After trying to consolidate several comments into a coherent diary for a few weeks now, without much success, I’m just reposting the whole series. Perhaps this will serve to take your mind off the Super Tuesday blow-out that’s looking inevitable at the moment. Perhaps it will serve as more than a temporary distraction.
What follows lies somewhere between a scrapbook of brilliant insights, and a scrapheap of half-baked crackpot rants—or it may be one masquerading as the other. My hope is that a few of these observations will be gritty enough to serve as the sand inside an oyster’s shell—embedded in the thinking of the Sanders campaign, impossible to spit out, irritating nuclei for future pearls of wisdom when some committee of more clever wordsmiths composes a manifesto to advertise our too-little-too-late (but unavoidable) political revolution.
Introductory Remarks
[In discussing] unsolved problems … one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
1950s, The Cranberry Marsh... My determination to write a definitive treatise on economics and ecology began about sixty years ago, at a place in my hometown called the Cranberry Marsh. It was where grade school kids gathered after school for dam-building, sledding, and gang wars. Sometimes we’d see Red Eckart, who ran the soda fountain by Six Corners, standing up still as a statue in a tiny dinghy with his high-powered bow drawn taut, waiting to slam a lethal arrow into the shell of a dreaded torp before it could devour all the cute little ducklings Red hoped to gun down in coming years.
We never imagined anyone could claim to own the Cranberry Marsh. It was beyond communal property—it was more like the marsh owned us as it owned its ducks, and as it had owned our families for generations.
But then one day the trees in the surrounding woods sprouted No Trespassing signs, and before long they morphed into For Sale signs. How could this be? I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. By the age of nine or ten I would lie awake at night imaging the entire planet covered with such signs, bulldozed, suffocating under asphalt. Some nights I drove myself crazy wondering how to convince everyone this was not the way to manage a living planet. I could see it and feel it but had no words for it.
TV arrived in the nick of time (we were the last family in town to succumb). Most afternoons I’d head straight home to Popeye. Some nights, Walt Disney and good old Werner von Braun turned my thoughts to moonshots and Martians. I asked my father when we’d get to the moon. Fifty years? Maybe sooner, he said.
May 1969, a Memorial Rat... While working on layouts for the Memorial Day issue of Rat Subterranean News, I stopped to read the center spread, devoted to a message from the Sierra Club (probably composed by the visionary David Brower just before he resigned to form Friends of the Earth, which you may recall has endorsed Sanders). These were the words I’d been groping for.
The message had three parts. (Titles are exact, text here is much abridged or paraphrased. It’s nowhere to be found on the net. I’ll transcribe the whole thing someday.)
I. The Moon, Mars, Saturn… nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
… Earth is a strange sort of oasis, in that quite apart from providing us what we need to live—water, air, sustenance, companionship—this oasis actually grew us and every other life form…
II. Toward a more Moon-like Earth.
There wasn’t much free oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere before green plants and marine plankton ‘invented’ photosynthesis. You’d think we have a stake in assuring this process continues, but…
In the US alone, a million acres are paved over each year; the rate is increasing and the contagion is spreading globally...
A half-million contaminants are pouring into the oceans, very few tested to see if plankton can survive them, and…
The rate at which combustion in factories, homes, cars and jets turns atmospheric oxygen into carbon dioxide and monoxide will soon exceed the rate of photosynthesis. (edited and paraphrased)
The haunting title of section II led to later musings about what happens to all those photons pouring out of the solar core. Those that encounter the lunar surface bounce off as moonlight or stay behind, absorbed by hot rocks. But those that penetrate Earth’s atmosphere may pass through countless permutations until they finally end up fueling our bodies, minds, emotions, and those rare moments of illumination Fichte called “consciousness becoming conscious of itself”. One such moment happened to millions of us at once when a photo of Earth rising over the moon showed up on the cover of Life magazine; we were a Stone Age tribe seeing our face in a mirror for the first time. And the moonshot itself was an eruption of solar energy accumulated genetically in organic structures, both physical and mental, over the preceding three or four billion years, now suddenly reaching critical mass. But meanwhile, each year of paving and poisoning takes us moonwards in the opposite direction: a photon landing on a parking can only bounce off as dull gray earthlight, or stay behind in the sun-baked asphalt.
III. A wildlife preserve where we are the wildlife.
...it is now the entire planet that must be viewed as a kind of conservation district within the Universe; a wildlife preserve of a sort, except we are the wildlife, together with all other life and environmental conditions that are necessary [for] our survival and happiness.
In that same Rat there was an article about People’s Park, with the image of the I Ching’s Hexagram 49 enclosing the headline: “We are building the new society in the vacant lots of the old”— along with a snapshot of James Rector dying on a rooftop. What we’d called The Movement was now billed as The Revolution, and ecology was on the front lines.
Much later I realized it was Governor Reagan’s gunfire that ignited the ecology movement, fueling the rage that was channelled into the first big Earth Day. That feel-good event, soon followed by the Kent State massacre, made environmentalism seem like a safe haven for risk-averse revolutionaries. The concurrent demotion of ecology to environment is noteworthy, marking a withdrawal from subjective engagement in a life-and-death struggle for survival, substituting an abstract, featureless, blank space that’s everywhere and nowhere; deeds went the way of words, as street-fighting to liberate earth from its enemies segued into fund-raising and schmoozing. The messages of Earth Day were “we’re all in the same boat” and “we have met the enemy and (s)he is us”— as if a subsistence farmer in Chiapas or Malawi has the same ecological footprint as a hedge fund manager with six cars and four homes and 100,000 annual miles of air travel.
June 1971, poisoning Aspatuck Creek… Downstream from the Cranberry Marsh, Aspatuck Creek flows very slowly under Turkey Bridge and out into Quantuck Bay which, like its smaller twin the Moneybogue Bay, hasn’t been properly flushed out since the ‘38 Hurricane sent a huge ocean wave crashing through the barrier beach. (That wave tossed the remains of over 150 houses and many vehicles all the way to Main Street a half mile away; a couple of dozen local casualties included several servants left behind to look after the beach houses whilst summer people fled inland.) Still waters didn’t seem to matter in the 1950s, when both these almost-landlocked little bays were aswarm with crabs, clams and flounder. But by the 1990s, locals who spent a lot of time out on the water were saying those bays were dead as doornails.
In the spring of 1971, while employed by a landscaping business, I did my part in this tiny sideshow of the global crusade against nature—just following orders, of course, like most of us who commit war crimes. The biggest residential property in Wursthamtongue was an oil company executive’s magnificent 1920s mansion on a vast lawn sloping gently down into the water where the creek broadens out to join the bay. My assignment was to walk back and forth, up and down, across the whole seven or eight acres, spreading some kind of powdery fungicide-insecticide-herbicide mix. As I was refilling the spreader for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to have a look at the small print on the label. It said not to apply the stuff within a quarter-mile of any body of water, because it’ll kill everything in it. I was about due to be fired anyway, so I quit in protest.
That may have been the day I began to notice the connection between economic strata and ecological impacts. The higher the strata, the heavier the per capita impact. (Flash forward to October, 2015 for a brief digression: Newsday does a series of investigative reports on Lawn Island’s biggest water users. Our old friend David Koch tops the residential water consumers, going through over 20 million gallons a year. The estates in the famous Hamtongues, though vacant most of the year, use so much water for irrigated lawns, putting greens, pools, and “environmentally friendly” geothermal heating and cooling that the last and deepest layer of precious aquifer is being sucked out, salt water is leaching in, overstressed infrastructure is breaking down, and there’s no end in sight. The primary purpose of eastern L.I.’s local governments is to keep billionaires comfortable, carefree, and well-watered. If forced to choose between the needs of the biosphere and the whims of the bourgeoisie, it’s no contest.)
That’s enough preambling. Recycled comments and maybe a few aborted diary fragments follow, starting with the most recent.
This is the only report on a rally I’ve seen that’s actually enlightening and worthwhile.
I have no idea how votes are going to go in future primaries, but this sums up the way I’ve been feeling too—big picture, long game, and the real issue now may be what happens during the next four years, with different scenarios for presidencies of Trump, Clinton, Sanders (and perhaps an Antitrump if his screw-up if the KKK endorsement—or Cruz’s going after tax returns showing Mafia payoffs as business expenses—turns out to be the screw-up that finally sticks).
I’m coming to think this is the Republican campaign of 1856, which you may recall was the first national foray of the new party that dared oppose the expansion of slavery into western territories. It came at very dark and hopeless moment, around the time of the Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott Decision, slavery showing up in Kansas. The decay of the Whigs was providing an opening for a new party, while the Democrats were breaking apart into the Southern faction’s fierce proponents of slavery now and forever and everywhere and the Northern mealy-mouthed, double-talking, very mild, laid-back, not-so-enthusiastic-about-slavery faction, the latter personified by Stephen Douglas.
Between 1856 and 1860, Lincoln’s debates with Douglas cornered him, forcing him to admit he didn’t really oppose slavery at all—it was all just empty talk (like “cut it out!”), intended to mollify Northern voters, backed up by no meaningful action.
After that it became clear that anyone who really didn’t like slavery was going to have to vote for Lincoln in 1860.
Of course that election (coming on the heels of John Brown’s guerrilla warfare) brought on secession and civil war. Food for thought.
My reasoning, by the way, is based on a long-held conviction that Sanders’ two biggest and most urgent demands—one dealing with economic inequality and the other targeting climate change—are not separate issues. Control of wealth is meaningful only when understood to mean control of natural resources, hence control of the planet’s future. When the further enrichment of the richest investors (bigger and faster profits at all costs) is the primary purpose of most economic activity, ecological unravelling is going to keep accelerating until we get into holocaust territory (we’re already there, but it’ll get much, much worse before it gets better).
This situation is a moral outrage equivalent to slavery, and in fact it involves a kind of slavery—the whole surface of the planet is in chains and worked to death. Only freely self-governing (self-regulating) ecosystems can keep thise planet alive and livable. When every unit of land is defined as “property” whose “highest and best use” leaves it dead or dying, and the air and water are poisonous and lifeless, ask not for whom the bell tolls. (Climate change is just a symptom; we need to realize that term is shorthand for an even bigger catastrophe-in-progress. A much fairer distribution of wealth is a prerequisite for addressing ecological problems, for reasons that need to be explained in more detail.)
So the question is not whether we will ultimately win, but how, when, by what means. I’m not sure that winning the White House this year is as high a priority as educating the country and the rest of the world (and ourselves!) about exactly what we’re fighting for and why. The more we make sense of this double-edged global crisis, and the more radical the analysis, the more moderate and reasonable (and relatively painless) the solution may be—and the more effective and lasting our victory.
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Time to step back and look at the Big Picture.
In military strategy, there’s an often-neglected top level called “Grand Strategy”— in which you ask questions like, “what (who) do you really need to fight for (and against)?” and “where do you want (need) to end up?” And finally, “is this the right war to get you where you need to go?” The respective economic strength of your side and the other side matter—“is the war effort sustainable?” But perhaps most important of all, “do your war aims make sense?”—and do they make sense to your population, and your troops?
Before we go any further, let’s note that the Sanders campaign qualifies as a “good war”. The ramifications of accelerating economic inequality, combined with accelerating ecological unraveling across the whole planet, are beyond mind-boggling. No other political campaign has faced this global crisis head-on; no other campaign has even acknowledged it’s happening, aside from occasional unconvincing expressions of concern (usually limited to assorted symptoms, oblivious to root causes and cumulative effects). So let’s look for historical parallels in other “good wars”.
World War Two is perhaps to recent, too huge, and too emotionally charged to provide useful parallels. There is not much question that the world is drifting quickly into some kind of holocaust, and a vast co-ordinated effort can’t start soon enough to deal with it. It will get far worse before it’s over; remember the Nazi’s Holocaust barely even reached full intensity until 1943-44, when the military tide had already turned in the Allies’ favor.
One parallel, though, is worth noting, and is indispensable for our purposes: for nearly a year after the fall of France, only a single country was at war with the Third Reich, and that country’s stubborn war effort was largely the result of a single flawed individual, whose relentless determination to resist the evil of Nazism was opposed by his own party leaders and by an entrenched elite. He only become Prime Minister after appeasement failed, and after fierce arguments over whether to just give up. You know the rest:
“...we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight ... on the seas and oceans, we shall fight... in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight ... in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”
It is said that immediately after giving the speech, Churchill muttered to a colleague, "And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that's bloody well all we've got!" (Wikipedia)
Is the campaign for the 2016 nomination World War Two? Hardly. It’s more like the arguments within the Conservative Party about what needed to be done. At most, it’s like the fighting in France in 1940, when the Blitz (helped along by some French officers who weren’t sure which side they were on) overwhelmed all resistance, and the best the Brits could do was go home and dig in for a long, lonely struggle they knew would have to end in eventual victory, because there was really no other choice.
Right now, Sanders seems unlikely to win the Democratic Party’s current argument about what needs doing. Does that mean there will be no war to wrest control of the planet from the billionaires who are devouring its resources and laying waste its social and political structures? Or does it just mean it’ll be messier, uglier, more protracted, and more global? There are already more billionaires in Beijing than New York, and Moscow comes third. Financial and ecological fault lines are sure to crack wide open, but it’s hard to predict where the global quake will hit first, or hit hardest.
The argument within the Democratic Party won’t go away as long as the crisis continues to intensiify. If we end up with President Trump, the question of what to do will take on new urgency, and may well require much more than electoral politics if Trump turns out to be as much of a fascist as we expect. If Clinton becomes president, hardcore Sanders supporters are unlikely to accept that their only role henceforth is campaigning for Clinton and her ilk.
Other “good wars” that come to mind include the Civil War, the American Revolution, and native nations’s long losing struggles to defend their territories. It’s possible that the last example is most relevant parallel with the Sanders movement, since the global economy has no place in it for a prosperous American middle class, any more than the United States had room for thriving free native nations. A more forward-looking approach, involving international alliances of beleaguered workers and defenders of ravaged ecosystems, organized along the lines of WW2 resistance forces, may make more sense than invoking the New Deal as if we were Ghost Dancers chanting for the return of the buffalo herds.
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THIS IS GETTING REALLY, REALLY LONG, AND WHAT FOLLOWS IS A COLLECTION OF DISCONNECTED SCRAPS. YOU CAN QUIT HERE, WITH NO HARD FEELINGS.
Some further thoughts on this economic-ecology connection, recycled from several comments posted on a diary by ban nock, “Conservation Might Well Not Mean What You Think It Does”
Feb 06 2016
We tend to forget that all members of our species (like all members of any species) are born with approximately equal needs and desires. Economic inequality does offer a few social benefits, but surely the point of diminishing returns must lie closer to 1:4 or 1:100 poorest-to-richest wealth ratios than to the 1:1,000,000,000 we have now. This is not a mere social issue; it’s an ecological crisis, arguably far more massive and urgent than the climate change it exacerbates. No species can be expected to survive with such a destabilizing maldistribution of habitat and resources, even if the majority are too distracted or depressed to do anything about it.
Queen bees and alpha wolves may take more than their “fair” share of the hive’s or pack’s resources, but they earn their keep by providing unique services. They don’t go overboard with hogging and hoarding. This isn’t about idealist notions of “fairness”—it’s about the practical business of balancing the costs and benefits of inequality, finding the right balance—i.e., if you get more than your “fair” share, how much more, and whatcha gonna do for the rest of us to earn it? If a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the human tribe doesn’t appeal to you, would you rather just be a parasite? Okay, but remember, we’re the host and you’re the guest, so don’t be rude, don’t get carried away with the bloodsucking shtick, the joke was on us but now the joke’s getting kinda tired, you know? Hosts can get along without parasites a lot better than parasites can get along without hosts.
The question isn’t whether a revolution is coming—you might say we’re overdue for a counter-revolution to take back our hijacked, mismanaged and dying planet from those who want us to believe they rightfully own it. The question is what kind of (counter)revolution. If we keep our wits about us, and strategize with surgical precision, it may even be disconcertingly moderate. Capitalism and corporations might fulfill their creative (and benign) potential once we realize that investment and management decisions are perverted, not facilitated, by inequality; socialism has always been part of the mix, acknowledged or not, and needn’t suppress free enterprise to make its contribution.
Once Sen. Sanders discovers that his two main “issues”—economic inequality and the unravelling of the biosphere (manifested as climate change, etc.) are one big problem and can’t be solved separately, the discussion of what’s needed will start to make much more sense. It’s a dangerous step, but nowhere near as dangerous as hesitation or retreat. Mobilizing rational citizens for the tasks ahead is the alternative to, and the opposite of, the raging mob rule of stormtrooper wannabes.
We are so far out of whack we need to review some fundamental ideas about what the planet is and how it works, and where we fit in, before we can adjust our agenda to the real situation confronting us. Even our most common words channel our ideas into dead ends and gordian knots. “The real world” is the realm of money, laws, governments, corporations, and property, all of which are largely imaginary, given meaning only by their use in lubricating the machinery that devours the planet for our temporary benefit. “Nature” is dismissed as a fairy tale realm, a sort of dreamworld, a luxury available to those who can afford to find the time and space to get into it (as if we’re not all in it already), despite the fact that any legitimate science defines reality as nothing more or less than nature.
Until the living surface of this earth and the bottom line have an unbreakable connection, and the state of the biosphere is built into economic spreadsheets, decision-makers will continue to profit by reducing land to lunar sterility. Nature will be preserved or conserved (it hardly matters which at this point) as decorative, recreational interludes hemmed in by pavement. As we fall below the critical mass of ecological interactions that sustain the life-supporting qualities of the ground, the water and the air, we continue to argue about carbon credits and deer populations, like people swatting gnats while in the jaws of a great shark.
Nothing will make sense until we recognize that economics and ecology are global systems sharing the surface of just one planet, a single ‘household’— oikos — echoing through both words. Ecology studies the inner logic of the household, deciphering the mysteries of how it works, and lives, and gives us life. Economics manages the household, so we can take what we need out of it. But the management doesn’t know or care how the place works, and will have no compelling reason to know or care until accounting systems turn conservation into profit and devastation into loss. When economic incentives overwhelmingly tend to reward real-life loss (ecological unravelling at ever-accelerating rates) and punish real-life gain (self-governing ecosystems thriving and keeping us alive in the process), the managers are remiss in performing their fiduciary duties to investors if they try to take into account the fact that nature is reality and how it works determines how we live and whether we live.
The outcome is predetermined.
As a postscript, let’s recognize that economic inequality cannot be separated from the scale and pace of eco-destruction. Income and assets translate into environmental impacts, both directly (in the mind-bogglingly wasteful lifestyles of the rich and famous) and indirectly (in the percentage of total economic activity that’s devoted to enriching the rich rather than providing for human needs). This hugely exacerbates the problems and makes even thinking about effective remedies a waste of time, unless (until) this factor is given the attention it deserves.
The “crisis of rising expectations” combined with population increases give ever-greater urgency to the inequality factor. To ignore that factor is to be knowingly complicit in setting the stage for mass extinctions of whole classes of human beings as well as the last fugitive remnants of wild ecosystems.
I’m fascinated by the abundance of natural forest and fauna that seemed to thrive across most of South and Southeast Asia until very recently, right in the midst of advanced civilizations and dense human populations—elephants, tigers, jungles, rich fishing grounds, you name it.
And yet in the Americas, we’re finally coming to accept that tiny nomadic clans of hunters drove something like 90% of megafauna species to extinction in the blink of an eye. Five very different elephant species, lions larger and smarter than the African variety, and the list goes on and on. I once came across a book entitled “Was America a Mistake?” a collection of essays by European natural philosophers (Buffon is one that I recall) circa 1550-1750 who were trying to find theological or scientific explanations for why the Western Hemisphere was so impoverished in its natural endowments. Australian wildlife had a similar sharp decline when people first showed up. The lesson is that there is NO minimal level of human population or technology that is safe for the biosphere—and yet Asia’s thousands of years of abundant nature and human culture, intermingling, suggests there may be no hard upper limit, either, beyond which civilization mustn’t grow. We can aim for the stars or shrivel up on a dying planet, but we’d better make up our minds pretty soon which way to go.
It comes back to economics, the management of the household. If economic systems learn and respect the laws of nature—and remember that property and money are just useful fictions, whose laws must conform to those of nature—the sky’s the limit. But if not, this story will not end happily.
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I guess that’ll do for now.