Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The same factors that led to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 are still with us. The French philosopher Bruno Latour made the case that Trump’s perplexing popularity could be traced to his ability to give voice to the anger and fear generated by the effects of Globalism.
I want my grandchildren to visit other places and countries and see different, unknown foods. I want them to feel like the world isn’t one giant airport lounge with sourdough and avocado toast on every menu.
By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!
World Factory is an extraordinary theatre project that sets out to explore the impact of globalised production (and by extension, globalised trade) by creating an experiential space for its audience.
Once upon a time we nomads settled down and created agriculture. The efficiencies of that agriculture released labour for both trade and the trades which in turn evolved centres of production and consumption which we know as rural villages, harbour towns and market towns. I’ll leave aside the influences (usually malign) of power in the simultaneous creation of walled cities, fortresses, trade blocs, dukedoms, ring roads, cloned towns, retail parks, gated communities and distorted and perverse social systems.
One of the more intriguing features of the current economic debacle is the way that remedies that have often worked in the past have failed so thoroughly this time around. Another is the way that remedies that have failed every time they have been tried in the past have failed this time, too. Behind the inability of central bankers to deal effectively with the crumbling of the global economy, though, stands a major shift in the shape of economic activity — one that promises to leave few aspects of modern economic life untouched.
The organic and fair-trade industries are booming, Farmers Markets are the new norm, the word “locavore” was added to the Oxford Dictionary, and Michelle Obama even planted a White House garden. But agribusiness continues to consolidate power and profit, small farmers worldwide are being dispossessed in an unprecedented global land grab, over a billion people are going hungry, and agriculture’s contributions to climate change are increasing. It’s not just that change is slow, but we actually seem to be moving in the opposite direction than alternative food movements are trying to take us.
Jeff Rubin is currently touring his new book, The End Of Growth. As the former Chief Economist for CIBC World Markets he brings an intimate knowledge of financial markets and how they work to the peak oil/end of growth community populated by other venerable thinkers such as Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson and John Michael Greer.
The world’s elites don’t want to admit it. But the kind of global village that they have insisted on building–a vast free-trade paradise run by an ever more complex and opaque system of logistics and finance–isn’t working, not even for many of them. The cost of maintaining this brittle, complex system and keeping the huge imbalances it creates at bay is becoming dizzyingly expensive.
-Argentina won’t be joining the global petro-surge any time soon – Steve Levine
-Argentina Claims Resource Sovereignty – Molly Scott Cato
Critics of today’s American empire too often seem to believe that it’s something unique in world history. It’s hard to think of better evidence for the pervasive historical illiteracy of American intellectuals, for nearly all the charges leveled against America’s empire today were made, with even better justification, against the British Empire that preceded it. The interaction between these two empires — the British lion and the American eagle — defined much of what we now call the modern world, and set the stage for the decline of American empire now looming in the near future.
There’s a fascinating parallel between the rise of America’s first overseas empire and the emergence of her petroleum industry. The age of oil, in fact, can be seen as an empire of time — the exploitation of the distant past for the benefit of the present — just as empire in the usual sense is an empire of space, the exploitation of distant countries for the benefit of one imperial nation. The two patterns would emerge together to drive a new mode of imperial expansion — one with a sharply limited shelf life.
