I ran into Andy Brett scavenging for material over on Biopolitical's blog not too long ago. I had beaten him to the punch on this one and he generously conceded the topic to me. I then went on vacation and am just now getting around to finishing it.
Nature (which I subscribe to but have not read yet) published essays from a number of African leaders on the topic of the now-completed G8 summit. One of the contributors, Anthony Nyong from Nigeria, had this to say:
Poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and causes people to live unsustainably. Take deforestation: people who cut down trees don't do it for fun: it is a bid to survive. Much of the rural population depends on wood as fuel for domestic energy and cooking. Faced with the need to survive, people even have to encroach on protected forests and game reserves. It is unfair and impractical to think that force can prevent this.
I can only disagree with his assertion that it is impractical to simultaneously protect what remains of Africa's biodiversity (by force) while trying to reduce poverty. Remove the game park fences, disband the armed patrols and within a decade you would have nothing left to protect. The poor would be right back at square one and the planet's biodiversity would be that much more impoverished. Allowing the destruction of the Congo and game parks is not necessary and should not be in the solution set.
Nyong continues:
We need to enable farmers to grow their own food in the face of environmental challenges.
Biopolitical dissents in his post "Let's get out of poverty, or not":
Growing your own food doesn't make you rich. Quite the opposite.... What makes you rich is to produce what you are better at, and buy everything else from others. Buy apples from those who are better at growing them. Wealth comes from the efficient division of labor. And global division of labor generates more wealth than local division of labor.
I don't pretend to know the answers, but Biopolitical makes an interesting point. Subsistence farming is an outmoded living model, along the lines of hunting and gathering, especially in parts of Africa where "environmental challenges" like droughts are frequent and fertility rates are sky-high. It is at best a difficult, unpredictable way to live and, like hunting and gathering, also not the most eco-friendly lifestyle in today's human-dominated world.
Comments
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amazingdrx Posted 1:10 am
17 Jul 2005
Were there no intervention in the situation the population would stabilize at the carrying rate of the local environment. Desertification from deforestation and climate change would leave the local area suitable only for desert nomads and the sparse vegetation they survive on.
So why all this intervention? Oil and mineral wealth under the local area.
Those who exploit it need to maintain a friendly dictatorship to facilitate the extraction of that wealth. Starving, desperate people interfere with that business.
They are driven off or massacred by the oil industry friendly dictatorship, onto land already occupied by other groups of starving, desperate people. This creates further devestation as the horsemen of the apocalypse are then in charge.
The money to buy those "apples" ought to be obtained by taxing the companies that profit from the oil extraction, instead any money from that source goes to support the dictatorship, that buys the guns, that hires the thugs, to drive off and massacre the people.
And if that money were only used to buy sustenance from others, then eventually when that oil runs out, a large population supported by that money from the oil will once again be desperate and starving.
If that money is used to educate the local population and establish businesses that produce products that can bring in the money to sustain it, then it will survive the end of subsidy from oil extraction. If reproductive rights for women are part of the education, then the population will stabilize without the horsemen's help.
A state that is solely supported upon oil revenues that would be a benevolent dictatorship would leave people helpless at the end of oil.
Natural economic and political evolution would produce a culture based on small family farms and businesses operating in a free market protected from outside interference by monopoly forces like the oil and mineral industries.
The only solution to these problems is global regulation of monopoly corporate power to facilitate that local economic and political evolution. That is what the UN and other development agencies ought to pursue.
And every arable region ought to grow their own "apples". Local business cannot be replaced by global commerce. In fact local business must be protected from the forces of global monopoly businesses like big oil.
Real competitive capitalism engenders economic and political evolution, monopoly corporatism produces a devolution into mega-feudalsim.
It is to the benefit of economic and political freedom in each local area to prevent encroachment of corporate monopoly upon any other local region on planet earth, for once the four horsemen start to match, they often match into areas far away from the original scene of conflict created by corporate greed and corruption.
They did that in NYC on 911.
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jdhlax Posted 6:27 am
17 Jul 2005
ing-gathering are"outmoded living model[s]." This couldn't be farther from the truth. The fact is that ONLY the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is sustainable. ALL "civilizations," defined as agricultural societies decay and go away after some period of time. The reason is simple: living as hunter-gatherers is the only natural way to live on this planet.
Unfortunately, I have no ideas for HOW to return to this way of life. However, our fundamental goals should be to greatly lower our population and give up agriculture due to the fact that it's environmentally destructive and unsustainable.
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jdhlax Posted 6:33 am
17 Jul 2005
Bio-d (good nickname Amazing, thanx) claims that subsistance farming and hunting-gathering are "outmoded living model[s]."
There should also be a comma after "societies" in the sentence that begins, "ALL 'civilizations.'"
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jdhlax Posted 6:39 am
17 Jul 2005
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amazingdrx Posted 12:47 am
18 Jul 2005
Look at this jd and bio-d. Very interesting aspect of nuke development that has been overlooked!
Still won't compete on cost with wind, but it might get rid of rad waste? Fell free to use this as a new blog article gristmill!
I would be honored.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:01 am
18 Jul 2005
No disrespect intended, diversivist has his priorities well ordered, even if we disagree much of the time on how to get there from here.
On this critique of local production of food versus import from agribizz megfarming that artificially lowers cost destroying the farm economy of developing areas...I think you are overlooking the course of natural economic and political evolution bio-d.
Think of the rise of the merchant/middle class in europe, and how it ended the dark ages of feudalism empowered by tyrannical religious activities like the crusades, witch burning, and the inquistion.
The middle east is stuck in that dictatorship phase through religious intolerance used to preserve corporatist oil monopolies. And the US is rapidly devolving into that mode via these neo-conservatives pandering to fundamentalism to maintain continuous war over oil.
Africa is submerged in this horror right now. Only reigning in corporatist corruption will restore the path of natural economic and political evolution.
And the same with the middle east. Progressive Iranians are trying to do that right now.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:02 am
19 Jul 2005
That article on nuclear waste was interesting. Would you say it is any closer to reality than some other ideas though, like fusion power or clean burning coal?
Corporations:
I think it wiser to critique specific companies by name rather than corporations in general.
I suspect that is is Ralp Nader's personal hatred of corporations that has helped to spawn this tendency among us envrionmentalists to see them as the root of all evil.
Not to defend the behavior of some corporations, I'm just saying that people instictively band together into competing groups for profit or defense and the name of that group and how it is organized is largely irrelevant. People don't need corporations to do terrible things to each other and to the environment.
The Soviet Union treated its citizenry badly, and created an ecological hell hole, all sans corporations. Ditto China. This focus on the corporation seems obsessive to me. People would still be wrecking this planet if the corporation had never been invented. The bad apples need to be reined in, but most corporations are not bad. They are just groups of people with jobs producing a product that we, as consumers want and buy.
Outmoded lifestyles:
We all have our thoughts, but I suspect the future will not resemble anything we have yet imagined. I am still betting on exponential technology growth to be a big factor. Environmentally friendly and sustainable power generation, food production, and transporation all depend on it. There are too many of us to go back to hunting and gathering, or even subsistence farming.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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amazingdrx Posted 10:28 pm
21 Jul 2005
So wrong on so many levels bio-d, where to begin?
Monopoly corporatism by it's very nature is benign? And even beneficial?
After all, government does nothing right, better to contract out what government should not be involved in (everything except photo ops?) to private contractors like Halliburton.
Even when they rippoff we the taxpayers, at least that is money that does not feed the evil of big government!
So you are a neo-libertarian just like Jerry? Place the power of government firmly in the hands of the residents of corporate boardrooms. Corporations are citizens too, deserving of the same or even more rights than individual citizens? Because they are made up of many citizens? Hehehey.
Darn that Ralph Nader he made US all nuts around these corporate monopoly corruption issues!
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amazingdrx Posted 10:40 pm
21 Jul 2005
But of course being a Jules Verne fan since childhood I still like to envision the future anyway. The Nautilus comes to mind. But who knew the real world Nautilus would use toxic radioactive substances as it's power source?
Exponential growth, the force behind life itself, that Einstein said is the most powerful principle in the universe.
I see two 1,000 foot, 20 megawatt windmills, the profits reinvested, turning into 4, turning into 8.... turning into 30,000.
I see quick charge battery powered electric cars growing exponentially and storing that wind power.
And eventually superconducting energy storage rings eliminating the need for any fossil fuel combustion.
I see tax dollars going to support these efforts instead of over 100 billion per year going to oil wars and 500 million per day being paid out (most to countries that fund terrorism)by american consumers for imported oil.
And I see a revived manufacturing and export economy here in the USA. Sci-fi or future reality?
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amazingdrx Posted 10:59 pm
21 Jul 2005
Corporate citizens are more equal because they are composed of thousands of citizens! Right bio-d?
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jdhlax Posted 9:20 am
22 Jul 2005
By granting corporations the status of "persons," the government has given them most of the constitutional protections supposedly enjoyed by natural persons. This is ludicrous, and prevents us from regulation them as we so wish. For example, it is very difficult to do something as simple as reducing or outlawing billboards, because the corporations will claims that the government is interfering with its freedom of speech. Furthermore, with their great wealth, corporations are actually able to enforce their consitutional rights much better than the vast majority of individuals;
By amassing already overly rich people into a group AND limiting their liability to what the corporation has, as opposed to what the owners remove for themselves, corporations get away with doing great wrongs without having to worry about losing money. Sure, it might cost the corporation something, but the individuals who own it will barely feel the difference, as their money can't usually be touched; and
The conglomeration of overly rich called corporations vests enourmous power in one place. It's bad enough that rich people have more power than those with less money; corporations allow them to concentrate that power even further.
Bio-d is correct that we should be more specific about which we criticize, but not for the reason he thinks. Most corporations are relatively small businesses. The bad ones are ALL of the big corporations, and these are the ones we should attack. Bio-d, if you can show me an example of a large corporation that I wouldn't describe as evil, I'd love to see it.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:23 am
23 Jul 2005
All the things that we criticized communism and national socialism for.
A guest on Al Franken mentioned the libertarian conservative wing last night. I believe we are getting a lot of that political point of view around here.
Can we call them neo-libertarians? Not real libertarians, just as neo-conservatives are not real conservatives? Well I am calling a duck a duck, they quack like neocons so...
But it surely iritates them! Hehehey.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:28 am
23 Jul 2005
Not sure on that. The article was kind of sketchy.
Is it a real solution to the huge stockpile of nuclear waste already accumulated or another mega-nuke-bizz boondoggle?
It seems to make sense from a scientific point of view, the sub-critical feature of the reactor and the ability of the reaction to use up the radioactivity of the waste.
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