permaculture

We like to blame politicians for the lack of action on climate change. But how prepared are people to really pay the price of change? We like to imagine that all politicians need to do is cleverly tax carbon and magically renewable energies will arise to take their place. The situation in France shows the fault in this thinking. Renewables cannot possibly replace fossil fuel - not on the scale needed to avert environmental disaster. Someone must pay the price - and it is the poor who get hurt most.

In France an attempt to raise diesel and fuel prices has resulted in mass riots, led in large part by people from rural communities who were most affected by the rises and had fewer alternatives. We have the same sort of phenomenon in Australia - wealthier Australians get solar panels (with subsidies) leaving renters and poorer people picking up the tab for the electricity distribution system.

I recommend this article by Mark Allen, as a very useful and well-written guide to enjoying activism more. I think that he has identified a major problem and that his solutions can definitely help us. I found that as I read his article, I was applying them in my head and thinking, "Yes." (Candobetter.net editor.)

The cartoon by Doug Savage is copyright and comes from www.savagechickens.com.

Some ideas about how we can reduce conflict among activists, create campaigns that are long lasting, reach out and connect with people who have different values to that of our own and work towards a meaningful shift in paradigm.

In the early 1970's, a book titled "The Limits to Growth" was published, a report by the Club of Rome on the predicaments of mankind. Ultimately translated in 30 languages, it caused a furore, predicting that should civilisation continue on its present path, it would run out of every resource under the sun, causing a collapse of society and a major dieoff of human population.

Over the past few years, many, no, almost all economists have lambasted this report, usually misquoting it completely and erroneously saying civilisation would, for example, disintegrate by the year 2000. In fact, the computer models described in "The Limits to Growth" predicted that within a period of 100 years from its writing, there would be famines, shortages of resources, and world population would greatly reduce. Because 'nothing has yet happened', the report is lampooned as the literal poster child of misinformed "Malthusian" type thinking that misled many people into believing the end of the world was nigh.

So then, thirty five percent of the way into this Century of Doom, how are we faring?

Markets are the most inefficient way of doing anything. It's free markets that got us into this mess in the first place, because when supply far far exceeds demand, commodities are so cheap they are squandered. This is exactly what happened to oil. And water. And farming land.

Now, and quite suddenly, population pressures are exposing all the cracks. We no longer have this super abundance, and the market's way of dealing with this is to increase prices, the idea being to decrease demand. Unfortunately, the high demand is no longer caused by over abundance, it's caused by [per capita] shortages, and the market does not know how to cope with this. It simply does not compute, growth is sacrosanct. Now I realise we 'need' growth merely to pay the interest on the accruing debts the market needs to create more 'stuff', it is fast becoming evident that growth must stop. It will stop. Growth simply cannot go on forever in a closed system [like Planet Earth]. It's immaterial whether we want to end growth or not, it simply will, just like a cancer dies when it kills its host.

Humans did not evolve in markets and money. Money and markets are not in our genes. Money and markets are social constructions.

No a-priori reason exists why people must work to live. Without money, markets or the requirement to work, we would not need banks, insurance companies or most of the institutions we have today.