Ecology: Enemy of the State

What’s the relationship between the recent ‘authoritarian’ crack-down on “protesters” in Britain, the current economic crisis, the debate on growth, the economy, climate change and resource depletion? Perhaps not that obvious?… A new report from the Free Range Network ties these issues together to try and find a deeper motivation behind the recent authoritarian shift against protest and dissent in Britain — yes, the threads are there if you look for them!
Its conclusions:

Environmentalism is a threat to the current economic and political consensus that defines current national policy towards the growth economy, trade liberalisation and the ascendancy of the market. The difficulty, and therefore the threat, that environmentalism represents to the present consensus is that the solutions which environmentalists promote are antithetical to the concentration of economic and political power, and wealth, that characterise the Western model of society today. Not because it represents a risk of violence or revolution, or because in some way it will create an insurrection against the state; the problem for the consensus is that the arguments of environmentalism have been proven “right” – the trends of human ecological overshoot and collapse that environmentalists have been discussing since the 1960s are now coming to pass.

This is the reason why the State, both from the political point of view, and from the security stance of groups such as ACPO, has shifted its position and now opposes the idea of non-representative protests (i.e., outside of “the usual channels”). Environmental protest especially, from the roads protests of the 1990s to the more recent anti-capitalist protests at the G20 conference, represent a threat because its message might receive a wider audience and greater appeal when the present trends emerge as an unavoidable crisis on society.

The greatest threat to the consensus is that people will finally understand that the concept of continual growth – that we can continue to consume without consequence – is a “great lie” that has no basis in reality.

Target Profile Analysis (You?)

Wondering what is happening to policing these days? Ian Parker-Joseph explains how police intelligence processes have shifted from investigation of an offense to investigation of an individual.

This shift has permitted a police state by the back door: Choose a person for political reasons (i.e. known criminal or other person, islamist or Iraqi dictator, to be targeted for policy reasons) and search for evidence to link that person to a crime = Police State.

http://thejournal.parker-joseph.co.uk/blog/_archives/2009/4/17/4155974.html

Change is in the Long Tail: Change is Now

I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation. -Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)

If you look around right now you may get the impression that the time for change is imminent, that converging factors of climate change, financial instability, social instability, war, peak oil, and zeitgeist are begging for real change to begin and that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge.

An alternative view is that change already started, decades ago or more, and that current turmoils are bound up in that change. The global restructuring looks like its just getting under way but only from the standpoint of institutions and centralised organisation – the real change has been happening since the early days of the information age.

When we look at the human organised world we tend to see it the way it is presented through the lense of our culture: Most human societies are presented as being organised in centralised ways around institutions and group norms, in terms of objective (abstracted) standards, in pursuit of quality and speed of decision-making, in the belief that some are better at governing us, some are better at teaching us, that some are better at this or that aspect of keeping our world turning – standards are good. Through this culture, our governance and our habits are constrained, certainly in terms of the way the mass of society converges around common principles. But this constraint is as much in our minds as it is a reality – the world continues to turn regardless. Liberal culture began to disturb the foundations of the monoculture significantly during the twentieth century.

Liberal culture may have been one factor in social change but another critical factor was mass communication. Alexander Graham Bell started it and the World Wide Web lead a quantum leap in the way we telecommunicate. The ongoing reorganisation of society which has been accelerated by the web, the fragmentation of (rigid and limiting) institutions and centralised norms of behaviour as its core, is seen by some as yet another crisis on the horizon. But to others this is a new age of creative possibility. The norms and averages, the classes and trends, standards and winners, of an institutionalised society are giving way to a diverse culture created from the bottom up. It is communication technology that is weaving its way around the foundations of a top-down centralised society and beginning to strangle the constant increase in power that a sustained hierarchy must feed on. And there is no way back other than through repression, and thankfully we left that behind a long time ago.

Self-organising communities, distributed communities of people and their minds, in nature’s own image – Capra’s Web of Life, the real forces of cultural change, do not operate as classically formed institutions. Self-organising communities, communities of rich ecology, reflect life in its uncertainty – there are no rules or norms but the fundamental need for equilibrium and permanence of culture. Conversely, the classical culture of institutions is based on the idea of norms and acceptance of Kantian ideas about ‘natural class’, an abstraction and poor representation of equilibrium, often anything but equium or librium. In our social and family lives we have always practised the self-organising, informal way of finding equilibrium. Now it is the turn of public life to submit to the flat structures demanded by peer-to-peer communications, to build a rich human ecology unconstrained by concepts of norms and standards and power hierarchies, no limits to creativity and difference, no limits to the potential for change and hence the strength of human ecology.

The short and homogenous tail of the Greek’s, Kant’s and Gauss’s ideas about the way the world works is giving way to an ecological way of thinking (see Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and Makridakis et al Dance with Chance). Self-organising networks and communities of people are nurturing human culture back to its potential of rich diversity and creativity in balance with the earth’s life processes. The ecological and creative thinkers, the non-normalists, the unclassifiable, have been excluded from the filters of our narrowly homogenous institutions and the power structures which perpetuate them but the new framework of the internet is now allowing their creative solutions to flourish beyond the control of centralised concepts of authority and standards. Creative minds hook-up and instantly they have the competitive edge over-and-under fixed institutions – self-organising communities spell the end of centralised hierarchical thinking.

Clay Shirky argues that current economic trends are partly related to this ongoing shift as the information age truly takes over from the industrial age (mass centralised organisations of production). The information age, in terms of peer-to-peer organising possibilities (e.g. social networking, collaborative tools, open source problem solving) is subverting existing social power structures and forcing them to contract. This happens whenever a form of industrial organisation is replaced with a new method.

When the motor car and oil-based production were in the ascendant the old social structures were forced to restructure and this caused economic turmoil. We are now in a similar situation as information and communication technology is beginning to support new ways of non-industrial economic organisation – the power of the individual is starting to overgrow institutional rigidity and causing them to contract. The grass-roots rhizome promised by ideas of democracy is now empowered by communication technology, it is spreading scale-free, it is putting pressure on representative forms of democracy to perform better at their representation, and is bleeding over into our economic world in ways that were never intended. It is a brave new world of opportunity for the creative thinkers of the long tail and an unsettling future for those who based their world on social norms and standards promoted by institutional hierarchy and classical thinking.

In terms of the Bill Mollison quote above there is everything to be sanguine about in these changes – the potential for a relocalised world in the context of peer-to-peer global communication means that power will continue to trickle from centralised and globalised processes back to the minds, places and activities that are best fitted for their environments. We are in the heart of an ongoing revolution of human reorganisation that institutions will inevitably try to keep up with as they go through their ‘global restructuring’ – but they will be the last to realise the facts of life long after the power of self-organisation has reasserted itself on human society.

On the War on People

It’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Green Scare Coming to the UK

Last Sunday (November 9, 2008) the Guardian reported that the Police (the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit; NETCU) are concerned about eco-activists becoming ‘terrorists’.

The police concerns are due to comments on activist blogs (such as Earth First) which emphasised that the human population needs to reduce by 80 percent in order to save life on this planet. The statement of this fact concerns them since they believe that a lone activist may unilaterally decide to effect that reduction.

Given that even extremists in the eco movement rarely countenance harm to people (the very few cases of injury to a person have involved small incendiaries etc) it is unclear why the police think that an individual or cell of violent extremists will emerge and develop the capacity to kill some 5.2 billion people.

Eco-activists, even those with extreme deep-ecology viewpoints simply do not think in the same way as conventional political power structures (the state) and their arch-adversaries (terrorists). The potential for harm to people by green activists (i.e., terrorism) is about as likely as it coming from trade unions. The most that eco-activists resort to is damage to property – activity that may be classed as extremist but it goes nowhere near the terrorism that NETCU imply. Earth first appears to support civil disobedience and monkey-wrenching (e.g., damaging property such as company infrastructure or powerlines) as its preferred tactic against those it believes are damaging the planet – this falls a long way short of terrorism.

We have to ask why it is that the police present this warning. The answer has already been found in the US where the ‘greenscare’ developed as a way to demonise non-violent green activists as terrorists – to the extent that damage to property is now perversely classed as terrorism there.

The most likely reason for the greenscare is that police forces have discovered that if direct activism can be labelled as terrorism then significant resources can be obtained – institutions like the police and military tend to work this way in order to make more work (and pay) for themselves. If intended harm to people can be pinned to a group or individual then the funds pour in to combat the ‘new terrorist menace’.

Perhaps the greenscare is coming to the UK? Given that the Guardian article is titled ‘Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists’ this appears very likely.

Read the Guardian article here