©
Sorry Jane Austenites, this column’s not about you. A friend of mine lent me a book several months ago, and last week I finally found a bit of time to look it over. It’s about India. Not just about India, about the actual forming of India from 1947 to 1948 and the role that religion played in its formation. Coincidentally, I’m also re-reading another book, which is not only about religion, but about all systems of belief.
One thing I learned from years in marketing, history is about as saleable as a poison pill, my way of saying both books are history lessons—which I also have to admit was not my best subject. But I’m comforted in knowing that the historical figures in the books weren’t that great at studying history either.
So who are these history-challenged historical figures? Well, the first set is no surprise, we all know the three amigos, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—they’re the characters from the book about religion. The Bush religion was and is neo-conservatism and its main pillar of faith was the new creed of democratic capitalism, which led them straight into Iraq directly after 9/11.
The author, John Gray, takes a rather dim view of the Bush gang’s approach to Iraq. He points out that if George had studied Iraqi history, he might not have been so quick to overthrow Saddam, and even more careful about disbanding Saddam’s army so quickly after the invasion. Why?
Because a British woman named Gertrude Bell had already dealt with the same issue in Iraq in 1920. Gertrude was the first woman political officer in the British colonial service, and was appointed ‘Oriental Secretary’ to Sir Percy Cox, where she and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia, yes, that one) were tasked with building the new state of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Admittedly, Gertrude had a few advantages over George Bush. Not only was she brighter (graduating at age 19 with a first-class honours degree in history from Oxford in just two years; George as you know graduated in drinking at Yale’s Skull and Bones club), she was also very well versed in the local culture. She was fluent in Arabic and Persian, translated the works of the poet Hafiz into English and started a personal archeological collection which was later used as the foundation of the Baghdad Archeological Museum—all before she went to work creating modern Iraq. George, you recall, learned about Iraq from the family oil business, when his dad, George Sr., went there to protect the oil the first time around in 1991.
What Gertrude figured out in 1920 and George did not 80 years later was this: Iraq was not a natural country. The region was comprised of Shia Kurds in the north, more Shias in the south with a sprinkling of Sunni Muslims throughout. In short, it was a cultural mess. Gertrude’s solution was to put the minority Sunnis in control—to prevent a Shia-led theocracy. She created a Sunni-led kingdom and backed it up with military clout. According to Gray’s account, “Bell knew the state she had created could never be democratic.” And that was Britain’s way of controlling the oilfields.
It's more than likely that, beyond protecting oil, George W. went to Iraq to protect his family pride—to finish off what dear old dad failed to do. Certainly, pride in U.S.-style democracy seemed to have figured into his tactical mistakes. If Gertrude Bell were advising him, she would have told him that he was better off with Saddam, or at least leaving the Sunni minority in control. Iraq in 2002 was still no more manageable as a democracy than it was in 1920.
The danger then and now for those who seek Iraq’s oil is having to deal with a democratic Shia theocracy, which is exactly what is about to happen. And when it does say goodbye cheap Iraqi oil.
Pride also features large in the other book, ‘Freedom at Midnight’. India then, like Iraq, was a wild mixture of cultures, kingdoms and religions—notably conflicting Hindu and Muslim cultures—which had been successfully brought together and ruled by the English for over 250 years. Under the populist revolution led by ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, the entire sub-continent was about to not only break away from England but break up altogether. In 1947 dashing young royals Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, in the midst of a troubled marriage, were dispatched to Delhi to wind down the British Empire in India by June, 1948.
Despite his polished playboy appearance, Mountbatten was a flexible pragmatist who was dedicated to creating a single, unified Indian nation. The challenge was to keep the Hindus and Muslims in the same country without killing each other. Gandhi was committed to finding a solution. Mountbatten struggled for a solution, but quickly decided it was impossible, choosing instead to create two states, India and Pakistan. He enlisted the help of the urbane and elegant Jawaharlal Nehru, someone with whom he could identify, to push through his plan, seeing in Nehru India’s first prime minister. Nehru, for his part, became very close to Edwina, some speculate overly close.
Gandhi, on the other hand, was Mountbatten’s polar opposite. Half naked and dressed in baggy wrap of hand-woven cotton, Gandhi’s style and appearance, not to mention his intimacy with lepers and peasants, made Mountbatten uncomfortable. When the Gandhi, leader of the Hindu majority, suggested that Mountbatten give the ruling authority to the minority Muslim faction rather than splitting the country—exactly as Gertrude Bell did in Iraq—Mountbatten dismissed the idea outright as too radical. The rest, as we say, is history.
Pakistan never became a Muslim-only country but remained a Muslim-Hindu mix as is today’s India, and has been an unstable entity since its inception, subject to violence, corruption and military coups. The recent assassination of two-time Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 is not the only example of the ongoing volatility there. Late last year the nine Islamist gunmen who took over a hotel in Mumbai, India were all Pakistanis, triggering another wave of anti-Pakistan sentiment and raising security levels sky-high across India. And it’s not likely to end there.
In retrospect, Gandhi’s idea, like Bell’s, was genius. Mountbatten’s solution, like Bush’s, was simply based on pride and prejudice—and downright ignorance. Gandhi and Bell both knew that you can’t shape a society without actually living with its people. Sage advice for all politicians I think.
But the real lesson to be learned is how profound and long lasting the effects of tinkering with the human social organism can be.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Dead canaries or dead frogs
©
There’s a funny little scene in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. It’s a cartoon of a frog in a pot of water on a stove. The narrator, Gore, tells us that if we turn up the heat slowly the frog will just sit there until it boils alive. But if we turn up the heat quickly the frog feels the shock and jumps out of the water immediately.
The point of the cartoon of course is the fact that we’re the frogs—and our planet-pot is heating up very slowly. Ergo, we’re not being shocked into turning off the heat.
This is something that happens at the local level too. For example, if a community suffers the loss of a major industry, as mining operations have done across northern Canada, the citizens are aware and mobilized to offset the effects. Community action plans are put in place, government funding is sought, new industries are courted, relocation plans are made for displaced workers and so on. The Town of Atikokan, Ontario is a good example. When the iron mines shut down in the 1970s, the Caland Ore Company launched a full-out transition plan that eventually led to the building of a thermal generating plant in the town and brought new government money into tourism to support Quetico Provincial Park.
The mine was the canary in that town’s immediate future. When a canary that big dies, everybody notices. It’s a lot different when communities die a little at a time. That kind of death is more like the frog in a slow-boiling pot. A downtown building disappears here, a small business goes bankrupt there, but overall life remains about the same.
This story has been repeated all across Middle America, and here at home in New Brunswick as well. One only has to look at the boarded up factories and warehouses, the empty lots where stores used to stand, the nature parks that used to be farms, empty waterfront lots that used to house wharfs and canneries to see the remains of yesterday’s economy.
All of these thoughts lead me to a single thought: the future is not what it used to be. The old future used to be hover cars, scheduled flights to Mars, never-ending technological advances and exponential growth of glistening cities rising to the sun. The new future is depletion of fossil fuels, climate change and severe weather, species extinction, global over-population, rising pollution from the developing nations, freshwater shortages and as a result of these, the real possibility of pandemics and war.
As frogs in the slow-boiling pot, it’s difficult for those of us living here to see what’s going on in the rest of the world. If we notice anything at all it might be a small reduction in the numbers of tourists visiting the area, a sawmill closure or a cutback in a service from a cash-strapped Provincial government. Nothing too dramatic.
So at the local level it becomes rather difficult to identify and assess the impact of global trends and to take real action. Ideas around sustainability automatically become too large and too remote to deal with. As bad as it is to say, it would actually be easier if a factory closed without warning, or the tourists stopped coming altogether. Then we’d get it.
Because now that slow-boiling pot here in Charlotte County is starting to heat up. St. Stephen is entirely dependent on distributing government services and manufacturing candy and fibreboard. St. Andrews is overly-dependant on summertime tourism. At the same time we’re exporting our brightest youth, importing retirees, and becoming more dependent on government infrastructure projects—including a new highway to speed traffic past our doorsteps even more quickly.
There are some silver linings. The recent government investment in upgrading the NB Southern Railway is one, even if it won’t replace the track that was torn out from St. Andrews. The Bell Aliant commitment to bringing fibre optic cable to the residential doorstep in Fredericton and Saint John is another. One can always hope that this initiative would go province-wide. And the $70+ million new reconstruction of the St. Andrews Biological Station is great news—especially if it brings a renewed commitment to ocean ecology and sustainability.
The real problem is the fact that the federal government, as generous as it has been to our region, is not a bottomless source of funds. And the world is changing rapidly in ways we’d rather not consider. The biggest game on the global table is fossil fuel, and since we’ll soon be running low on the stuff, everything we do or think about will be ruled by the loss of cheap energy.
That means our Wal-Mart shelves will have fewer goods from China as transportation costs rise. Our dinners will have more expensive ingredients. Our tourists will be either paying a lot more to get here, arriving from places located much closer to us—or not arriving at all.
Seen from the outside, meanwhile, our local planners appear to be caught in a 1980s time warp. Many of them still seem to be chasing the “growth and progress” model. Sustainability to them means “economic sustainability in a globalized economy.” And while that may still work over the short term, the fossil fuel math is working against it. Without cheap energy globalization as we know it is over.
The real development task is planning the post fossil-fuel economy. That means much greater focus on developing regional skills and local capacities, the very things we’ve all been vigorously deconstructing for nearly five decades. We’ll need more regional food production, cheaper modes of transportation, better sources of alternative energy, ways to manufacture things on our own and repair things instead of throwing them out.
But it’s very likely that we won’t make these moves until something very dramatic happens to kill the canary. Should we go the other way, ignoring this new future simmering on the stove, it’s going to really suck being the frog.
As you know, in the movie Al Gore rescues the frog from the slow-boiling pot. We should be so lucky.
There’s a funny little scene in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. It’s a cartoon of a frog in a pot of water on a stove. The narrator, Gore, tells us that if we turn up the heat slowly the frog will just sit there until it boils alive. But if we turn up the heat quickly the frog feels the shock and jumps out of the water immediately.
The point of the cartoon of course is the fact that we’re the frogs—and our planet-pot is heating up very slowly. Ergo, we’re not being shocked into turning off the heat.
This is something that happens at the local level too. For example, if a community suffers the loss of a major industry, as mining operations have done across northern Canada, the citizens are aware and mobilized to offset the effects. Community action plans are put in place, government funding is sought, new industries are courted, relocation plans are made for displaced workers and so on. The Town of Atikokan, Ontario is a good example. When the iron mines shut down in the 1970s, the Caland Ore Company launched a full-out transition plan that eventually led to the building of a thermal generating plant in the town and brought new government money into tourism to support Quetico Provincial Park.
The mine was the canary in that town’s immediate future. When a canary that big dies, everybody notices. It’s a lot different when communities die a little at a time. That kind of death is more like the frog in a slow-boiling pot. A downtown building disappears here, a small business goes bankrupt there, but overall life remains about the same.
This story has been repeated all across Middle America, and here at home in New Brunswick as well. One only has to look at the boarded up factories and warehouses, the empty lots where stores used to stand, the nature parks that used to be farms, empty waterfront lots that used to house wharfs and canneries to see the remains of yesterday’s economy.
All of these thoughts lead me to a single thought: the future is not what it used to be. The old future used to be hover cars, scheduled flights to Mars, never-ending technological advances and exponential growth of glistening cities rising to the sun. The new future is depletion of fossil fuels, climate change and severe weather, species extinction, global over-population, rising pollution from the developing nations, freshwater shortages and as a result of these, the real possibility of pandemics and war.
As frogs in the slow-boiling pot, it’s difficult for those of us living here to see what’s going on in the rest of the world. If we notice anything at all it might be a small reduction in the numbers of tourists visiting the area, a sawmill closure or a cutback in a service from a cash-strapped Provincial government. Nothing too dramatic.
So at the local level it becomes rather difficult to identify and assess the impact of global trends and to take real action. Ideas around sustainability automatically become too large and too remote to deal with. As bad as it is to say, it would actually be easier if a factory closed without warning, or the tourists stopped coming altogether. Then we’d get it.
Because now that slow-boiling pot here in Charlotte County is starting to heat up. St. Stephen is entirely dependent on distributing government services and manufacturing candy and fibreboard. St. Andrews is overly-dependant on summertime tourism. At the same time we’re exporting our brightest youth, importing retirees, and becoming more dependent on government infrastructure projects—including a new highway to speed traffic past our doorsteps even more quickly.
There are some silver linings. The recent government investment in upgrading the NB Southern Railway is one, even if it won’t replace the track that was torn out from St. Andrews. The Bell Aliant commitment to bringing fibre optic cable to the residential doorstep in Fredericton and Saint John is another. One can always hope that this initiative would go province-wide. And the $70+ million new reconstruction of the St. Andrews Biological Station is great news—especially if it brings a renewed commitment to ocean ecology and sustainability.
The real problem is the fact that the federal government, as generous as it has been to our region, is not a bottomless source of funds. And the world is changing rapidly in ways we’d rather not consider. The biggest game on the global table is fossil fuel, and since we’ll soon be running low on the stuff, everything we do or think about will be ruled by the loss of cheap energy.
That means our Wal-Mart shelves will have fewer goods from China as transportation costs rise. Our dinners will have more expensive ingredients. Our tourists will be either paying a lot more to get here, arriving from places located much closer to us—or not arriving at all.
Seen from the outside, meanwhile, our local planners appear to be caught in a 1980s time warp. Many of them still seem to be chasing the “growth and progress” model. Sustainability to them means “economic sustainability in a globalized economy.” And while that may still work over the short term, the fossil fuel math is working against it. Without cheap energy globalization as we know it is over.
The real development task is planning the post fossil-fuel economy. That means much greater focus on developing regional skills and local capacities, the very things we’ve all been vigorously deconstructing for nearly five decades. We’ll need more regional food production, cheaper modes of transportation, better sources of alternative energy, ways to manufacture things on our own and repair things instead of throwing them out.
But it’s very likely that we won’t make these moves until something very dramatic happens to kill the canary. Should we go the other way, ignoring this new future simmering on the stove, it’s going to really suck being the frog.
As you know, in the movie Al Gore rescues the frog from the slow-boiling pot. We should be so lucky.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Replacing old models with new
©
The rush raced up my spine, crashed into my skull and crescendoed up into every hair on my head. Music does that to me. I was listening to a tape of the Beatles “Let It Be” when George Harrison’s slow, deliberate and almost invisible guitar solo broke into my consciousness. Before that moment I’d never even noticed that the song had a guitar solo.
George Harrison was an interesting artist. He wasn’t the most gifted musician. Many of his contemporaries could play better, faster—Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton or even Keith Richards come to mind. But George took a more workmanlike approach to his craft, taking the time to find his own voice rather than copying the old blues guitar cats from the States. You’d have to re-listen to “Let It Be” to get what I mean. He’d come a long way from “She Loves You” in a very few short years—years that included drug experimentation, discovering Indian music and the sitar and working with classical musician and Beatle producer George Martin. By the time he played on “Let It Be” George had become a mature artist, and the song is a mature work of art.
I connected this thought to a brand new Mercedes Benz I saw driving through St. Andrews the other day. It was a beautiful cream colour. The lines of the thing were quite dramatic. The side windows were narrowed to slits and arched like a diver headed for the water. The effect was like the leaping Cat logo for the catamaran ferry that runs from Yarmouth to the States.
“How different,” I thought. It used to be that American or Italian cars led the way in styling. Mercedes was known for its engineering, not its dramatic style. So, what had happened? Had the merger with Chrysler triggered some new emphasis styling or what?
I don’t know why, but the thought nagged at me for a couple of days. What was it with Mercedes and the new fascination with styling? And then it hit me. Mercedes, and in fact the entire automobile industry, has reached the very end of fossil-fuel-powered engineering. Without revamping the entire paradigm of personal transportation, we are now at the zenith of automotive engineering. There’s simply nothing left for Mercedes to engineer on a regular automobile. The only remaining novelty is styling. Designing automobiles has become, not just a mature art form, but an over-mature one. Old age catches up with all of us, including our machines.
A couple of days ago my father took his old Model A roadster out for a drive. My sister went along. They headed to a coffee shop down the road and went inside for a coffee. After chatting for a couple of minutes my dad felt an arthritic pain in his neck and passed out. My sister avoided panicking and called 911 for an ambulance. At first they thought he’d had a stroke, but it turned out it had been a heart attack. He had a bad day in hospital yesterday, reacting to the drugs, but seems to be doing better today.
I’ve been expecting something like this for a while. He’s 87, and very active. So there’s no knowing when and where the clockwork might malfunction. My dad would appreciate this. He’d rescued his old Model A from some farmyard 20 years ago and spent 2 years restoring, reconstructing or renewing every piece of it, from the kingpins to the door hinges to the radiator ornament. It’s a thing of beauty.
Of course in the grand scheme my dad’s car doesn’t mean much to anybody. Most of the people who loved those little roadsters have passed on. A younger generation loved them too—as the basis for hot rods—but those people are getting old, too. The 1950s and 60s are a long fading in the rear view mirror.
Fossil fuel resources are also fading fast. Although there’s some dispute as to when, it’s likely that we’ve already crossed Peak Oil and we're now on the down side of the bell curve. In the UK they're calling this “Energy Descent”. The next 50 years may be the most difficult transition humans will ever make.
Everything from transportation to food and shelter is about to be hit—because in reality our entire social paradigm is supported by fossil fuel. Everything is about to change as the oil bell curve collapses. In fact there are four 150-year bell curves are overlapping simultaneously: the use of fossil fuels as motive power, the explosive growth in industrialization, the dramatic increase in human population, and the extreme rise in CO2 in the atmosphere among other serious environmental concerns.
The collapse of any or all of these bell curves could be catastrophic, as has been pointed out by even the most conservative sources, including two recent CIA reports.
This is not unique in history. Nor is it Apocalyptic. All societies move from early struggle to abundance to finally falling over the edge into decadence. This is what happens to all organisms as they move from immaturity to old age.
The only real defense against organic decline is not physical, but spiritual. And crossing the threshold from the physical to the metaphysical is not easy in decadent times. We’ve become accustomed to over-abundance. Just as it will be difficult to manage the a reduce, recycle and reuse strategy in our “energy descent” flight plan, it is even more difficult to leave behind the enormous physical distractions in favour of a more spare, ascetic, spiritual way of living.
I guess our present situation would be easier to see from an anthropologist’s view 500 years from now. Our fired up, wired up, Blackberried lifestyle might be seen for what it is—a kind of global case of mass ADHD.
And it’s even affected our art. Today’s art is nothing if not attention-seeking ADHD. Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” sculpture, a diamond-covered skull is a great example. Recent knock-offs now include a $75,000 diamond-encrusted toilet. Being an art lover, I don’t mean to suggest that any of this is decadent.
Of course, all of this seems pretty remote from our lives here in Charlotte County. Then again, most of us live a big chunk of our lives in front of cable TV and high speed Internet, so we’re all shaped by it whether we like it or not.
The rush raced up my spine, crashed into my skull and crescendoed up into every hair on my head. Music does that to me. I was listening to a tape of the Beatles “Let It Be” when George Harrison’s slow, deliberate and almost invisible guitar solo broke into my consciousness. Before that moment I’d never even noticed that the song had a guitar solo.
George Harrison was an interesting artist. He wasn’t the most gifted musician. Many of his contemporaries could play better, faster—Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton or even Keith Richards come to mind. But George took a more workmanlike approach to his craft, taking the time to find his own voice rather than copying the old blues guitar cats from the States. You’d have to re-listen to “Let It Be” to get what I mean. He’d come a long way from “She Loves You” in a very few short years—years that included drug experimentation, discovering Indian music and the sitar and working with classical musician and Beatle producer George Martin. By the time he played on “Let It Be” George had become a mature artist, and the song is a mature work of art.
I connected this thought to a brand new Mercedes Benz I saw driving through St. Andrews the other day. It was a beautiful cream colour. The lines of the thing were quite dramatic. The side windows were narrowed to slits and arched like a diver headed for the water. The effect was like the leaping Cat logo for the catamaran ferry that runs from Yarmouth to the States.
“How different,” I thought. It used to be that American or Italian cars led the way in styling. Mercedes was known for its engineering, not its dramatic style. So, what had happened? Had the merger with Chrysler triggered some new emphasis styling or what?
I don’t know why, but the thought nagged at me for a couple of days. What was it with Mercedes and the new fascination with styling? And then it hit me. Mercedes, and in fact the entire automobile industry, has reached the very end of fossil-fuel-powered engineering. Without revamping the entire paradigm of personal transportation, we are now at the zenith of automotive engineering. There’s simply nothing left for Mercedes to engineer on a regular automobile. The only remaining novelty is styling. Designing automobiles has become, not just a mature art form, but an over-mature one. Old age catches up with all of us, including our machines.
A couple of days ago my father took his old Model A roadster out for a drive. My sister went along. They headed to a coffee shop down the road and went inside for a coffee. After chatting for a couple of minutes my dad felt an arthritic pain in his neck and passed out. My sister avoided panicking and called 911 for an ambulance. At first they thought he’d had a stroke, but it turned out it had been a heart attack. He had a bad day in hospital yesterday, reacting to the drugs, but seems to be doing better today.
I’ve been expecting something like this for a while. He’s 87, and very active. So there’s no knowing when and where the clockwork might malfunction. My dad would appreciate this. He’d rescued his old Model A from some farmyard 20 years ago and spent 2 years restoring, reconstructing or renewing every piece of it, from the kingpins to the door hinges to the radiator ornament. It’s a thing of beauty.
Of course in the grand scheme my dad’s car doesn’t mean much to anybody. Most of the people who loved those little roadsters have passed on. A younger generation loved them too—as the basis for hot rods—but those people are getting old, too. The 1950s and 60s are a long fading in the rear view mirror.
Fossil fuel resources are also fading fast. Although there’s some dispute as to when, it’s likely that we’ve already crossed Peak Oil and we're now on the down side of the bell curve. In the UK they're calling this “Energy Descent”. The next 50 years may be the most difficult transition humans will ever make.
Everything from transportation to food and shelter is about to be hit—because in reality our entire social paradigm is supported by fossil fuel. Everything is about to change as the oil bell curve collapses. In fact there are four 150-year bell curves are overlapping simultaneously: the use of fossil fuels as motive power, the explosive growth in industrialization, the dramatic increase in human population, and the extreme rise in CO2 in the atmosphere among other serious environmental concerns.
The collapse of any or all of these bell curves could be catastrophic, as has been pointed out by even the most conservative sources, including two recent CIA reports.
This is not unique in history. Nor is it Apocalyptic. All societies move from early struggle to abundance to finally falling over the edge into decadence. This is what happens to all organisms as they move from immaturity to old age.
The only real defense against organic decline is not physical, but spiritual. And crossing the threshold from the physical to the metaphysical is not easy in decadent times. We’ve become accustomed to over-abundance. Just as it will be difficult to manage the a reduce, recycle and reuse strategy in our “energy descent” flight plan, it is even more difficult to leave behind the enormous physical distractions in favour of a more spare, ascetic, spiritual way of living.
I guess our present situation would be easier to see from an anthropologist’s view 500 years from now. Our fired up, wired up, Blackberried lifestyle might be seen for what it is—a kind of global case of mass ADHD.
And it’s even affected our art. Today’s art is nothing if not attention-seeking ADHD. Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” sculpture, a diamond-covered skull is a great example. Recent knock-offs now include a $75,000 diamond-encrusted toilet. Being an art lover, I don’t mean to suggest that any of this is decadent.
Of course, all of this seems pretty remote from our lives here in Charlotte County. Then again, most of us live a big chunk of our lives in front of cable TV and high speed Internet, so we’re all shaped by it whether we like it or not.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Low hanging fruit of our labour
©
There it was, the Superman stuffed toy dumped on the bathroom floor, again. I picked it up. It had been dunked in the tub and was still sopping wet. I turned it over in my hand.
As I checked it out, it occurred to me that a lot of work had gone into that toy. I started counting. There were 37 separate pieces of cloth carefully stitched together along with 15 heat decals printed on top, not to mention the stuffing inside and the professional Made In China tag sticking out of the leg seam. The workmanship was outstanding; I couldn’t have done it. And to think that it came all the way from China and cost less than 10 bucks.
What made the toy possible at all was the cheap labour available in China. A lot of our clothes come from Bangladesh for the same reason. Business always goes where the costs are cheapest and the markets are the wealthiest. In business parlance this is going after “the low hanging fruit”—the easy profits.
That has also been the guiding social, cultural and economic philosophy for the past 200 years. Do what comes easiest is a kind of Occam’s Razor of the modern age. But it goes back much further than that. As far back as 10,000 years ago, humans have hunted animals to extinction. The wooly mammoth was one. Our ancestors over-cut forests and over-farmed sensitive habitats creating deserts that last to this day.
The development and wide-spread use of fossil fuels has provided us with the ultimate low hanging fruit. The stuff powers most of our machinery, from farming to manufacturing to transportation and everything in between. As far as quality of life is concerned, at least from a human perspective, it’s never been better. It’s become so good, in fact, that it’s killing us. For a third or more of the world’s population we now live in a reality of over-abundance. Living off the fat of the land takes on new meaning.
Eric Schlosser tells it pretty well in “Fast Food Nation”. He informs us that rate of adult obesity in the States is twice as high as it was in the 1960s, and that “no other nation in history has gotten so fat so fast.” He also notes that as the US exports its culture abroad, obesity is on the rise all over the world.
Call it the curse of the “labour saving device”. Gadgets and machinery were the great liberators of the 20th Century. They “freed” our parents and grandparents from heavy manual work. The side effect, of course, is the fact that they’ve chained themselves to us—or us to them. We’re chained to our cars. We’re chained to our computers and our television sets. We’re chained to our fast food restaurants and golf carts and office desks. Constantly seeking oral gratification—to take the place of physical activity—we’re chained to our fridge doors and microwave ovens, too.
All of this is symptomatic of the real low hanging issue: that we’re Hoovering up the world’s most accessible resources at an alarming rate. Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute says that in a world that’s growing by more than 70 million people a year, the prospect of feeding the world’s population is becoming increasingly difficult. He forecasts food shortages in the near future and the real possibility of regional conflict. In the meantime human encroachment is driving thousands of species toward extinction annually and gobbling up millions of hectares of wild spaces around the globe—reconstituting them into monocultural uses such as vast tropical palm farms for palm oil.
Increased demand for dwindling resources will create new, troubling scenarios. Brown’s website gives a good example:
“The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest—enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels—will go to fuel cars. Yet even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were diverted into making ethanol, it would meet at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.”
And so we arrive, full circle, back at the granddaddy of low hanging fruit—gasoline. There are, fortunately, people working on what comes after fossil fuel. On the same website, Brown’s Earth Policy crew reports that…
“The events of the past two years illustrate that the door is closing on the prospect of building new coal-fired power plants in the United States. While only five new coal plants, totaling 1,400 megawatts, began operation in 2008, more than 100 wind farms capable of generating 8,400 megawatts came online. Yet this is only the beginning…”
Indeed. The world is currently—and continuously—using 15 terawatts of electricity (a terawatt is a trillion watts) to keep the global lights on. It would take more that 7 million wind turbines operating constantly at peak output to produce that much power—or 30,000 big coal-fired generating stations. The modern world is an energy-hungry place.
So if we’re rapidly running out of low hanging fruit what comes next? In a world of diminishing expectations we’re headed for what the Europeans call “Energy Descent”. They’re now building action plans and reconfiguring entire cities to survive the coming decline of affordable fossil fuel supplies.
Looking at Canada, and especially New Brunswick with its ramping up oil refinery and LNG terminal, we’re not even close to these kinds of thoughts—let alone action plans.
But the problem is not the government or even big business. It’s us, all of us. It’s difficult enough to reduce, reuse and recycle let alone committing to abandoning our cars and SUVs and cutting our home energy consumption by two-thirds.
The answer is in the mirror. The ultimate weight loss program is not driving to the gym. It’s parking the car, getting out of the easy chair and doing some real, physical work, though it’s unlikely that’s ever going to happen. As the world’s most opportunistic species, opportunism—going after the low hanging fruit first—is what we do best. Tomorrow will always take care of itself. For better or worse.
There it was, the Superman stuffed toy dumped on the bathroom floor, again. I picked it up. It had been dunked in the tub and was still sopping wet. I turned it over in my hand.
As I checked it out, it occurred to me that a lot of work had gone into that toy. I started counting. There were 37 separate pieces of cloth carefully stitched together along with 15 heat decals printed on top, not to mention the stuffing inside and the professional Made In China tag sticking out of the leg seam. The workmanship was outstanding; I couldn’t have done it. And to think that it came all the way from China and cost less than 10 bucks.
What made the toy possible at all was the cheap labour available in China. A lot of our clothes come from Bangladesh for the same reason. Business always goes where the costs are cheapest and the markets are the wealthiest. In business parlance this is going after “the low hanging fruit”—the easy profits.
That has also been the guiding social, cultural and economic philosophy for the past 200 years. Do what comes easiest is a kind of Occam’s Razor of the modern age. But it goes back much further than that. As far back as 10,000 years ago, humans have hunted animals to extinction. The wooly mammoth was one. Our ancestors over-cut forests and over-farmed sensitive habitats creating deserts that last to this day.
The development and wide-spread use of fossil fuels has provided us with the ultimate low hanging fruit. The stuff powers most of our machinery, from farming to manufacturing to transportation and everything in between. As far as quality of life is concerned, at least from a human perspective, it’s never been better. It’s become so good, in fact, that it’s killing us. For a third or more of the world’s population we now live in a reality of over-abundance. Living off the fat of the land takes on new meaning.
Eric Schlosser tells it pretty well in “Fast Food Nation”. He informs us that rate of adult obesity in the States is twice as high as it was in the 1960s, and that “no other nation in history has gotten so fat so fast.” He also notes that as the US exports its culture abroad, obesity is on the rise all over the world.
Call it the curse of the “labour saving device”. Gadgets and machinery were the great liberators of the 20th Century. They “freed” our parents and grandparents from heavy manual work. The side effect, of course, is the fact that they’ve chained themselves to us—or us to them. We’re chained to our cars. We’re chained to our computers and our television sets. We’re chained to our fast food restaurants and golf carts and office desks. Constantly seeking oral gratification—to take the place of physical activity—we’re chained to our fridge doors and microwave ovens, too.
All of this is symptomatic of the real low hanging issue: that we’re Hoovering up the world’s most accessible resources at an alarming rate. Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute says that in a world that’s growing by more than 70 million people a year, the prospect of feeding the world’s population is becoming increasingly difficult. He forecasts food shortages in the near future and the real possibility of regional conflict. In the meantime human encroachment is driving thousands of species toward extinction annually and gobbling up millions of hectares of wild spaces around the globe—reconstituting them into monocultural uses such as vast tropical palm farms for palm oil.
Increased demand for dwindling resources will create new, troubling scenarios. Brown’s website gives a good example:
“The potential for further grain consumption as incomes rise among low-income consumers is huge. But that potential pales beside the insatiable demand for crop-based automotive fuels. A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest—enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians at current consumption levels—will go to fuel cars. Yet even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were diverted into making ethanol, it would meet at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.”
And so we arrive, full circle, back at the granddaddy of low hanging fruit—gasoline. There are, fortunately, people working on what comes after fossil fuel. On the same website, Brown’s Earth Policy crew reports that…
“The events of the past two years illustrate that the door is closing on the prospect of building new coal-fired power plants in the United States. While only five new coal plants, totaling 1,400 megawatts, began operation in 2008, more than 100 wind farms capable of generating 8,400 megawatts came online. Yet this is only the beginning…”
Indeed. The world is currently—and continuously—using 15 terawatts of electricity (a terawatt is a trillion watts) to keep the global lights on. It would take more that 7 million wind turbines operating constantly at peak output to produce that much power—or 30,000 big coal-fired generating stations. The modern world is an energy-hungry place.
So if we’re rapidly running out of low hanging fruit what comes next? In a world of diminishing expectations we’re headed for what the Europeans call “Energy Descent”. They’re now building action plans and reconfiguring entire cities to survive the coming decline of affordable fossil fuel supplies.
Looking at Canada, and especially New Brunswick with its ramping up oil refinery and LNG terminal, we’re not even close to these kinds of thoughts—let alone action plans.
But the problem is not the government or even big business. It’s us, all of us. It’s difficult enough to reduce, reuse and recycle let alone committing to abandoning our cars and SUVs and cutting our home energy consumption by two-thirds.
The answer is in the mirror. The ultimate weight loss program is not driving to the gym. It’s parking the car, getting out of the easy chair and doing some real, physical work, though it’s unlikely that’s ever going to happen. As the world’s most opportunistic species, opportunism—going after the low hanging fruit first—is what we do best. Tomorrow will always take care of itself. For better or worse.
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