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Joe [Bageant], why did you crap out on us?
Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus
Joe,
Did everything get so hopeless you just gave up? I liked your fighting spirit here, in 2004, and feel when you’ve got a voice, as you have, we’d appreciate hearing it as a call to arms instead of an old man’s complaints. I can say this without being ageist, I’m probably older than you. …
Diane
Hawaii
——
Hi Diane,
Well, I’ve certainly changed my view of things since 2004. In the subsequent six years of reading, listening, trying to learn what’s going on, I find the conclusion inescapable that that it will take a collapse to initiate the sort of ground-up change necessary. That doesn’t mean good people should not carry on the struggle if they can find it in themselves. But I really don’t think there are enough souls with time or stamina to pull it off in the face of the overwhelming corporate/government machinery opposing them (us).
At the same time I believe we can become finer within ourselves, even during collapse, which will take god only knows how long. Or not. So I have become interested in the in the spiritual side of things, as well as the political — because as near as I can tell, spiritual courage, insight and judgment, are what is missing from the progressive struggle (or whatever you want to call it).
… I am not saying saying that we should run away to some transcendental space and never come back. I’m just saying we can never have a clue unless we look inward and learn that spiritual territory, then look outward and discover that it’s common ground for all of mankind.
And besides, doing that helps one get up every morning and do the right things — such as stop mindless consumption (which in itself is subversive in a nation of zombie gluttons), stop following sham leadership
… So at this point I am content to let up, to quit raging so much (though there’s no accounting for the occasional effects of ethyl spirits). Rage fatigue eats up one’s stamina and inner resources, without one bit affecting the autonomic predatory system in motion.
Beyond that, I am seeing others do the same, directing their energies to places out of the path of the machine. Places like Ecuador, northern California — all sorts of places — creating little spots of sustainability as best as possible. They’re not going to stop the collapse either, and in all likelihood go down with everyone else, just not as fast. (After all, we are in the sixth great species die-off here). But when I am around these people, I feel healthy human beings flourishing both physically and spiritually — something you don’t see much in America these days, and something I’ve not seen since my boyhood on a West Virginia mountain farm. And I want to bounce their babies on my knee, and savor a little rightness in the world for a change.
(16 April 2010)
Previous post from Joe: Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. -BA
The Global War on Tribes
Zoltan Grossman, CounterPunch
The so-called “Global War on Terror” is quickly growing outside the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan, into new battlegrounds in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. The Pentagon is vastly increasing missile and gunship attacks, Special Forces raids, and proxy invasions–all in the name of combating “Islamist terrorism.” Yet within all five countries, the main targets of the wars are predominantly “tribal regions,” and the old frontier language of Indian-fighting is becoming the lexicon of 21st-century counterinsurgency. The “Global War on Terror” is fast morphing into a “Global War on Tribes.”
Tribal regions are local areas where tribes are the dominant form of social organization, and tribal identities often trump state, ethnic, and even religious identities. Tribal peoples have a strongly localized orientation, tied to a particular place. Their traditional societies are based on a common culture, dialect, and kinship ties (through single or multiple clans). Although they are tribal peoples, they are not necessarily Indigenous peoples–who generally follow nature-centered spiritual and cultural systems. Nearly all tribal communities in the Middle East and Central Asia have been Islamicized or Christianized, but they still retain their ancient social bonds.
Yet modern counterinsurgency doctrine only views tribal regions as festering cauldrons of lawlessness, and “breeding grounds” for terrorism, unless the tribes themselves are turned against the West’s enemies.
… Whether in Mexico, India, Iraq, or the United States and Canada, the Global War on Tribes has some common characteristics. First, the war is most blatantly being waged to steal the natural resources under tribal lands. The rugged, inaccessible terrain that prevented colonial powers from eliminating tribal societies also made accessing minerals, oil, timber and other resources more difficult–so (acre for acre) more of the resources are now left on tribal lands than on more accessible lands.
Resources are not always the underlying explanation for war, but they’re a pretty good start at an explanation. In the case of Indigenous tribal peoples, their historic attention to biodiversity has also enabled natural areas to be relatively protected until now, as corporations seek out the last remaining pockets of natural resources to extract. Look no further than the Alberta Tar Sands, for instance, to see the exploitation of Native lands by modern oil barons.
(13 April 2010)
Surveying the field and charting a course
Guy R. McPherson, Nature Bats Last
… So how do we go from this list of economic issues to the notion of economic collapse? I’ve moved from imperialist city educator to economic doomer rural sharecropper in one (damned difficult) step. This move was driven by many factors, including the profound (and profoundly late) realization that we live immorally, buying and selling nature’s bounty at an imperialist whim. Another contributing factor was my strongly held suspicion that we’re headed for a collapse of the industrial economy by the end of 2012. If the industrial age does not end soon, we’re headed for the complete absence of habitat for humans on Earth. Obviously, there is plenty of disagreement with me on both points, and I’ve been asked to make my case. What tea leaves do I read?
I restrict this essay to economic collapse, thus leaving the issue of environmental collapse to previous posts (and perhaps future ones). The data on collapse are clearer than the rest of my guides, so I’ll start with them.
… A little more from history: Empires fall. All of ’em, so far. Some fall slowly, others rapidly. Some fall with a modicum of grace, others with extreme violence. American Empire is so complex, so dependent on finite materials, and intricately connected with the entire global economy that it’s difficult for me to foresee a long, peaceful decline.
… In addition to the near-term price of oil, our empire is threatened by the ever-tightening grip of globalization, which ensures that economic collapse in any of the world’s large economies will lead, domino-like, to economic collapse throughout the industrialized world. This grip was allowed and facilitated by cheap oil, and it’s no coincidence that the end of the cheap-oil era resulted in financial crises throughout the civilized world. Today, Greece is the word. But Portugal, Spain, and Japan hover on the brink (Japan is the world’s second-largest economy). So does the U.S. and the remainder of the industrialized world, though you’d never know it based on mainstream media reports from this country. We have the advantages of the world’s reserve currency and the largest killing force in the history of the world (and the willingness to use it, everywhere, all the time). But when China stops buying U.S. Treasury notes, a process already under way, the de facto rate of interest will rise, taking us inexorably and likely quickly into the land of hyper-inflation.
… With every passing day, we move further into ecological overshoot and also closer to the end of western civilization and its apex, the industrial economy. For most individual industrial humans, the end will not be welcome. But for the living planet on which we depend, and therefore our very species, the end of industry will bring a welcome relief from decades of oppression. It might even give us back our humanity while granting our species a few more decades of planetary existence.
(16 April 2010)
Space, Oil and Capital (book)
Mazen Labban, Routledge Publishers via Google Books
[Excerpts from the book are online]
From the publisher Routledge:
The historical development of capital has produced a progressive increase in the demand for raw material and has consequently resulted in the concentration of capital in, and the geographical expansion of, the production of natural resources, globalizing and intensifying the competition for the control of production and markets.
This book is an attempt to explain, at the theoretical and empirical level, the relationship between the production of oil and the process of inter-capitalist competition in the global economy, and why it is necessary to appreciate the underlying process of the social production of space in determining the access to and control of global oil production and world markets. It will appeal to those undertaking research in political economy, economic geography, resource geography and international relations.
Reviews
“Mazen Labban’s insightful, dense, and short book applies a Marxian geographic analysis to the subject of oil with a focus on the Soviet Union, Russia, and the Iran. In doing so, he provides a fresh perspective on the causes of global price fluctuations and the geopolitics of access to the world’s oil reserves. … Labban offers an insightful analysis and challenging thesis on the place of oil within the dynamics and contradictions of capital circulation and accumulation expressed in the production of geographic integration (aka globalization) and fragmentation.” — Economic Geography (vol 86, Jan 2010) Paul. K. Gellert, University of Tennessee.
Table of Contents
1. The expansion of capital, oil scarcity and the contradiction of space 2. Contradictions of capitalist accumulation: inter-capitalist competition, the production of raw material, and the contradiction of space 3. Imperialism and the geographical contradictions of monopoly capital 4. Oil in the development and decline of the Soviet Union 5. Geographical contradictions of state and capital in the development of Russian oil – competition for Russia, competition with Russia 6. Geographical contradictions of Iranian oil: capital verus the law
About the Author(s)
Mazen Labban is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Miami, USA.
(2008)
Bio of Professor Labban at the University of Miami:
Professor Labban’s research combines interests in critical social theory, philosophies of space and nature, political economy, and theories of development and globalization. His current research focuses on the geopolitical economy of petroleum; historical geography of modern imperialism, especially in the postwar period. Labban teaches courses in economic geography, geopolitics, development theory and history, and resource geography
-BA
The Index of Life
Patrick Takahashi, Huffington Post
Our species, scientist term Homo sapiens, have been around for around 100,000 years. How long is 100,00 years? Well, light would take 100,000 years just to cross our Milky Way galaxy. Our closest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away from us. The distance of one light year is just under 6 trillion miles. While these numbers just represent the vastness of our corner of the Universe, it is humbling to consider these space and time dimensions as we worry about today.
Anyway, we’ve survived to dominate, but struggled through some tough times. About 75,000 years ago, for example, the world population dropped to only a few thousand according to the Toba Catastrophe Theory. Another threat to our civilization occurred a little more than 6 centuries ago when up to half the European population were killed by bubonic plague. But our population only dropped, at most, from 450 million down to 350 million. Not a big deal in terms of extinction.
The greatest threat to humanity, no doubt, was only half a century ago, when the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 edged our society to the brink of an extinctive nuclear winter. We overcame our greatest test, for the end of the Cold War in 1991 might well have insured for our continuation in perpetuity. I’m taking the super optimists viewpoint that the Sun will not change much for a few billion years and fusion or whatever will someday enable our kind to populate the Universe.
Technological progress has been remarkable, and there is a sense that our lifestyle will only get better and better. A terrorist dirty bomb will be messy, but our continuation as a species will not be threatened by this act, nor any attempt by Iran and North Korea to assert themselves.
But here is the problem. More and more I’m beginning to be influenced by some of my doomsday colleagues who have become frighteningly convincing that the combination of Peak Oil and Global Warming means that life will, from now, only get worse. Your children, and, certainly, theirs, they say, will descend into mediocrity, and worse. Renewable energy? Not sufficient, according to their analysis. Toss in hopeless governance, and they might have a few good points.
… A book by Richard Heinberg entitled Peak Everything provides greater detail. In short, it is conceivable that the Index of Life (IOL), on “average,” will only decline, forever. Let me arbitrarily give the year 2000 a 10 rating, and drop the IOL to 5 for where we were from October 2008 to March 2009 (our Great Recession). In short, a range of parameters is involved in this Index, but, frankly, the survival and enjoyment of life pretty well represent the essence of that number. How, then, is Humanity doing today? Here is a summary:
(14 April 2010)
