Living in Our New World Part 7: Becoming a Fairy Godmother

How do we become that fairy godmother of Sleeping Beauty fame? How do we soften the curse from having left things undone? In other words, how do we transition to the new normal?

First, we need to understand how we brought this "curse" on ourselves. We did so by not asking the right questions and by ignoring the warnings. We have plundered our planet's bounty of finite gifts. We need to learn how we did that and how we can stop. Realizing the seriousness of our situation and getting over our shock and sense of loss, we can then choose to become a participant in creating our new normal, instead of feeling like a helpless victim.

We can ask ourselves how we can begin to climb down our dangerous ladder and how far down we need to go. And what will it look like down there? What positive changes can I make on my descent? How do I foresee my life in the new normal?

What is at the upper rings of the ladder? More than most people usually think about: driving to the supermarket whenever you wish, flying across the country to visit your grandchildren, receiving medical care, setting the thermostat to a nice warm temperature in the winter or to cooling air-conditioning in the summer, washing and drying clothes in machines, driving your own car to work or taking a bus or train, eating foods from around the world whenever you like, setting your house ablaze with electric light, turning on the tap and having cold or hot running water whenever desired, taking out the garbage for someone else to dispose of, stopping for take-out on the way home or going to a restaurant where you are waited on by a smiling wait-person. The internet, iPods, cell phones, plasma TVs, vacations, electronic games, movies delivered to your door, microwave ovens, well-stocked stores, prolific gas stations, Amazon.com and UPS. All of that is at the top.

Clearly, it will look very, very, very different on the lower rungs.

What happens as we begin our long descent down the ladder? We lose our privacy and perceived independence, our dreams and conveniences, our expectations that life will just keep getting better and that technology will solve all our problems. We encounter change, a great deal of change. And change is something we don’t like to have thrust upon us. Also, we will become fearful for we will have no idea exactly how far down we will have to go. Gradually, most of the things we took for granted will cease.

But with all our loss of conveniences and possessions and all that we are used to, we can also gain. What could we possibly gain? The chance to stop the harm we are doing, and to do what is right. The chance to end isolation and loneliness, and to, instead, create a stronger sense of family and community. The chance to learn how to work in a way that we make something of lasting value instead of producing toys to numb the mind or excite the senses.

How do we prepare for our descent? Mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Mental preparation is what I have been writing about. We have created the terrible problems we now face. With our craving for more possessions and experiences, with our inability to control our anger in all its forms, our ignorance of what is truly important, our arrogance in placing our own interests above those of others, and our pride in our accomplishments and technology, we have been living in a manner that cannot be sustained and has only been possible because we are more powerful than others and we got here first.

From a Buddhist perspective, our greed, anger, ignorance, arrogance, and pride of countless lifetimes lead us to being born at this point in time as a human on this planet. We’re here because of our past karmas: mental, verbal, and physical. Our craving, angry ignorant, arrogant, and proud thoughts, speech, and behavior are seeds. Now those seeds have matured and we’re here at the top of the ladder looking all the way down. Like children, we want to blame others for getting us here and for not rescuing us. But the reality is that there’s no one else to blame. We’re responsible for our actions and their consequences. No one else.

From a non-Buddhist (non-karma, non-rebirth) perspective, our greed, anger, ignorance, arrogance, and pride have resulted in our placing our own interests above those of others. When you get the most powerful countries in the world with a lion’s share of earth’s finite resources doing this, the consequences become apparent. First, natural resources become increasingly difficult and expensive to procure. And then, with alarming speed, they are either depleted or so contaminated they are as good as depleted.

So there’s no one to blame. We did it. You and I.

The question becomes what do we do now.

We take a deep, and quivering, breath and start our descent. We face our grief and deal with it. We can use Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s grief cycle to help us recognize and work through what we'll be feeling:

• Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
  
• Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
• Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
• Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
• Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
• Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
• Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.
  

Yes, Kübler-Ross was talking about the terminal illness of one person while I'm talking about a planet and every being, plant, and mineral on it. But the process is the same.

To move on from our precarious perch to the new normal, we need to understand how we got here and what we're facing, work through stages of loss, and find the way to move forward.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 8: Making Preparations)

Living in Our New World Part 6: Back Down the Ladder

When my mother spoke to me about having lived through the Great Depression, she'd always say that her family had been okay. They didn't have a lot, but they had what they needed. Their not having a lot hadn't been a problem because everyone was in the same position. Many people who lived through the Depression said the same thing. Times were extraordinarily difficult, but the difficulty was experienced by almost everyone and thus became "normal."

In the developed countries, we have climbed up the ladder of prosperity over the past six decades. We've now reached the top of that ladder. Most people do not yet see there's no more rungs above us because they're so engrossed in planning their next upward move. But as a society, there's no more going up. We’re running out of cheap oil, readily-available natural gas, good soil, clean air and water, and so on, to build any more rungs or to even maintain the ones we have. The rungs are starting to fall apart. And as more and more people try to clamber up, the ladder is beginning to perilously shake and sway.

A possible scenario for reaction? We at the top can hold on to what we have while pushing those ascending back down, and those lower down can keep trying to clamber up. By doing so, the ladder will continue to sway more and more dangerously until it finally crashes to the ground, crushing millions, billions, of people in the process.

Alternatively, those at the top, realizing their precarious situation, can carefully—but as quickly as possible—start to climb down the ladder while injuring as few people as possible in the process. Our descent will be extraordinarily difficult. For one thing, people like their higher rungs on the ladder. Those rungs are comfortable and familiar. Second, while climbing down, we'll be moving in the opposite direction of all those surging up. They won't like being told that the rungs at the top are no longer safe, or even attainable. They won't like hearing that we used up their share, not just ours. Third, the higher we are on that ladder, the lower we will have to go until it becomes safe for everyone.

Perhaps it will help to remember that there are others we care about on the ladder: our children and grandchildren, spouses, family members, friends, and neighbors. Holding on and refusing to move down will doom possibly two-thirds of them. Maybe more. Yes. Holding on and refusing to move will result in the death of possibly 60-80% of humanity: all six and a half billion of us.

Hearing all this we will grieve: for the loss of what we had, for the harm we have done, for future dreams that will never come into being, for all those who are yet to come.

We can get lost in the fear and grief. We can deny the reality. We can go out and spend like there’s no tomorrow or climb back into bed and never leave again or pretend that the world situation is just a blip in the timeline and that soon everything will return to normal.

Or we can ask the logical questions:

What do those lower rungs look like?

And what do I need to do to become a fairy godmother?

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 7: Becoming a Fairy Godmother)

Living in Our New World Part 5: Food

There's two kinds of food in the world today: real and artificial.

Real food is what our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. It was what I grew up on in New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. Just down the road from us was a farm owned by an elderly Polish couple. One day one of their cows died. My father heard about it and drove his tractor over, dug a deep hole, and buried the cow. It would have taken a long time to dig the hole with a shovel. After that, we would often open the front door to find a basket of fresh produce on our porch. (They also made dandelion wine--the only alcoholic drink my father ever drank. But that's another story.:-)) My mother canned every summer and we enjoyed the results of her work often in the winter. Mom cooked simple food. Real food.

But times changed. Women started working outside the home in larger numbers in the 1970s. There was more disposable income and less time to cook. Convenience foods became the response to "What's for dinner?" With the addition of chemical preservatives and the inclusion of whatever was left over from the production of other foods, we moved from real food to artificial food. Try to understand, or even pronounce, what's on the ingredients panel on that box of breakfast cereal or that microwave dinner and you'll see what I mean.  

In the US, Australia, and Canada, where about 70% of my readers come from, we see a lot of artificial food. Even the meat that people eat is largely artificial. Cows, designed to eat grass, are now fed corn because it's cheaper and easier. Factory-raised farm animals are injected with chemicals and antibiotics to increase corporate profits. Most people eating meat and fish have no idea what is in their food. Suffice it to say it's not "real."

Or read the headlines. We're seeing more and more foods banned from import or being recalled due to contamination scares. From spinach to beef to milk, there are serious problems with our monoculture farms, factory farms, and processing plants.

Then there are all the attendant problems of getting our food to us. Our fruit and vegetables are raised to look good rather than taste good, picked before they're ripe, shipped a few thousand miles, wrapped in plastic, and plunked down on the store shelves under artificial lighting designed to make them look good.

We're already seeing the risk of this corporate-based farm system as even in the U.S., there have been food shortages this year. Try googling "wheat rice shortage." Then add "Costco" and you'll see what I mean.

The answer?

Raise your own, buy local, swap with neighbors, shop at farmer's markets, join a CSA. Get to know the people who grow your food. And the closer to home your food is grown or raised, the better it will taste, the less it will harm the environment, and the healthier it will be for you and your family. The food scandals we've been hearing about are because everything was done behind closed doors. When you isolate yourself from the people who eat what you produce, it’s easy to think only of your own personal gain. Another indication of the sad state our food industry is in? When you visit a factory farm for chickens or cows and have to put on a hazmat suit (garment worn as protection from hazardous materials or substances) you know they're not producing healthy food.

As we transition into our new normal way of living, food will be one of our primary concerns. We have to change the way we think of it. Most homes in the U.S., Australia, and Canada have about three days worth of food on hand. The supermarkets also stock about three days worth of food. In the U.S., both FEMA and the Red Cross are urging people to have two weeks of food and water on hand. FEMA expects people to be self-sufficient in an emergency. So consider that for those first two weeks, you and your neighbors are on your own, and plan accordingly.

After Ike hit Galveston and Houston, there were reports of American Red Cross workers not eating all day. Food was so scarce that volunteers didn't want to eat in front of the people who were desperately in need of food. So the volunteers didn't eat. Many local families could only get one meal a day. In the few weeks after the hurricanes, in the southeastern U.S. there were long lines at gas stations as supplies were severely restricted.

We've gotten used to getting what we want, when we want it. In the "new normal," this will no longer be possible. We're going to need to do some planning. Like our grandparents and great-grandparents did.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 6: Back Down the Ladder)

Living in Our New World Part 4: Financial Collapse

At the risk of sounding like a Sharon Astyk groupie, I’m going back to her blog for our fourth installment in this series. I would think that you have heard enough about climate change to know what it is so I don’t need to elaborate on it here.

But how can we make sense out of the expanding US financial crisis that we're hearing about daily? Is it really about too many risky mortgages by financial institutions only concerned about profit? Or is there an underlying cause. Or causes. Finding the causes really is like peeling back the layers of an onion.

Peeling the Onion: What’s Behind the Financial Mess?

Sharon  September 25th, 2008

If you want a pat answer to what has caused the financial crisis that is reverbating around the world, and now threatening the derivatives market, we’ve got one. Nearly everyone - in the mainstream media and outside it, tells the same story - that the crisis was caused by the unravelling of the housing market, particularly the US housing market.  And if you ask what’s behind that, well, we’re told there was a bubble.  And if you ask what was behind the bursting of the bubble, well…it is turtles all the way down.

 I’m not a turtles kind of gal, and so I thought it might be worth playing with root causes some more.  Now it is absolutely the case that original causes are virtually impossible to come by - everything is always multicausational. And there’s no question that the housing market was so ridiculously overvalued that in no sense could it have been sustained.  Still, it is sometimes interesting and productive to tease out some of the major causes of our problems, the things that explain why now and how, and I think there’s one that people haven’t been looking too carefully at - and one I think bears some exploration of.

I’m going to suggest that if you peel off the layers of the financial crisis, we’re going to find some pretty basic things.  And one of the basic things is, well, food.  It seems sort of anti-climactic, I think, if you are a pundit, to talk about the cost of rice and soybean oil as part of the root problem of such a massive financial crisis, but I suspect we’ll find it there.  And underneath the food, I think we’ll find oil. 

Most commentators have taken the food crisis, which has run more or less in parallel with the financial crisis - growing gradually through 2007, and beginning to move more dramatically towards crisis in the winter and spring of this year, as an irritating factor, a small push against already strapped consumers.  But I’m not really sure this is the right way to look at this.  Instead, we might look at the question of how the growth economy grows.  Some of it, of course, is through population increase - new workers, new consumers.  But population growth itself has proved over and over again to be insufficient - not only do we need more people, but the industrial growth economy always needs a larger percentage of the populace to serve it.  This is one of the reasons I tend to agree with Vandana Shiva that the population problem is not primarily a cause of our current crisis, but a symptom of it.

We might look at the boom and bust cycle of our economy, and indeed, the world economy, as one moved not just by energy, but by new workers (who then conveniently become new consumers and create new markets - remember, 70% of the economy is consumer spending).  Each boom cycle has followed the move of vast numbers of new workers into the economy, essentially creating more money in the form of productivity, and more income to spread around and lubrication to the economic system. 

So, for example, after the Great Depression, we got the country moving in large part by the industrialization of a large portion of the agricultural population - millions of farmers were brought into the industrial economy either to serve in the service or work in the factories.  After the war, many of them never returned to the farms - and the GI bill and the conversion of wartime industry to peacetime industry encouraged lower income farmers to go to work.  The movement of people employed largely in the subsistence economy into the industrial economy created a huge boost - poor black farmers in the South moved to industrial centers in vast numbers to take advantage of good wages, and low income women who had worked in the factories never did return to pre-war levels of women’s work.

In the 1970s, as the economy began to stagnate again, the answer was a new influx of workers and consumers - quite rapidly, women began entering the workforce in staggering numbers, requiring new work wardrobes, second cars, fast food restaurants and daycare providers to take the place of what we had.  Workers who had primarily provided subsistence labor not counted into the GDP were transferred into the formal economy, and disproportionately as low wage laborers.  The excesses of the 80s began just as the numbers of women workers fully doubled - all of a sudden there was more money to go around - and this is hardly surprising since there was more work being done, and more money being spent both on luxuries and on paying to do the jobs that had previously lived in the subsistence economy.

The next wave of prosperity was a world scale one, running from the 1990s until pretty much the last couple of years - and again, millions of new workers and new consumers were inserted into the world economy, spreading money.  Suddenly there was new movement of funds, new workers doing new things and buying new stuff.  There were new markets again, and plenty of growth to go around.  Again, we find that the growth is primarily produced not by high value, highly educated workers in the new information economy - the most important economic growth during those periods was of new, low wage workers, moving from the subsistence economy into the industrial economy. 

It is worth asking why these low wage workers are so important to each bubble.  There are a couple of reasons.  The first is that even in the booming periods of cheap energy, it was never possible to mechanize or use oil for the majority of jobs - and as energy supplies rose in cost and tightened, it is less and less possible to do so.  The majority of all world farmers, builders and factory workers do use some machinery, but the primary engine of production is human work.  The other thing that matters is while there is a substantial difference in the pay scale of, say, an IT professional over a construction worker or a farmer, and the value of the work of the IT professional in the industrial economy is higher, moving people over to the white collar economy isn’t nearly as effective or profitable as taking people out of the subsistence economy and putting them on the lower rungs of the industrial economy.  First of all, you take a large portion of the productivity of a human being (remember, new industrial workers generally work long, long hours), without any amortized costs to provide him or her with health insurance or education.  That is, the total society investment in someone in the subsistence economy who then moves to working 12 hours a day in the industrial economy is very small, and the amount of work she does is quite dramatically more than what she did to serve the industrial economy when she was a subsistence farmer or a housewife.  Education, on the other hand, is expensive, and white collar workers like things like health care and vacation.  The money is in the new workers.

So what happened? Well, in America and the UK some of it really just was a bubble popping.  But what, oh what funded the bubbles?  To a large degree it was the purchase of various American assets, including a lot of mortgages, by the newly cash flush emerging economies.  And gradually, gradually those purchases have slowed down - they began slowing in the fall of last year, after some rumblings even before that, and the slowdown has accellerate - it hasn’t stopped, but the flow of money into the American economy through various routes, including buying bundled paper, has slowed.  And it has slowed at least in correlation - I do not swear about causality - with the housing market.  Now the assumption has been that the slowing is due to the increase of risk - and that’s probably true to a degree.  But I think some further scrutiny might find that there’s another factor - that it has slowed as the emerging economies have been dragged down.

One of the news stories that came out last week was that in addition to the 100 million starving people that made the UN news last spring, we’ve now got still 75 Million more hungry people in the world than there were before.  The UN announced that essentially all of the progress made on global poverty up until now is being erased by the food crisis.

Now it might be worth asking - where are those 175 million new starving people coming from?  Before they were starving, who were they?  And the answer would be that many of them were the people who left their farms in China and Vietnam and Indonesia and a host of other places to go live in the slums of various cities and work there.  They were the people who were just getting by - the ones who sent a daughter to the factories and who did day labor in construction building up the economies.  They lived quite close to the edge, and then, they crossed the edge when food prices began to rise.   Now these were the lowest level new industrial workers - they weren’t buying cell phones, but they might have bought a few things that they wouldn’t have when they needed every penny for rice or bread - they sent their children, even their daughters to school, and bought clothes and pencils, they might save up for a radio for the family, and all these things, over millions of people, added up.  And they produced more than they were paid for the economy as a whole - their work was more valuable than their salaries could account for, as is the way of things.  But now they aren’t buying those things - their kids are out of school, there is no money for radios or batteries, and there’s no food - so they are working less, getting sick more, contributing less to the industrial economy, unable to make money selling things to the other people in their neighborhoods, because their neighbors have no extra money for anything either.  Not only are they starving, but they’ve stopped adding money into the economy - and stopped spending it on anything but food.

Meanwhile, the next tier up in income were the people who had a little more than just enough - enough and a bit to send back home to their families, to get a cell phone and some jeans and buy meat a bit more often.  These people worked pretty regularly at the new jobs - in factories, in building, in making the new globalized economy.  And they spent money too and moved it around within their communities, and back into the global economy - the spent a little money buying coca cola, which came back this way.  Now they aren’t starving yet, but the rising cost of food has pushed them too - now the coca cola and the meat are gone, except for the holidays, and there won’t be any more jeans.  Because now the money goes for food - they have food to eat, but not enough for those other things.  And so the money increasingly doesn’t move around that much - because the farmer who grew the rice they are buying spent most of his money buying fertilizer.  And so the money is headed mostly back to a few small companies - without a lot of stops around the neighborhood. 

It is easy not to pay attention to such small things, and small people - after all, they aren’t spending much money, and their wages aren’t much. But they produce the stuff we need, they move money around - and hundreds of millions and billions of these small personal economies add up to quite a lot.  And the money that they made went places  - it took trips.  The money a poor Chinese worker generated in productivity went a bit into his pocket - and some of that went back to American corporations that made things.  And a lot of what he generated went into companies that invested in other things that fed our economy.  And some of it went to the Chinese government that used it to buy up dollars and other things that seemed to have some value.  It is perhaps not totally surprising, then, that as the Chinese worker got functionally poorer because of rising food prices, there was less money to pour back - times some millions.

And so it goes, down the latter.  The new workers, and the lubrication they provide in the global money system are being systematically impoverished, and what money they do spend goes to an increasingly narrow band of companies - instead of spreading the money around, money goes for very basic things - mostly food, and mostly basic foods.  And the farmers who make the basic foods mostly send that money back to a very small number of companies - the ones that produce oil and the ones that produce fertilizer - many of them located in the same countries and places. 

What is reducing the amount of productive work accomplished, and moving the money increasingly only into a few pockets?  It is the high price of food.  And what is the root cause of the high price of food?  Well, the single biggest factor, according to a number of studies, including the UN studies, has been the move to food based biofuels.  So if we peel back the onion one more layer, what we find is that one of the major factors slowing the economy has been, well, oil.  The rush to biofuels is a response to tightening oil supplies and rising costs, and the aggregate effect has been to push up food prices all over the world, while doing pretty much nothing to increase energy security, reduce greenhouse gasses or do much of anything else useful.

I’m no economist, and I don’t pretend to be.  But I wonder, when we peel back the layers of the onion later, and look at the history of this Depression, I wonder if we’ll see that in fact, what happened was that we squeezed out the lifeblood of the very thing we’d built our economy upon - new workers/consumers who could be counted on to grow the economy outwards and upwards.  We could have forseen this - but we chose not to - we chose, as we struggled to keep our lifestyle intact on the backs of the world’s poor, not to see that we stand on their backs, and it is people…all the way down.  In killing them, we killed ourselves. It may be that besides the tragedy of starving millions of poor people, we may also have brought down our own system, simply because we did not see, did not realize that the poor matter more to us than we like to admit.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 5: Food)

Living in Our New World Part 3: Peak Oil

In yesterday's post from Sharon Astyk's blog, the question of why we should be thinking about peak oil was raised. I've written about peak oil briefly, but as I wrote in the first post in this series, our only hope for the future is to understand the present. Well to understand the present in regard to peak oil, we need to step back into the past a bit. So we're moving back down that timeline again.

Rather then try to be an expert in peak oil, I'd like to share an excellent program that was produced by ABC television in Australia in 2006.

click here.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our World Part 4: Financial Collapse)