Peak Relationships: the end of suburbia up close and personal
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
For most individuals who are aware of and preparing for the collapse of industrial civilization, the notion of a convergence of crises in the current milieu-Peak Oil, climate change, economic meltdown, species extinction, and overpopulation, is not new information. They know that never before in recorded history has the human race been confronted with the web of crises it is now facing. What they didn’t anticipate, however, is that when sharing their bursts of enlightenment with spouses, friends, children, or parents they would increasingly be perceived by their loved ones as something akin to psychotic alien life forms. What they had hoped for instead is that their dear ones would be willing to investigate the same topics they had so carefully researched and would join them in preparing to navigate a daunting future.
These days, wherever I speak or conduct a public event, and whenever I check my inbox for email, I hear similar stories of conflict or estrangement in the lives of courageous men and women who have chosen to dig deeper into the state of the macrocosm, only vaguely aware of what it might bring forth within the microcosm of their own lives. Onerous it is to be preparing for the future-contemplating and acting on the weighty issues of where to live, how to earn a livelihood, what skills to learn, and how best to fortify oneself for survival in an unraveling world, but it is nothing like having loved ones distancing or parting ways when one wants and needs them now more than ever.
Sometimes it’s about fear for the well being of loved ones; sometimes it’s about wanting to share something as momentous as collapse and transition with our best friend who also happens to be our beloved. Sometimes it’s about wanting to be validated, heard, and seen. Maybe it’s just about wanting help with the extensive, arduous tasks of preparation. But sadly, perhaps tragically, in countless instances, the kind of joining for which our hearts desperately yearn cannot happen-for whatever reason. That doesn’t make our loved ones sick, bad, crazy, or stupid, but it does mean that we have reached a threshold in our relationship with them that will result in distance, perhaps permanent estrangement.
How do we cope with this? After all, isn’t human connection the larger hope we hold for this transition? Isn’t that what’s it’s all about?
Nothing I could say would make this easy, but perhaps the pain can be tempered with a larger perspective…
(9 May 2010)
I share their despair, but I’m not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain
George Monbiot, the Guardian
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world’s richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.
But we needn’t rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians’ thesis as self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10 times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees.
The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich world’s demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber and animal feed.
The Guardian’s carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is that official figures don’t count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment.
…So the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that “capitalism has absorbed the greens”. Instead of seeking to protect the natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists now work on “sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right”.
Today’s greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more of the world’s wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They’ve forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save industrial civilisation.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement’s first book, to be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.
While I’m prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK’s land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point. Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don’t believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn’t reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain people believe will be civilisation’s imminent collapse, without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies. There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet’s every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don’t give a stuff about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than the alternatives…
(10 May 2010)
The End of Thatcherism
Anthony Barnett, Open Democracy
This week’s creation of a Conservative led coalition with the Liberal Democrats has brought the period associated with Margaret Thatcher after her election in 1979 to an end. The UK will continue to play its part in global capitalism but a new kind of domestic politics is on offer. One way of describing it, uncomfortable as it may be for me to report, is that the transition from New Labour to a Tory led coalition promises a distinctly more progressive government in the UK. If indeed the Coalition agreement is carried out, then the new government will be to the left of its predecessor by being:
- tougher on the bankers
- more focused on helping the very poor
- more democratic
- ending New Labour’s assault on liberty
- Europeanising Westminster politics
- implementing greener policies
- reintroducing cabinet government
This is relative praise. It remains a Tory government. The new coalition says it is planning to stuff the House of Lords with 200 cronies to secure its majority there, who will stay for their lifetimes; it will not investigate our use of torture; it says it will ask the British people to decide on how we vote yet, despite language about “grown-up” politics, it will treat us like infants and not permit us to consider a proportional system. And, of course there is the famous chasm between words and deeds.
However, for those of us involved with the Convention on Modern Liberty, especially my Co-Director Henry Porter who led the way in campaigning against New Labour’s transforming the British state into an instrument of hi-tech despotism, the coalition’s programme is a triumph, as he has rightly claimed. First for what it delivers, in rolling back ID cards, the National Information Register and the promise of a Great Repeal Bill. Second, for prevailing not least thanks to the Guardian/Observer, over the Murdoch press and the BBC – which refused to report on civil liberties as a serious issue and still doesn’t. Third, in terms of political culture that the Convention plugged into – the latent energy of collaboration and constructive discussion of differences, as against tribalism. The first press conference of Prime Minister Cameron and his Deputy displayed an embrace of this culture proclaiming it as a different and better way of doing things.
It is. We will see whether they can continue to embrace it. This be Britain. Our political class is exceptionally determined and flexible. Can pluralism really be proclaimed by scions of perhaps the narrowest and most homogeneous elite in the world? Our liberty may have been saved for the moment, which is a great achievement. Our so-called democracy is merely being modernised – and in a fashion designed to pre-empt the real change the document proclaims. First, liberty had to be saved and this seems to have happened. Next, liberty needs to be secured. Which means it needs to be grounded in law-based democracy and breath in the open air. If it remains in the secretive hands of the UK state it won’t be long before it once again needs life-support.
…Replacing Thatcherism
The centerpiece of what has happened, however, is the transformation of the Tory Party. All those cheap and lazy jibes about toffs taking us back to Thatcher-style polarisation have been shown to be so much vapour. On the contrary, what Cameron has done is to return Toryism to its one-nation Whig tradition. He has broken the spell that Thatcherism and its conviction politics has had over his party since the coup that ousted her in 1990. And his combining with Nick Clegg could break the grip of Thatcher’s wider political culture over British politics as a whole. Her sense of principle and belief in British institutions had long been eviscerated by New Labour, leaving behind only her legacy of macho bullying and devious cunning personified by Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell. Now they too have been swept away.
In his magisterial introduction to Britain Since 1918 David Marquand identifies four shaping traditions in British politics. They are all forms of democracy. They cut across left and right. Most of the major political leaders and all the big parties have combined different strands. They are: whig imperialism, tory nationalism, democratic collectivism and democratic republicanism.
Churchill, for example, was ‘whig imperial’: his was a one-nation, consensual, great-British politics appealing to all classes. It was built upon to create the welfare state by the ‘democratic collectivism’ of Attlee’s post-war government. When the stifling consensus politics that resulted collapsed in the 1970s, it opened the way for Thatcher. She used ‘Tory nationalism’ to draw upon Churchillist themes thanks to the Falkland’s war. But in fact she broke both the wings of the post-1945 settlement: whig imperialism, scorned as wet and liberal, and democratic centralism including its trade union base.
Her election in 1979 was thus a true turning point for the UK. After 1997 Blair and Brown proved to be Thatcher’s “sons” as Simon Jenkins documented. They oversaw many humanizing reforms, and tried to heal the social wounds of Thatcher’s divisiveness, but were unable to offer a coherent alternative to her Tory nationalism. Instead they sought to protect their efforts at social improvement by outbidding her search for national greatness: backing globalisation and finance capital by giving the City of London an even bigger bang than she did, and outdoing her belligerence by going to war even more often and doing so illegally as well. Looking back one can see that the many good things that have happened since 1997 were achieved despite the core project of New Labour not because of it. That core project was to climb on board the neo-liberal engine of global finance and military supremacy to ensure continuity in office.
David Cameron’s stated aim was to carry on this tradition and at the same time persuade both his party and the country that the Conservatives had returned to their inclusive whig tradition. In other words to be even better at providing Thatcherism with a human face than Blair and Brown. But the still ongoing great financial crash put an end to this vainglorious ambition. Instead, Cameron has seized the opportunity offered by a hung parliament to reshape the nature of his party and the country’s politics. It is a turning point as sharp as 1979. It deposits New Labour into its Thatcherite dustbin. It demonstrates what realignment really means…
(10 May 2010)
Very long article on the implications of the recent UK election and subsequent coalition agreement between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, which has been termed a “game-changer” for UK politics by many analysts. -KS
