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I was doing the quarterly trip to the local recycling station today, taking plastic, glass, cans and paper that we store up in order to make the trip more economical. Most of the rest of our recycling is organic and we compost it. We put out for landfill half a bag of waste each week. I don’t think that’s too bad for a family of four but we are making improvements to our consumption patterns in order to reduce the amount of waste and recycling we produce.
So I was carefully tipping cans out of my bins into the large containers at the recycling station, picking out any glass and putting it in a separate bin to carry over to the glass container. Behind me a man pulled up with a trailer and started to tip all kinds of waste into a general waste container. The stuff he was throwing in there was mostly the same as I was carefully sorting out, cans, bottles, plastic and paper. This in full view of everyone else who was carefully recycling. Was he making a mistake? Is it possible he didn’t understand that recycled materials need separating? I wonder if he even cared about what he was doing? I’ll never know because when I carefully approached him to casually mention that ‘the glass recycling bin is over there’ his eyes widened and he mumbled and grunted something that sounded like a negative response.
It is going to take a lot for us to change the appalling habits that we have built up over the past generation. The habit of use, abuse and discard that so many people seem unable to shake is the opposite of the reduce, reuse and recycle process that our grandparents used to have and which we desperately need to re-adopt.
This is exacerbated by industries that seem to be locked into the same mantra, they have no creativity. They behave in ways that have no thought for future generations and the environment, they don’t even seem to care about people, whether they be employees or people in developing countries who sell them materials. They show no emotion of any kind, they have no human values of any kind, and they behave amorally at best. One of the nasty aspects of industries these days is that they actively try to sell us products that are easy to use, abuse and discard, this is just another aspect of what Ted Heath called the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.
We live in a world where very little is made to last, and that which is made to last is not reparable or maintainable (try buying spare parts for anything). This reinforces a culture in which no one takes any responsibility for anything anymore, not even their own possessions. If people still had the habit of maintaining and repairing all their own possessions they wouldn’t use and abuse so often and consequently they wouldn’t discard things so often either.
Reduce means think before you buy anything – wouldn’t life be a lot simpler and easier without all that consumption? Buy things that are made to last, consider the short lifecycle of most consumer goods these days. Are you buying it for life? Can you repair it? Think about the long-term economics of what you intend to buy. Reuse means thinking about what you are going to do with something you have bought after it no longer works. Can it be integrated into making something else? Recycle means finding future uses for your waste, this does necessarily mean taking it to a recycling station, but if you do please don’t just tip it all into the landfill container!
Staring us in the face is an unpalatable and awesome fact, one which encompasses Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and a whole lot more besides. To use an apt metaphor civilisation is like a supertanker heading towards the arctic. Sometime in the near and predictable future the inevitable iceberg will loom out of the darkness. The collapse of our civilisation in its current industrial-military-exploitative form is certain. In many ways it is to be welcomed in order to stop the killing and suffering that civilisation consciously inflicts. See Stan Goff’s Civilization War Rant.
The US concentration camps fill me with a sense of foreboding. Why would an influx of Mexican immigrants need rounding up and imprisoning, are they all expected to have rabies or something? What possible civil emergency requires the detention of millions of people behind barbed wire under watchtowers? The key strength that any nation has in times of emergency is the self-organising power of its people, and not the central organising power of governments which only gets in the way. So I struggle to understand why a US government thinks that detention centres for millions of people are a valid part of FEMA’s work. That’s why I find this offical explanation hard to believe.
Terrorism? The potential for locking up millions of suspects, and possibly dissenters too, after the next terrorist attack on the US? This too is difficult to understand. Locking the door after the horse has bolted makes no sense. Nor does internment of mostly innocent people prevent anything, it is a form of collective punishment which creates martyrs and further serves terrorist recruitment. If you eventually let them go a significant number will become bombers in revenge for their treatment, further fuelling terrorism. What do you with all those people whom you do not want, aliens, non-people? Keep them incarcerated for life, or worse? Who will know they are there, will they be disappeared? I shudder to think.
Only dictator-led states round people up these days with no recourse to open courts, not states that are built on foundations of freedom, democracy and free speech. The ominous term ‘rapid development of new programs’ says it all, as if the concentration camps are not already way beyond the pale. History shows that it starts this way, the programs are normal, they are necessary for the good of all: be reasonable, be quiet, do not dissent (no, seriously be a compliant citizen or we’ll lock you up too). The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the UK’s Civil Contingencies Bill and Anti-Terror legislation are all contributing to what Gramsci called the cultural hegemony. This makes creeping state power over a population difficult to perceive. We won’t notice the reality of the function creep until its too late to take any action, then democracy will be truly gone. Fully effective democracy may already be slipping away.
An emergency can be declared in the US, as the following article points out, with the stroke of a presidential pen rather than by a majority vote in congress. From that point on, no one can challenge what’s happening without a significant risk of being locked up themselves. You think its not possible? The history of the twentieth century rings some very loud warning bells. I won’t be visiting the US again, no thanks. Read more…
Complexity increases fragility and the potential for system collapse. This principle tells us one thing when applied to human society: we are heading into very risky territory. There is a real potential for us to go straight back to the stone age after a near extinction. This is staring us in the face. Such a process could occur over a period of a few years and involve war, civil war and starvation the like of which has never been experienced before.
A solution, one which may already be occurring through a process of evolutionary self-organisation of the human species is known as rhizome. Rhizome is the antithesis of the foundations of civilisation, hierarchical power. Think of collaboration, networks of networks, My Space, Wikipedia, Open Source Software, intentional community networks, think of terrorist cells. Jason Godesky makes this point with great clarity so I won’t attempt to replicate it.
My point is simple: we can decide either to cling to outdated notions of centralised power and hierarchical civilisation or we can localise power in our immediate communities. Communities can be physically localised or information communities localised by common information context. Open Source Software is a fundamental example since it provides each user with a copy of the same solution to a problem and each user has the ability to input improvements to that solution.
We now have the tools to act locally - to go back to Aristotle’s fundamental unit of human society, the village - while communicating directly and globally under shared information contexts. Here is the practical solution to acting locally and thinking globally, and it is beginning to happen. For the those who cling to conventional civilisation the future looks bleak, but those whose choose to become part of the solution are looking at a potential renaissance of human life in sustainable form. Sustainable because in the village we must all take responsibility for our actions, since the effects our our actions are immediate: what goes round comes back round to us immediately.
The power of the rhizome is that it is, like a virus, able to adapt and outwit centralised attempts to kill it. Centralised power cannot compete and will either collapse under its own complexity or evolve into rhizomatic organisation. We are already witnessing the beginning of that collapse and the potential end of all that is wrong with conventional society, capitalism, social hierarchy, and war.
What we are looking at is anarchy. Not anarchy in its pejorative sense, that is hierarchical civilisation’s propaganda against its worst enemy. True anarchy is not chaos but balanced self-organisation: distributed control rather than centralised control. A self-regulating human society. The question is whether we can adapt quickly enough to rhizomatic organisation before centralised civilisation collapses.
The Middle-East situation is slipping from bad to worse, towards the unthinkable. The United States seems pathologically attracted to armageddon, oil or bust.
This attitude is understandable but impossible to comprehend from a human point of view, but then capitalism has no human values. The simple but immoral reason is that the US in its current condition is more than addicted to oil. Its over-powerful status as a world dominating empire is wholly dependent upon oil. Furthermore, its implicit assumption that might is right extends to its own population. They call it freedom but in reality it is freedom and pursuit of happiness for a very few, for the rest it is unhappiness and disease of the soul. The increasing wealth gap between rich and poor in the US is one small piece of evidence that illustrates the situation.
The necessary adjustment to life without oil will require a complete reversal of internal US power relationships: renewable energy cannot be filtered through the hands of a few, it is a form of grass-roots empowerment. The centralised economic system made possible by the oil reserve will be gone. A non-centralised economic system would also be owned directly by the people. It will arise from localised economic and social processes. It cannot be centrally controlled in the information age when we all have access to global knowledge in the same way that it was one-hundred years ago. Post-oil means empowerment of the masses. The industrial and social elites who control the US will resist that empowerment so long as it doesn’t risk their lives, even if it means having to kill millions of people in the Middle-East. This explains why the current US administration is prepared to take extreme action for the oil.
A nuclear attack on Iran and the potential for events that will dwarf any holocaust in human history is now a strong possibility. The US is emboldened by its recent impunity and will use tactical nuclear weapons to achieve its aims. Iran will either surrender its power and hence control over the oil or the US will unleash apocalypse. A powerful state like Iran is unlikely to capitulated to save its own people. The future for the people of the Middle-East is either bleak or black. Read more…
John Taylor Gatto argues that state education over the past century has been formulated to serve the consumption society. Just Enough Education to Perform (JEEP) describes it all very neatly, but the truth is clearly there behind the myth.
My question for you is - to what extent are you a product of this mind control, even today as an adult? More importantly, to what extent do present state education processes continue the abuse? Is private education simply a way of teaching the controllers of the future how to use the system for their benefit? Ask yourself. Read on…
Time to wake up everyone. Optimism and denial are not solutions to the coming reality. The following article is written for Americans but it applies to Europeans equally. Read more…
Fascism and power, might is right in the name of Freedom and Democracy. Materialism as our unquestionable religion - in place of the spirit of humanity. Fighting dissent, working title ‘fighting terrorism’. All being achieved through increasing supremacy of the State. State Totalisation
The current US administration seems shamelessly intent on crushing Iran in the same way that it has crushed Iraq, in pursuit of its own ends. Iran is a soveriegn state that doesn’t have a brutal dictator in charge, but the US has nuclear proliferation as its excuse this time.
Can you let the US government attack an otherwise peaceful country like Iran? Watch this Flash video Why isn’t the US government focusing with all good faith on peaceful diplomacy? If the US gets away with it again, then wherever you live on the planet your own peace and security will be threatened too because they simply won’t stop at dominating the Middle-East. Get on the Peace Train
Armchair Activism That Works…
Wikipedia, one of the Web’s most valuable resources, is based on thousands of volunteers. Can progressives make that same power of networked volunteers work for us?
The precursors of fascism — militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization — are ascendant in America today.
I have refrained from posting photos of my experience with my drainage system yesterday, it wasn’t pretty.
The sewage regularly gets stuck under my house and I have to clear it by pushing rods through the pipe from inside and outside. When I opened the cover outside the house yesterday morning there was about a wheelbarrowful of the stuff all heaped up there gently steaming away, so I broke it up and pushed it away down the pipe using the hose jet and then set about clearing the rest of it from under the house. It took half an hour to get water into it and mix it up to a consistency where it would ooze out of the pipe - with a lot of assistance from my drain rods. Good thing it was cold, in the summer the smell is overpowering and stays in my nose all day.
While I was doing all this I thought about the absurdity of what I was doing, all that effort just to wash valuable organic waste away to a sewage station where it would be mixed with who knows what toxic chemical soup and then I guess dumped in landfill, at sea or burned.
The alternative to all that energy intensive and polluting processing is a composting toilet. These things require more effort at the input end in terms of the way you keep the toilet hygienic in the house, and management of the products during the process. But it has to be better than dealing with the disgusting process of sewage (human waste plus water) that so many people in the developed world take for granted, and it would save so much energy to use composting systems. Thankfully, due to my sewage shoving experience I don’t take toilets for granted and my gut-instinct (sorry) is that composting systems are the natural solution to human waste.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before we begin to accept composting toilets as normal and react with towards sewage as an antisocial practice. Sewage is an illustration of the nasty truth underlying civilisations. Using water to wash nutrient-rich waste away from ourselves and hide it from our minds is an aspect of the externalising culture of civilisation. It is simply selfish to wash our waste away into someone else’s lives, to throw our detritus into landfills, rather than accept responsibility for managing it ourselves. In the industrial revolution sewerage systems were developed when the same investment could easily have been applied to improve the waste composting of individual homes. It was more convenient to wash it away, but sooner or later it comes back to us and we do have to deal with it.
There are still many people who find the simple process of recycling household rubbish and kitchen scraps beyond their capability or sense of responsibility, and yet it is so easy to do. There are those who rant about their rights to have their waste taken from them so that they do not have to deal with it. My rant is the opposite. It is about time laws were formulated in order to force every one of us to manage our own waste and take full responsibility for what happens to it until it is reaccepted into prodution as a resource. Every single stinking scrap of the stuff.
Ambience for the Masses. Complex fractal chaos music SleepBot Constructs
What? Comprend pas.
The Neoist Luther Blissett Three-Side Football League has been propagating three-sided football since the early 1990s. The first game was organized by the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) and was played in 1993. It involved a game played with three teams on a hexagonal pitch. The winner is not the team with the most goals, but the team that concedes less goals than the others. The game avoids the confrontational structure of conventional football. The game was invented by the Danish painter Asger Jorn (1914-1973) 1, who wanted to use it to illustrate his concept of trialectics. Luther Blissett is also closely connected to the game. The name refers to the football pro Luther Blissett, the first person of colour to play in Italy for the AC Milan, who supposedly organized a youth league of three-sided football at the British club Watford in the early 1980s. By now, three-sided football has been played in England, Scotland, Italy, Serbia, and Austria. HMKV
What have we accomplished in 30 centuries of civilization? Aren’t we still as barbaric as we were 5000 years ago? Don’t we use our religions just to set ourselves apart from our fellow human beings? Don’t we use our intelligence just to better our own little selves in flagrant disregard of others? Is that the way of a civilised being or is the the way of a primitive animal? -George Monbiot’s discussion list
On this depends my liberation: to assist others - nothing else. Cornelius
- Fact : there are adults on Earth.
- Fact : there are children on Earth.
- Fact : there are things adults do, directly or indirectly, that have a negative or abusive impact upon the welfare of children in the present and in the future.
- It follows that, as responsible adults, we must immediately cease those behaviours/activities that directly or indirectly have a negative or abusive impact upon the welfare of children in the present and in the future.
- Having stopped the damaging behaviour/activity……We can discuss how we take it from there,
- Discussing the issue prior to cessation only allows the abuse to continue.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -Abraham Maslow.
Current farming methods are only intensive because of the cheap energy subsidy provided by fossil-fuels and chemical fertilisers. Without these aids it would not be possible. Real intensive sustainable farming is permaculture:
Permaculture is permanent agriculture which is sustainable. It is dependent on renewable solar, human, and animal energy. It is
Permaculture is permanent human community dependent on local agriculture. In the round, both agriculture and human culture sustain each other. This is not a new idea, it has been around for thousands of years. Only recently have we chosen to experiment with different (and I contend dangerous) forms of agriculture, production, and human community.
The principle of permaculture is a high degree of planning and husbandry (both in agricultural terms and as ‘intentional’ human communities) so that a closed and symbiotic cycle can be maintained, combined with a low degree of energy-intensive brute force.
It is claimed that because permaculture food production maximises the use of a given ground area, for example by using multiple levels of foliage, it is actually more productive than current methods of agriculture which depend on chemical fertiliser and machinery. When the energy and nutrient subsidy we currently enjoy from fossil fuels is accounted for permaculture wins outright. When the oil and coal run out permaculture is the only option. See Thom Hartman’s
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and Derrick Jensen’s Endgame: The Problem of Civilization for an illustration of the depth of the problem.
In the same way that permaculture creates a stable closed organic food production system, community-based and cooperative agriculture helps to promote a more stable and sustainable social system by encouraging strong connections between people, their work, and the land.
Permaculture is therefore more than just a sustainable model for agriculture. It is a grass-roots approach to both agriculture and human culture. David Orr’s essays emphasise the importance of the synergy between social and biological forms of ecology and sustainability; deep ecology: The Learning Curve, Loving Children, The Case for the Earth, and Beauty is the Standard
We must love our children enough to design a world which instructs them towards community, ecology, responsibility, and joy. - David Orr
Existing Community farms / cooperatives
http://www.catalystcollective.co.uk/
http://talamhlifecentre.org.uk/home/page
http://www.highburyfarm.freeserve.co.uk/
http://http://www.keveral.org/
http://www.thefarm.org/
http://www.fordhallfarm.com/
Resources
http://www.communitylandtrust.salford.ac.uk/index.php
http://www.gaff.org.uk/
http://www.eco-logicbooks.com/
http://www.fwi.co.uk/
http://www.soilassociation.org/
http://www.resurgence.org/
http://www.ofrf.org/
http://www.organicfarmers.org.uk/
http://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/organic/default.htm
http://www.hdra.org.uk/
http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com/
http://www.permaculture.org.uk/
http://www.permaculture.net/
“The physical reality is that “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron. A soft energy landing from the last two hundred years of development will require massive conservation, especially by the overdeveloped countries, and that can only happen in a nongrowth ( and therefore noncapitalist ) society. The choice is now becoming either capitalism or humanity.”
Stan Goff, ex Delta Force
