All posts in category Environment

All that solid melts in air: Labor Day reflections on Marx, Darwin and the need for new paradigms

As always around Labor Day, I am getting ready to talk with young people about some old, dead people: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, all of whom loom large in the curriculum of the General Education seminar required of sophomores at my college.

Rereading Darwin and Marx, who we’ll be discussing this week, it’s not hard at all to find ways to make these old thinkers, whose ideas are more than 100 years old now, relevant for our times.

Darwin

Darwin believed that life is a constant battle for limited resources, with the “struggle for existence” being entirely material, rather than spiritual.  When a dominant species overruns a weaker species, it is always for the best:

“It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.”

He believed that humans are the highest, most important species, and that within the species men are higher than women, and white-skinned, “civilized” people are better than dark-skinned “savages.”  And implicit in his theory of natural selection is the ideology of Manifest Destiny: that strong, rich people got that way because they were “better” than poor, weak people.

It’s the logic that paved the way for the ruthless capitalist paradigm that presided over the industrial revolution of the late 19th and 20th centuries, along with the relentless search for new markets and new sources of raw materials: colonialism, imperialism, globalization.

Marx

Writing back in the mid-19th century, Marx was incredibly prescient.  His description, in “The Communist Manifesto,” of the process of colonial globalization could have been written last week:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

This actually doesn’t sound like much of a critique—Marx describes the positive side of capitalist globalization first.  But then he shows, with remarkable foresight, how the capitalists are unable to control the economic system they have created:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells….It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

We have just lived through one of these episodic crises that Marx is talking about here—the bursting of the housing bubble, and the broad financial crisis that was generated by an over-reliance on debt.

The “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces” is a nice way of saying “war”; and indeed, our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have kept the military-industrial complex humming, along with companies like Halliburton that snapped up all the rebuilding contracts.

Marx believed that the capitalist system would fail because it is structurally unable to support the needs of the masses.  It is built on inequality—on the Darwinian framework of the “struggle for existence” where might makes right, the strong survive and the weak perish, and the spoils of industry are concentrated tightly in the hands of a small dominant class, the bourgeoisie.

The modern laborer… instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

Marx thought it inevitable that the middle class would sink into the proletariat as wealth became more and more concentrated in the hands of the few capitalists controlling government and industry.  And the proletariat, having nothing left to lose, would eventually rise up and seize power, overthrowing the capitalist system and instituting a new economic system, more truly “by the people, for the people.”

However, Marx was still a prisoner of his time as regards his understanding of humans’ relation to our natural environment.  He was not able to foresee that industrial growth, whether under the leadership of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, would bump up against the carrying capacity of the planet, providing a natural (in Darwin’s terms) limit to growth.

Darwin would look out at what’s happening to our planet today, in the age of climate change, and see it quite dispassionately, as part of the process of natural selection. People in low-lying areas will have to migrate or die. We will figure out ways to adapt to our new climate reality, or we will be swept away.  The strong will survive, the weak will perish.

Marx, on the other hand, would be ranting about how the bourgeoisie have, in his own words, “dug their own graves,” and taken everyone along with them.  He would be calling for the international proletariat to rise up and fight for a better social system, in which labor is rewarded with well-being and the profits circulate among the many, rather than being concentrated in the hands of the few at the top.

We know with the power of hindsight that no Communist system has ever actually been successful at making people happy.

This is because the old hierarchical structures that have pervaded human civilizations for thousands of years still tend to creep back, no matter what name we give our socio-economic structure.

The challenge of our time is to envision a social structure that is horizontal, circular and interdependent, rather than vertical, linear and unidirectional.

A social structure in a harmonious give and take with the natural world, rather than one that only takes and takes to feed the maw of human industry.

Darwin may be right that the strong will survive and the weak will perish, but our concept of strength needs to change to meet our new reality.

Strength is not about domination and the ability to force others to bend, it is about cooperation and the ability to bring people and the natural world into productive harmony.

Black Elk

What we need now is a renaissance of indigenous tribal social systems, based on reverence for the natural world, and respect for one another.

Those people Darwin dismissed as “savages” may turn out to be the only ones who are able to survive in our new planetary epoch, as “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

 

3 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on September 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Politics, Spiritual growth
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on September 4, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/09/04/all-that-solid-melts-in-air-labor-day-reflections-on-marx-darwin-and-the-need-for-new-paradigms/

No, we’re not crying wolf

I gain a shred of hope for the future when I read about the heroic efforts of Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, to draw attention to the criminal exploitation of the Arctic by fossil fuel prospectors.

Last week Naidoo braved hosing with cold water in the frigid temperatures of the North to take a stand on a huge Russian oil platform.

It was a publicity stunt, yes.  But how else are we going to attract the attention of the multitudes who need to know what is being done under the radar in the new Arctic Oil Rush?

As the pack ice melts at a historic pace, the fossil fuel industry is moving in.  Never mind the fact that oil spills in these waters will be almost impossible to stop.  Never mind the fact that this is the last refuge for so many endangered species, from polar bears and seals to whales and seabirds. Never mind that the more oil we pump out of the bowels of the earth, the faster we’ll wreck our fragile climate.

I am doing a lot of pondering lately about tactics.

The Occupy movement here in the States seems to have largely fizzled.  Oh yes, a couple of busloads of protestors did go down from NYC to Tampa to protest at the RNC—and it’s true that the hurricane warnings put a damper on people’s enthusiasm to venture forth.

But if Kumi Naidoo and his team can brave the Arctic to climb the side of an oil rig, it seems to me that we ought to be able to mount a better protest at our Stateside behemoth, the Republican National Convention.

But no.  The mainstream media is reporting on the Convention in level terms, as though it weren’t a circus aimed at gutting what is left of the social contract that, at least since FDR’s time, Americans have come to consider a birthright. It reminds me of how reporters went along with the “WMD mushroom cloud” nonsense in the build-up to the invasion of Baghdad, or how they all but waved American flags in our faces when publishing the photos of the American soldiers killed in Iraq.

Hardly anyone has bothered to remark on the fact that we just passed our two-thousandth dead American soldier in Afghanistan this summer.

These deaths just creep upon us, the same way that oil rigs spring up like weeds in previously pristine waters, along with aquaculture farms, chemical runoff, GMO seeds and fracking wells.

It all happens so quietly and so deftly, while we are busy trying to pay our bills, or getting in a little vacation, or saying farewell to another loved one who has succumbed to cancer.

The Kumi Naidoos and the Tim DeChristophers and the Rachel Corries of the world jerk us back to reality and remind us that while we weren’t paying attention, the thieves got in and began “minding the store.”  In their own fashion.

Their tactics are always the same.  Catch people unawares; get them to sign documents ceding their rights; then systematically go about the business of resource extraction as quickly as possible, with as high a profit margin as possible.  Get it done before the sleeping populace awakes, before the regulators notice anything amiss, before people and animals begin to sicken and the lawsuits begin.  After all, the legal process can be held up in appeals for generations, and meanwhile how many fortunes can be made?

What should our countering tactics be?

Visibility is important: hence the merit of the Greenpeace approach.

Building a movement is important—not just among those willing to camp out in city parks, but among senior citizens and the middle class, unemployed white collar workers and soccer moms, as well as the marching band kids.

People need to realize that this is deadly serious.  No one is crying wolf here.

If we don’t act now to break our fossil fuel addiction, our time on this planet is almost over.

Maybe if we’re lucky, we can come back as bacteria or cockroaches.  But humans?  We’re just about done.

 

28 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Eco-terrorism, Environment, Media analysis, Politics
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 28, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/28/no-were-not-crying-wolf/

American insanity

I admit to a feeling of dejection at being back in the USA again.

Same old callous attitude towards women vomiting out of the Republican Party (“legitimate rape,” my ass!).  Same old desperate pleas for money from the Democrats, who are forced to beg for funds from small fry like me to try to compete with the billionaire Republican funders.  Same old blithe disconnect between the reality of climate change (drought, anyone?) and the steady roar of the fracking drills in Pennsylvania and the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.  Shrimp and fish turning up grotesquely deformed by tumors, eyeless and burned, for hundreds of miles around the BP spill.  Whatever.

Not that things were paradise in Canada.  The crash of the fish populations there is alarming, and they too are involved in the dirtiest of business in the Alberta boreal forest (which I refuse to call by the euphemism “tar sands,” implying as it does that there’s nothing there worth saving).  They clearcut forests and pollute rivers and all the rest of it.

But from just a few weeks of tuning into the media there, I can tell that there is much more clarity and focus there on environmental issues.  Every single issue of the Halifax Chronicle Herald has at least one article, and usually several, about energy or agricultural or fishery policy in relation to climate change.  They are actually working towards meeting the goal they set for themselves of generating 15% of the nation’s energy needs by renewable means by 2020, and many are calling for a more ambitious target.

Coming across the land bridge into Nova Scotia one is now greeted by a newly erected forest of huge wind turbines, and there are water turbines churning in the nearby waters of the Bay of Fundy, too.  Many more are in the works.

Although there is political strife in Canada, such as has boiled up in Quebec in recent months, there is none of the viperous, self-destructive attack politics that goes by the bland name of “the election year cycle” here in the States.  Politicians campaign on the issues rather than on smearing and sniping at each other. Voter turnout is about 60%, as compared to the dismal 40% in the U.S.

Why do so many people feel disengaged, disillusioned, and disgusted with politics here in the U.S.?  Why do we feel like no matter how we vote, our values will not be reflected in Washington?

Because it’s true.

I happen to believe that Barack Obama shares my values.  I believe he is a genuinely caring, ethical man who sincerely wants to create a country in which politicians collaborate rather than backstab each other; in which government and corporations serve the public good; in which the goal of economic activity is raising all boats, rather than creating a few luxury liners for the richest 1% of Americans.  I believe he’s a good man.

And yet, he has been unable to make a dent in politics as usual in Washington.  The Republicans have shown repeatedly that they are the party of the wealthy boardrooms of Big Business and Big Finance, and since they own so much of the news media, and so many think tanks, and so many political seats, including Supreme Court seats, well, they can do as they wish and everyone else be damned.

I have noticed a certain grim set to Obama’s jaw in the last year, as the reality of his fly-in-the-web position has sunk in.  He knows that even if he wins re-election, he will be foiled at every turn.  And it doesn’t help that it’s getting harder and harder for him to inspire his base—people like me who are beyond frustrated with the status quo, and no longer believe he and his team can make a change.

When I get those daily emails from Democratic headquarters pressing me to donate to the campaign (just $12!), and then I hear about how the Koch brothers are donating millions to the Romney campaign, the little sprout of hope that springs eternal in me just starts to wither.

Yes, if 100 million Americans donated $12 to Obama it would make a big difference.  But frankly I would rather see some savvy crowdsourcing through social media, with the goal less raising money to burn up on TV than getting more people out to the polls on election day, and empowering ordinary Americans to rise up and insist on real representation in Washington.

I am not interested in betting on the horse race.  I can’t sanction the wasteful spending of huge sums on campaigning, while our planet burns and billions of people are locked in poverty.

Romney will be bad—very, very bad—for the health of the environment and all living things, including humans.

He, and all the slimy bastards who prop him up, must be defeated.

But this battle is about much more than just one country’s Presidential race.  It’s about our future on this planet.  A vote for Romney is a vote for business as usual, and then some—drill, baby, drill.

Why is it that so many Americans are so suicidal?

Maybe we need some collective social therapy more than anything else.

It really does seem that as a nation, we are insane.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Media analysis, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 24, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/24/american-insanity/

Looking backward, looking forward, being here

When I started Transition Times a year ago, I was in a state of emotional turmoil.  I had just become fully awake to the scary reality of climate change, and was allowing myself for the first time to recognize the extent of the terrible environmental degradation of our planet that had taken place in my lifetime, on my watch as it were.

I was also smarting from some direct hits on the economic front, having just lost my second teaching post to state budget cuts.  I was looking at a yearlong evaluation process for a longterm contract at my primary institution (our equivalent of tenure), and the outcome was far from secure.

Added to that, I was just emerging from a yearlong divorce battle—nowhere near as vicious as some I’ve witnessed, but still painful and emotionally debilitating.

So all in all, I was in a pretty distressed and tender state of mind a year ago, when Transition Times grew from the flicker of a thought to a fully formed weblog.

Thinking back over the year, I see that I have grown a lot, and my blog has grown with me.

Many of my posts have charted the ups and downs of my outlook on the future: our planetary future in a time of precipitous loss of biodiversity, rapid, out-of-control global heating, and growing food insecurity for all inhabitants of the planet, humans included; our future as Americans, citizens of a nation that controls the largest military, police and prison forces in the world and seems to revel in showing off its ruthless muscle, even against its own children; and my own future as a newly single mom parenting two teenage boys, working more than fulltime, and trying to keep an even keel through turbulent economic waters.

As I embark on the second year of Transition Times, and close in on my 50th birthday, I am glad to find myself in a fairly calm, even mildly positive state of mind.

Although the past year has given us little to celebrate in terms of the environment, the global economy or the political scene, at least on the home front things are—well—okay.

A year into my life as a divorcee I am finding a comfort level with being on my own that I remember from years ago, before I married.  It’s been 25 years since I was single, which is a long, long time.  But I am beginning to get a remembered twinge of anticipation, the awareness that as a single woman doors may open for me that would have remained closed were I still married.

Stepping through any doors—meeting new people, visiting new places, making new choices—necessarily involves risk.  Twenty-five years ago, I took the risk of marrying—and it paid off in my two handsome, talented, charming (for the most part) sons, as well as many good times with my husband before and during our marriage.

A year ago I was so emotionally battered from the divorce that I could not have imagined opening myself up to that kind of attachment again.

Now I think—well, maybe someday.  There’s no rush.  I am pretty content as I am, just me and my family, as it was for the first 25 years of my life.

In the meantime, I will be doing a lot of thinking aloud on Transition Times about how best to channel my passions, concerns and talents in the coming years.

I am just one small woman with many limitations but I want to give the best of myself to the beautiful world I love so much—the birds and insects, the ocean creatures, the furry mammals and the cool reptiles, and the green forests, waving grasslands and flowering marshes that nourish us all.

5 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Environment, love, Resilience

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 13, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/13/looking-backward/

Call the bouncer: Let’s show Romney/Ryan the door

As many pundits have been remarking, the choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate appears to be a gift to the Democratic Party.  Ryan is such a rabidly conservative Tea Party type that he makes Romney look fangless by comparison; as a team they are guaranteed to demonstrate just how out of touch the Republicans are with the mood of most Americans.

How could we elect a President whose VP wants to slash every social service, from food stamps for children to Pell grants for college students to health care for the poor? Ryan is a throwback to the Gilded Age, starving the poor while throwing ever bigger bones to the rich, in the form of tax cuts, loose regulation and subsidies for big business.

Funny how history repeats itself, with a Dust Bowl rearing its emaciated head this summer in the Midwest, prompting panicked farmers to appeal frantically to their Congressmen for a robust farm bill, including generous crop failure insurance to keep hope alive for the next growing season.

In the House of Representatives, Ryan and his cronies won’t hear of enacting a farm bill unless it also includes substantial cuts to the nation’s food stamp program.

That’s right—the Republicans are holding the nutrition of America’s most vulnerable citizens—many of them children and the elderly—hostage to political machinations, while also failing to protect farmers and ranchers.

 

But the truth is that all the farm subsidies and food stamp programs in the world are just bandaids that don’t begin to address the serious underlying issues that must be dealt with as we move on into the perilous 21st century.

Even The New York Times, surely no tree-hugging type of newspaper, published an op-ed column recently pointing to the fact that if the U.S. government simply stopped pouring so much American corn into ethanol, the anticipated drought-related food shortages and price increases would simply fail to materialize.

“Federal renewable-fuel standards require the blending of 13.2 billion gallons of corn ethanol with gasoline this year. This will require 4.7 billion bushels of corn, 40 percent of this year’s crop,” say the authors, Colin A. Carter, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, and Henry I. Miller, a physician and a fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at the Hoover Institution.

“Any defense of the ethanol policy rests on fallacies, primarily these: that ethanol produced from corn makes the United States less dependent on fossil fuels; that ethanol lowers the price of gasoline; that an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline increases the overall supply of gasoline; and that ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

“The ethanol lobby promotes these claims, and many politicians seem intoxicated by them. Corn is indeed a renewable resource, but it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than either biodiesel (such as soybean oil) or ethanol from other plants. Ethanol yields about 30 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Finally, adding ethanol actually raises the price of blended fuel because it is more expensive to transport and handle than gasoline.”

 

Looking at this bigger picture allows us to see that the Midwest drought, while serious, does not have to result in a crisis of food insecurity in the U.S. or in the many other countries that depend on U.S. agriculture.

Not if we had a strong, smart government that could wield the power of policy and regulation intelligently.

We need a farm bill that will encourage farmers to diversify their crops rather than plant millions of acres of corn to turn to fuel.

We need an energy policy that sharply increases incentives for conservation at every level, from personal household energy use to industrial use, and starts aggressively switching our national transportation system to public mass transit, at the same time promoting the development of renewable energy sources nationwide.

We need a social welfare bill that looks deeply into the reasons why more and more Americans are forced to rely on food stamp and food pantries to stave off hunger, and figures out lasting, community-oriented solutions to the vicious cycles of poverty that plague too many American families.

It’s past time to start a new Civilian Conservation Corps that will put ordinary Americans to work at worthy projects that will be far better in every way than grudging handouts.

 

Recent polls show that a solid majority of Americans now acknowledge the reality of anthropogenic global heating, and they are worried about what the next season’s erratic weather patterns will bring.

It’s a good time to start enacting policy directives that will help us shift, as a nation and as a patchwork of smaller communities, away from our gas-guzzling, coal-burning past into a cleaner, wiser future.

It’s a good time to start building the resilience we’ll need at the local level to withstand the environmental and economic shocks that are coming.

It’s high time we kicked the gridlock-inducing, ham-fisted, hard-hearted Tea Partiers out of Congress, and elected some political representatives who are willing and able to be the visionary leaders this country so badly needs.

1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 12, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Politics

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 12, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/12/call-the-bouncer-lets-show-romneyryan-the-door/

Let’s get aquaculture right

When you’re vacationing by the northern Atlantic, you expect cold, salty surf, coastlines bristling with glossy green fir trees, shorebirds galore, and—of course—plenty of freshly caught local seafood.

Here in Nova Scotia, the sea is a magnificent clear blue, the beaches are deserted and littered only by bladderwrack and long waxy strands of kelp, and the dense fir forests are carpeted with a deep cushiony layer of moss, except on the rocky seaward cliffs, where blueberries reign supreme.

It’s a paradisiacal landscape, so much so that’s hard to believe it when the oldtimers shake their heads sadly in response to questions about local fishing.

Time was when you just dropped a line in the bay and in half an hour you could pull out more than enough fish for dinner.

Time was when you could buy your haddock, halibut or cod fresh off the boats pulled up to the dock in Riverport or LaHave.

Not any more.

There is still a lobster industry here, but that’s about all the local seafood that’s doing well these days.

At the fish counter in the supermarket down in Bridgewater, you can find a few pathetically small local haddock filets alongside farmed salmon and stiff-looking tilapia of uncertain provenance.  A handful of dried-out clams and a few defrosted King crab legs completes the sad picture.

I was shocked, turning to the frozen fish case, to find that all the frozen haddock, cod and salmon filets, despite the jocular image of a Nova Scotia fisherman blazoned on their packaging, were stamped “Product of China.”

Were they farmed, processed and shipped all the way from China to Nova Scotia?

Or were they fished and processed on some huge Chinese trawler out on the Grand Banks, and sent over to Canadian shores from there?

Either way, it’s a depressing snapshot into the dismal state of the local fishery.

The Halifax Chronicle Herald ran a big front-page story the other day about the Nova Scotia provincial government’s recent $25 million subsidy of the up and coming aquaculture industry.

The plan is to expand salmon farming along the coast and the Digby side of the Bay of Fundy.

As the article made clear, the prospect is very much a mixed bag.  Yes, aquaculture will bring a few hundred fishing jobs back to these shores, and will make moderately  priced fish available to consumers.

But the environmental costs are potentially huge.  Salmon in small pens generate a tremendous amount of waste, which leads to outbreaks of bacteria, disease and pests like sea lice—all of which must be treated with fungicides, antibiotics or pesticides that easily get out into the open ocean.

The biggest local corporate salmon farmer in these parts, Cooke, admitted having to destroy several hundred thousand immature salmon just last month because of an outbreak of infectious salmon anemia.

The problem with aquaculture so far is that it’s being run on the same model as terrestrial factory farms: pack in the most animals at the lowest cost to maximize profits.  Never mind that the living conditions of the animals are atrocious, and they can only survive to maturity by way of heavy doses of drugs and chemical applications.

It seems to me that if we are able to create trawling nets that are miles long, we ought to be able to create aquaculture cages that are also big enough to provide healthy living conditions for the fish that inhabit them.

Or maybe it’s not that the cages have to be bigger, but that they have to be stocked with a lower volume of fish.

Given the depleted, collapsed state of wild fish stocks, it doesn’t make sense to totally reject the idea of aquaculture.

But let’s build this relatively new industry in a sustainable way, on a biodynamic model rather than an industrial one.

That way it will truly be win-win all around.

11 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 8, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/08/lets-get-aquaculture-right/

Canadian High

Driving north up the Atlantic coast, the sunscreened crowds fade away as you pass through Bangor, ME, entering the no man’s land of narrow highway heading towards the Canadian border at Calais/St. Stephen.  There’s nothing to stop for, other than some grand, flat vistas of endless balsam fir forests, and once you’re over the border into New Brunswick the landscape is even emptier, rolling plateaus heading out unhindered to the deep, restless tides of the Bay of Fundy.

Whizzing on over the land bridge to Nova Scotia, the din of American politics, entertainment and consumerism gradually fades away, and now, having been almost a week here under the hypnotic spell of the rhythmic tides, rolling waves and balsam-scented breezes, my mind feels cleansed and curiously blank, reluctant to be drawn in again to any particular focus.

This morning dawned foggy, and now the sun is burning through, setting sparkles glittering on the gray, barely visible sea.  The twisted firs stand sentinel on the edge of the cliff, and a small group of sea ducks bob peacefully around the rocks, diving now and then to grab a tasty morsel.

Such has been the scene for millennia, minus the alien intrusion of this house and my people here on these shores.

I felt sad and disturbed to read in the Halifax Chronicle Herald that the natives of this region, mostly Mi’kmaq, are struggling to provide decent housing for their people.  It doesn’t seem right that the placid, prosperous Euro-Canadians, who have benefited so mightily from the ownership of this land, are not at minimum giving back to the native peoples in the form of decent housing.

Of course it’s the same in the U.S., where the only way the tribes are able to become self-sufficient is by setting up casinos to collect tariffs from the colonizers.

Somehow I expect more of the Canadians, but they too are only human. They are clear-cutting their forests, strip-mining for coal, oil and minerals, and they’ve already decimated the marine life in their waters through over-fishing.

The saving grace of Canada so far has been its low human population density, as compared to so many other parts of the world. With its vast land mass, Canada only has an average of about 3 people per square kilometer—higher here on the Atlantic coast, and lower in most of the interior.

Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to imagine a scenario here where the humans and non-humans live in harmony, as the Mi’kmaq ancestors did just a few generations back.

We must face the fact that it’s human over-population that is driving our current environmental crises, worldwide.

If we don’t scale back population growth ourselves, the planet will do it for us, self-correcting the imbalance with a few violent shakes: climate disruptions, epidemics, famine.

Here in Nova Scotia I am able to get a taste of what it feels like to live in a more balanced, uncluttered environment.

It feels like the way things should be.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 3, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment, Human Rights
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 3, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/03/canadian-high/

Taking the Leap into a Better World

Lately I’ve been feeling like I am straddling two banks that are rapidly moving away from each other, leaving me performing ever more of a balancing act in the middle of a rushing stream.

One foot is still hanging on to the familiar dry land on which I was born and bred: the safe, predictable world of a privileged existence within the capitalist empire, where every problem has a technological solution, all needs are met, and there is nothing really to worry about, beyond what to have for dinner, or where to go on the next vacation.

This is the world in which I am a true-blue Democrat, I pay my taxes without question, and I work hard in expectation of an eventual pleasant retirement.

But I also have a foot in quite another realm, one that is still quite foreign to most of my peers.

In this other, parallel universe, security and predictability are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as the weather turns ever more erratic, leading to food shortages and a survivalist mentality.  Clashes between unarmed protesters and heavily armed police are common, with the protests mainly concerning lack of basic food and supplies.

No one knows where this is all heading, but it does not appear to be anywhere positive. The elites have hidden themselves away in their own privately funded strongholds, and other than the military folks it does not seem that anyone is really in charge.

Most people I know are clinging to the first bank, even though it’s beginning to seem ever more unstable, as if beset by internal tremors that are slowly but surely breaking it up. They are positioned like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking resolutely backward, away from the chaos of the future.

I don’t know why I am unable to join them in their denialist party.  It sure looks like a good time.

But having become aware of the crisis through which we’re living, I can’t just turn a switch and pretend I don’t know what’s going on. The second bank is like a mirage that is slowly coming into focus, no matter how much I try to turn away and not look.

I’ve spent long enough studying narratives of social upheaval and moments of violent crisis to know one when I see it coming.

A recent article in the New York Times Sunday Review provided an unusual window into the curious calm before the storm of all-out societal dissolution—in this case, the unfolding Syrian civil war.

The author, Janine di Giovanni, begins with a series of questions: “What does it feel like when a war begins? When does life as you know it implode? How do you know when it is time to pack up your home and your family and leave your country? Or if you decide not to, why?”

When does life as you know it implode?

When is it time to pack up and leave?

Where can we go to find safety?

Eastern European immigrants entering New York

These are questions that my ancestors asked, back in the 19th century Europe of ever-narrowing restrictions and ever-more-violent pogroms.  I am here because they had the courage and the foresight to get away to safety before it was too late.

But now the safely cushioned existence that so many of us have enjoyed here in the U.S. and other privileged enclaves on the planet is threatened by a crisis of our own making.

We didn’t realize that everything about our lifestyle, politics and ideology would contribute to the downfall not just of American empire, but of human civilization itself.

We didn’t realize what a deadly game we were playing.

But we can no longer plead ignorance.

Unlike our predecessors, we 21st century folk are going to have a very hard time finding any place to go that is safe, where we can ride out the climate shocks unscathed.

We can’t run, we can’t hide from the environmental shocks that are only just beginning to hit. 

We have to stay and see this through.

What that will mean I am not sure.  In part it depends on how many of us wake up now and begin to take some proactive steps towards reorganizing our society, before we’re reduced to reactive crisis control.

Our political system is locked in a kind of stasis from which there does not seem to be any forward movement possible—just endless round and round and round.

We must move forward—grow, evolve, adapt—if we are to survive.

Today I caught a glimmer of something new that may be the early stages of the kind of change we need to successfully weather the coming storms.

The International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS) is an emergent (or is it insurgent?) movement to create a decentralized, highly participatory catalyst for urgent social change.

It’s not clear yet whether it will be a flash in the pan or an idea whose time has come.

So far it has just over 2,000 members worldwide.

Including me.

Maybe it’s time to stop straddling both banks.  Time to take the leap and jump fully into new territory, both feet on the ground.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, New stories, Politics, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 23, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/07/23/taking-the-leap-into-a-better-world/

Climate Change: What do we tell our children?

This has been a big week for change agents in the U.S.

First Annie Leonard came out with her new movie, The Story of Change.

Annie Leonard

Then David Brancaccio released his new movie, “ Fixing the Future,” with a two-day nationwide roll-out starting on July 18.

David Brancaccio

And today Bill McKibben made the cover of Rolling Stone, confirming him, at least in my eyes, as the true rock star of the environmental movement.

In the same week, radical economist Gar Alperovitz gave a historic keynote address to the Green Party National Convention, arguing that you can’t have a democratic society unless you democratize the ownership of wealth as well.

The big question is, will the best efforts of all these good folks make a difference in what is happening to our precious planet?

Or is it just so much more hot air, to add to an already too-hot summer?

This week I am teaching a class in media studies for middle schoolers.  While I’m amazed and delighted at the facility of the students with the technology of digital communications, I am also struck by the narrow focus of their concerns.

Three of the students have started blogs about fashion trends.  Another has started a blog about anime and manga characters.  Of the three others in the class, one is using her blog to do movie reviews, another is talking about hard science issues (the Higgs Boson discovery), and the third is writing about the stock market and the technological age we live in.

Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.

Except that if we don’t solve the climate crisis, it will all be completely moot.

Runway fashions, movie stars, cartoons and stocks will all be swept away before the onslaught of food insecurity, economic instability and violently unpredictable storms.

No, this is not the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.  It is real, and as McKibben points out in the intro to his Rolling Stone article, it’s already happening.

As a teacher, what am I supposed to do?  If I remind my students (and my own children, for that matter) just how grave and portentous a time we are living through, aren’t I placing an enormous burden on them?  And isn’t it true that it is my generation, not theirs, that bears the brunt of the responsibility for where we are now?

And yet, if I say nothing and let them proceed as if fashion and anime were the most compelling topics of the moment, am I not being dishonest?

It really is quite a dilemma, for any parent and every teacher who is aware of what is really at stake in the times we live in.

I imagine it must have been similar for principled people in other times of crisis.  Do we try to shelter the children, keep their lives as normal as possible, for as long as we can?  Or do we let them know what is going on, and enlist them in the urgent struggle for positive change?

I don’t believe in lying to young people, and I have never been very good at lying, anyway.

The truth is that we are living through times unlike any faced by human beings before, in the 10,000 years of our history on the planet.

What we do in the next decade will make the difference between our continued existence on the planet, or the extinction or radical reduction of human civilizations on Earth.

I love Bill McKibben because so far, at least, he never gives up.

He’s got a true fighting spirit that refuses to take no for an answer.

Still, eventually even Bill may have to concede that the fossil fuel industry, with the politicians in their back pockets, is simply not going to give.

When that moment occurs, it will be game over for human beings on the planet, and so many other of our fellow Holocene travelers too—birds, fish, plants, and mammals.

But it’s not over til it’s over.    And I, at least, will never give up hope that people of all ages, from every corner of the world, will see the crucial urgency of this moment; that they will act upon their new awareness;  that the politicians will be compelled to listen; and that we will be able to turn this great climate change juggernaut around.

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Environment, Politics, Resilience
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 19, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/07/19/what-do-we-tell-our-children/

Love in the end times

The political horserace in American politics has begun, with both Presidential candidates running full-tilt but ponderously towards each other like armored knights on horseback, wielding the lances of millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads and backed up by slick, smart campaign pages.

Meanwhile, it continues to be hot, hotter and unbearably hot here in the Northeast.  It was a blessing to wake up this morning to a brief soaking rain, breaking weeks of drought.

But there is no way to fool myself into hoping that things will go back to normal, weather-wise.

As many people have been saying lately, this is the new normal.

Just as we’ve gotten used to a political climate in which it’s normal for a Presidential candidate to hide his tax returns, refuse to comment on moving his millions into off-shore tax havens, and totally repudiate everything he once stood for in order to lick the shoes of his political bosses, we’re going to have to get used to a climate that lurches from one extreme to another–from blizzards to heat waves, from floods to droughts.

Those extremes also characterize the new economic normal.  These days, I’m having trouble convincing myself that the global economy that has been built up over my lifetime, since the end of World War II, is ever going to be able to function in such a way as to provide security and prosperity for the majority of the world’s people.

Maybe it never did.  There has always been a vast underclass of the disenfranchised, for whom globalization was just another name for displacement, oppression and exploitation.

The difference is that now we’re seeing a huge spike in the ranks of the poor right in the heart of what used to be called the First World—right in our backyards.

For a middle-class earner like me, it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet, and there are no substantial raises or bonuses in sight.

For the millions who are unemployed or under-employed or scraping by with under-the-table jobs in the informal economy, this new normal has got a distinctly  Dust Bowl feel to it.

Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala

The Occupy encampments have faded away, victims perhaps of effective police surveillance, infiltration and undermining.  The only Presidential candidate who has any new ideas to offer about improving the economy is the one we never see or hear on prime time, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, along with her running mate Cheri Honkala.

Most people aren’t saying much about the panic that runs like a live wire through their interior lives.

We are trying to enjoy this hot summer in the usual ways: going to the beach, having barbecues with friends and family, taking in a nice air-conditioned movie now and then.

But every once in a while a voice will break through our heat-addled stupor, crying to us to Wake up, wake up, before it’s too late!!

So, for example, we hear marine scientist Roger Bradbury shouting out from the Opinion Pages of the New York Times today, telling us to pay attention now, in these crucial last years before the planet’s entire coral reef ecosystem collapses, setting off a chain reaction of events that may very well include the starvation of millions of people, particularly in the tropics, who depend on the ocean for food.

Bleached coral

“Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion,” Bradbury says. “What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.”

Bradbury advocates “an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort” towards the “ecological engineering” necessary “to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need.”

Even though Bradbury aims to be pragmatic and forward-thinking with his wake-up call, I still wonder if he’s living in a dream world.

Governments and the United Nations can’t even agree on basic protocols to begin to cut carbon emissions and pump up our renewable energy industries.  They don’t appear to give a damn about the hundreds of millions of poor, hand-to-mouth folk who are already being hard hit by climate change pressures, and they are not even willing to act when it comes to trying to assure the safe passage of the elites into the Anthropocene, air conditioners and all.

What should we be doing in these end times?  Where should we be putting our energies?

Not in the political side show of the Presidential race.

Not in the mindless distractions of our media-saturated cultural environment.

No, I believe we need to do two things above all as the world warms and our precious days of “normal” existence come to a close.

One: stay close to friends and family; strengthen the bonds of community.  We will be needing each other more than ever in the times ahead.

Two: Try to stay in the present moment as much as possible.  We humans are very good at casting our minds forward into the future, but in this case, the scenarios are only going to be pushing our panic buttons.  It’s important to stay calm and focused.

Tend the parts of the earth you can reach.  Keep your love flowing.

37 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 14, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Environment, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 14, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/07/14/love-in-the-end-times/

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