6-26-2003

How did it come to pass that we created an economic system that tells us it's cheaper to destroy the earth than to take care of it. Why do we get economic signals that are antithetical to our deeply held values and common sense? Why do our deepest aspirations for goodness, for inclusion and generosity not cumulate into a peaceful and equitable society? Why do we live in two worlds instead of one?

Most corporations believe that we reside in a world where capital has the right to grow and that that right is a higher right than the rights of people to their culture and what we hold in common.

You can't get to sustainability from an economic model that strives first and foremost to increase the amount of money large corporations have. You can't get there if you're destroying the world's local economies. You can't get there if you spend $2 billion a year to get children to eat your junk food. One out of every five meals in the U.S. is fast food.

We can't correct environmental problems if we don't correct the assumptions that cause them.

Most of the world's economy and the behavior of the world's governments are under the control of corporations. Corporations are striving to increase their control; at the same time, the world is increasingly out of control. there is a direct connection.

The new weight of corporate colonization is having disastrous results.

[By almost any measure, multinational corporations have failed spectacularly on their promise of fostering global democracy and prosperity. That's why people all across the planet -- from villagers in India to students in North America -- are stepping up to challenge the abuses of big business. While corporate power is deeply entrenched, this new economic democracy movement is fueled by a fresh set of strategies about how people can regain power.

Transnational corporations are not sustainable, and they need to do the following:

• get out of our schools.

• get out of our stomachs.

• get out of our government.

• get out of our rivers, oceans, and forests.

• get out of our skies and soils.

• get out of our seeds and the human genome.

Corporations are spearheading a kind of commercial fascism which is causing a growing resistance from consumers because it is usurping freedoms of choice by creating a meta-order for people. The assumption is that a small group of people know better than the larger group -- and thus the small group doesn't have to consult the larger group when deciding what's best for the majority of people.

What the World Trade Organization and Free Trade Areas are trying to do is design the rules and order which best fits their needs, not the needs of the consumers. Who sets the rules and who enforces them? What will be the shape of the relationships be among nations, regions, peoples, companies, markets and the commons which support all life on Earth?

Do we want democracy and self-determination, or do we want oligarchic institutions? Do we want a world of uniformity? Or do we want strong regional and native cultures proud of their heritage, devoted to their land, committed to true development and the future of their children? Wouldn't it be better to have a world that represents the expression of the fabulous qualities of all human beings rather than a world structured by rich, white men?

Corporatization of the world is creating a loss of diversity. The degree to which the corporate world order tries to enforce a one-size-fits-all formula to the planet's media, culture, agriculture, and dietary habits is going to be seen in hindsight as just as much of a criminal act as the deracination and slaughter of the indigenous peoples of the Americas or the enslavement of Africans. Are we too close to what we are allowing to be done now to realize that it is a violation of humanity?

It is less expensive to share wealth than to continue with the extravagantly self-centered system we call corporate capitalism. It is cost less to maintain the Earth in real time than it is to try to clean it up after the corporate pig has rooted through the goodies.

A world where 20 percent of its people get less than 1 percent of its resources, where nearly a billion go to bed hungry, a world torn by strife, riddled by greed, controlled by small, petty men bankrolled by large transnational corporations is not cheap.

We know how to transform this world to reduce our impact on Nature by several fold, how to provide meaningful, dignified living-wage jobs for all who seek them, and how to feed, clothe, and house every person on Earth.

What we don't know is how to remove those in power, those whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference to human suffering. this is a political issue. It is not a ecological problem. The way to save this Earth is to focus on its people, and particularly those people who pay the highest price: women, children, communities of color, the localized poor.

the sustainability movement -- without forsaking its understanding of living systems, resources, conservation, and biology -- must move from a resource flow model of saving the earth to a model based on human rights, the rights to food, the rights to livelihood, the rights to culture, community, and self-sufficiency.

The environmental movement must become a civil rights movement, a human rights movement. Without that, it will simply be a failed white man's movement from the North.

Sustainability has to be about improving the quality of life of all people on earth and honoring all forms of life.

People never change when they are comfortable. Author Margaret Drabble wrote, "When nothing is sure, everything is possible." We have nothing to fear. The worst is happening right now. Helen Keller once said, "This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time."

I was recently asked by a journalist. "Aren't you just dreaming?" I replied, "Absolutely I'm dreaming; somebody's got to dream in America." the dreams of a livable future aren't coming from george Bush and dick Cheney, and it is our right to dream. It is something we owe our children's children. A dream is a gift of the future, and the future is begging.

I dream of having a U.N. arms control and inspection team coming to the United states to remove assault weapons from the hands of all National rifle Association members. I dream of another u.N. team shutting down the 15,000 chemical plants in this country that are essentially biological weapons waiting to happen. I dream of my country living up to its legal treaty commitments and getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. I dream of a United states that actually has an energy plan; a climate plan, not a midterm election plan; a water plan to get rid of the pollutants in our riparian corridors and streams; a bio diversity plan; a plan to eliminate poverty and illiteracy; a plan that ensures that no child here or anywhere goes to bed hungry.

I once gave a talk at an elementary school to third graders, and I told them that there are a billion people in the world who want to work and can't work. a girl raised her hand and said, "Is all the work done?"

I dream of getting my government back, a country of, by and for the people. I dream of a country that is big enough to say it is wrong; that can be remorseful and say it's sorry for the suffering it's caused First Peoples, African Americans, Hispanic americans, Asian americans, and people in other lands that we have wronged; a country big and generous enough to build new schools in inner cities and act with decency in the world.

Let's not spend so much time on the big villains. It is not the Ken Lays or George Buses we should be demonizing. We need to honor the saints in our midst, not the fools, the small heroes, not the big louts. Arundhati Roy writes that "we have to support our small heroes (Of these we have many. Many.) we have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that's what the 21st century has in store for us. the dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us."

The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote, "Clever men place the world into cages, but the wise woman who much duck under the moon throws keys to the rowdy prisoners." Let's throw keys to the rowdy prisoners. Sustainability is about freedom from tyranny, from empire, from corporate rule, the freedom to honor life. Let's create, in Janine Benyus' memorable phrase, "a world conducive to life."

Paul Hawken is an author, entrepreneur, and activist. He is the author of "Growing a business, the Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism." This essay was adapted from a speech delivered at the Bioners conference in October 2002.

The Empire Strikes Out

By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet
October 17, 2003

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece is adapted from Kenny Ausubel's opening remarks to the 2003 Bioneers Conference, which takes place Oct. 17-19 in San Rafael, Calif. Kenny founded Bioneers in 1990.

Speaking once at the Bioneers conference, Paul Hawken re-framed the famous defining image from the movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' As you may recall, while the horizon fills with a flotilla of space ships, the earthbound scientists are feverishly fumbling to make contact with the E.T.'s. Awestruck, they try sending out a sequence of musical tones to establish communication. Meanwhile, unseen behind them rises the Mother Ship, dwarfing everything else, blotting out the entire horizon. The Mother Ship is the biology of the planet. The Mother Ship is the Mother Earth. And it is bigger than anything we can imagine.

That's about the size of it. For all the chatter about the Age of Information, what we are really entering is the Age of Biology.

We didn't invent nature. Nature invented us. Nature bats last, the saying goes, but even more importantly it's her playing field. We would be wise to learn the ground rules and how to play by them.

When I founded Bioneers in 1990, the impulse originated from my exposure to the work of biological pioneers searching to rediscover nature's own operating instructions. Their quest has been to glean what we might learn from four billion years of evolutionary intelligence and apply it in practical ways.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what the bioneers are doing is mimicking nature in order to help nature heal and serve human ends harmlessly. In many cases their knowledge is prefigured by ancient indigenous science from First Peoples, the world's original bioneers. These are the true biotechnologies.

The great ecological play takes place in a food web that makes no waste. It's powered by a solar economy that neither mines the past nor mortgages the future. Some of its guiding principles are diversity, kinship, symbiosis, reciprocity and community. It's all alive. It's all intelligent. It's all connected. It's all relatives.

One of the beauties of biology is that its facts can become our metaphors. These underlying codes may also serve as inspiring parables for how as human beings we might organize a more just, humane and authentically sustainable society.

If there is a single story woven within these many stories, it's the grand tale of interdependence. Life is intimacy interconnected, and as a culture we've made a basic systems error to believe that we exist somehow separate from nature, or from one another. That illusion could prove fatal at this momentous cusp where our turbo-charged technologies and overwhelming numbers have given us, for the first time in history, the capacity to blow it on a planetary scale.

Today a globalized corporate empire is menacing the future of the entire biosphere. We all know that empires are castles made of sand that always crumble and fade away, but by the time this empire strikes out, the biological game could be all but over. Corporate globalization is killing off its host – and ours – mother Earth.

Gary Larsen once did a great cartoon that sums up the empire express. A ship is sinking, and a pack of dogs crowded into a lifeboat are watching it go down. The lead dog says to the others, "OK – all those in favor of eating all the food all at once, raise your paws." That's economic globalization in a nutshell.

The real-world situation that's spontaneously combusting today is a perfect storm of extreme environmental degradation and rolling infrastructure collapse. It's by no means the first time this has happened. Previous civilizations bought the farm because of self-induced environmental catastrophe, but in the past the damage was localized.

As Jared Diamond, the author of 'Guns, Germs and Steel,' has pointed out, these societies met their demise by cutting down forests, eroding topsoil and building burgeoning cities in dry areas that eventually ran short of water. Sometimes hastened by sudden climate change, the ensuing disintegration occurred suddenly – in a matter of a decade or two after a society reached its peak of population, wealth and power. Because that pinnacle also marked maximum resource consumption and waste production, it produced unsupportable environmental impacts.

But there's more to it, Diamond says. "They had foolish leaders...who embroiled them in destabilizing wars and didn't pay attention to problems at home. They were overwhelmed by desperate immigrants, as one society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the societies that weren't collapsing."

When Diamond studied the ecological downfall of Mexico's ancient Mayan civilization, he determined that the final strand in its unraveling was a crisis of political leadership. He said, "Their [leaders] attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities." Sound familiar, my fellow peasants??

Today we're going mano a mano with the whole biosphere, and she's responding with her own form of deregulation. Just take global warming. The planet is reeling from record-smashing temperatures, violent storms, long-term droughts, hundred-year floods, unstoppable fires, massive insect infestations, migrating disease patterns, rising seas, and wholesale species extinctions not seen in 65 million years. Fifteen-thousand people died in France this summer from record-setting heat. In Phoenix, Arizona, people's flip-flops melted on the pavement. One woman who tripped and fell face-first on the sidewalk was rushed to a burn unit. As if the atmosphere weren't already unpleasant enough, global warming is just getting going.

Earlier this year, the White House pressured the EPA to hit the delete key in its state-of-the-environment report regarding the forty-weight connection between global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. The US political class says we need more scientific study while they march us backwards into the 21st century carrying a sack of coal. In fact, the science is unequivocal. It's no longer a matter of connecting the dots. It's a matter of connecting the elephants in the room.

Global warming means more and bigger storms, and one of the most striking images from the relatively mild Hurricane Miserabel was the battered mall of the Washington Monument. A large stand of flagpoles forlornly flew the stars and stripes, shredded to tatters by the violent weather. As the great urban farmer Michael Abelman once said here at Bioneers, "After all, what good is a country and a flag if there is no more fertile soil, no ancient forests, no clean water, no pure food? If you really love your country, protect and restore some wildness. Support local agriculture. Plant a garden. Those who work to protect and restore these things are the real patriots."

In truth, the US political class is clueless. It has no plan, besides eating all the food all at once. Although the empire may seem awesomely powerful, it's coming apart at the seams.

What is also true here and around the world is that people are stepping up with real solutions. There's a new superpower: global popular movements. They are growing from the bottom up – to take back control over our lives, our communities, our economies and our cultures. People are starting to assume responsibility for the lands, the waters, the forests, and the global commons we all share with the web of life.

People worldwide are rejecting the deification of the market over environmental and human rights. As Amory Lovins has said, "Markets make a great servant but a bad master and a worse religion. Markets produce value, but only communities and families produce values. And a society that tries to substitute markets for politics, ethics, or faith is seriously adrift."

There are brilliant scientific and social innovators among us who've been patiently incubating the seeds of successful local, regional and even societal plans for the transformation to a sustainable civilization. An alternative globalization movement of unprecedented proportions is taking shape, weaving a green web of innovative models grounded in true biotechnologies and social equity.

This new world is being born right now before our eyes. It mimics the decentralized intelligence of living systems, the innate democracy of life. It's founded in the recognition that the first homeland security comes from environmental security. Our civilization's out-of-body experience is screeching to a halt as we awaken to our absolute dependence on natural life-support systems and our interdependence with all life. And in a world where half the people live on $2 a day or less, we can have no peace. The Gulf War we need to wage is to end the gulf between rich and poor.

And in terms of global security, it's no coincidence that the world's most dangerous political hot spots and breeding grounds for terrorism are exactly the same places with the worst environmental devastation and poverty. Go figure.

We're entering into unknown territory. There will be little to hold onto. It could be a time of unimaginable suffering and loss, but it will also be a renaissance of flourishing creativity and deep healing. The regenerative capacity of nature is powerful beyond our imagination. And the boundless nobility of the human soul is arising everywhere in waves of caring and kindness. Our social security is being woven in community, as people gather to mend our shredded social fabric and solve problems together. There is as much cause for hope as for horror. And we know we must prevail.

We can start by attending to our worst wounds. In very practical terms, the solution is to invest in our problems. We need a Green New Deal, a massive global investment in repairing the environment, transforming our infrastructures, and restoring people. The measure of any solution is whether it solves for pattern by resolving multiple problems in one fell swoop.

What's called for is strong government leadership to reboot the system. We need an immediate global Marshall plan of clean, renewable energy, and the re-design and rebuilding of our decaying infrastructures and clotted transportation systems. We can jump-start a permanent transition to an ecological agriculture that produces healthy, nutritious food in regionalized foodsheds – restores the land, air and water – and revives rural economies thriving with small and medium-sized farms. We need to revitalize public health with an Ecological Medicine anchored in the health of our ecosystems, which is the best investment any society can make. And we need a just legal system that puts human and environmental rights above property rights and corporate rights. All these programs will yield dramatically positive results – environmentally, economically, socially and spiritually. All of it is do-able.

In great measure, we know what to do in practical terms to realize this vision. The vexing bottleneck we face is political, not technological. The other power blackout we have to fix is the corporate empire turning the lights out on democracy. As the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, known as "the father of fascism," said in a uniquely refreshing moment of candor, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." As the whole world becomes a company town, democracy is in peril of becoming a phantom limb, severed from the body politic while we imagine it's still attached. Cleaning up the environment will happen when we clean up politics and reclaim our government.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. Voting is not something we can do just every two or four years. We need to vote every day with our lives. The coming environmental blowback and social dislocation could just as easily swing us toward martial law and totalitarian rule. If we don't change directions, we might just end up where we're heading.

Sixto K. Roxas

"It requires a whole new culture for organizations to think of sustainable development in terms of whole communities in relation to their respective habitats rather than in terms of sector-specialized enterprises and capital projects. It demands a whole new discipline to combine in feasibility appraisals, social and ecological integrated with economic criteria. A new breed of managers must emerge that manages communities towards integral goals where economic efficiency is defined to include social equity and ecological wholeness as integral outputs from the use of resources.

. Ideas - Movements - Institutions: these define the sequence and process of social transformation. Ideas become dominant among a critical mass of people and stimulate social movements. Social movements topple old institutions or energize them with a new spirit and a new culture. Such a process established the hegemony of the ruling economic order responsible for the enterprise-centered, growth-obsessed, unsustainable world that we have. It will take a similar process to transform our world into the community-centered sustainable socio-economic order that alone can save humanity and its habitat."

extracts : (complete text on Sixto K. Roxas )

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