This is the last U.S. election. Have we taken stock of the implications? There is no room for incremental thinking. The storm will fall on whomever we elect president (and isn't there a case for McCain?). Among the startling implications of breaching the 350 ppm limit is the likelihood that this is the last U.S. presidential election during which there remains a slim opportunity to take decisive global climate action.
All the ordinary rules and habits of elections and campaigning have been summarily and unexpectedly tossed out the window. Building party power, advancing political careers, and addressing climate incrementally are no longer plausible strategies. We must now concern ourselves with electing leaders of character who will rise to the challenge as the crisis begins to unfold and political systems are stressed.
Comparing campaign climate policies, in this context, is not the best measure of candidates. The differences between Clinton, McCain, and Obama on climate are minuscule compared to the gulf between the state of U.S. civic debate and the scale of response required to avert cataclysm. Furthermore, a simple head-to-head comparison of policy takes no account and gives no credit for the key indicators of political grit and integrity: context and history.
John McCain may espouse the weakest platform of the three, but he adopted his position early and at high potential political cost. Both Clinton, who logged more dinner time with Al Gore then almost anyone, and Obama, a N.Y. PIRG college intern who credits LCV with his surprise victory in his first Senate race, were positioned to be strong climate action advocates but did not do so.
McCain has also shown more grit and leadership by his willingness to challenge the influence of money in politics, also at greater potential cost to a Republican, while Clinton and Obama are neither advocates of political reform, nor have they been notable for bucking special interests.
We must also consider what political conditions we should anticipate. The gathering climate crisis will strain politics-as-usual, just as slavery stressed the pre-Civil War era. The largest fault line runs through the Republican Party, with fossil fuel interests and Neanderthal conservatives on one side, and enlightened business interests and traditional conservatives/conservationists on the other. The Republican Party, like the Whigs, may well collapse, putting more value on installing a Republican in the White House.
Finally, a global solution can only be achieved under vigorous U.S. leadership. We must put up money and make new technologies freely available, but we will also need to bring to bear all the muscle of American superpower diplomacy and military menace. Democrats are congenitally conditioned against any international flexing of U.S. power. We know Republicans don't have that problem. I'm not urging a McCain endorsement, just pointing out that the case for Obama or Clinton is not clear cut.
Unfortunately, while the times cry out for third party candidacies, the offerings are dismal. Ralph Nader's recent announcement didn't mention climate, while the Green Party has descended into internecene warfare between leftist camps with barely a veneer of "green" left between them.
The prudent course of action for environmentalists is to set a high standard -- a platform that acknowledges the 350 ppm / 1.0 degrees C limit at a minimum -- and be willing to make no endorsement. Failure to do so forfeits our leverage in the Democratic intramural battle and general election, and endorsing any candidate without a significant change in the candidate's platform would be criminally irresponsible.
Turning to Congress, the same crucial factor of leadership pertains. It is of surpassing importance in this election that we elevate electing a handful of climate action leaders above all other objectives. Our ability to craft effective climate strategy is hamstrung by the lack of political leaders who see themselves as climate advocates operating within the political arena, coordinating with climate campaigners and organizers on the outside.
Two examples of such leaders are Mark Udall, running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, and Mike Brennan, running for U.S. Congress in Maine. Udall is co-chair of the 218-member Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus in the House and is author of a number of broad climate bills. Brennan has a history advocating sustainable energy that goes back to 1980, when I worked with him on the Campaign for Safe Energy, winning an anti-nuclear, pro-renewables plank in the Democratic national party platform. Both Udall and Brennan are distinguished by their ability to rise above petty infighting and bureaucratic mindedness with humor and warmth, while keeping their eyes on the prize.
Seven reasons for optimism about the Senate climate bill
How Senate Dems should lure GOP to a climate bill
Comments
View as Flat
Jon Rynn Posted 3:52 am
14 Mar 2008
Other than that, I agree that we need to think big. Perhaps you could provide a link to a set of policy proposals that you think fit the bill, something people could rally around.
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LegumeSam Posted 4:15 am
14 Mar 2008
I don't see why we are trusting "leadership" at this point. The real leadership, the economic as well as the political leadership, has already discussed climate change at Davos, and concluded that it is going to do nothing. Staying atop the global hierarchy of power and privilege means more of the 85-million-barrel-a-day crude oil habit (which, in itself, accounts for only 36% of total greenhouse gas emissions). Bush's recalcitrant stance on Kyoto conveniently kept the spotlight away from the general ineffectiveness of Kyoto itself.
If we make it to 2009, we will have survived eight years of an administration dedicated to the consensus fantasy of the elites: Bush was the icon of their wistful yearning for an era when macho militarism was king, and imperialism, the banner of the "white man's burden," could just go back to invading turf and building bases rather than dealing with those sticky proxy regimes. Token opposition to Bush belies a consensus endorsing the initiatives and image of a regime which needs daily infusions of monopoly-media propaganda to survive. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," as the Wizard of Oz said.
Only a general uprising against said "leadership" and its sacrifice of the bottom 99% of us to the economic obsessions of late capitalism will do. We need to cast off the millstone of the "Washington consensus" of neoliberal policy if we are to have any impact upon government.
We must put up money and make new technologies freely available, but we will also need to bring to bear all the muscle of American superpower diplomacy and military menace.
Do any of you read William Blum? US "military menace" has always served as an adjunct to corporate penetration of economic affairs in nations with natural resources ripe for plunder, and as a cudgel to keep stray disobedients in line. Are we supposed to expect something radically different at this point? Maybe under a Kucinich administration, see, but he dropped out...
As for "money," how about that collapsing dollar? If any entity can claim world leadership in the field of money at this point, it would be the EU with its Euros.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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vernacularsnoop Posted 4:23 am
14 Mar 2008
What are you basing this statement on? The Green Party will be running 1000 candidates this year across America, all of whom recognize the necessity of taking strong measures to curb the climate crisis, and none of whom take money from corporations or lobbyists. Cynthia McKinney's plan to shift our energy economy away from oil to renewables, Kent Mesplay's support for alternative energy and green jobs, and Jesse Johnson's tireless activism against mountaintop removal shows that the Green Party remains as dedicated to protecting our environment as it has always been. As for "internecene leftist warfare", perhaps you're referring to the fact that one marginal socialist candidate left the Green Party because it was not a match for her political views.
The most effective way to get the government to take action on the environment is to vote Green - politicians will simply not listen to environmentalists if they think that eco-friendly votes can be taken for granted.
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caniscandida Posted 4:24 am
14 Mar 2008
But the new, goofy, totally unnecessary rift among the Democrats surely portends a disaster much more horrible.
I love Jon's idea, to have the US Navy enforce fisheries regulations. How wonderful, not to need Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd to save the whales in the Antarctic!
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:49 am
14 Mar 2008
Our lobbying organizations, like NRDC, have been coopted by industry. We have almost no impact in local, state, and national party politics. I was told repeatedly by regional party officials here that environmental issues are not effective campain issues in this area.
Lip service to green issues, then industry lobbyist money at legislative voting time. Sign onto that lobbyist bill for ethanol to raise campaign money, that's the ticket.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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infp Posted 5:30 am
14 Mar 2008
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bookerly Posted 5:35 am
14 Mar 2008
You say "but we will also need to bring to bear all the muscle of American superpower diplomacy and military menace".
So, um, if people don't do what we say, we will nuke them in order to save the world?
And what are we going to require they do? Dismantle their homes and live in caves so we can keep McMansions and SUVs? Give us all their resources while their children starve? Work as our slaves?
You actually started out making a decent case for McCain, but wow, when you blew it, you really blew it!!
Please tell me who else not to vote for!!!
patrick in Beijing
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Rossputin Posted 6:24 am
14 Mar 2008
It seems that global cooling is at least as likely as further warming.
But even if you believe in warming, why do you believe it has to be a negative for the planet? The planet has warmed slightly in the past century, and during that time every important measure of human well-being and quality of life has improved dramatically.
We produce more food and more real income. The number of heat-related deaths has dropped in almost every metropolitan area in the country. (The only place I know of where it increased was Seattle, one of the coolest places in America.) Humans are very adaptable. The idea that the world or the human race will end with the modest changes in temperature that even most panicky alarmists claim will happen is ridiculous.
The risk to the world's economies of the destructive policies of Algore and friends is FAR greater than the risk of leaving people to adapt to whatever comes next, as we always have.
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Ken Ward Posted 9:49 am
14 Mar 2008
Global warming is ranked 8th on a list of 11 issues on the 2008 Green Party candidate questionnaire.
According to Brent McMilian, Green Party Political Director, "On energy policy, the connections between wars of imperialism, global warming and peak oil should be the number one focus of our federal level candidates."
This quote appeared in the Fall, 2007 issue of Green Pages http://www.gp.org/greenpages/, which contains no story about climate change, but does include articles entitled: "Anti-Racism: Green Party Has a Long Way To Go," "The Color of Green: Getting to Know People of Color Across the Country Active in the Green Party," "Greens Join Soldiers in Protest Against Iran War," "The Drug War is Meant to Be Waged, not Won," and so on.
What is this if not an orthodox leftist agenda? All three announced Presidential candidates - Jesse Johnson, Cynthia McKinney and Kent Mesplay - are vying for leadership of this agenda, none challenge it.
I stand by my assessment.
Ken Ward
ken[at]brightlines.org
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Ken Ward Posted 10:12 am
14 Mar 2008
It will be too late to avert significant impacts, but there may be room to stave off the very worst - catastrophe does have a sliding scale. In these circumstances, even the best funded, most hard-core corporate game plan is going to crumble (and if this is all a fiction, as Possputin, et. al. prefer to believe, then no great harm is done, because the world has not and will not make any significant effort to slow extractions and use of fossil fuels).
There will then be 2 choices: techno-crackpot quick fixes like lofting billions of Mylar umbrellas into geostationary orbit, or a global mobilization on world war-level footing, which pairs a cap and phase down on extractions of oil, gas and coal with a massive, US led and and financed, global rollout of renewables. If the US is prepared to invade Iraq to secure access to oil supplies, there is no reason why we shouldn't contemplate US action, presumably under UN or other international mandate, to shut down extractions. We're talking about the fate of the world here, of course we would, and should take vigorous action.
Ken Ward
ken[at]brightlines.org
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:47 am
14 Mar 2008
And if you do think it's an emergency, what kind of capping system? I think we're a little past a nice stately trading system, no? How about building continent-spanning high-speed, renewable electricity-powered trains around the world? spreading permaculture? eh?
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LegumeSam Posted 1:14 pm
14 Mar 2008
The first option is probably unfeasible, as there is doubtless so much space junk already in geostationary orbit that the umbrella network would be smashed.
The second option is leagues above the rest, because at least a "phase down on extractions" is in some way a manner of leaving the fossil fuels in the ground, rather than just making the consumers jump through hoops and pretending that all is well, which is what everyone else is recommending.
There is no guarantee, of course, that alternative energy will substitute in any adequate way for the fossil fuels we'll not be using. Nor is there any guarantee that governments will voluntarily restrict oil output to the extent needed, since oil production is bound to be immensely profitable in the (capitalist) future. Why should the biggest beneficiaries of the profits system give up on it, even if to avoid certain disaster? So I see two possible outcomes:
The people of the world are put on energy "starvation diets" while the government doles out huge privileges to its corporate connections in order to pretend that the capitalist system is still functioning.
Economic decisions devolve to a local level so that average people can at least get air conditioning in the summer/ heat energy in the winter, as corporations and governments are vastly downsized to meet the new energy and climate realities.
The problem is that, after hundreds of years of capitalist discipline, few people can bring themselves to imagine a world society that is not capitalist. They can't imagine an economy based on economic democracy; they can't imagine an economic system that isn't expanding, even if (as William K. Tabb reports in summarizing Angus Maddison's OECD statistics) the growth rate is slowing considerably; after all, this is why the great fiction that is the Era of Finance Capital has multiplied out of control for the past thirty-five years. And they certainly don't like the ideological implications of "post-capitalism." So we'll probably see option #1 before we see option #2.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:33 pm
14 Mar 2008
However, when it comes to the US, I think we can see a classic problem of rise and decline -- although I wouldn't particularly blame capitalism, as the same thing happened to the USSR. Like the USSR, the US has wasted and depleted the potential of its manufacturing base with a huge military, but unlike the USSR, a very large financial sector is sucking the life out of what remains of the manufacturing base. Again, hopefully we can articulate a better vision of economic democracy now, so that either people have some alternative to prevent crises, or if the shit hits the fan, at leasts there will be a decent alternative to the inevitable right-wing movements that will pop up.
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LegumeSam Posted 3:28 pm
14 Mar 2008
Especially, read van der Pijl's 1998 book "Transnational Classes and International Relations." In order to explain the framework of competing nation-states, van der Pijl writes a history of capitalism as a history of capitalist discipline, or, specifically, the conversion of the things of the world (and the life-hours of the working class) into saleable properties. That's what they call "commodification." Capitalist discipline became more complex as it evolved, proceding from a brute commodification of the world to the era of financial capital that rules the roost today.
There were four main periods of capitalist history, corresponding to four stages of capitalist discipline. This occurred in American history in somewhat this order:
Agricultural capitalism, before the Civil War, until at the earliest 1859, the year of America's first for-profit oil well. The dominant industries of this period were in "the textile and food industries" (55), esp. cotton.
Industrial capitalism, from the Civil War to World War II. The dominant industries of this period were in "metal, oils, and engineering" (56)
Consumer capitalism, starting with Ford's adoption of the assembly line in 1913 but really taking hold only after World War II. The dominant industries of this era were in "automobiles, chemicals, and electrical engineering" (56)
Neoliberalism, beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. In this era, finance takes over the productive industries, which now include things such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, communications (57), and so on. Capitalist discipline has now made it into the genetic codes, which are engineered so they can be patented by Monsanto et al.
The point of such an analysis is that capitalist discipline exhausts each stratum it encounters. It runs down the world, in the process of sucking it clean of what is "saleable" about it. Eventually it will exhaust the whole world, at which point there will be no more capitalism.
As van der Pijl points out in his more recent book "Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq," the Soviet Union fits seamlessly into this history of capitalist discipline. Despite its employment of "Communist propaganda," the Soviet Union was from the get-go a mere "contender state," employing authoritarian methods to "catch up" in capitalist development with the capitalist "heartland," most significantly the British and French empires and, later, the United States. Thus, despite its ideological pretenses, the Soviet Union competed at the same game that the capitalists were playing. Its eventual downfall was due to a collapse in confidence of its elite classes, fueled by capitalist penetration of its economy. So, yeah, capitalism is to blame. I don't mean to step on toes with this; but I don't see any other way.
Economic democracy is not necessary to avoid ecological crisis -- some sort of benevolent dictatorship would do -- but dictatorships tend to be kleptocratic: rule by thieves. Capitalist dictatorships are especially like this.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:08 pm
14 Mar 2008
First, one "quibble" -- maybe the USSR collapsed because of the loss of confidence of the elites, but they lost confidence because the production system was collapsing, and it was collapsing because they had poured most of the output of the means of production -- remember that phrase? -- into the military. And they also messed up their environment even worse than the West did, which points to the importance of democracy as a foundation of an "ecological discipline", as you put it.
Anyway, there are many theories of these technological stages of history -- there are a whole set of "leading" theories, or cycles, related to Kondratieff and all kinds of other stuff, and it always left me cold, I must say. It just seems too ad hoc. It still comes down to production machinery, it seems to me -- even in the 18th century, the French in particular had very sophisticated machinery (if you can get ahold of pictures of diderot's encyclopidie, you'd be amazed at the technologies -- and Adam Smith based his pin factory on those books).
I notice we haven't discussed Wallerstein, and if anybody else is still reading this, kudos to ya! But capitalism was commodifying to the extent of a large-scale system of slavery at that point; even the Romans had commodified humans. So I don't know if I buy the idea that more and more is commodified, although Polanyi makes a big deal of it, at least in the 19th century.
At any rate, I tend to operate on the idea that power, whether economic or political, is what leads to oppression and exploitation, the accumulation of which has been occurring for thousands of years. Certainly, the exploitation of the environment has been going on for very long, in various guises -- if you want to call all of them capitalist, fine, but it all seems to lead to 1) the need to distribute power as widely as possible, including embedding democracy into ecosystems (through rights to indigenous peoples?), and to inculcate a different set of morals or culture -- perhaps an "ecological discipline", part of a system of economic democracy.
For instance, here's a wild and crazy idea: instead of bailing out the banks, why not let them go bankrupt, and reconstitute them as local Mondragon-type worker coop/community/green infrastructure banks? That, it seems to me, would be a big step toward economic democracy. It should be possible to be able to offer a democratic (small d) alternative to whatever shenanigans are going on at the time.
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Pangolin Posted 7:27 pm
14 Mar 2008
The one economist who claims the (stable) container isn't expanding but in fact stable is regarded as a heretic and shunned by the others. Then they will write papers on the expansion rate of measuring tapes, which is different than (not) boxes.
There is one planet here. Any "economy" on this planet is an exchange of materials and energy that may or may not have anything to do with the exchange of value tokens. When the value tokens are purely fictional the variation of the value token exchange will tend to exceed the variation of the energy exchange. It will also tend to favor the writers of said fiction and close friends thereof.
Until we assimilate and internalise the idea that the earth is pretty much a closed system with a fixed energy balance we are going to screw it up. Economists, for the most part, are cheering on the destruction.
Put the Carbon Back
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caniscandida Posted 7:44 pm
14 Mar 2008
Economists make little sense to me too, and I have no intention of wasting the rest of my short life studying their science. Nevertheless, it gives me delight to observe them going at it here in Gristmill.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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LegumeSam Posted 9:06 pm
14 Mar 2008
First, one "quibble" -- maybe the USSR collapsed because of the loss of confidence of the elites, but they lost confidence because the production system was collapsing, and it was collapsing because they had poured most of the output of the means of production -- remember that phrase? -- into the military.
I thought the USSR was collapsing because its economy was being privatized. Remember, Moscow "adopted G-7 and IMF recommendations for a withdrawal of the state from the economy," as van der Pijl's "Global Rivalries" book tells us. It states further that (246):
... the state class abandoned the state-socialist form of the contender effort, switching to a free-for-all in the race for private enrichment
And if "militarization" is supposed to collapse an economy, then how was it so that "militarization" led to US and Soviet expansion after World War II, and to the US recovery from the economic downturn of 1982? So, no, I don't think so.
I notice we haven't discussed Wallerstein, and if anybody else is still reading this, kudos to ya! But capitalism was commodifying to the extent of a large-scale system of slavery at that point; even the Romans had commodified humans. So I don't know if I buy the idea that more and more is commodified, although Polanyi makes a big deal of it, at least in the 19th century.
IMHO it's good we haven't discussed Wallerstein. Much as I respect the guy, he writes a lot of stuff that is way too dull and abstract.
Early modern slavery was a short-term response to the absence of labor-power on the frontiers of expanding capitalist society in the early history of the Americas. If you read Crevecoeur, giving out advice in the 18th century to foreigners moving to the Thirteen Colonies, he tells them: "Come to America! But get yourself a slave." At some point it became more expensive to hold people as slaves; the security costs were too high, as they tended to escape, and it was cheaper for the slaveholders just to pay for the hours of their workers' lives via "wage labor contracts" rather than buying the entire worker as a slave. The commodification of labor became more efficient, more refined, as a result of the abandonment of slavery.
Other, later advances in commodification were also good for working people. In order to create a consumer society, the ruling classes eventually found themselves obliged to adopt Keynesian economics, because only with the Keynesian endorsement of "circulation" did the capitalist economy create a consumer class, an "American middle class," capable of buying the products produced in the factories. Thus the post-World War II boom, in which the economy sought consumption guarantees through increased government spending, the creation of "suburbs" for consumer housing, and the explosion of mass media, in which an environment of omnipresent advertising was to coerce people into the adoption of consumer "lifestyles" designed around the purchase of market products.
However, at some point in the 1970s the elites found it more profitable to "downsize" the American middle class than to prop up the Keynesian economy as a whole. There was also a political revulsion against the growing "people power" trend of the 1960s -- read, for instance, Samuel Huntington's piece in a 1975 collection called The Crisis of Democracy, in a book written for the Trilateral Commission, in which the replacement of democratic power with elite power is openly advocated. Thus the birth of neoliberalism.
Certainly, the exploitation of the environment has been going on for very long, in various guises -- if you want to call all of them capitalist, fine,
Actually, I don't -- it's just that the exploitation of the environment has only achieved world-threatening proportions with late capitalist exploitation, whereas with precapitalist exploitation natural ecosystems always had a chance to come back. Even with the early capitalist destruction of, say, the forests of the Northeast, the forests could come back eventually with the help of protectionist legislation.
but it all seems to lead to 1) the need to distribute power as widely as possible, including embedding democracy into ecosystems (through rights to indigenous peoples?), and to inculcate a different set of morals or culture -- perhaps an "ecological discipline", part of a system of economic democracy.
Right!
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 1:09 am
15 Mar 2008
Evidently, actual looming concerns for long-term human wellbeing, biodiversity protection, and the maintenance of environmental health and Earth's body are now somehow momentarily at odds with powerful forces that are adamantly driving the rampant expansion of the global political economy toward the inevitable point of its unsustainability in the unbounded world we inhabit.
As more and more people are becoming aware, one of humankind's biggest challenges will be to find reasonable and sensible ways of re-organizing and modifying the colossal, artificially designed, manmade and soon to be patently unsustainable world economy into a sustainable human construction, one more adequately suited to the limitations of the relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible world we are blessed to inhabit.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
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LegumeSam Posted 1:57 am
15 Mar 2008
Indeed. But one thing to remember, here, is that that top 1% who own half of all non-home capital assets has a vested interest in this particular "world economy" -- they are, after all, the people described by George Carlin in this video...
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:47 am
15 Mar 2008
Sam -- The reason for the post-war expansion was the full manifestation of a very powerful manufacturing base -- in both the US and USSR -- and as early as 1965, Seymour Melman, an industrial engineer, was writing a book called "The Depleted Society", as in the military depleting the economy. It was the military (plus in the US, the financial sector and the desire on the part of the large corporations to rid themselves of unions) that was acting against the production base, not for it. As for 1982, that was probably the inflection point when the manufacturing base started to take its last dive. The ratcheting up of the dollar devastated the exporting industries -- much as the british attempt to keep the pound as a world currency helped destroy their manufacturing base. In other words, empire over industry, the very industry that made empire possible. This, to me, is the main contradiction in international systems -- the leading powers destroy their own capability to generate the wealth that led to their power in the first place.
The reason that the ecological crises are accelerating now, or in the last 150 years, is that the machinery improved to the point where we could do more damage. As the Soviet economists in the 1920s realized, the industrial core of an industrial (actually, any human economy) can grow exponentially because of the self-reproducing nature of people working with tools, and so the "explosion" we see (Steve) is the result of the "success" of these technologies.
The discovery of fossil fuels advanced the disintegration of slavery, both in the US and USSR (serfdom), because fossil fuels became the slaves (this was nicely developed by Dale Allen Pfeiffer in "Eating fossil fuels"), so hopefully we won't descend back into slave-based systems when they disappear.
And thus, the project to try to envision and spark a new technological and social basis of the civilization, because we do have new technologies that clearly can replace the old, ecosystem-destroying ones, and we have some examples of new social paradigms (e.g., Mondragon). On which we can agree!
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amazingdrx Posted 3:59 am
15 Mar 2008
Vinod and Bill C.'s venture into ethanol has their company funding a sugar cane cutting slavery operation in Brazil. Why use expensive high tech robots to cut the cane when you can use expendable slaves?
Good ole ethanol boys club. They'll save us from soaring oil prices due to endless oil war.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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LegumeSam Posted 4:32 am
15 Mar 2008
Let's see -- Alexander, the Romans, the Muslims, the Mongols, the Chinese... industry makes empire possible?
The discovery of fossil fuels advanced the disintegration of slavery
The first for-profit American oil well: 1859, Pennsylvania. The de facto end of most slavery in the US: 1863, Pennsylvania again. Did it really happen in only four years?
Just food for thought. Have fun, Jon.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:43 am
15 Mar 2008
The Mongols are fascinating, because they had the most advanced understanding and experience of using the horse of any nation, before or since. Horses were the tanks and power sources pre-industrial revolution, and though the Mongols used them mostly for war, that was still a technical advantage, as were their bows.
The Chinese were definitely at the technological leading edge until about 1500, when Europe was starting to move toward an industrial revolution. In 1100 they made more iron than any nation until the 1800s in Britain. The Indians and Arabs, pre1500, were the other two top civilizations (there is an excellent book called "before european hegemony" by janet abu-lighod, a little wallersteinian,but not too bad). And of course the Arabs were very busy advancing science and building a vast and prosperous empire before the Mongols (yes, again) and Ottoman empire started to strangle it.
So, I think you can find some technological source, even a production machinery source, for all of the most powerful civilizations and states throughout world history. There is no sharp line between "industrial" and "pre-industrial" -- tools and machinery have been part of human society for our entire existence, but that's another story.
Now, about 1870 -- The civilization that we now inhabit is not based on petroleum, it's based on coal. The coal-based industrial revolution started, depending on the source, sometime in the late 18th century. By 1870, the "second" industrial revolution was taking off, particularly with the dissemination of steel and better machine tools. Every Great Power was trying to keep up with the British -- and the US Civil War resulted in the Northern industrial elite winning the argument as to which type of civilization the US would be. The Germans had pretty much caught up, as seen in the Franco-Prussian war of that year, and the Russians freed the serfs.
So, again, I think you can see how fossil fuels and industry have been interacting, and why we had better have, in even relocalized economies, enough advanced tech to generate solar/wind/geothermal, or we'll be back to the pre-coal age, trying to figure out how to get by on just wood -- which will disappear pretty fast if it is the only source of energy. There are some writers, such as Sharon Astyk, who seem to think that we will go back to a medieval lifestyle, but with today's population, that will lead to total deforestation and massive starvation. No, we need to step lightly on the earth,with advanced technology.
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GRLCowan Posted 11:20 am
15 Mar 2008
will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas by technofixes that are not crackpot.
The principal non-crackpot technical fix for our past CO2 emissions, and such future ones as we cannot prevent, is dispersal of alkaline silicate minerals in out-of-the-way places to adjust the atmosphere's CO2 back down to where it was in the late 19th century. More here.
Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!
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bookerly Posted 12:55 pm
15 Mar 2008
It is true that the Chinese were far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of technology, but somehow never got around to conquering every place they saw (like the British, for example).
There are many historical theories and reasons for this, but there is one that I have always found lovely (though will not comment on its accuracy).
Some historians claim that the reason for China's failure to move up and dominate the world was that they valued poets over businesspeople. When it came time to appoint governors, many of the emperors turned to poets, writers and artists. Business was important, but always secondary.
You might say "I made a million bucks", but people would ask you "how is your calligraphy?".
So, the business models needed to advance into the industrial age were set aside in favor of discussion of literature.
Only theories, of course.
patrick in Beijing
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:00 pm
15 Mar 2008
On the other hand, "administration" seems to have dominated "business", or commercial interests, which is why a poet or calligrapher might find more favor at the court than a "crass" merchant.
I think another reason for their lack of expansionism was the idea of being "satisfied", advanced by a german historian (fellow by the name of dehio), that when a state gets large enough, the urge to expand diminishes, because they fill a "natural" territory. So the europeans were always fighting to establish a more "natural" polity in Europe, which didn't work until they did it all cooperatively in the post-wwii period. So the Chinese were able to keep the military in check, keeping their civilization going for a very long time -- until they were militarily conquered by the Mongols. I've read that the reason they started looking inward was as a reaction to the Mongol occupation. could be.
At any rate, the "natural" global balance of power is now reasserting itself, that is, China and India, will be the "superpowers", as they were for a couple of thousand years, with Europe and the new kid on the block, North America. I think the "natural" bounds of a state, or "union", or "community", should be continental or subcontinental, which means that for the poor countries to reach a decent stage of wealth, they will need to form some sort of common market, and develop a sustainable manufacturing base.
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LegumeSam Posted 2:53 pm
15 Mar 2008
like theories about the decline of Rome, there are many theories.
Two military blunders stand out as immediate causes of Rome's fall in the West:
In 376 CE the Goths, fleeing the Huns, crossed the Danube and settled in the area around Adrianople (now Edirne, in Turkey). The Emperor Valens, ruling in Constantinople, had to deal with a running conflict that broke out between the Romans and the Goths. He could have waited for reinforcements from Gratian, who ruled in Rome. But, no, he had to be Macho Man, and claim all victory for himself. So on an incredibly hot day in August of 378 the Roman Army met the Goths, battle accidentally broke out, and the Romans were slaughtered. Oops!
In 402 the magister militum (head of the army) Stilicho, acting for the boy emperor Honorius, stripped the Rhine border of its limitanei (border patrol) in order to fight the forces of Alaric, leader of the Goths. Later, in 406/407, a huge contingent of Alans, Sueves, and Vandals crossed over the frozen Rhine River into Gaul, and then on to Spain. Oops!
I think another reason for their lack of expansionism was the idea of being "satisfied", advanced by a german historian (fellow by the name of dehio), that when a state gets large enough, the urge to expand diminishes, because they fill a "natural" territory.
The Romans had a potentially endless urge to expand; it was checked when Tiberius lost a few legions in Germany.
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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Jay Alt Posted 3:00 pm
15 Mar 2008
Indeed. One could say 'does', except that his proposals are so poorly documented no one can tell what he has in mind. Or, it's all about the omission - meaning, he'll leave the solutions up to the invisible hand.
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amazingdrx Posted 5:37 pm
15 Mar 2008
How was their system scammed?
The same way it's always done with exams, test takers quickly write down all the questions they can remember after the test. Nowadays camera phones can be used to copy tests.
Then the questions are all gathered eventually from various cooperative test takers and a list of question and answers is made that can be memorized by people who don't know anything about the skill or knowledge being tested.
Civil service undermined, corruption riddles the system from the inside.
When the dumbest and most corrupt make it to the very top using the scamming, your empire is doomed. Sound familiar?
Kind of how duuhbya graduated from the Ivy League?
Standardized testing like IQ tests and SAT, and no child left behind multiple guess ed..jee...kay..shun. Opens the quality control to this flaw.
Real education instills real knowledge. That makes for a creative productive culture.
Neil Bush even set up a test cheat company (with Saudi funding) designed to drill kids to pass the standardized tests of no child left behind. It costs 40 bucks per student for the computer software, call your school today!
Your children need the best! Designed by a Bush to beat the Bush test. Will your kids be ignorant enough to suceed like the bush boys? one can only hope.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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bookerly Posted 6:30 pm
15 Mar 2008
Dear DrX,
The Chinese Examination system (the forerunner of civil service systems everywhere, I suspect) is not as simple as you see it. I am hardly an expert on it, but it required years of study, and often resulted in people from obscure backgrounds achieving power.
The gaming of it came mostly from the fact that the wealthy could afford tutors and special classes.
Doing well at even an early level often resulted in wealthy patronage and position.
It involved a different mind set than in the West (which may be one reason we often misunderstand it).
Too complicated for a simple post!!! (smile)
Dear Jon,
Another theory which matches your boundaries theory, is that the Chinese empire was already so large and so full of interesting things, that it kept attention focused internally, ignoring much of the outside world. (Which explains why their fleet turned back and didn't conquer the world).
In terms of the future? It does seem clear that we are entering a multi-polar era. This may not mean that all poles will be equal. Certainly China and India will play growing roles. Don't ignore Africa or South America.
For the US, the key question is how can it learn to "get along" with others without bullying everyone? And if it can't, what happens?
I often tell my students that anti-Chinese sentiment in the US is a natural reaction to a rising China and a falling America (or rather perhaps a settling into place as one among many equals America), and they can expect more of it during the transition.
McCain represents the worst of the old cold-warrior ethos, and his hard line in terms of "us vs them" would be disastrous.
Whoever the next President is, he/she needs to learn how to negotiate in good faith with the world, and approach with a spirit of friendship, respect and equality.
Businesses have learned the secret of "win-win", it's time our American political leaders did so as well.
patrick in Beijing
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caniscandida Posted 9:36 pm
15 Mar 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Fore ....
Augustus already had a conservative, anti-expansionist approach, preferring to secure defensible borders rather than to push on into dodgy new territory. E.g., his adoptive father Julius Caesar had established a Roman presence in Britain, but Augustus pulled back to the Channel. The strategy of his commander Varus in the Rhineland was to acquire some territory on the east side of the Rhine in order to establish a province; but their intention was certainly not to seize all of Germany, which in the minds of the Romans was useless real estate covered by damp and unpleasant forest.
In fact, the Romans did maintain a presence in the Rhineland for a few centuries. A number of cities on the Rhine are Roman foundations, or were earlier settlements which were urbanized during the Roman period, most notably Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz.
The German commander, whom the Romans knew as Arminius but Germans starting perhaps with Martin Luther decided to Germanize by the somewhat different name Hermann, had in fact lived for a number of years in Rome as a noble hostage (a common practice back then; the last Seleucids had lived in Rome, as did members of the dynasty of Herod), had studied Roman tactics, and in this campaign was traveling with the Roman commander Varus as his aide and companion. It was he who deviously led the trusting Romans into an ambush in difficult terrain, then abandoned them and went over to the Germans. Perhaps 20,000 Romans were killed in the course of the three-day battle.
To the Germans, not unnaturally, Hermann has become something of a national hero. In this country, there is a German-American social organization called the Sons of Hermann. And in the small city of New Ulm, Minnesota, there is a large neo-classical monument, like one in Germany, the Hermanns Denkmal.
As a child of the Romans myself, while I have no intention of apologizing for the Roman Empire, I cannot get too excited about Hermann.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 11:06 pm
15 Mar 2008
Cf. in Oliver Stone's not very good movie "Alexander," the relative simplicity of the Macedonians, even the royal family (e.g. Angelina Jolie, as Olympias, in an undyed gown), by contrast with the spectacular opulence of the Persians. But Alexander and his generals inherit that opulence, and get used to it. The narrator is Ptolemy the Great, played by Anthony Hopkins, who is shown in his elegant palace in Alexandria.
(That is one of the few things that I like about that movie, actually. Another is the variety of sexual expression indulged in by Alexander: he has a heterosexual relationship with the Central Asian princess Roxane; but he also acquires the accomplished male eunuch Bagoas in the household of the Persian king; and the love of his life is his friend from boyhood, the man Hephaestion.)
(I have no idea, by the way, what the peculiar charms of sex with a eunuch might be. Sex with Jared Leto, who played Hephaestion, is a good bit more understandable.)
It was only in the case of Alexander that the Greeks conquered an empire. (Strictly speaking, Alexander and his people were Macedonians, a barbarian people who had adopted Greek culture, and were not true Greeks; but do not tell the Greeks that.) Earlier, however, from around the eighth to the fifth centuries, when conditions in the old Greek city-states got crowded, they would send out colonies to establish themselves at unoccupied places on the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Odessa in Ukraine, Trebizond on the north Turkish coast, Tripoli in Libya, Naples and Taranto in southern Italy, Syracuse in Sicily, and Nice and Monaco on the Cote d'Azur were all originally Greek colonies.
The Greeks do not seem to have been greatly interested in technological innovation. If for a while they were the greatest warriors of antiquity, that was because of their unique style of combat, hoplite warfare (see another very bad movie, "300"), perfected in the Macedonian phalanx, not because of advanced technology.
During the siege of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, the celebrated mathematician and physicist Archimedes is said to have invented a great claw which could lift the Roman ships out of the water, as well as an array of mirrors which could focus sunlight onto the ships and set them alight, but they seem to have been not very practical.
Much later, during the time of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire, they did indeed invent an inflammable substance called "Greek fire," which could be fired from cannons mounted on ships, and the recipe of which was a state secret. It was used to great effect a number of times.
The Byzantine Empire was a Christian empire, and its emperor had a religious function. The words of Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew, 28.18, "All authority in heaven and on the Earth has been given to me," were applied to the emperor as vicar of Christ. But that hardly inspired them to conquer new territory. In fact, the history of that empire is a long, sad narrative of shrinking and loss, until at the end, in 1453, it had been reduced to little more than the neighborhood of Constantinople.
It is possible, though, that their spiritual heirs, the Russians, had that sort of religious justification in mind when they expanded their territory to the east across Asia and even for a period into North America.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:31 am
16 Mar 2008
As to my comments, that's what you get from a political scientist, a tendency to try to rip some kind of laws out of the chaos of history. It was amusing when I researched theories of rise and fall, for my dissertation, that political scientists would advise looking to historians for various theories of rise and decline (of Rome or China, for instance), and then historians would suggest asking political scientists.
Maybe it ultimately depends on the reason that you're trying to figure out the ups and downs of various civilizations. In "the upside of down", for instance, Thomas Homer Dixon focuses on the ecologic of the Roman economy, and how the energy demands of that civilization affected their fortunes. But then, there are also lessons to be learned from being too macho as well!
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caniscandida Posted 5:15 am
16 Mar 2008
Interestingly, it was the Western Empire, not the Eastern one, which suffered most as a result of Adrianople. With respect to military history, the Eastern Romans adapted by radically re-thinking what an effective force must consist of; after Valens' legions were abandoned by the Roman horse and then were surrounded and cut to pieces by the Gothic cavalry, they came to reject centuries of Mediterranean tradition, in which the core of an army was heavy infantry, and to emphasize the importance of heavy cavalry, which in time became the cataphracts.
Goths and other Germans got to know about horses from Jon's Central Asians -- before the Mongols, there were Huns, Alans, Sarmatians ... And so heavy cavalry became a staple of European warfare, and conquest, for centuries. One of the most famous conquests in history, that of England by the Normans in 1066, began with a decisive battle that pitched heavy cavalry against heavy infantry, with the side on horses prevailing. And the final cavalry campaign in history was not that long ago: the valiant but pathetic effort by the Polish cavalry to defend their homeland against the Germans, at the beginning of WWII.
(Was it good for the horses? Well, probably not, on balance. But surely Jon's Mongols, and others, took good care of their horses most of the time, and treated them with honor and even affection.)
Anyway, back to machismo. It can be both good and bad, so there is no easy way to construct a rule about it. Napoleon swept to power, and established French military dominance on the continent, with one bold gesture after another. Was the early, futile Egyptian campaign a foolish display of machismo? Perhaps, but he had a lot of bad luck there; it might have worked, he might have opened up a secure route to India, and then historians would be hailing his genius. On the other hand, the invasion of Russia, and, even worse, the way he misplayed Spain, were foolhardy fits of pigheaded blindness.
What about the 100 Days? Was Waterloo a failure of foolhardy machismo, or just some more bad luck? If Wellington had been less successful in holding up the French cavalry, and if these had been able to turn effectively against the late-arriving Prussians, could Napoleon actually have been able to force the Europeans to accept him back in command in France?
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:08 am
16 Mar 2008
Had they wanted to "nation build" instead of conquer (remind you of somebody? -- and god forbid that Hitler would have sat on his winnings), they probably could have consolidated their empire in Europe -- although maybe not forever. Throughout European history, the most powerful state has tried to take over what is essentially a peninsula (not a continent), because it is a logical political/economic unit.
By the way, the Huns, etc. went west, young men, because the Chinese were too much for them, and they had more success over the Romans. At least, so I've read. The Mongols made one attempt to take over Europe, and although they were meeting some success, the great khan of the time died and they had to return to pick a new one. But their empire prefigured the Soviet one, because a central eurasian entity probably makes sense geographically as well.
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LegumeSam Posted 7:29 am
16 Mar 2008
Indeed, and so, also, was George Herbert Walker Bush, who mercilessly bombed hundreds of thousands of surrendering Iraqi troops...
http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus
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lorna salzman Posted 8:05 am
16 Mar 2008
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Rancher Posted 9:43 am
16 Mar 2008
With an efficient high speed rail system, transit could be faster and more comfortable than driving. The USA needs to nationalize its mainline rail system, which is the only way a modern system can be built.
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Pangolin Posted 7:20 pm
18 Mar 2008
If we don't mind could we put away the 20-sided dice and our little tin figurines and focus on the near future and the dubious survival of most of the human race? You remember them don't you? The several billion people that just lost their lunch to the fuel tanks of american SUV's.
Eyes front now and stay on topic.
Put the Carbon Back
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caniscandida Posted 10:00 pm
18 Mar 2008
As for "stay on topic":
Readers are free to skip over any comment that does not interest them.
Commenters are free to decide what sort of comment a topic is eliciting.
As a thread develops, there is no single topic anymore. Topics proliferate, as more commenters put forth new considerations.
In this case, the original topic had a lot to do with political science, and then two commenters with a background in political science have been commenting appropriately. They raised the issue of empire and past systems of imperialism.
History is always relevant. I certainly would not wish to entrust the fate of billions of people on Earth to people who either ignore history or hold its study in contempt.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Pangolin Posted 10:12 am
19 Mar 2008
Since none of the imperial leaders mentioned did much but invade other warlord aggregations while ignoring, looting and raping the peasantry as always I just don't get the connection. Could it be "testosterone bad?" Not exactly a unique thought.
Generally it's considered polite to retain some connection to the original topic on threads. That way people don't read clubby little tangent threads looking for the wrapup. Did I miss the rule change?
Put the Carbon Back
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caniscandida Posted 3:34 am
20 Mar 2008
Meanwhile, all readers are free to ignore what they choose to ignore. No one is compelled to read anything; and everything can be quickly passed over. To pretend that readers are unjustly subjected to reading what they do not wish to read is technically called "whining."
LegumeSam and Jon Rynn have written respectfully about matters raised in Ken Ward's post, or elicited by it. Ken Ward is free to protest at any time regarding how this thread has developed; that protest has never come, which suggests that KW is not discontent, and certainly not intolerant.
The subjects of imperialism and machismo seem to have been brought up as negative examples. No one is recommending that policy-making, regarding global-warming mitigation, or anything else for that matter, should be put into the hands of an emperor, or an empire-builder, or a promoter of his own status as alpha-male. And it is disingenuous to claim that anyone has made such a recommendation. Quite the contrary, everyone who has written is apparently critical and reluctant, if it should come to entrusting such important decisions to such people.
Meanwhile, it seems to be the case that we must still deal with kranky, pushy, dyspeptic, cantankerous individuals who love to issue commands, call the shots, and tell others what and what not to do.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:19 am
20 Mar 2008
Pangolin, history is the empirical evidence on which to rest theories, or speculation, or prognosticating, as you like. We can't take societies and do lab experiments with controls, etc.; much as in the case of ecosystems and geology, we have to use the past.
Now, the important point, that is relevant to the discussion, is this: A continent-wide political/economic unit is a more "natural" unit, and is more appropriate for generating wealth, thus of great concern to alleviating poverty. The implication is that globalization, that is, transporting intermediate and final parts of the production system all over the planet, is not only ecologically nonsustainable, it's also economically suboptimal.
Also, if every "natural" (I put that in quotes because it's hard to figure out boundaries) region were a coherent political/economic entity, such as the US, EU, India (mostly, it should includ Pakistan and Sri Lanka), and China are, then this would also minimize the potential for war, which would then lead to all kinds of good effects, such as ramping down military spending, increasing international cooperation, allowing for greater diversion of resources to a green transformation, etc.
finally, if those regions where democratic, that would reduce the possibility of the shenanigans and tragedies imposed by brutal dictators (I pontificated at greater length in this article).
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Colin Wright Posted 4:24 pm
20 Mar 2008
There is also a more contemporary book comparing Napoleon and GW by one of our top middle eastern scholars, Juan Cole . (He was on Alternative Radio last week here.) Here's a sort of weird excerpt from Open Source:
Napoleon in Egypt and George Bush in Iraq were book-end fiascos, Juan Cole argues -- for neatly opposite reasons. Napoleon was too early in Egypt -- before the Ottoman sick-man was ripe for dismemberment, before European arms could overwhelm native resistance; but in fact he set the course of French imperial expansion in North Africa and also Southeast Asia. George Bush hit Iraq too late, Cole says, long after bullying colonialism's day was done.
Have to agree with CC and JR that a reading of history will become more important (and not less) as we negotiate an uncertain ecological and social future! Of course, I'm sure we all wish we had the time to read all those great historians out there.
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caniscandida Posted 7:10 pm
20 Mar 2008
Napoleon had great initial success in Egypt, most notably at la Bataille des Pyramides. But then he got drawn into Palestine to meet the Ottomans themselves; and perhaps he could never have secured a port at the northern end of the Red Sea safe from Ottoman intervention.
Also, he lost his fleet at Aboukir Bay. That defeat itself was probably unnecessary; but in general Napoleon was reckless to think he could count on a secure route from Marseille to Alexandria, and another from the Red Sea to India, which the British would not be able to interrupt.
Jon Rynn's theory, about "natural" regions adapting themselves peacefully to being governed by single respective governments, somewhat reminiscent of the old empires, only kinder and gentler, is excellent. Of course, there are always considerations of one kind or another; e.g.:
1. Through most of history, "Europe" did not make sense. "The Mediterranean" did, however; and Greeks and Italians always had much more to do with Egyptians and North Africans than they did with people up in Poland or Denmark or Britain. Two more or less contemporary religious events changed that: the quick spread of Islam in the Levant, across North Africa and into Spain; and the gradual Christianization of the northern nations, who were thence introduced into either of two Mediterranean-based cultural systems, one speaking Latin, the other Greek.
(Hence, though I do not agree with Pope Benedict XVI on many things, I agree that the historical section of the proposed European constitution would be very silly indeed if it did not refer to that early cultural commonality resulting from the spread of Christianity.)
(And hence, as a teacher of classical civilization, inasmuch as I still resort to paper maps, I go nuts having available only maps that go from Crete and Sicily to Lapland: for what I teach, I really do not give a damn about Lithuania or the Netherlands or Ireland, but I very much need to see Lebanon and Egypt and Libya and Tunisia -- which of course are not included in maps of Europe!)
The Indian Subcontinent is also complicated by religion, because it overlaps with the great cultural region dominated by Muslim Persia (or Iran), stretching from the eastern edge of Mesopotamia to the Ganges valley and north to the important trading centers of Balkh, Tashkent and Samarkand. Note that Tajik, the language of most members of the Northern Alliance in late 2001, is very closely related to Persian; Dari, the common language of Kabul and most of northern Afghanistan (Pashtu being the language of Kandahar and the south), is in fact a form of Persian; and Urdu, the language of Pakistan, is identical to Hindi, except for the large number of loanwords from Persian and Arabic, and for its being written in a Persian style of the Arabic alphabet. The Mughals in India in their arts developed native Indian styles and techniques, but never without abandoning their Persian models; their most famous monument, the Taj Mahal, incorporates native Indian stonework into a basically Persian structure. Remember that in E.M. Forster's "Passage to India," his Muslim hero Dr. Aziz writes poetry in Persian as well as in Urdu.
As for the Chinese moving westward out of their great river valleys, the world is currently witnessing yet another revival of the old debate about whether Tibet, high up on the Himalayan Plateau, is in fact "naturally" a part of China, as many Chinese claim, or rather is it obviously a distinct place, as many Tibetans and their friends respond.
Not unlike the westward expansion of the Han Chinese is the history of Portuguese-speakers in Brazil. When Napoleon (him again!) occupied the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish colonists in Latin America started learning how to live without their king. But the King of Portugal, whose beautiful capital anyway had been destroyed in the horrible Earthquake-plus-Tsunami of 1755, simply packed up his belongings, put the keys to the palace in the hands of a subroyal caretaker, and sailed off to Rio. Brazil cannot often claim to have been a very enlightened country, but at least there was a relatively peace-inducing state of affairs brought about by a common language and government.
The Spanish colonies, by contrast, offer a negative example to the "natural region" theory. On the one hand, it is interesting that from Patagonia up to Mendocino, the provinces of the Spanish Empire were contiguous (save for the Antilles). But on the other, the geographical and topographical barriers were huge, in very many places; all "natural regions" are small and isolable. Hence, unlike the situation in Brazil, and in the English colonies in North America (leaving aside those stiff-necked Canadians for the moment), there was never a chance for there arising a single Spanish-speaking country embracing the entire old empire. Even more discreetly, with regard to the Andes, a Bolivarian republic stretching from Venezuela to Bolivia, or a unified Southern Cone including Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, would be very difficult to make happen with pre-Star-Trek technology.
In defense of the Canadians: The Scotch Bar of the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec is surely one of the greatest rooms in North America; and it is hard to imagine how it could exist, were the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the pinnacle above.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Pangolin Posted 2:42 am
21 Mar 2008
For anyone still dipping into this thread what the long scadian historical screeds (a flirtation maybe?) above could be summarized thusly:
The area of a political unit is determined by the speed and throw weight of it's logistical lines of communications. Good horse, road and train technology allows for land-based empires, shipping technology for marine empires, aircraft for global empires. That and "male political leaders do dumb things for reasons unfathomable." (paraphrased)
What in gods name that had to do with the OP is beyond me. The bracketing paragraphs here:
"This is the last U.S. election. Have we taken stock of the implications? There is no room for incremental thinking. The storm will fall on whomever we elect president (and isn't there a case for McCain?). Among the startling implications of breaching the 350 ppm limit is the likelihood that this is the last U.S. presidential election during which there remains a slim opportunity to take decisive global climate action."
and...
"Turning to Congress, the same crucial factor of leadership pertains. It is of surpassing importance in this election that we elevate electing a handful of climate action leaders above all other objectives. Our ability to craft effective climate strategy is hamstrung by the lack of political leaders who see themselves as climate advocates operating within the political arena, coordinating with climate campaigners and organizers on the outside."
The impression I get from the OP is that we better get our political shit together or the "OR ELSE" clause of "nature bat's last" will render further politicking moot. For when your complicated survival infrastructure depends on parts from a place locked into famine induced civil war you too are screwed.
Put the Carbon Back
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:11 am
22 Mar 2008
And thanks, cc, for taking a serious (well, usually serious) stab at "natural" regions.
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