Peak Food: Blaming the Victims

I've already written about this in previous posts under the 'hidden holocaust' theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it's been dealt with by mainstream media and associated 'experts'.

In today's Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of "global food shortages", a new "government-backed report" shows that "the British public" annually throws away "4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded" -- adding up to "a record £10b" every year.

And that's just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word "overconsumption" seem like a gross understatement.

But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I'm increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: "... millions of the world's poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines."

So the food crisis comes down to three things:

1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)

2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can't do much about)

3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.

Indeed, according to the British government's new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:


"price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. 'The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.'"


So again, population and economic growth in the 'developing nations', plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we'll come back to that). It's Them again -- too many of Them, wanting More.

As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:


"Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world's population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years' time. 'How are we going to feed everybody?' he asked."


Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t'ya folks, but 'feeding everybody' has never really been one of the state's major concerns. That's why "Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)", thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers.

But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it's clear that the cause of the problem is "their" population growth.

Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: "I am only nine weeks into the job, so don't yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical."

According to Beddington, food security is the "elephant in the room" that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the "elephant in the room" goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington's observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, "science and research" in order to maximise "efficiency" so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.

From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing 'market incentives' (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.

Obviously, none of these 'solutions' seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis -- and that's because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It's not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what's actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It's the developing nations, who just won't stop breeding, dammit. It's us Western consumers, who won't stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It's everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.

Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:


"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year... An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government's waste-reduction programme as 'unambitious and lacking urgency'. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report's publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was 'ludicrous' that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary 'solutions to food waste' in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. 'The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,' said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that 'too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable', said Wrap should adopt a 'more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste'...

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price."


So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government's waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don't need, a third of which they dump in turn.

Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period. Don't penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.

The corporate-biased law doesn't help either, because: "The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality." In other words, we don't even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing -- here's an example: "In the past 10 months, the government's food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices."

So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry.

Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.

Most of the Earth's fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that "there is now little room for further agricultural expansion." One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: "The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?" Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food?

It's not that the Earth can't produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can't produce the food. In fact, as I've warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits.

For us to keep eating, it's true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That's why real solutions aren't being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it's not so bad...

Brian Haw Allegedly Assaulted by Police at Parliament Square

Received this from Brian Haw's Facebook pals few days ago. Sorry for late post, but worth noting:

On 6th May at around 1.30pm, a community support officer started hassling Aqil Shaerer who is a Palestinian protestor associated with Brian Haw and often around Parliament Square. It is unclear what grounds they had for this. Brian became involved and explained to them that Aqil was part of his authorised demonstration. Two more Pcso officers became involved, but then they all left.

A short while later a police van arrived and they immediately homed in on Brian, claiming that he was harassing them. Before anyone realised what was happening, one of the youngest of the cops kicked Brian’s legs from under him, wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him behind his back.

In years of dealings with the police, Brian has never ever been violent towards them, although he has suffered at their hands on many occasions, including a very violent and pre-meditated attack by a TSG officer, U1019, on the 12th January this year. Rear handcuffing is normally reserved for violent offenders, or is sometimes used where police have no knowledge of the person arrested and cannot guarantee their safety. Of course, neither situation relates to Brian haw. Brian was manhandled into the police van, and the police waved jauntily at protestors as they drove him away to Belgravia police station.

At first the custody officers told supporters Brian was being held for 'disorderly conduct' but when his solicitor, Maggie Peters from Bindmans, became involved, they said he was being held for a section 5 public order offence. They allege that he had shouted at a passing vehicle "get a job you fat bastard". This seems quite unlikely, and the only witness the police appear to be relying on is one of their own policemen.

They admit the passer-by has not made any complaint. Section 5 is not an imprisonable offence and can in fact be dealt with by a fixed penalty notice. Despite this, police have now held Brian for more than four hours.

There seems to be a sinister pattern emerging. Recently, the parliament square protestors have launched legal challenges against the police and courts, and these have taken the form of lodging judicial reviews at the high court, and adding "addendums" as new events occur. Each time something is lodged, within a matter of days, the police target one of the protestors at the square, violently arrest them and then hold them for a disproportionate time. Just this Friday Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker lodged a new addendum to their judicial review at the high court, detailing recent legal travesties for judicial consideration.

--

Yet another shining example of the state's ongoing war on our freedoms.

What London's In For: A New Mayor and a Newish Fascism

Racism is insidious. It has a new face. The face of Anti-Racism.

Years ago, recognising the importance of Political Correctness and exploiting the anxiety generated by 9/11, the fascist BNP cunningly reinvented itself as entirely Non-Racist. In doing so, it focused its efforts less on the idea of carting off black communities and ethnic minorities “back home”, than on the supposedly rapidly inter-breeding alien Muslim communities invading “our country.”

Increasingly, these ideas have crept into the mainstream political spectrum. Although the failings and inadequacies of the British, European and global political economy are rooted in its structural inequalities, immigration takes the blame for the problem of unemployment. Although al-Qaeda terrorism is a marginal phenomenon relative to the global Muslim community, covertly financed even now by Britain’s own diplomatic and financial allies in the Middle East and Central Asia (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), Muslim communities are increasingly criminalised wholesale as inherently backward, anti-modern, and excited by medieval anti-female violence. Thus, multiculturalism is recognised as a huge mistake. Difference should never have been tolerated – it needs now to be concertedly dissolved into a homogenous culture, the norms and values of which are defined by an implicit ideology of ‘blood and soil’ – ‘we are the white indigenous population, our skin evidencing our purity of bloodline, our pristine ancestry, tied to our native soil; and thus you aliens coming into our land need to conform to our ways.’

Suddenly, there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, irreconcilable, except by the latter’s absorption into the ‘us’. Cultures are viewed as discrete entities tied to biologically distinctive racial groups. Racism, and racial war fought as a clash of civilisations, is viewed as a natural, inevitable dynamic of the neo-Darwinian human condition – regrettable, perhaps marginally tameable, but nevertheless entirely natural, and thus understandable. The real signifier, then, of difference is no longer biology as such, but culture. Cultural difference implies bio-territorial incompability.

Social cohesion, then, can only be achieved through a process of purification. Cleansing the soil of alien additives by converting them into ‘good citizens’ who are no longer culturally different.

This is a new form of fascism, different from the old, blatant, Nazified manifestation, primarily due to its recognition that it cannot allow its face to be seen. While denouncing the piece of cloth a Muslim woman might wear on her head (yet strangely uninterested by the pieces of cloth sometimes worn by Jews and Sikhs), it hides beneath its own veil, the veil of ‘freedom’. It hides so well that it no longer even recognises its own reflection:

‘We want you to be free. Free to conform to our ways. For we are Modern, the New.’

Freedom is now defined not by the individuals right to be as they wish to be. It is defined by a bio-territorial mass, dissent against which is viewed as a dangerous form of subversion, a national security threat, justifying further sanctions against freedom, ridicule, humiliation, incarceration, until the source of subversion submits.

Boris Johnson is here to stay.

And here’s some of what he’s already had to say.

Of course, he denies that he is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic. And he may well even believe this, genuinely.

But the new racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia is defined fundamentally by its new chameleon visage, its extraordinary ability to shape-shift at any moment and appear as its exact opposite. Here we have instances of Boris being an anti-colonialist, an anti-racist, and an anti-terrorist. Yet it is in these very instances that he reveals himself for what he is.

“What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say [Tony Blair] is shortly off to the Congo . No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.” [Telegraph (10/01/2002)]

“Like much of western Europe, Britain faces a demographic quandary. In the words of a recent UN interview the populations of EU countries are ‘melting like snow in the sun’… No one knows whether this is caused by the fecklessness of the modern British male, or by women’s liberation; or whether it is because divorce has become too easy.” [Boris Johnson, Lend Me Your Ears (London: HarperPerrenial, June 2004) p. 395]

So is Boris worried about the White Race, the increasing ability of Browns and Blacks to reproduce themselves and perhaps outnumber Us?

“When I shamble round the park in my running gear late at night, and I come across that bunch of black kids, shrieking in the spooky corner by the disused gents, I would love to pretend that I don't turn a hair. Now you might tell me not to be such a wuss. You might say that I am at no more risk than if I had come across a bunch of winos. But somehow or other a little beeper goes off in my brain… You might tell me that when they shout their cheery catcalls, I should smile and wave. And, you know, maybe a big girl’s blouse like me would break into an equally rapid lollop if it were a gang of white kids. Quite possibly. The trouble is, I'm not sure. I cannot rule out that I have suffered from a tiny fit of prejudice. I have prejudged this group on the basis of press reports, possibly in right-wing newspapers, about the greater likelihood of being mugged by young black males than by any other group. And if that is racial prejudice, then I am guilty. And so are you, baby. So are we all. If there is anyone reading this who has never experienced the same disgraceful reflex, then - well, I just don't believe you. It is common ground among both right-wingers and left-wingers that racism is ‘natural’, in that it seems to arise organically, in all civilisations. It is as natural as sewage. We all agree that it is disgusting, a byproduct of humanity’s imperfect evolution. The question is, what to do with the effluent?” [Guardian (21/02/2000)]

Well thanks for the admission, but Boris, you're not absolving yourself by insinuating that everyone feels the same way you do, nor that how you feel is actually an unfortunate byproduct of 'nature'.

“... too many Britons have absolutely no sense of allegiance to this country or its institutions. It is a cultural calamity that will take decades to reverse, and we must begin now with what I call in this morning's Spectator the re-Britannification of Britain. That means insisting, in a way that is cheery and polite, on certain values that we identify as British. If that means the end of spouting hate in mosques, and treating women as second-class citizens, then so be it. We need to acculturate the second-generation Muslim communities to our way of life.” [Telegraph (14/06/2005)]

I’m a second generation Muslim. Come and acculturate me. Please. I had no idea that my kind spouts hate in mosques (yes, the Finsbury Park mosque is not "all mosques") or that we treat our wives, daughters, mother, sisters and generally any females we meet as second-class citizens. I'll ignore for now that marginalising a woman for wearing a cloth on her head puts her in second-class. I’d really like to understand what you mean Boris, whether, indeed, there is any meaning at all behind this notion, and any real research or understanding behind it. How many mosques have you visited Boris? Or are you still believing that fraudulent nonsense put out by the right-wingers at Policy Exchange exposed by the lefty liberals on BBC Newsnight? You say we should identify our British values. I agree. But can we try to get beyond the banal tautology that British values mean fighting those barbaric second-generation Muslims who hate our values?

“We’ve all got to be as British as Carry On films and scotch eggs and falling over on the beach while trying to change into your swimming trunks with a towel on. We should all feel the same mysterious pang at the sight of the Queen. We do indeed need to inculcate this Britishness, especially into young Muslims.... We should teach British history. We should think again about the jilbab, with the signals of apartness that it sends out, and we should probably scrap faith schools. We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English; because if you want to build a society where everyone feels included, and where everyone shares in the national story, we cannot continue with the multicultural apartheid.” [Telegraph (04/08/2005)]

Right. So if I’m not entirely impressed by the Carry On films, don’t eat pork, have a conception of modesty than doesn’t involve running naked on the beach, wonder what the big deal is about a monarchy that swallows taxpayer’s money due to dubious historical reasons, then I’m bordering on typically Islamist treason? I guess I’m just not sharing in “the national story” – or maybe the Etonian Boris version of it.

But perhaps it's too much to expect an educated Etonian to understand what really lies behind social exclusion, the segregation and marginalisation of both white and non-white communities in this country, the structural violence, institutional racism and class inequality that hits at the majority of the British people, Muslim and non-Muslim. Far easier to focus on the bogeyman of "multicultural apartheid", get Us to hate Them, so that the system itself can avoid uncomfortable scrutiny.

I’m sure an eager Boris fan will find many ways of interpreting such statements in the most angelically benign fashion possible. Thank our lucky stars we’ve got the BNP to remind us! For the BNP, Boris should be brought in as their preferred second candidate, because “a second choice vote for him gives you the chance to vote BNP as your first preference and still vote to get Livingstone out of office”. Boris Johnson as Mayor would “be an improvement for the majority of Londoners.” Oh yes, the majority of Londoners. You mean, "the White Race majority", don't you, my dear friendly fascists?

Boris clearly feels more comfortable airing his rather filthy laundry when it concerns Muslims, who aren’t recognised as an ethnic minority and thus receive less protection than other ethnic minorities. Thus, Boris feels on firmer ground, more confident, when dealing with us subversive brown folks with our medieval beards and scarves, psychotic penchant for honour killing, and rampant obsession with imposing Shariah Law-defined Caliphate dynasties on England, by which to generally repress, murder and subjugate. No need for him to mince words. He jumps right in to mincing Muslims.

“To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture – to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques – it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victims mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim. The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?”
[Spectator (16/07/2005)]

If you really feel like getting "18th century" on someone's ass, try your own, Boris, but please, I beg you, stay the hell away from mine.

And from the same piece: “The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.”

“The proposed ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’ makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself.... Militant Islam has been shielded from proper discussion by cowardice, political correctness and a racist assumption that we should privilege the beliefs of a minority, even when they appear to be mediaeval." [Telegraph (21/07/2005)]

So Islam is the problem, the "Koran" should be banned, and the Muslim minority's beliefs are "mediaeval."

So let’s fast forward to the present. What are you telling voters now, Boris? Islam is a "religion of peace". Militants take stuff “out of context.” We don’t need to ban the “Koran”. It’s not the whole Muslim minority community who believe this dastardly evil stuff supporting terrorism. Hmm. Somewhat off-key from your previous statements, Boris. So here we have a case of lying as part of your political campaign. Shouldn’t this be illegal in a democracy? No, I guess, not when democracy is already half-dead. Rather like Boris' pathetic Etonian excuse for a brain.

Boris Johnson’s coming victory is a significant blow to our weakened democratic institutions in this country, and proves that those who wish to protect human and civil rights need to revitalise, somehow, their traditional defunct strategies. Those strategies are failing precisely because they issue forth from a serious failure to understand the interconnected systemic dynamic of the intensifying social, political, economic and ideological crises our societies are facing. We don’t understand the insidious nature of the new racism. We don’t even recognise it as racist. In fact, some of us think it’s a wonderful step toward what Boris calls “re-Britannification” - the first time I’ve seen a term used regularly by Hitler and Himmler (the idea of “Germanisation”) appropriated and re-applied in a modern European context.

This is a wake up to civil society, that it needs to re-think its modus operandi and in particular its entire sociological vision. Unless we do so, and fast, the post-Boris era will be even worse than the one round the corner.

Boris Will Win

This is a ballpark prediction. I hope, deeply, that I'm wrong. We'll find out soon enough.

Why've I thrown this prediction out there in this way?

Because the outcome of Mayoral elections will tell us a great deal about the political direction of this country.

I predict that Boris will win on the basis of a number of observations. Boris represents the legitimisation of the politics of the Far Right in the mainstream political party system. His position is quite clear, and is becoming increasingly accepted as fact by mainstream political parties across the spectrum: immigration, asylum is now a serious problem that is undercutting British jobs and damaging the economy; Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community inherently tend to incite violence and terrorism; alienation and segregation of ethnic minorities from wider society is a symptom of an outmoded ideology of multiculturalism, which is weakening social cohesion and undermining national security.

These ideas are no longer simply the province of the BNP. The wholesale problematisation of the "Other" in Britain has now become a mantra voiced with varying conviction and persuasiveness by all the mainstream political parties, each offering their own differing levels of criticism and corresponding policy solutions.

Boris will win because the City (i.e. the UK's financial community) is backing him. In turn and in tandem with them, Boris is being backed by the corporate media. Headlines in the dailies, including front-page ones, for the past months have frequently focused on Red Ken's flaws: stories about extremists and terrorists amongst his campaigners and advisers; financial scandals at the heart of his administration.

Boris, whose racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic track record, as well his utter political illiteracy and buffoonery, has received marginal coverage in comparison. Never once on the front-page, perhaps a few back stories, more likely, the odd pieces in the 'comment' sections of perhaps the Guardian and a few other more liberal outlets. Why is Boris being coddled, while Ken kicked, by the corporate media?

Because the political climate has shifted. Boris, with all his hateful, xenophobic baggage, has solicited the backing of powerful special interests who, having a very strong financial base, are prime political donors. The politics of the Far Right now finds pseudo-academic and mainstream support from the House of Commons, and even from recent investigative television documentaries. New Labour, furthermore, is in its death throes, having lost credibility not only with the powerful corporate lobbies which dominate our politico-economic landscape, but also with the wider public, repeatedly submerged in scandal after scandal. It is time for regime-rotation.

In will swing the Tories, though with nothing particularly new. Blair, admirable only for his ability to lie flagrantly while maintaining his trademark fixated cheshire grin, followed by the notoriously unelected and agonisingly uncharismatic Brown, have already together succeeded in pushing New Labour's domestic and foreign policy programmes further to the Right than Thatcher could have imagined in her wildest, wettest dreams. The Tories are now rightfully reclaiming the still-born heritage they had hatched more than 20 years ago, albeit renewed and revitalised in all its bloody, radicalised glory. A sign of how bad things are is the BNP's (qualified) endorsement of Boris as Mayoral candidate -- the first time that the fascists have actually come out in the open and found a mainstream political party candidate acceptable.

Why this sea-change in the political wind? It's a common thing, actually, historically. In times of social crisis and anxiety, the politics of 'Otherization' frequently becomes a strategy of political consolidation, and emotional consolation. It's always easy to find Others to blame. They steal our jobs, our bread, our women. Kill us and attack us all the time. They're so different from us. They hate us. Don't want to know us, or be like us. Can't speak our language. Want to change us. Control us. Enslave us. When the economy is teetering on the edge of the abyss (yes, it is an abyss), the climate is spiralling out of control (far faster than the IPCC would have us believe), peak oil well passed (the age of energy scarcity is here), food prices rocketing (yes, food production peaked about a decade ago and now we're feeling it [well imagine how they feel in the South?]), when systemic crises are converging but those who benefit from the system aren't willing to change it, then the avalanche of anxiety thus generated needs an outlet, a deflection point: the Other.

In other words, if Boris wins, it is an omen of things to come. It would mean that the problematisation of the 'Other' has become entrenched in popular consciousness in the heart of London, often viewed as one of the world's richest multicultural societies. It would mean that ethnic minority and Muslim voting blocs, despite having turned out in force, had been rendered obsolete. It would vindicate the extraordinary power of the military-corporate complex and its UK extension in the form of the City, to influence popular thinking through its structural influence over the mass media -- which is why Boris has been ahead in the polls this week.

Not only will Boris win, comfortably, his unlikely comrades in the BNP will come out with far more votes than hitherto expected. This will be treated as a surprise by mainstream media, if even acknowledged.

I hope that I'm wrong. But if Boris loses, he will lose by a margin. That he's gotten this far already, half-backed by the BNP, is a bad enough indication of the political climate in this country.

Maybe, by a long shot, he'll lose badly. Maybe I'm so wrong, it's almost hilarious. I really hope so. If this is the case, it means that my pessimism is unjustified, that the politics of the Far Right hasn't quite become as entrenched as I'd thought, that corporate and other special interests have been less successful than I'd anticipated in influencing public opinion in the favour of their favoured candidate.

This would be a good sign, a sign that people are still thinking, and not so easily susceptible to the fear-mongers.

But I still think I'm right.

Well, we'll find out soon enough...

The Crisis of Perception

The Fragmentation of Health

According to Dr Deepak Chopra, a physician and philosopher of holistic health, the global crises we now face are evidence of a more deeply rooted crisis of perception. A former chief-of-staff at Boston Regional Medical Center specialising in endocrinology, in his mid-30s Chopra smoked excessively and drank too much coffee and alcohol to cope with the stresses of being a doctor. But a turning point came when he began to learn about transcendental meditation, which helped him to quit smoking and drinking. “So I decided to give up my endrocinology practice to focus on holistic health. I think it was just the fact that there is a lot of frustration when all you do is prescribe medication, you start to feel like a legalized drug pusher. That doesn’t mean that all prescriptions are useless, but it is true that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit.”

Chopra argues that for hundreds of years, science mistakenly set in stone distinctions between the biological organism and the environment which don’t really exist. “We are not ‘biological organisms contained in an environment’, that’s a fundamental misperception,” he points out. “The biological organism, whether it’s a sentient human being, or a sentient mosquito, a sentient bacterium, is not separate from the environment. Both the biological organism and what we call the environment are differentiated patterns of behaviour of a single reality, whether you call that reality ‘Gaia’, or ‘Planet Earth’, or even if you wish, the ‘sentient universe’.” Ok, I’m thinking, if that’s the case then what does this shift in perception imply in terms of action? “So you don’t look at that tree and say, ‘oh that tree’s the environment’, that tree’s your lungs, if it didn’t breathe, you wouldn’t breathe”, explained Chopra. “The Earth is your body. The rivers and waters of our planet are your circulation, if you pollute them, you pollute your circulation. The air is your breath. We need to start thinking of the world as our universal body. Because our survival as human beings is equally dependent on our personal bodies, as well as our universal body.”

Now this was a surprisingly refreshing way of thinking that hadn’t occurred to me before – and it seemed to tie in with the diverse calls from psychologists, philosophers and economists for a fundamental shift in our values. What excites me about Chopra is his groundbreaking suggestion that such a shift in values was not simply a case of social convenience, of what works best; but that it might actually reflect the reality of our embeddedness in nature. Intriguingly, although Chopra has faced hostility from the medical establishment in the United States for his views, his consistent work to expand the boundaries of traditional medicine led to the peer-reviewed Journal of American Medicine doing a special issue dedicated to alternative medicine in November 1998. Since then, holistic conceptions of health care have increasingly been researched and recognized. For several years now, Oxford University Press has published a quarterly international peer-reviewed journal, Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM). Dr. Edwin L. Cooper, who is founder and chief-editor of the journal, is also a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Neurobiology at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he heads up UCLA’s Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine. Dr Cooper remarks that the impact of cancer “reaches beyond the physical disease. It shapes a patient’s thoughts and emotions. Increasingly, physicians are recognizing that treating cancer often means more than just aggressively attacking the malignancy. It means considering the whole person—mind, body and soul—and adding complementary approaches that increase health and well-being, reduce stress, boost tolerance of conventional treatments, improve quality of life and help people to live as fully as possible.”

The new UCLA research programme in holistic health is host to the Center for East-West Medicine, housed in UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. The Center, which receives 13,000 patients a year, is working to develop “a model system of comprehensive care with emphasis on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation through the integrated practice of East-West medicine.” These developments in health and medicine back-up Chopra’s arguments by revealing that the fragmentation and separation at the heart of our normal way of making sense of the world are reflections of a fundamental crisis of perception, a mistaken way of understanding human nature and its relationship to Nature. Chopra is pointing to an inherent interconnectedness, not only between mind and body, but also between the organism and its environment.

The Interconnected Cosmos

This recognition of interconnectedness in the health sciences is paralleled by new breakthroughs in other sciences, particularly in physics, which suggest that old, mechanistic conceptions of nature and the world are relics of an outdated worldview that no longer fits what’s happening at subatomic levels, beneath the surface of everyday life. At first, I was rather sceptical of the relevance, to questions about social change and global crisis, of a field as seemingly obscure and technical as quantum mechanics. But my bemusement quickly turned to fascination, and then conviction, after discovering one of the pioneers of this revolutionary perspective, Dr. Fritjof Capra, a physicist who teaches and researches theoretical high-energy physics at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. Capra has written widely on the philosophical implications of modern science, and his first book, The Tao of Physics, argued controversially that Western science was now confirming the same fundamental propositions about reality found in Eastern mysticism. When Capra first started work on the manuscript in the 1972, he was spurred on by the realisation that two of his colleagues, both senior physicists who had made paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in the field, agreed with his views. “I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then, and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter.” The “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”, which refers to the impossibility of simultaneously measuring the position and momentum of a subatomic particle, was named after Werner Heisenberg, credited as the founder of the new quantum mechanics.

“He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum mechanisms, had a similar experience when he went to China.”

In a follow-up book, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture, Capra went on to apply his philosophical explorations of the new physics to developments in other areas of science, coming to the conclusion that the crises currently afflicting industrial civilization are rooted in scientific beliefs which are now outmoded on the basis of new data and theories across the physical sciences. He later went on to found the Center for Eco-Literacy in Berkeley, a think-tank addressing the social and ecological implications of new developments across the physical sciences.

“What quantum physics has brought, indisputably, is a dissolution of the notion of hard and solid objects, and also a dissolution of the notion that there are fundamental building blocks of matter. When you study the smallest pieces of matter that we know, the subatomic particles, you find that you can only talk about probabilities. That's very well known. Since quantum mechanics we know that all these laws and regularities can only be formulated in terms of probabilities. But then you ask, what are these probabilities of? And you find they are probabilities of making a certain measurement, of these large-scale instruments interacting in a certain way. So whatever you say about the smallest pieces comes back to the large pieces -- can be expressed only in probabilities, in terms of the large pieces. It’s sort of a circular situation. In other words, everything is interconnected, interconnected in such a way that the properties of the smallest pieces depend on the properties of the whole.”

In words that sound uncannily similar to those of health-practitioner Deepak Chopra, Capra argued that “whereas before we believed that the dynamics of the whole can be explained in principle by breaking it down, and from the properties of the parts, now we see that the properties of the parts can only be defined in terms of the dynamics of the whole. So it’s a complete reversal. And that’s become one of the most fundamental scientific insights of our century. In fact, if you go even further and ask, ‘Well what are these parts?’ then you will find that there are no parts, that whatever we call a part is a pattern in an ongoing process.”

Capra believes that this insight, or rather the lack or it, lies at the core of global crises, which as we have argued here are all interconnected as manifestations of a defunct global system. For Capra, the interconnection of these crises is further evidence of a dysfunctional perspective of life underlying that system. “These systemic problems, all interlinked, are in fact reflections of the limitations of an outdated world view.” Given that all our social institutions -- the large corporations, the large academic institutions, the large political institutions -- all subscribe to this outdated worldview, it’s therefore not surprising that they are not able to solve the major problems that we have. “The old system shows us such a spectacular failure that the experts in various fields don’t understand their fields of expertise any longer”, Capra argues. “Researchers, for instance investigating cancer, don’t have a clue, in spite of spending millions of dollars, of the origins of cancer. The police are powerless in face of a rising wave of crime. The politicians or economists don’t know how to manage the economic problems. The doctors and hospitals don’t know how to manage the health problems and health costs. So everywhere it’s the very people who are supposed to be the experts in their fields who don’t have answers any longer, and they don’t have answers because they have a narrow view. They don’t see the whole problem.”

But a shift of perspective, of worldview and values, can only be meaningful if it incorporates a shift in our actual modes of social behaviour and organization, in politics, economics and energy. Such a transformation not only needs to be grounded in a more accurate understanding of nature and our relationship to it, but that understanding itself, if authentic, ought to imply certain key changes in our lives. The extent of the change required is, indeed, radical. But for perhaps the first time, the necessity of such change can be justified not merely by moral euphemisms, but by reality itself.

A Quantum Model of Social Harmony

Another physicist, Danah Zohar who graduated from MIT and Harvard, has followed the implications of Capra’s work on the philosophical implications of quantum physics in the realm of sociology, and even further into real-life problems of business management. Described by the Financial Times as “one of the world’s greatest management thinkers”, Zohar, who currently lectures at the Said Business School at Oxford University, in her book The Quantum Society fashions a concrete eightfold guideline for how social reality ought to be mobilized on the basis of the insights of quantum physics. The new social reality:

1) Must be holistic -- where it is recognized changes in any part will in some way affect another part.

2) Must transcend the individual/collective dichotomy -- where individualism and community goals merge.

3) Must be plural -- where we accept that “all meanings are true”, for the person who holds the meanings, and in that spirit attempt to truly not only “tolerate” other cultures, but to embrace and learn from them.

4) Must be responsive -- where society becomes a living machine “designed to cope with ambiguity and creative challenge”.

5) Must be bottom-up or emergent -- where front-line citizens make the decisions not top-level bureaucrats.

6) Must be ecological -- where humans are recognized as part of nature and treat nature as part of themselves.

7) Must be spiritual -- where we seek spiritual answers to basic questions of life and society.

8) Must be in dialogue with science -- where we replace the outmoded Newtonian mechanics billiard ball model of social interaction with the newer holistic all-at-once quantum mechanics understanding.

The last item, the dialogue with science, is the major theme of Zohar’s work, fundamentally because the new science is telling us surprising things about the world in which we live, that have direct implications for how we should live. “If we are to rediscover the moral and spiritual roots of our society”, she writes, “we must do so in a way which mirrors, which extends and develops rather than contradicts, the knowledge that science is giving us about the nature of the physical and living worlds of which we are a part.”

Evolution and Revolution

But all this needs to be translated into a specific programme of action. How do we start to shift our societies in such a new direction? The modes of behaviour that govern the global system, that underpin the conflictual and destructive nature of the international political economy, belong ultimately to what philosopher John McMurtry calls the tendency of “money self-maximization”, itself both rooted in and fuelling a culture of consumerism that defines human gratification by measures of material consumption. But we’ve seen that behind this tendency, this “infection of affluenza” as psychologist Oliver James put it, is a deeper problem of perception, a reductionistic worldview that views life and nature in competitive, mechanistic, materialistic terms in which organisms are pitted against one another in a hostile world. But this underlying way of looking at the world has been increasingly discredited, firstly because it is precisely this reductionistic and fragmentary worldview that is linked directly to the escalation of global crises; and secondly, because the new science increasingly confirms the accuracy of a more holistic and interconnected understanding of life and nature.

“It’s all to do with evolution”, observed John Peterson as we sat in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in London late last year. Peterson, founding director of the Arlington Institute in Washington DC, had agreed to meet with me during his visit to the UK to discuss their work on global crises. The Institute, set up in 1989, specialises in assessing global trends to make strategic forecasts about the future. “Humanity is on the verge of a precipice. All the trends in energy depletion, global warming and the markets show that we have very little time left. Either we’ll all just drop off the edge of that precipice, a precipice created by our own activities, or we’ll evolve into something that can take flight.” Peterson is not just a run-of-the-mill academic. In fact, ironically, he has a very conservative background. His government and political experience includes stints at the National War College, the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff at the White House. After founding the Arlington Institute in 1989, he focused his efforts on futurism -- developing new concepts, processes and tools for anticipating the future and translating that knowledge into better present-day decisions.

In Peterson’s view, if we take evolutionary theory seriously, if we take our science seriously, then we have no choice but to understand our current global condition in the context of our fate as a species. Right now, we are on the path to total self-destruction. What does this mean? It means that we are failing to adapt, in other words, our modes of existence are not in accord with our natural environment. So what can we do about it. Are we doomed to extinction? Are we actually talking seriously about the imminent demise of the human race?

Species that fail to adapt to the conditions of nature cannot survive. If we’re failing to adapt, and the evidence before our eyes -- the climate change, the economic crisis, the draining of natural resources – proves clearly that we’re failing to adapt, then this means that there’s something seriously wrong with our understanding of nature, and our fundamental modes of existence as a species. If we want to survive, then the theory of evolution needs to become more than a theory; it’s staring us point-blank in the face: We have to evolve.

For Peterson, maybe this is not just doom and gloom. As the only species that has ever been conscious of itself as a species, and therefore conscious of the possibility of extinction, if there is any species that might be able to save itself, it is us. “Humanity may well be at death’s door, but we are simultaneously facing an unprecedented opportunity to become something new, real, and perhaps even beautiful. Maybe this is nature’s way of letting us know it’s time for change? I’m not sure what that new human being might look like, but it will clearly have to involve a new set of ideas and values, a new way of looking at the world that respects life and nature, and a whole new way of life to go along with it.”

For the first time in human history, the imperative to move toward a social order based truly on popular participation, social justice as well as both material and spiritual well-being is not just a matter of choice; but a matter of the survival of the species.

So where do we start? If we’re talking about a programme of action, then such a programme can only begin at the source: our social relationship to nature. As communities, societies and nations, we relate to nature not simply through our ideas and perceptions of the world, but more pertinently in how those ideas and perceptions play out in the way we inhabit and make use of our environment. In other words, we need to ask, how does our understanding of nature link to the way we exploit nature? I use the term “exploit” here quite neutrally to simply mean how we extract materials and energy from the natural world in order to drive and develop our societies. Because underlying all our economic growth, industrial and informational technologies, and everyday commuter-consumer lifestyles is the point-blank fact of energy. The kinds of energy we depend on, and the manner in which we extract, distribute and utilize that energy, constitutes the life-blood of the financial circuits of exchange that are the substance of our economies.

We’ve already seen the extent to which our dependence on hydrocarbon energies, and our continuing neglect of viable renewable forms of energy and associated technologies, is self-defeating. Both global warming and peak oil are tied indelibly to our energy dependence. With all the data showing that both of these crises are set to spiral out of control within the next few decades, it’s clear that we need to go cold turkey on our oil addiction. The question, of course, is how do we do it? What are the alternative energy sources, and are they viable? And how would a post-carbon society look and function, politically and economically?

Capitalism, Consumerism and Materialism: The Value Crisis

The Continuum of Crisis

The global economic, ecological and energy crises we face – as well as associated crises (terrorism, conflict, and so on) -- are not separate but fundamentally interlinked:
at the source of our ills is an excessive exploitation of hydrocarbon resources that is tied to the escalation of CO2 emissions with no recognition of limits or boundaries, fuelling global warming and the acceleration of climate change, devastating eco-systems, facilitating the deaths of millions of people and the extinction of thousands of species.

The logic of “growth” is simultaneously driving us to deplete hydrocarbon and other natural resources at unprecedented, and unsustainable, rates – such that oil and gas are for all intents and purposes running dry. Both climate change and energy crises are impacting on our ability to sustain global food production. Water shortages and hotter weather are destroying the viability of agriculture, while portended fuel shortages are set to undermine the continuity of agribusiness which is heavily dependent on oil and gas. The increasing inability of food production to meet consumer demand is also linked to the destructive “growth”-driven technologies of a hierarchical agribusiness industry monopolized by short-sighted corporate conglomerates, within a skewered international system of food distribution that marginalizes two-thirds of the world population.

Finally, the world economy on its own terms is on the verge of self-imploding. Geared to serve the interests of corporate profit maximization, the world economy systematically generates widening inequalities that result not only in the deprivation of the majority of the world’s population, but death-by-deprivation on an increasing scale. But in doing so, the economic system ignores its own internal contradictions, even while leading financial analysts from within the IMF to Morgan Stanley are now warning of an imminent global economic meltdown.

So we are nearing critical points simultaneously on four fronts – the climate, our energy dependence, our economy, and even our food supply. The scale of these crises has been sorely underestimated by officials, and even some experts, because their cumulative impact is not properly understood. Western experts tend to look at these crises as separate processes, and thus to offer separate analyses and solutions. The problem is that these crises are not separate at all – they are fundamentally tied into the way the global political economic system functions, and as they accelerate they are, and will, feed into and exacerbate one another.

The worst thing is, amidst the chorus of condemnation suddenly coming from Western governments themselves about the catastrophic dangers and costs of climate change, there has been a gigantic obfuscation of the true extent, scale and impact not only of climate change, but of its intimate interrelationship with other global crises.

The Matrix: Dysfunction and Disorder

The “Matrix of Control”, made up of special interests linked largely to powerful financial actors, through its dominance-by-donations of the political party system, is able to influence the agendas of our mainstream political parties on issues we really care about like education, health, social welfare, and so on. Corporate imperatives mean that the government is pressured by its key donors to rollback all sorts of social spending, privatize public services, and open up society to the rampaging whirlwind of corporate financial speculation: Profit over people.

The rollback of social welfare has undermined standards of living and well-being while escalating social tensions and crime, across the West. Simultaneously, the prevalence of consumer culture that is also promulgated by the corporate-owned, advertising-driven mass media has led to dangerous, skewered lifestyle choices. Although consumer goods and services are often sold on the premise that they make life easier and more fulfilling, hidden costs lie beneath the surface.

Take a dream home in the suburbs. A study of more than 200,000 people in 448 US counties found that those living in low-density suburban communities weighed 6 pounds more on average than those living in densely populated areas. Suburbanites were also found to be as likely as cigarette smokers to have high blood pressure. Fast food or highly processed food is typically marketed as saving time and money. Yet, in the US, an estimated 65 percent of adults are overweight or obese, leading to an annual loss of 300,000 lives and to at least $117 billion in health care costs in 1999.

Here in Britain, we now know that the majority of British citizens will be obese at current trends within twenty years; and not even the state-backed media hype around Jamie Oliver’s food revolution seems to be working. We’ve also just heard about how alcohol consumption is at “dangerous” levels among the more affluent middle-class. Those are just two simple examples.

But things look grim from a deeper perspective, the question of well-being. Does money make you happy? Findings from the World Values Survey, an assessment of “life satisfaction” in more than 65 countries conducted between 1990 and 2000, indicate that income and happiness tend to track well until about $13,000 of annual income per person. After that, additional income appears to yield rather modest additions in self-reported happiness, to put it mildly. Although most governments make ongoing growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) a leading priority, under the assumption that wealth delivers well-being, the truth is that undue emphasis on generating wealth -- particularly by encouraging heavy consumption -- is hardly working. Overall quality of life is suffering in some of the world’s richest countries as people experience greater stress and time pressures, along with less satisfying social relationships.

Based on World Health Organization data, British psychologist Oliver James showed that English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer from mental illness as mainland European ones over a twelve month period. Deeper analysis exposes a direct link between mental illness and social inequalities generated in the context of neo-liberal capitalism, “which largely explains the greater prevalence among English-speaking nations”, according to James. “By this I mean a form of political economy that has four core characteristics: judging a business’s success almost exclusively by share price; privatisation of public utilities; minimal regulation of business, suppression of unions and very low taxation for the rich, resulting in massive economic inequality; the ideology that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost every kind.”

James encapsulates this specific tendency to generate mental illness linked to neo-liberal capitalism using the metaphor of a virus, which, he says, is actually a kind of disease: affluenza. “Selfish capitalism causes mental illness by spawning materialism, or, as I put it, the affluenza virus - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (social and physical) and fame. English-speaking nations are more infected with the virus than mainland western European ones. Studies in many nations prove that people who strongly subscribe to virus values are at significantly greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. Follow the logic? Selfish capitalism infects populations with affluenza; it fosters mental illness; English-speaking nations are more selfish capitalist - ergo, more prone to illness.” So what’s the bottom-line for us Brits? “Blair’s encouragement of free market capitalism has boosted spiralling levels of British mental illness. The net consequence for true Labour voters has been to force us to become more or less severely virus-infected.”

The New Fundamentalism

Thus, consumer culture, itself a product of neo-liberal economics, is encouraging us to make disastrous life-style choices that are systematically eroding our quality of life, and in fact potentially killing us. So while the question of values might seem a surprising one to start off with, it’s now becoming increasingly obvious that the global political and economic order operates on the basis of a very specific value system rooted in what Oliver James depicts as a rampant materialism. Some of the most vocal critics of globalization have recognized this. Take Dr. David C. Korten, for instance, a Stanford University Business School graduate who went on to work for the US Agency for International Developent (USAID). After more than a decade of work at the agency, Korten grew increasingly disillusioned with official aid policies. He could no longer deny that the government of the United States “was actively promoting -- both at home and abroad -- the very policies” that were “deepening” regional deprivation: “For the world to survive, the United States must change.”

After writing his seminal book, When Corporations Ruled the World, Korten was quickly recognized around the world as a leader in “the movement of movements”; and he has followed it up with a series of books and educational programmes aimed at generating awareness of the dangers of globalization. One of Korten’s most intriguing observations, however, is his contention that behind the global economic system is not merely an ethical and ontological philosophy of life and human nature, but what borders on being a fundamentalist theology in which unlimited profit is the sole criterion of value:

“In the quest for economic growth, the free market ideology has been embraced around the world with the fervour of a fundamentalist religious faith. Money is its sole measure of value and its practices, advance policies that are deepening social and environmental disintegration everywhere. The economic profession serves as its priesthood, it champions values that demean the human spirit. It assumes an imaginary world divorced from reality and it is restructuring our institutions of governance in ways that make our most fundamental problems more difficult to resolve yet to question its doctrine has become virtual heresy.”

Korten’s indictment of free market ideology has important implications. But to understand them, we need to first make clear what we mean by “values”. And to do that, we also need to understand how “values” are embedded in social systems.

Any given social system is linked to its fundamental conception of nature, and a corresponding value-system. Energy is the bedrock of society. The way a society derives and makes use of energy defines its relationship to nature, because nature’s resources are our source of energy. In turn, the way a society exploits natural resources, produces, consumes and functions, is therefore inseparable from the way a society conceptualizes its relationship to nature, the way a society views both itself and nature. In other words, any given social system consists not only of a set of particular social, political and economic structures, but rests on a body of (often implicit) assumptions about human nature, the way nature works, and the way humankind ought to relate with nature. It is within these assumptions that one finds a set of (equally implicit) values about what is good and bad for human life.

This is where we get specifically to the notion of a moral or ethical “value”. One of the most interesting attempts to get to grips with the value-system underlying the neo-liberal politico-economic order is from the Canadian philosopher John McMurtry. Professor Emeritus-Elect at the University of Guelph in Ontario, McMurtry came to philosophy after a rich and diverse career as a professional football player, print and television journalist, academic English teacher, world-traveller and a student of Eastern philosophy. Selected by the United Nations as organizing editor of the philosophy volume of its Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, he is a leading intellectual voice among those critical of the global market system, a system which, he argues, is deeply destructive precisely because of its deification of the market.

Moral values may well be human constructs. But they are more than just constructs. They are categories constructed to differentiate between the usefulness of different kinds of social behaviour. Value, in other words, is tied to action. But the essential core of the concept of “value” is exactly that: worth. Something is valuable if it’s worth doing. But if it’s not worth it, it’s not valuable. So value is all about worth. An ethical value is thus a category that implies certain types of action are intrinsically worth doing. Moral values therefore designate special kinds of social behaviour as having this sort of intrinsic worth. All social systems are tied to values, because they encourage certain types of behaviour while discouraging and prohibiting others. So why certain types of behaviour are encouraged and others discouraged depends on the nature of that specific social system; it depends on the way that social system conceives human beings and nature; it depends, in summary, on a particular conception of life and nature – whether or not that conception is unconscious and implicit. There is therefore an objective dimension to values – which is whether they work or not, whether they lead to forms of behaviour that generate well-being, or do the opposite. Values are more likely be useful, if they reflect reality – human nature, the nature of the world, and the way their mutual interrelationship.

One of Professor McMurtry’s most well-known and disturbing areas of focus is his analysis of global markets as an ethical system. He points out that the global economic regime is based on “an unexamined and absolutist value system.” Capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, Anglo-American wars and the intensifying suppression of civil liberties are all symptoms of a “new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns.” Conventional neo-liberal economic theory is supposed to be value-free, objective, scientific. But it isn’t, at all: “To the contrary, the positions of a ‘value-free’ or positivist economics still presuppose as given and self-evident the value system of private property rights, the pursuit of self-interest and profit, and the monetized production and exchange of needed goods as the foundational, regulating norms of their analyses…. The principle of self-serving for money accumulation in all conditions, with no constraining obligation to one’s own society or to use-value production, has become the overriding, abstract imperative of market doctrine. The promotion of the public interest, on the other hand, has become a token mantra with no demonstrated connection to money self-maximization.”

Like David Korten, John McMurtry sees in this free market ideology subtle but deeply engrained fundamentalist strains that elevate materialist market principles of self-interest and profit maximization to unquestionable levels of God-like status. “We find that government and their leadership now assume that the value system of the global market is to be the proper order to social organization and that societies must be made to adapt to this order as the needs and demands of the market requires. The market is not now seen as a structure to serve society, rather society is seen as an aggregate of resources to serve the global market.” He continues, “No traditional religion had declared more absolutely the universality and necessity of its laws and commandments than the proponents of the global market doctrine.”

So the question is, how do we overcome this hidden theology of market fundamentalism that is so deeply embedded in our dysfunctional social systems?

Hope: Preliminary Observations

It's been a while -- apologies for the delay in posting. In particular, apologies to all those who have posted comments which I've failed to answer. I'm finding it quite difficult at the moment to keep up with my own work as well as the pace and speed of current developments. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this feeling!

Many of you have expressed interest in my mentioning this "paradigm shift", which appears already to be taking place in some ways, and the potential hope it signals for our future. Over the next few weeks, I'll be taking up these theme in some more detail. I won't pretend to provide any fundamental answers -- I think there are others, some of whom I'll be mentioning, who are perhaps trying to do that with far more expertise than I'm able to lend to such an endeavour.

What I hope to do here is provoke a new way of thinking about these issues -- one that is interdisciplinary, holistic, non-materialist, and yet no less rigorous, scientific and logically-defined. I want to outline the interconnections that often go unnoticed, and in so doing hope to draw together ideas and info from disparate thinkers and activists, some very well-known, others less-so, to explore the implications of my critique of our global crises, and the prospects for radical social transformation.

My analysis of social and global systemic crises converging over the ensuing decades (see earlier posts) ultimately leads us to one major conclusion: the failure of the prevailing social, political and economic system. That we need an alternative is no longer disputable. It is a given. But for the first time, we’ve reached a point in human history where the alternative doesn’t lie in a separate well-thought out “system” of “ideology”. We seem to have exhausted them all. With socialism having died out since the demise of the USSR, neo-liberal capitalism daily demonstrating its inability to respect the environment and life in general, and orthodox religions exceedingly unattractive with the “clash of fundamentalisms” between Bush-led neoconservativism and Bin Laden-backed Islamist extremism (and mainstream religions ineffective and unconvincing in countering this extremism with their more moderate values), it is now clear that we don’t simply face a social crisis “out there”; we face a comprehensive internal crisis of ideology, of self-identity as a species, and indeed, of our place in the world and our relationship with ourselves, one another and nature at large. And we’ve got to a point where our conventional ideologies and systems aren’t providing meaningful answers.

Given that the UN International Panel on Climate Change is now warning that at current rates of emissions (which are still only increasing not decreasing), the planet will be utterly uninhabitable before the end of this century (that’s within a single life-time of 90 years), the urgency of our predicament cannot be overstated. We are talking about not only the end of civilization; but the end of our species; and the annihilation of all life on Earth. OTT? Indeed. But it’s not some lunatic conspiracy theory. It’s the UN’s gathering of the world’s leading scientific experts telling us this. The apparent shortage of packaged solutions, in this context, is particularly disconcerting.

It’s precisely in this context this apparent paucity of simple ready-made solutions which, itself, points us in the direction of what needs to be done. We need to draw as much as possible from the best of human knowledge and experience in trying to understand what has gone wrong, and how to deal with it. We need to draw from the richest resources of human understanding to rediscover ourselves, our relationship to one another, and to our world. We need to ask the people. We need to ditch all our ready-made top-down ideologies and start looking at some of the truly innovative, spontaneous, ground up, ideas and visions blossoming up from all over the world as communities and activists try to produce and practice their own solutions to what’s going on. And we need to check out what some of the best human minds have to say about our crisis, the human condition, our relationship to the world, and the way forward.

There is what might be called a “new humanism” spontaneously and loosely emerging from the disparate thinking and activism of different social movements and social scientists. It is a synthesis of multiple theoretical perspectives, fundamentally spiritual without being superstitious or dogmatic, fundamentally scientific without being constrained by orthodox empiricism. Further, it is not just about a new "value-system" that recognizes the need to revive compassion and justice in our lives and societies. Rather such values point to modes of interpersonal behaviour and social organization which are actually more in tune with life and nature than self-interest and reductive consumerism. These values, therefore, come part and parcel with new ways of doing things, new ways of organizing politically and economically, new ways of deriving energy, new ways of communicating and sharing culturally; ultimately new ways of living in relationship with one another and nature, based on a vision of reality that is centred not on the accumulation of money as the be-all and end-all, but on the protection and enhancement of life and nature.

The “new humanism” that is emerging from the ground up from so many different voices among communities and experts is a vision of a way of living that is in harmony with who we are, and the way the world is. These values are in some sense grounded in the deep-structure of Nature, which means that the modes of behaviour implied in such values – encapsulated in more just, ecologically-balanced and open societies – are actually far more in tune with human nature and the natural world, than the current system.

My discussion of the new emerging humanism is, then, not simply about an overhaul of our values and our conceptions of life and nature. Fundamentally, such an overhaul must be indelibly linked to changes in:

1) The organization of the international economy and local economies, based not only on ideas like sustainable development, but also initiatives like the “participatory economics” of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. This is not simply about redistributing wealth, but re-configuring the inherently unstable manner in which wealth is manufactured and speculated. The world will need to think seriously about restructuring national economies, indeed the global economy, so that they serve peoples.

2) The organization of our energy dependence, involving immediate measures to transfer to sustainable and renewable energies along with corresponding clean technologies. I'm reminded of some innovative new thinking, like the “green economic growth model” being proposed by London’s Institute of Science and Society, which argues that renewable energies combined with a novel ethically and ecologically defined model of economic growth offer the path to post-industrial societies that can be truly free of CO2 emissions.

3) The localization of our social infrastructures along with the decentralization of political power, so that peoples are able to govern their lives in new ways that cannot be hijacked by centralized elites, whilst at the same time being subject to the basic regulations necessary for the good of all. This means new ways of thinking about ourselves, moving away from a simplistic human self-identity based purely on fragmented nation-states, toward a new humanism that recognizes the intrinsic unity of peoples and organizes not on the basis of national identity, but human identity. I'm reminded of exciting ideas about the people’s parliament (see George Monbiot's The Age of Consent) simple mechanisms to ensure local empowerment, harnessing the possibilities offered by technology like the internet, and other cutting-edge thinking on how citizens can re-capture popular control of their governments.

4) And finally, of course, linked to all these, the creation of a new culture that recognizes not only human interconnectedness, but the interconnectedness of human life with all life, and with the natural world, rather than seeing humankind as a kind of unconstrained overlord for whom the planet is nothing more than a source of endless self-gratification.

In summary, there is a commonwealth of new thinking from disparate actors in "the movement of movements", which seems to be pointing quite coherently towards a more accurate and scientifically grounded conception of the human condition as one fundamentally embedded in nature.

Will be back soon to follow up these observations with some concrete analysis. Once I feel I've covered some of these issues in sufficient detail, I want to return to a broad contextual analysis of terrorism and security issues. There is a very strong reason for doing so in the context of a full understanding of global crises. That will become obvious when I'm done.

More later!

hidden holocaust--civilizational crisis, Part 3: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?

Today, we enter into a new year which brings us yet closer to the imminent convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises that threaten not only the end of our species, but the end of all species on the Earth.

In previous posts in this series, we reviewed the origins and evolution of the modern world system through a long historical process of protracted military and economic violence, violence that continues today in the imperial atrocities being committed across diverse strategic peripheries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Northwest Africa.

This global system is hugely destructive of human life. Devoid of the capability to recognize and enact ethical values, it is driven purely by the imperatives of profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. Consequently, it is not only destructive of human life; it is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself.

It is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 10-15 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now.

These crises can be categorized broadly into four key themes:

1. Climate catastrophe

2. Peak oil

3. Food scarcity

4. Economic instability

These are summarized below.

1. Climate Catastrophe

Industrial civilization derives all its energy from the burning of fossil fuels, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The C02 emissions from the industries that drive our economies, our societies, that sustain our infrastructures, are the main engine of global warming in the last few decades. This doesn’t mean that all climate change ever is due to human-induced C02. Scientists know that there are many other factors involved in climate change, such as solar activity, as well as periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit. But they have overwhelmingly confirmed that these are not the primary factors currently driving global warming. The primary factor is C02 emissions induced by human activities.

The origins of climate change are no longer a matter of serious scientific debate. Early in 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported the findings of a three-year study projecting the rise in temperatures due to global warming by 600 scientists from 40 countries, peer-reviewed by 600 more meteorologists. The report confirmed that human-induced global warming is “unequivocally” happening, and that the probability that climate change was due to human C02 emissions is over 90 per cent.

Indeed, climate scientists last year published the results of the latest research into the relationship between the sun and climate change in the top journal, Nature. The London Times reported on the study as follows:

“Scientists have examined various proxies of solar energy output over the past 1,000 years and have found no evidence that they are correlated with today’s rising temperatures. Satellite observations over the past 30 years have also turned up nothing. ‘The solar contribution to warming... is negligible,’ the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.”[1]

So what exactly is likely to happen to the climate at current rates of emissions? According to the IPCC’s first report issued last year, by 2100, the average global temperature could rise by 6.4C, leading to drastic ecological alterations that would make life throughout most of the Earth impossible. This is what is supposed to happen at 6c : “Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive.”[2]

Growing evidence suggests that the IPCC projections are extremely conservative, and that the climate crisis is rapidly growing out of control. According to Dr David Wasdell, a climate expert and an accredited reviewer of the IPCC report, the final report was watered down by Western government officials before release to make its findings appear less catastrophic. Dr Wasdell told the New Scientist (8 March 2007) that early drafts of the report prepared by scientists in April 2006 contained “many references to the potential for climate to change faster than expected because of ‘positive feedbacks’ in the climate system. Most of these references were absent from the final version.”[3]

The following IPCC report, however, distilling the research of 2,500 climate scientists, released in November 2007 only confirms that the original projection was too optimistic. To avoid heating the globe by the minimum possible, an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the world’s spiraling growth in greenhouse gas emissions must end no later than 2015, and must start to drop quickly after that peak. By 2050, carbon dioxide and other atmospheric polluting gases must be reduced by 50 to 85 percent, according to the estimates. But even this is already too late. “We may have already overshot that target,” said David Karoly, one member of the core team that wrote the report. Current emissions already are nearing the limit required in 2015 to limit the warming to 2 degrees Celsius, he added in a media interview from Valencia.

But Western governments have known about this danger for years. At the June 2005 UK government conference on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” at the Met Office in Exeter, scientists reported an emerging consensus that global warming must remain “below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided”, which means ensuring that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stays below 400 parts per million. Beyond this level, dangerous and runaway climate change is likely to be irreversible.[4]

About two weeks after the government conference warned of this minimum threshold, the Independent commissioned an investigation by Keith Shine, head of the meteorology department at the University of Reading. Using the latest available figures (for 2004), Professor Shine calculated that “the CO2 equivalent concentration, largely unnoticed by the scientific and political communities, has now risen beyond this threshold.” Accounting for the effects of methane and nitrous oxide, he found that the equivalent concentration of C02 is now 425ppm and fast rising, guaranteeing that the global mean temperature will rise by 2 degrees. Consequently, some of the worst predicted effects of global warming, such as the destruction of ecosystems and increased hunger and water shortages for billions of people in the South, may well be unavoidable. When asked about the implications, Tom Burke, a former government environment adviser, told the Independent:

“The passing of this threshold is of the most enormous significance. It means we have actually entered a new era -- the era of dangerous climate change. We have passed the point where we can be confident of staying below the 2 degree rise set as the threshold for danger. What this tells us is that we have already reached the point where our children can no longer count on a safe climate.”[5]

According to the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) the percentage of Earth’s land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, from about 10-15 per cent to 30 per cent, largely due to rising temperatures. Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. [NCAR Press Release, “Drought’s Growing Reach” (Boulder, Co: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 10 January 2005]

Global warming is not only melting the Arctic, it is melting the glaciers that feed Asia’s largest rivers -- the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow. Because glaciers are a natural storage system, releasing water during hot arid periods, the shrinking ice sheets could aggravate water imbalances, causing flooding as the melting accelerates, followed by a reduction in river flows. This problem is only decades, possibly even years away, resulting in hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who have water, being short of it, most likely in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages, and by 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people. Some climate models show sub-saharan Africa drying out by 2050.[6]

2. Peak Oil

There is yet another crisis emerging, which is also linked to our addiction to burning fossil fuels. That is the energy crisis. Today, the most prominent energy source is, of course, conventional oil. Here in the UK, from where I’m now writing, 90 per cent of our energy comes from conventional oil, gas and coal, but primarily oil. Without these energy supplies, civilized life in the UK would simply collapse. Transportation, agriculture, modern medicine, national defence, water distribution, and the production of even basic technologies would be impossible. This formula applies across the board, throughout western industrial civilization.

The basic rules for the discovery, estimation and production of petroleum reserves were first laid down by the world renowned geophysicist Dr. M. King Hubbert. Hubbert pointed out that as petroleum is a finite resource, its production must inevitably pass through three key stages:

1. production begins at zero.

2. production increases until it reaches a peak which cannot be surpassed. This peak tends to occur at or around the point when 50 per cent of total petroleum reserves are depleted.

3. subsequent to this peak, production declines at an increasing rate, until finally the resource is completely depleted.

One of the most authoritative studies so far on peak oil and its timing was conducted by Dr. Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, leading oil industry experts, on behalf of the Geneva-based Petroconsultants. The Petroconsultants database, used by all international oil companies, is the most comprehensive for data on oil resources outside North America -- and is considered so significant that it is not in the public domain. Campbell and Laherrere concluded in their report, priced at $32,000 a copy and written for government and corporate insiders, that “the mid-point of ultimate conventional oil production would be reached by year 2000 and that decline would soon begin.” They also projected that “production post-peak would halve about every 25 years, an exponential decline of 2.5 to 2.9% per annum.”[7]

According to the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, this conclusion is probably the most accurate, based as it is on performance data from thousands of oil fields in 65 countries, including data on “virtually all discoveries, on production history by country, field, and company as well as key details of geology and geophysical surveys.” Due to their unprecedented access to such data, Campbell and Laherrere, unlike other oil industry commentators, are in “a unique position to sense the pulse of the petroleum industry, where it has come from and where it is going to. Their report pays rigorous attention to definitions and valid interpretation of statistics.” A review of the research by senior industry geologists in Petroleum Review indicated, apart from minor disagreement over the scope of remaining reserves, “general acceptance of the substance of their arguments; that the bulk of remaining discovery will be in ever smaller fields within established provinces.”[8]

Rapidly rising oil prices and growing reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has already occurred, or will do, well within the dawn of the 21st century. London’s Petroleum Review published a study toward the end of 2004 concluding that in Indonesia, Gabon, and fifteen other oil-rich nations supplying about 30 percent of the world’s daily crude, oil production is declining by 5 percent a year -- double the rate of decline a year prior to the report. Chris Skrebowski, the Review’s editor and a former BP oil analyst, noted that: “Those producers still with expansion potential are having to work harder and harder just to make up for the accelerating losses of the large number that have clearly peaked and are now in continuous decline. Though largely unrecognized, [depletion] may be contributing to the rise in oil prices.”[9] Indeed, Chris Skrebowski reported in early 2005 that production in conventional oil reserves are already declining at about 4-6 per cent a year worldwide, including 18 large oil-producing countries, and 32 smaller ones. Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India are due to peak in the next few years.[10]

According to an official report published by British Petroleum late last year, we have about 30 years before we peak. This is supposed to be an ‘optimistic’ assessment. Apart from the fact that this is hardly good news, it is a clearly politicized claim from an oil industry fighting to sustain its credibility as the Oil Age nears its demise. Colin Campbell, himself a former senior BP geologist, argues that the data shows we have less than 4 years; and in the meantime, former US government energy adviser Matt Simmons argues that we have most likely peaked years ago, but won’t know for sure until we start feeling the crunch within a few years.

3. Food Scarcity

The convergence of these two global crises, climate change and peak oil, threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.

At the British Association’s Festival of Science in Dublin in September 2005, US and UK scientists working at the Hadley Centre described how shifts in rain patterns and temperatures due to global warming could lead to a further 50 million people going hungry by conservative estimates. “If we accept that broadly 500 million people are at risk today, we expect that to increase by about 10 per cent by the middle part of this century.”[11]

Then toward the end of 2006, a study by Met Office’s Hadley Centre funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought making agriculture impossible will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people already struggling in conditions of dire deprivation over the precipice.[12]

The grim truth is that we are already pushing the limits on world food production within the existing structure of modern corporate agriculture. According to new maps released in December 2005 by scientists at the Centre for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Navin Ramankutty, “Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops.” The maps thus show that the Earth is “rapidly running out of fertile land” and that “food production will soon be unable to keep up with global population growth.”

World food production probably peaked shortly before the new millennium. Lester Brown, a former international agricultural policy advisor for the US government who went on to found the World Watch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, reports that since world grain consumption has exceeded production since 2000, such that 2003 saw a deficit of 105 million tones. On that basis, Brown predicts a global grain deficit within the next few years. In 2003 he noted that “World grain harvests have fallen for four consecutive years and world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 30 years.” This is partly why world grain prices are steadily rising.

This is not centrally about population, but about modern intensive agricultural methods as practiced by the globalized corporate food industry, which are simply unsustainable. US structural geologist Dave Allen Pfeiffer points out that while it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil, in soil made susceptible by modern agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65 per cent each year. Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from US agricultural soils every year. Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.

Already, populations in the South are suffering from the grim reality of these crises. Near the end of last year, the Guardian reported:

“Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products. Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years.”[13]

Peak food will be exacerbated beyond all proportion in the context of peak oil. Modern intensive agriculture that produces most of our food, is industrialized, mechanized. It needs oil. Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.

4. Economic Meltdown

According to the United Nations Development Programme, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989. The rewards of globalization are increasingly “spread unequally and inequitably -- concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations and corporations, marginalizing the others.”

Successive UN Human Development reports give us the broad contours of the manner in which this system inflicts protracted death-by-deprivation on the majority of the world’s population. Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, almost a third -- about 1.3 billion people -- have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children in the world receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people -- a third of the human race -- suffer from anaemia. 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Thirty million people die of hunger every year, half of whom, UNICEF estimates, are children. Over 840 million suffer from chronic malnutrition, almost a sixth of the population. Three billion people -- that is half the world population -- are forced to survive on less than two dollars a day. Indeed, as Ignaciot Ramonet wrote several years ago in a famous editorial for Le Monde, of the 6 billion people in the world, only 500 million live in comfort -- that is approximately one-twelfth of the world population. This leaves a massive 5.5 billion people living in need -- over five-sixth of the population.

According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.[14]

And what of neoliberal globalization? Have the policies advocated by the international financial institutions that govern the capitalist world system alleviated or exacerbated these despicable trends? Thanks to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC, we now have some serious economic data by which to derive a plausible answer to these questions. Using IMF and World Bank data, the CEPR conducted a comprehensive study of economic growth and other indicators for the period between 1980 and 2005. The results are shocking. In the period hailed widely as neoliberal globalization’s golden age, the vast majority of the world’s economies have been systematically retarded. Mark Weisbrot et. al. argues that for economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, these 25 years have exhibited an empirically incontrovertible decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980] in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.[15]

But the global economic system is not merely inherently unjust and unequal. It is also inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises, and as events of the last few months have shown, it is increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Financial institutions, corporate investors and even mainstream economists have been aware of the dangers