Category: Environment
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David Harvey on Capitalism
David Harvey, social theorist, Marxian scholar, proponent of zero growth in advanced economies, and author of The Enigma of Capital, offers an uncommon perspective on how capitalism has worked out in recent decades, its many crises and modes of resolution. After stating that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”, he nevertheless looks at why it is so hard not only to imagine an alternative to capitalism, but even to the kind of capitalism we have today. At the very least, there is food for thought here.
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We Call This Progress
Arundhati Roy on the recent arc of economic development in India. I think her voice is important for lending support to certain radical and moral ideas in public life, esp. since so few public intellectuals in India do so with any force or clarity. I say this even though I don’t share her romantic disenchantment with modernity and globalization, at least not most of the time, and find some of her analysis too simplistic.
I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons. -
Capitalism Without Growth?
The idea of economic growth based on continuously rising production and consumption, barring short-term hiccups, is integral to modern capitalism and its institutions. Most models of investment today are built upon returns outpacing inflation. Indeed, the promise of growth is fundamental to modern politics. In a world of finite resources, however, the expectation of endless economic growth is rather absurd, a fact now being made amply evident by ecological degradation, climate change, and extinction of species. Many economists are now exploring the idea of “steady state” economics with zero growth. Seemingly, it’s only a matter of time when, one way or another, we are forced into such a state (or worse, because we won’t accept it gracefully). What might that look like and what might a transition to such a model entail for our societies? Featuring Ben Harris-Quinney, Giles Fraser, and Meghnad Desai, this video has an interesting discussion on the topic (54 mins).
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Dan Miller on Climate Change
In this talk, Dan Miller describes how climate change is shaping up to be worse than was predicted by the movie An Inconvenient Truth, why most humans are unable to grasp this threat (because it is invisible, without historical precedent, has a complex causality, is seen to have long drawn out or intangible consequences, lacks a well-defined enemy to pursue, etc.), and what we ought to be doing about it pronto.
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Animal Rights: Mapping the Debate
Carlo Salzani presents a brilliant overview of the current philosophical debate on animal rights by focusing on three authors of recent books. For what it’s worth, I lean towards the viewpoints of Milligan and Garner, and not Francione’s.
The heterogeneous galaxies of studies revolving around the issue of animal ethics agree on one point: nonhuman animals endure unacceptable levels of suffering due to human exploitation, and this suffering ought to be eliminated. For the rest, philosophers and activists working in this field agree to disagree: they disagree on the moral status of nonhuman animals, on the major goals of pro-animal activism, on the actions to be taken to ameliorate animals’ conditions, on the strategies to adopt, and on the results achieved by the various movements to date. The diversity of theoretical positions and practical approaches, and the growing number of works addressing the problem, have generated an intense internal debate. Two books published in 2010, Gary Francione and Robert Garner’s The Animal Rights Debate and Tony Milligan’s Beyond Animal Rights, help giving a sense of what is presently going on in philosophical circles and mapping the theoretical territory of the animal ethics discourse.The two books certainly do not (and do not claim to) cover the entire territory, nor attempt to summarize the entire debate; rather, the three authors offer three distinct — and discordant — positions which, though all advocating a revolution in the human treatment of animals, are as distant as the stars in a constellation. Francione and Garner argue that the debate between abolition and regulation of the human use of animal is at the center of modern animal advocacy, and propose two solid and consistent set of arguments: Francione is in favor of the abolition of the human use of animals, while Garner defends a protectionist approach, according to which at least some uses of animals may be justifiable. Milligan, on the other hand, does not propose a thesis or a consistent “package,” but rather attempts a different approach which explores different issues in different ways without relying on fixed and one-dimensional baselines.
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Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
This article by Bill McKibben is going to scare the pants off you. It pairs quite well with Bartlett’s analysis that I blogged about recently.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.Also check out this article on the everyday denial of climate change.
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Tapped
Check out this multi-award winning documentary “Tapped” and say NO to bottled water, if you haven’t already. Blurb and trailer appear below; the full movie can be seen on YouTube for $1.99 (75 mins). A related excellent documentary is Blue Gold: World Water Wars (the full movie is on YouTube for free).“Tapped” documents how the bottle water industry is wreaking havoc on the environment and examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. Bottled water doesn’t just come from your grocery store. It comes from small towns across America where citizens argue their way of life and ecosystem have been disrupted as a result of corporations coming in and claiming ownership of the public’s water supply. With only 20% of bottled water containers recycled in the U.S., every day Americans dump 30 million single-serve plastic water bottles into landfills. Because of America’s poor recycling rate, much of our plastic ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Specifically in an area known as Plastic Stew – an area twice the size of Texas where the ratio of plastic to plankton is 46:1. “Tapped” highlights how everyday heroes have taken on the fight for our most precious resource – water.
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Peaceable Kingdom
HumaneMyth.org is a site dedicated to exploding the myth of “humane” farming of animals for food. It is run by animal activists who not only recognize factory farming of animals for the massive barbarism that it is (thanks to people like us), but go beyond and argue that it is not “possible to use and kill animals in a manner that can be fairly described as respectful or compassionate or humane.” These activists desire a “peaceful transformation of our society that fully respects the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike.”Revisiting the site recently, I came across a documentary film, Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home. Below is a blurb and the trailer. Also check out the video excerpts of the bonus features on the DVD at the film website (one, two, three, four) and award ceremonies (one, two). It’s just out on DVD and I’ve ordered my copy.
Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home explores the powerful struggle of conscience experienced by several people from traditional farming backgrounds who come to question the basic assumptions of their way of life. A riveting story of transformation and healing, the documentary portrays the farmers’ sometimes amazing connections with the animals under their care, while also providing insight into the complex web of social, psychological and economic forces that have led to their inner conflict. Interwoven with the farmers’ stories is the dramatic animal rescue work of a newly-trained humane police officer whose sense of justice puts her at odds with the law she is charged to uphold. With strikingly honest interviews and rare footage demonstrating the emotional lives and intense family bonds of animals most often viewed as living commodities, this groundbreaking documentary shatters stereotypical notions of farmers, farm life, and perhaps most surprisingly, farm animals themselves. Directed by Jenny Stein. Produced by James LaVeck.
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Arithmetic, Population and Energy
A brilliant lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, professor of physics, that looks at population growth, energy use, and sustainability in light of basic arithmetic. Insightful and alarming, Bartlett shows why “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron and how many “experts” do not get this. According to Bartlett, a person in the U.S. on average consumes ~30 times the resources than a person in an underdeveloped country. One encouraging trend I found elsewhere is that per capita energy use in the U.S. has fallen in the last three decades though more than offset by population growth in the U.S., and by growth in population and per capita energy use in developing countries. Hardly a better case can be made for zero population growth and massive investments in renewable energy than the one made by Bartlett (from 2002, via 3QD).
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On Eating Animals
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A slightly modified version of this essay appeared in the July/Aug 2013 issue of the Humanist.)
Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her “daring escape” stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager made a show of “granting clemency” to what he dubbed “the brave cow.” Given a name, Molly, the cow was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. Some years ago in Omaha, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for several seconds before collapsing, died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.
Category: Animals, Culture, Economics, Environment, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Science, Video -
A 50-Year Plan for Energy
In this TED talk, Amory Lovins, an energy researcher, lays out a plan for a whole new private-sector energy industry that will save trillions while decimating fossil fuel use, creating jobs, reducing oil conflicts, and growing the economy. For more, visit ReinventingFire.com.
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A Brief History of Paper
Here is an article with some interesting facts on paper. For example, “28 percent of all wood cut in the U.S. is used for papermaking” vs. 35 percent elsewhere due to less recycling. But like oil, with 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of all paper.
Take a minute to look around the room you’re in and notice how many things are made out of paper. There may be books, a few magazines, some printer paper, and perhaps a poster on the wall. Yet, if you consider that each person in the United States uses 749 pounds (340kg) of paper every year (adding up to a whopping 187 billion pounds (85 billion kg) per year for the entire population, by far the largest per capita consumption rate of paper for any country in the world), then you realize that paper comes in many more forms than meets the eye.World consumption of paper has grown 400 percent in the last 40 years. Now nearly 4 billion trees or 35 percent of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries on every continent. Besides what you can see around you, paper comes in many forms from tissue paper to cardboard packaging to stereo speakers to electrical plugs to home insulation to the sole inserts in your tennis shoes. In short, paper is everywhere.
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The Spirit of Cities
In the popular imagination, cities are often associated with distinctive personalities. In India, for instance, Mumbai is often seen as a city of dreams and possibilities. In an interesting new book, Daniel A. Bell & Avner de-Shalit explore the character of cities in greater depth, The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age. Below is the book abstract; also read the introductory chapter.
Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today’s cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities.Bell and de-Shalit look at nine modern cities and the prevailing ethos that distinguishes each one. The cities are Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Bell and de-Shalit draw upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors’ own personal reflections and insights. They show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city’s ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo, a journalist known for her perceptive writing about the poor and the voiceless, has just published a book about the people of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai. It is getting some really great reviews. Here is an excerpt from one by Thrity Umrigar:
And yet, despite such instances of human decency, the residents of Annawadi are not the saintly, noble poor of much fiction. There are no Tiny Tims or Tom Joads here. They cannot afford to be. Living on subsistence wages, beside sewer lakes and mud-cased pigs and goats, standing in line for hours for a trickle of water, facing the daily threat of the imminent razing of the illegal slum, battling their own superstitions and flaws, killing themselves to pay for a substandard education for their children doesn’t leave much time for human kindness.This is not poverty porn. Rather, it is an unflinching, unsentimental portrait of the city’s poor – mean, envious, striving. There is no apotheosis in poverty, Boo reminds us. There is only humiliation and a kind of bewilderment.
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BBC Series on the Ganga
Here is an excellent BBC documentary, Ganges, on the river’s Himalayan birth and descent, its journey through the plains, and its end in the Bay of Bengal in what is the largest river delta in the world. The series focuses on the natural history and human life along the river’s course. The three episodes embedded below (one hour each) are: (1) Daughter of the Mountains, (2) River of Life, (3) Waterland. One critique I have is that by concentrating the most beautiful and the rarest nature and wildlife footage, the series encourages the highly misguided impression that the environment along the river’s course is robust and thriving.
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On Mothers and Others
Anthropologist Melvin Konner reviews Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who argues that “more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.”
It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That Never Evolved. It may be the most important. As she demolished, in the first, the idol of an evolved passive femininity, and in the second, the serene, always giving maternal goddess, in her third synthetic work she takes on another cultural and biological ideal: the mother who goes it alone. In our once male-dominated vision of evolution, we had the lone brave man, the hunter with his spear, and the lone enduring woman nurturing her young beneath the African sun; they made a deal, the first social contract, exchanging the services each was suited to by genetic destiny.Hrdy has not been alone in challenging this myth. A conference and book edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, although it was called Man the Hunter, showed that women brought in half or more of the food of hunter-gatherers by collecting vegetables, fruit, and nuts. This meant that, given the unpredictability of hunting success and the human need for plant foods, the primordial deal between the sexes was rather more complex than we thought. It also suggested that women had power in these societies; that men listened to them and decisions were made by consensus, not by male fiat as in more complex, hierarchical societies. …
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Sørensen on World Order
An insightful talk by Georg Sørensen on the world order today, where he considers four dimensions: (a) war and peace, (b) global economy, (c) institutions and governance, and (d) global environment. Sørensen is distinguished professor of international politics and economics in Denmark and has written fifteen books “on international relations and development issues. His research areas include society and politics, international community, democracy and development, prospects for a liberal world order, transformations of the state and its effects on international relations.” If you like this, check out another recent talk by him on Democracy and Democratization.
In his new book, A Liberal World Order in Crisis, Sørensen quotes me in his final chapter (from my essay, Being Liberal in a Plural World).
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Growth is Not Development
Here is a great article by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen on growth vs. development—how the two can feed each other but not in any automatic way, not without the right planning and investment—and why India, despite good economic growth has fared abysmally on human development when compared to other similar nations, especially in South Asia. Must read.
Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like this. “After decades of mediocrity and stagnation under ‘Nehruvian socialism’, the Indian economy achieved a spectacular take-off during the last two decades. This take-off, which led to unprecedented improvements in income per head, was driven largely by market initiatives. It involves a significant increase in inequality, but this is a common phenomenon in periods of rapid growth. With enough time, the benefits of fast economic growth will surely reach even the poorest people, and we are firmly on the way to that.” Despite the conceptual confusion involved in bestowing the term ‘socialism’ to a collectivity of grossly statist policies of ‘Licence raj’ and neglect of the state’s responsibilities for school education and healthcare, the story just told has much plausibility, within its confined domain.But looking at contemporary India from another angle, one could equally tell the following—more critical and more censorious—story: “The progress of living standards for common people, as opposed to a favoured minority, has been dreadfully slow—so slow that India’s social indicators are still abysmal.” For instance, according to World Bank data, only five countries outside Africa (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen) have a lower “youth female literacy rate” than India (World Development Indicators 2011, online). To take some other examples, only four countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar and Pakistan) do worse than India in child mortality rate; only three have lower levels of “access to improved sanitation” (Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti); and none (anywhere—not even in Africa) have a higher proportion of underweight children. Almost any composite index of these and related indicators of health, education and nutrition would place India very close to the bottom in a ranking of all countries outside Africa.
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Dharavi: India’s Model Slum?
Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is usually spoken of as a hell-hole and a shame for urban India. Here is a very different viewpoint. “Look beyond the stereotype,” says urban development consultant Prakash M. Apte, “and you’ll find a successful settlement with a vibrant community and economy. But developers want to raze it all and start again … Dharavi is a model that should be replicated, not redeveloped.”
The Indian megacity of Mumbai has an estimated population of about 14 million. Of those, only about 35% live in ‘regular’ permanent housing. The other 65% live in informal settlements, which for more than a third of those people means squatting on sidewalks and under bridges. The rest — nearly 6 million people — occupy settlements on private and public open lands, some of which are more than 50 years old. Dharavi is one of the most famous, but unlike all others and despite its common depiction as a “slum”, it is actually a successful work-cum-residential settlement. Developers have been trying to redevelop the area for years, but Dharavi is a model settlement that needs to be replicated, not replaced.Located in the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi has a population of more than 600,000 people residing in 100,000 makeshift homes, and one of the world’s highest population densities at more than 12,000 persons per acre. It is just across from the Bandra- Kurla Complex—a fast developing commercial center that has overtaken Nariman Point, the current downtown of Mumbai—and is also located close to Mumbai’s domestic and international airports. Despite its plastic and tin structures and lack of infrastructure, Dharavi is a unique, vibrant, and thriving ‘cottage’ industry complex, the only one of its kind in the world.
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An Indian-American in China
In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.
