take their lives not our issue as a starting point.</div>
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<em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Steven Johnson is an independent writer, speaker and creative consultant specialising in sustainability, CSR and behaviour change. He is a </em><a href="http://www.dandad.org/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">D&AD trustee</em></a><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, founder of </em><a href="http://www.collaborativechange.org.uk/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Collaborative Change</em></a><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> and author of upcoming book, </em><a href="http://www.considered.org.uk/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Considered Creative</em></a><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">. He blogs and tweets as</em><a href="http://www.twitter.com/considered_" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><em style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">@Considered_</em></a></div>
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<strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This content is brought to you by </strong><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian-professional" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Guardian Professional</strong></a><strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">. Become a </strong><a href="https://register.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #005689; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title=""><strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">GSB member</strong></a><strong style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> to get more stories like this direct to your inbox</strong></div>
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Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-15122745133116011882013-03-29T18:56:00.002-03:002013-03-30T14:24:31.089-03:00Distributed Power: From the One to the ManyGrist magazine has an interesting article on the emergence of the distributed power grid (let's not confuse this with transport energy) as an example of 'emergent complexity.'<br />
<a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/distributed-energy-driving-the-ghosts-out-of-the-machine/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed" target="_blank"><br /></a>
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<a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/distributed-energy-driving-the-ghosts-out-of-the-machine/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed" target="_blank">Distributed energy: Driving the ghosts out of the machine</a></h1>
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By <a href="http://grist.org/author/david-roberts/" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Posts by David Roberts">David Roberts</a></div>
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The folks over at Platts have a feature on distributed energy called “<a href="http://www.platts.com/newsfeature/2013/electricpower/powergen/index?sf256751=1" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the ghost in the machine</a>.” That title is ironic, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute. Still, it’s great to see outfits like Platts taking note of this stuff. For a broad view of the same trend, check out my post on “<a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-next-big-thing-in-energy-decentralization/" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">the next big thing in energy: decentralization</a>.”</div>
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Platts begins:</div>
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The wave of small-scale power generation technologies — technically known as distributed energy resource (DER) systems — that are growing in use or undergoing rapid development across Europe, from fuel cells to micro turbines, photovoltaic systems and reciprocating engines, do indeed point to a fundamental change in the way, and by whom, power is generated, transmitted and stored.</div>
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More from the Platts report: <br /><br />What do these month-on-month declines in high voltage power use tell us? Three things for sure: that industrial, <b>grid-connected demand is down;</b> that there is no evidence of HV demand recovery to pre-2008 levels; and that Europe’s central plant overcapacity is likely to keep generation margins comfortable and prices down for the foreseeable future.<br /><br /><br />Increasingly, however, there is another factor at play. High voltage deliveries are facing competition from local network production. <b>With its arsenal of a million PV-paneled roofs, Europe’s ‘prosumer’ army is turning the traditional transmission/distribution relationship on its head. Further up the consumer chain there are companies building their own PV farms connecting directly to their facilities to avoid fees. The era of assuming grid statistics give us an accurate picture of overall production and consumption is over</b></section><section class="article-body" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />Then there are the sixteen Bundesländer themselves, who have ambitious renewable energy plans that, taken as a whole, exceed federal plans. “Everybody more or less wants energy independence,” Burger said. <b>“This is a powerful movement, the people want to be the agents of change, communities want to attract new inhabitants focusing on new technology, which will breed growth clusters, as well as provide work for local artisans, reducing unemployment. There are signs of a ‘race to the top’ now, with communities generating PV power trying to integrate e-vehicles into their systems.”</b><br /><br /><br /><b>The key is not technology but engagement of the community. “I’d say this is not a big bang revolution, rather this is a thousand stings,</b>” Burger said. “It is not just the communities, it is individuals with PV panels on their roofs, it is not just one technology, it is a number of technologies, not necessarily renewables, there might be gas-fired or biogas generation in there. This is more to do with final control, the proposition that if I create value it is kept within my region.”</section><section class="article-body" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">* * * * * * * * * * *</section><section class="article-body" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 0.95em; line-height: 1.5em;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.95em; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em;">It’s not just about the power generation, of course, it’s also about storage, intelligent management, and demand reduction. It’s about creating a lean, resilient, just-in-time electricity system to replace the lumbering dinosaur we live with today.</span></div>
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The centralized paradigm, which still dominates, is simple. It’s a one-way street from generators to transmission to distribution to (passive) consumers:</div>
<figure class="grist-img-container aligncenter" id="attachment_167841" style="border: 0px; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.75em; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 470px;"><a class="cboxElement" href="http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/central1.gif" rel="lightbox" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="Platts: centralized power generation" class="size-large wp-image-167841 " height="470" src="http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/central1.gif?w=470&h=470" style="border: none; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="470" /></a><figcaption class="credit" style="color: #9d9d9d; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.8125em; line-height: normal; margin: -5px 2px 2px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-align: right;"><a href="http://www.platts.com/newsfeature/2013/electricpower/powergen/index?sf256751=1" style="border: 0px; color: #777777; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="image credit">Platts</a></figcaption><figcaption class="caption" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 4px; max-width: 100%; padding-bottom: 5px;">Click to embiggen.</figcaption></figure><div style="border: 0px; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.95em; font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 1.4em; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The localized paradigm is more complex, with power going every which way, via multiple technologies:<span id="more-167840" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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The transition from the former to the latter is going to scramble everything, not only the economics of power but the institutions, the regulations, the political landscape, the technology, and of course the carbon content. It’s going to be fun to watch.</div>
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So yeah, mainly I just wanted an excuse to post those graphics. But I know all of you are wondering, “Why is the title ‘ghost in the machine’ ironic?” Well, I’ll tell you!</div>
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“Ghost in the machine” is a derogatory term that British philosopher Gilbert Ryle used to refer to the mind-body dualism made famous by philosopher René Descartes. The idea — which still holds a strong intuitive appeal for lots of people, even today — is that there’s a <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">body</em>, a thing of the physical world, and an immaterial <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">mind</em>, which operates and oversees the body. The picture one got from Descartes was of a little man (a “homunculus”) inside the brain, gathering data from the body’s senses, interpreting it, and giving instructions for action. You know how, in spy or action movies, the guy running the nefarious government program is always standing in a room, surrounded by computers, barking things like “I want eyes on that warehouse!” and “move team A into position!”? That’s sort of how Descartes imagined the mind inside the brain — a homunculus integrating all the information and figuring out what to do. (The precise way that mind stuff can cause changes in physical stuff has always been a bit hazy, but leave that aside.)</div>
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Mind-body dualism has come under frequent attack ever since, but another aspect of Descartes’ vision has also fared poorly. It is the idea that intelligence/reason must reside in a singular seat of rationality (that homunculus). There must be a headquarters, a central control station, a nerve center, where info is gathered and decisions are made. The presence of that “seat of reason” is what sets humans apart from animals, which are governed by brute instinct.</div>
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When people first got into artificial intelligence — trying to make intelligent machines — this was the model they had in their heads. They built computers with huge central processors and fed them tons of raw facts. But over time, in the cognitive sciences, that model has gone out of favor. The new model is based on parallel, distributed processing. There is no center, no singular intelligence running things. Rather, there are comparatively “dumb” nodes — with limited processing power devoted to limited subroutines — networked together in a latticework of relatively simple, rule-governed interactions. Get enough of these nodes interacting and you get <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">complex systems</a> with<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence" style="border: 0px; color: #9d9d9d; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">emergent properties</a></em> — properties of the system that are not reducible to the properties of its constituent parts. Consciousness and intelligence themselves are now generally seen as emergent properties of distributed neural processing systems interacting with physical and social contexts.</div>
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You’ll notice that this same transition, from centralization to distribution, from linearity to complexity, pops up in other places too. Democracy itself is an example. It was taken for granted for centuries that a populace with no singular, strong ruler would dissolve into chaos. But it turns out that self-organizing systems of distributed political power — even with the dumb nodes, and boy are there some dumb nodes — are generally healthier and more dynamic. Capitalism is another example. Central management of economies has generally failed to create prosperity; prosperity has tended to be an emergent property of economies that consist of rule-governed interactions among independent nodes. The IT revolution is another good example. The creation and distribution of information was once a highly bottlenecked process, governed by a few large entities, but now processing power and bandwidth have been put in everyone’s hands and things have been created that never could have been anticipated or planned by a single governing intelligence.</div>
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It’s the same transition that’s now happening in the power system. Rather than one central intelligence (a utility) predicting demand and directing investment, there are going to be thousands, nay millions, of dumb nodes, houses and buildings and cars and batteries and microgrids and whole communities generating and managing their own electricity based on local needs and preferences.</div>
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My prediction is that the familiar pattern will repeat itself: The transition from centralized to distributed power will produce more reliability, resilience, and intelligence than the clunky, top-down systems of the past.</div>
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Unfortunately, when it comes to power we have the central intelligences of the past, utilities, still very much alive, influential, and hostile to the notion of being overwhelmed by a leaderless swarm. They are actively inhibiting the transition and will likely continue to do so until they wither entirely. Der commissar does not submit peacefully to the rabble.</div>
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But the transition is inevitable. And that’s the irony: distributed energy is not a ghost in the machine. The ghosts, the homunculi, are being<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">driven from the machine</em>. Soon there will only be the machine and its emergent intelligence.</div>
</section>Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-63852932518317282042013-03-21T10:54:00.000-03:002013-03-30T14:16:48.368-03:00New Study: One Katrina-Like Storm Surge Every Other Year<br />
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On Tuesday, March 19, Thomas Homer Dixon showed a slide as part of his presentation that illustrated one response to the climate crisis, which he called the "We're Fucked" response. Then he quickly shifted to the next slide which redefined that as "Opportunity for Change." I appreciated that note of optimism. But when I read stories like the one below—one Katrina or Sandy-like storm surge every other year due to climate change—that seems to belong in the "We're Fucked" category. I don't think sugar-coating it as an "opportunity" does much good. I learned from the Buddhist Ecologist Joanna Macy that we have to get in touch with our shock and grief for the planet's situation, fully accept it as it is, if we're going to realistically do something about it. We have to move <i>through</i> the fear, grief and sometimes paralysis and then we can move into the "opportunity." </div>
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<a data-mce-href="http://jpgreenword.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/new-study-one-hurricane-katrina-like-storm-surge-every-other-year/" href="http://jpgreenword.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/new-study-one-hurricane-katrina-like-storm-surge-every-other-year/">New Study: One Katrina-Like Storm Surge Every Other Year</a>.</div>
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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), a storm surge is an "abnormal rise of water generated by a storm, over and above the predicted astronomical tide". (See image below)</div>
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<a data-mce-href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-en-svg.png" href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-en-svg.png"><img alt="Graphic representation of a storm surge. Image: chathamemergency.org" border="0" data-mce-src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-en-svg.png?w=560" src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-en-svg.png?w=560" style="border: 0px; cursor: default;" /></a></div>
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Graphic representation of a storm surge. Image: <a data-mce-href="http://chathamemergency.org/" href="http://chathamemergency.org/">chathamemergency.org</a></div>
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In other words, the wind of a storm pushes the sea at a higher level than the normal tide. The result is flooding of coastal areas which can cause not only incredible damage coastal homes and infrastructure, but also great loss of life. Still fresh in the collective memory of North Americans are the storm surges associated with Hurricane Sandy (2012) and Hurricane Katrina (2005).</div>
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<a data-mce-href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/flooding-in-nj-photo-scott-anema.jpg" href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/flooding-in-nj-photo-scott-anema.jpg"><img alt="Flooding in New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy. Photo: Scott Anema." border="0" data-mce-src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/flooding-in-nj-photo-scott-anema.jpg?w=480" src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/flooding-in-nj-photo-scott-anema.jpg?w=480" style="border: 0px; cursor: default;" /></a></div>
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Flooding in New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy. Photo: Scott Anema.</div>
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<a data-mce-href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-destruction-katrina-katrina-destruction.jpg" href="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-destruction-katrina-katrina-destruction.jpg"><img alt="Horrific damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Photo: katrinadestruction.com" border="0" data-mce-src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-destruction-katrina-katrina-destruction.jpg?w=560" src="http://jpgreenword.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/storm-surge-destruction-katrina-katrina-destruction.jpg?w=560" style="border: 0px; cursor: default;" /></a></div>
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Horrific damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Photo: <a data-mce-href="http://katrinadestruction.com/" href="http://katrinadestruction.com/">katrinadestruction.com</a></div>
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According to a group of researchers from the Neils Bohr Institute (NBI), extreme storm surges like the one caused by Hurricane Katrina, are set to dramatically increase in the years to come.</div>
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Graphic representation of the results from the Neils Bohr Institute study.</div>
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The scientists from the NBI used data from monitoring stations along the coast of Gulf of Mexico as well as the Atlantic coast of the US to predict the frequency of hurricane storm surges into the next 100 years. Their results led to the conclusion that if warming of the planet reaches 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial temperatures, we would see <strong>10-fold increase in the number of Katrina-like storm surges</strong>. Put in different units of measurement, this translates into one Katrina-like storm surge <strong>every other year</strong>.</div>
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Unfortunately, the situation becomes even worse when you consider that sea levels will also be rising as temperatures continue to rise. This means that the starting point of any storm surge will be higher, resulting in greater flooding and greater destruction.</div>
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Every day that we delay, we reduce the odds of limiting warming to 2 degrees. Every day that we delay, we increase the chances that this is in our future. So what the hell are we waiting for?</div>
Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-7408163036420220652013-03-18T22:43:00.003-03:002013-03-18T23:33:22.789-03:00Dr. Bruce Alexander: The Globalization of AddictionA fascinating discussion with psychologist, Dr. Bruce Alexander, professor emeritus from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, who explains the global addiction epidemic, <i>sociologically</i>, as the end product of modernity and capitalism. He describes the addiction epidemic as almost, dare I say it, <i>peak addiction</i>. Capitalist Modernity, as a system, now globalized, strips people of a shared spirituality, culture and community that protects and nurtures people, while it isolates, dislocates and exhausts the human psyche, leaving addiction to drugs and consumption as a last resort. <span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 16px; text-align: left;">Alexander calls for a model of Recovery that goes beyond personal, individual recovery to a social recovery of communities and cultures that support and nurture people in a society-wide context. Dr. Alexander belongs to a group that is involved in what he calls 'social recovery.'</span><br />
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The Globalization of Addiction</div>
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<span class="with" style="font-style: italic;">with</span> <span class="guest_name" style="font-family: 'Open Sans Semibold';">Dr. Bruce Alexander</span></div>
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<span class="guest_name" style="font-family: 'Open Sans Semibold';"><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-size: 16px;">Bruce Alexander is a psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, where he has worked since 1970. His primary research interest has been the psychology of addiction. He is best known in the UK for the "Rat Park" experiments, which helped to demonstrate the falsity of the outworn belief that simple exposure to narcotic drugs can cause addiction. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">At its nub, Alexander’s argument can be presented in a few blunt brush strokes, which he does well. He defines addiction as “overwhelming involvement in any pursuit whatsoever … that is harmful to the addicted person and his or her society.” These pursuits, drugs or gambling or whatever, are not themselves the causes of addiction. For Alexander, addiction is an adaptive response to dislocation—the loss of (or failure to achieve) psychosocial integration. Dislocation includes but is more than the displacement that immigrants, refugees or the colonized experience, which he vividly illustrates using the history of his hometown of Vancouver.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Alexander views psychosocial integration as the goal of human development, both personal and societal. The more people, individually and collectively, are unable to establish and maintain an existential sense of wholeness and community, the increased the likelihood that they will recourse to addictive behaviour. Addiction is a way of adapting to the homelessness of the human spirit that dislocation produces.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Alexander shows that our age is particularly vulnerable to addiction and other pathologies because the prevailing economic order undermines psychosocial integration more than any other social structure to date. Because globalizing free-market forces produce mass dislocation as part of normal functioning, Alexander sees this as an age of “unprecedented, worldwide collapse of psychosocial integration.” Addiction is not just the problem of the disadvantaged and the destitute; it affects even more perversely those who have wealth and resources; dislocation is “the general condition.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Addictions become the tiny baskets into which more and more people put all their eggs in search of compensation for lives without psychosocial integration. For Alexander, addiction occurs along a continuum, and is not the only manifestation of dislocation. He mentions other pathologies of modern life—depression, apathy, anxiety, self-harm and violence, for example. In building his case, Alexander acknowledges that while dislocation is a necessary condition, it alone is insufficient to “cause” addiction. This turns us back to the need to have a fully integrated bio-psycho-social-spiritual view of these problems. In contributing to that comprehensive model, Alexander points out what we’re up against and where we need to look for solutions. Not a bad testament to a lifetime of work.</span>Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-42355524296437210762013-03-16T19:47:00.000-03:002013-03-16T19:59:58.284-03:00Discourses of Climate Change<br />
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Remember climate change? The issue barely comes up with any substance in our current political dialogue. But bringing climate change back into our national conversation is as much a communications challenge as it is a scientific one.</div>
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This week, in an encore broadcast, scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the <b>Yale Project on Climate Change Communication</b>, joins Bill to describe his efforts to galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference.</div>
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Half-way through the discussion, there is a presentation of the digital photography of Chris Jordon, who creates Burtynsky-style images of over-consumption and waste.</div>
Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-57039860286279745652013-03-13T22:18:00.000-03:002013-03-13T22:31:55.555-03:00Get Gangsta with Your ShovelRon Finley's talk on community gardens in South Central LA is a brilliant piece of first, a sociological analysis of the effects of food poverty on urban, minority populations; and second, the social dynamics of community gardens; both delivered through the distinct urban culture of South Central.<br />
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<br />Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-41094237493158006392013-02-28T08:22:00.000-04:002013-02-28T08:22:57.614-04:00Social Cohesion and Climate Crises<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Two articles accessed through Resilience.org discuss the importance of social cohesion for dealing with climate change and the aftermath of extreme weather events. Studies of disasters show that living in a walkable neighbourhood where you have frequent contact with people on the streets and local businesses promotes the kind of social network that will support you through a crisis. </span></span></div>
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When dealing with severe weather events, the type that climate change is making more common, improved infrastructure is important. But the social ties of a neighborhood – the kind of relationships that are nurtured by trips to the corner coffee shop and chats on the sidewalk – might prove equally important when it comes to saving lives.</div>
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In a <em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_klinenberg" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">New Yorker </a></em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_klinenberg" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">article this week</a> (behind a paywall), sociologist Eric Klinenberg looks at the impact that solid, place-based social networks can have on protecting lives in a natural disaster. He takes as his example the Chicago heat wave of July 1995, which killed 739 people. As you might expect, the mortality rates were highest in poor neighborhoods. African-American communities were particularly badly affected.</div>
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But in two adjacent neighborhoods that were demographically nearly identical – mostly black, with high concentrations of poverty and elderly residents -- Klinenberg reports the death rates were vastly different. Englewood recorded a fatality rate of 33 per 100,000 residents. Right next door, Auburn Gresham’s rate was 3 per 100,000, better than many rich neighborhoods on the city’s mostly white North Side. From the <em>New Yorker</em> piece:</div>
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The key difference between neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham and others that are demographically similar turned out to be the sidewalks, stores, restaurants, and community organizations that bring people into contact with friends and neighbors. The people of Englewood were vulnerable not just because they were black and poor but also because their community had been abandoned. Between 1960 and 1990, Englewood lost fifty per cent of its residents and most of its commercial outlets, as well as its social cohesion….Auburn Gresham, by contrast, experienced no population loss in that period. In 1995, residents walked to diners and grocery stores. They knew their neighbors. They participated in block clubs and church groups….</div>
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[D]uring the severe heat waves that are likely to hit Chicago and other cities in the near future, living in a neighborhood like Auburn Gresham is the rough equivalent of having a working air-conditioner in each room.</div>
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After Superstorm Sandy, neighborhood networks like the ones that Klinenberg references in his piece were activated quickly around the five boroughs. Community-based groups such as<a href="http://rhicenter.org/" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">Red Hook Initiative</a> in Brooklyn (where I volunteered after the storm), which already had deep roots in the area, were able to call on existing relationships and get help where it was needed, even as government and national relief organizations were falling short.</div>
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What’s more, in places where different social groups had robust internal connections but didn’t really interact with each other, storm survival and recovery provided a framework for building new alliances. They haven’t always been seamless or comfortable, but they have been happening.</div>
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It happened in <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/10/surveying-damage-red-hook-and-gowanus/3750/" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">Red Hook</a>, where residents of the public housing projects found themselves working alongside business owners from the gentrified streets nearby. It happened in the often fractious <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/11/power-bicycles-disaster-recovery/3834/" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">Rockaways</a>, where surfers and firefighters and everyone else has pitched in to clean the streets and rip moldy sheetrock from homes, despite past resentments and divisions. For the most part, strength has built on strength.</div>
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"I don’t think in any way did it change the tight-knit community, other than to make us tighter," says one Rockaways surfer and homeowner in <a href="http://www.surfermag.com/videos/surfing-after-sandy/" style="color: #16aab1; text-decoration: none;">a video about the storm’s aftermath</a>produced by <em>Surfer</em> magazine. "Because I don’t know anyone who didn’t help out."</div>
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As cities prepare for climate change in earnest, they’re going to need to harden infrastructure, change building patterns, and overhaul government emergency procedures. But they’re also going to have to put a greater value on the human connections that can be found in walkable neighborhoods where people know each other and support local businesses. It’s not just about quality of life. It’s about survival.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">by Eric Kleinberg, <i>The New Yorker</i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">DEPT. OF URBAN PLANNING about “climate-proofing.” For the past decade and a half, governments around the world have been investing in elaborate plans to “climate-proof” their cities—protecting people, businesses, and critical infrastructure against weather-related calamities. Much of this work involves upgrading what engineers call “lifeline systems”: the network infrastructure for power, transit, and communications, which are crucial in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Some of the solutions are capital-intensive and high-tech; some are low- or no-tech approaches, such as organizing communities so that residents know which of their neighbors are vulnerable and how to assist them. Even if we managed to stop increasing global carbon emissions tomorrow, we would probably experience several centuries of additional warming, rising sea levels, and more frequent dangerous weather events. If our cities are to survive, we have no choice but to adapt. Writer speaks with Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University. Genuine adaptation, Jacob believes, means preparing for the inevitable deluge. “The ocean is going to reclaim what we took from it,” he said. He thinks that New York can learn from Rotterdam, which has a long history of flooding. After enduring a devastating storm surge in 1953, Rotterdam began building a series of dams, barriers, and seawalls. It’s now experimenting with an architecture of accommodation: it has a floating pavilion in the city center, made of three silver half spheres with an exhibition space that’s equivalent to four tennis courts, and buildings whose façades, garages, and ground-level spaces are engineered to be waterproof. It also has a resilient power grid, designed to withstand strong winds and heavy rain, with power lines which are primarily underground and encased in water-resistant pipes. The island nation of Singapore offers other lessons. Singapore began adapting to dangerous weather thirty years ago, after a series of heavy rains during monsoon season caused repeated flooding in the low-lying city center. Mentions Singapore’s Marina Barrage and Reservoir, which opened in 2008. Still, a strategy of resilience will involve more than changes to our physical infrastructure. Increasingly, governments and disaster planners are recognizing the importance of social infrastructure: the people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support. “There’s a lot of social-science research showing how much better people do in disasters, how much longer they live, when they have good social networks and connections,” says Nicole Lurie, a former professor of health policy who has been President Obama’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response since 2009. Discusses, at length, the case of a deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago, during which people living in neighborhoods with stronger social networks fared better than people who lived in comparable, but less socially cohesive, neighborhoods. Since 1995, officials in Chicago have begun to take these factors into account. City agencies have maintained a database that lists the names, addresses, and phone numbers of old, chronically ill, and otherwise vulnerable people, and city workers call or visit to make sure they’re safe. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;"><br /><br />Read more: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_klinenberg#ixzz2MCB5oFmY" style="color: #003399; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_klinenberg#ixzz2MCB5oFmY</a></span>Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-84085746458736314562013-02-27T15:31:00.002-04:002013-04-01T19:09:23.651-03:00Italy's Election: Networked Politics<br />
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<i>The recent Italian elections have seen the rise of the "five star" movement founded and led by Mr Beppe Grillo (shown in the picture above). The movement is a "non party" completely structured around Internet networking. We may call it "networked politics" and it is surely a revolutionary innovation. But will it make a difference?</i></div>
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I've done some more investigation of Beppe Grillo's Movimento 5 Stelle. It has a very Green agenda, but it's more like the Pirate Party with a greener slant. <br /><br />The Federation of Greens is the official Green Party of Italy, but only garners 2% of the vote. They have worked in coalition with Socialist and Communist parties and tend be socialist Greens. Beppe Grillo's M5S has a Green agenda, but rejects (even ridicules) socialist politics, which is probably why M5S got 25% of the vote. M5S pulled votes from both the Right and the Left. The Federation of Greens supports Grillo's M5S movement:<br /><br />"In September 2010 the Greens launched an Ecologist Constituent Assembly. In Bonelli's view the new political force would have taken inspiration both from the French Verts and the German Grünen and would have be open to the contribution of movements and associations, notably including Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement."[Wikipedia]</div>
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Franco 'Biffo' Berardi also supports the M5S movment: </div>
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"This movement of society that you propose, would it have any programme?<br />Biffo:<br />"The programme was set forth by Beppe Grillo, a programme which, despite what the professional liars of La Repubblica say, is very reasonable:<br /><br />A citizen wage Reduction of the working week to 30 hours.The restitution to schools of the 8 billion dollars that the Berlusconi government stole from the education system. Good working conditions for all precarious workers in education, health and transport. Nationalisation of banks that have favoured speculation at the cost of the community. Immediate abolition of the fiscal pact."<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: 'DIN Next W01 Regular', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; padding: 0px 0px 0.7em; vertical-align: baseline;">
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The Italian national elections of this week have seen a clear winner: the "five star movement," founded by Mr. Beppe Grillo, former actor now turned politician. The movement didn't gain a majority, but it managed a stunning feat by gathering almost one quarter of the valid votes in its first appearance in a nation-wide election, nearly matching the results of the main traditional parties in Italy. More than that, Grillo and his colleagues were able to make the other parties look old, useless, and worn out in their desperate attempts of gathering votes by making promises that they knew they could never maintain.<br />
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This success is all the more surprising if we consider that the national political program of the movement is contained in just fifteen pages of generic proposals. The movement is a "non party" without a hierarchy and where elected members are seen just as spokespersons for the others. Most of the movement's candidates had little or no previous political experience and none of them is a known figure in politics or culture. The movement didn't do traditional media advertising and Mr. Grillo never even appeared on a TV debate. <b>So, most voters seem to have chosen the movement as a reaction against the old parties, perceived as staffed with thieves, sex maniacs, and all sort of criminals.</b> At least, this is the general interpretation of the results of the recent Italian elections. But, probably, the explanation goes somewhat deeper.</div>
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<a href="http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-02-26/elections-in-italy-the-rise-of-networked-politics" target="_blank">[read the rest of the article at Resilience.org]</a></div>
Shaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1148797755731444630.post-75403231919390876212013-02-25T10:40:00.002-04:002013-02-25T10:40:52.700-04:00Crisis of Civilization: the Neo-Liberal CrisisThis film, "The Crisis of Civilization", narrated by Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, is a very sophisticated and carefully argued explanation of the current crisis of energy, climate, food production, financial instability, war and terrorism. Before you dismiss it as just another conspiracy film, or just another home-made doc on peak oil and climate change, watch it through, it's only 77 minutes. It's not a conspiracy film because it presents a much more sophisticated and nuanced explanation using a theory akin to Wallerstein's World Systems Theory. And it's much more than a doc on 'peak everything' because it explains in great detail how Neo-Liberal economic policy is a key driver behind all these crisis.<br />
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http://youtu.be/pMgOTQ7D_lkShaunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00819386247211202874noreply@blogger.com0