book review

In its transition from rich biodiversity to the barren, cold land of blizzards we see today, Antarctica provides a dramatic case study of how subtle changes in continental positioning can affect living communities, and how rapidly catastrophic changes can come about. Frozen in Time reconstructs Antarctica’s evolving animal and plant communities as accurately as the fossil record permits.

Antarctica: from paradise to polar ice

No other continent on Earth has undergone such radical environmental changes as Antarctica.

According to a new book, Frozen in Time: Prehistoric life in Antarctica, by Dr Jeffrey Stilwell from the School of Geosciences at Monash University and John Long from the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County, Antarctica has gone from paradise to polar ice in just a few million years, a geological blink of an eye when we consider the real age of Earth.

In its transition from rich biodiversity to the barren, cold land of blizzards we see today, Antarctica provides a dramatic case study of how subtle changes in continental positioning can affect living communities, and how rapidly catastrophic changes can come about.

Frozen in Time presents a comprehensive overview of the fossil record of Antarctica framed within its changing environmental settings, providing a window into a past time and environment on the continent.

It reconstructs Antarctica’s evolving animal and plant communities as accurately as the fossil record permits.

From the story of how fossils were first discovered in Antarctica to modern day expeditions through remote sites, Frozen in Time presents a clear guide to the palaeontology of Antarctica. The publication provides an overview of the discovery and exploration of the continent to contemporary issues of heritage and preservation including the major impacts of climate change.

Chapter highlights include the age of fish and ferns, giant amphibians and hairy reptiles, volcanic lakes and early dinosaurs, when giant reptiles swam in southern seas, killer birds, giant penguins and early mammals.

Jeffrey Stilwell is a Senior Lecturer and Leader of the Applied Palaeontology and Basin Studies Group in the School of Geosciences at Monash University. Dr Stilwell is also an Honorary Research Associate at the Australian Museum, specialising in ancient greenhouse Earth environments and equator-to-south-polar ecosystems.

Dr Stilwell is the author of five monographs and more than 60 peer-reviewed research papers, including many on the fossil record of Antarctica. He has participated on five major expeditions to the Antarctic Peninsula and Transantarctic Mountains/McMurdo Sound.

John Long is an Australian palaeontologist and the Vice President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He has authored some 26 books, including The Rise of Fishes and Feathered Dinosaurs. His research has focused on the early evolution of fishes, especially from Australia and Antarctica.

Frozen in Time: Prehistoric life in Antarctica (248 pages, illustrated, RRP $69.95) is published by CSIRO Publishing and will be available online and at bookstores from October 2011.

It is surprising to pick up a book about wealth statistics and find that it segues so readily into another about psychopathology in young girls. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone takes a revealing look at how wealth is distributed within different developed countries and Reviving Ophelia illustrates the decline of women's rights in the face of aggressive pornography and its effect on girls. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

Some people are more equal than others, especially if they are not women

In the Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011, Deidre Macken writes, “After a week when economic statistics made a lie of our feelings of being worse off, it seems like an opportunistic time to check how good we are at reading ourselves. Obviously we are not good judges at assessing our economic well-being. Repeat after me – we are a lucky people, living in a country that’s never been luckier.”[1]

Without going into the adequacy of the indicators she used but does not reference, was Deidre talking about averaged statistics or was she talking about the way they are distributed throughout the nation?

I chose a quote from a female financial journalist to introduce the feminist implications of the theories of two books. One was published nearly two decades ago and the other was published last year. The earlier one is by Mary Pipher, with the title of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. It was published by Riverhead Books, New York, 1994. The second book is by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It’s title is The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, and it was published by Penguin in 2010.

Both books are about the impacts of inequality as you and I experience it, rather than the global economics of inequality between different countries by which the first and the third world are often defined. I found these books interesting particularly in the light of the recent inquiry into human rights in Australia, which ignored Australian citizens’ rights by concentrating on international rights. Citizens’ rights require active democracy and laws to facilitate this, whereas global human rights are relative abstractions, requiring recognition by national governments in hard-to-enforce treaties.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is better for everyone

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin 2010 beg the question of defining countries as rich or poor according to their average wealth. The book points out that, although Australia or the United States might have relatively large GDPs for their total populations, large sections of those societies are politically, materially, socially and physically disempowered and disadvantaged by their relative poverty. The authors imply that these differences drive seriously negative outcomes in almost any area you care to think of. The more unequal you are with the people geographically close to you – in your neighbourhood, your state, your nation - the more anxious and dysfunctional you are likely to be. Inequality is actually an indicator of relative unhappiness and that unhappiness is linked to many social and physical ills, including violence and obesity.

Further on we will relate the lesser condition of women as a subclass within these unequal nations.

Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that, rather than comparing “rich countries with poor countries” we should compare rich countries and then look inside them to see how well they are actually looking after their people.

Within countries like Japan and some of the Scandinavian countries … the richest 20 per cent of people are less than four times as rich as the poorest 20 per cent of people. At the bottom of the [scale] are countries in which these differences are at least twice as big, including two in which the richest 20 per cent get about nine times as much as the poorest. Among the most unequal are Singapore, USA, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. (p.16-17)

The book makes no attempt to explain why Portugal should stand out in such a contrast to its continental European neighbours, which almost invariably outperform English speaking countries on equality and social conditions. I would suggest however that one reason lies in Portugal's inheritance laws, which reflect a tendency to disinherit children in favour of spouses, similar to English-style laws. In the other European countries roman-style civil codes provide for children before spouses equally, therefore men and woman come to adulthood with similar wealth.

Wilkinson and Pickett find that the countries with the worst social inequality have the worst social outcomes overall in health, violence, obesity, illiteracy, mental illness, addiction, and rates of teenage pregnancy.

The official message is that developed western countries have done their duty by their own populations in fulfilling their material needs, leaving a remaining task of bringing the poor of other countries up to the same material standard. It seems churlish of people in those first world populations to reproach the rich in their countries for ostentatious and dishonest living, while the poor in the third world suffer malnutrition and disease. The official message is really that the poor of the developed world need to put the needs of the poor of the undeveloped world ahead of theirs, rather than to exert their own rights locally. The normalization of competitiveness over cooperation and social trust is a strategy to justify the growing vast internal inequalities in the first world.

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

Female obesity linked to inequality

Most women would be interested to know that the authors, Wilkinson and Pickett, are able to find a clear association between inequality, obesity and the female sex.

The World Health Organisation has found, from a study begun in the 1980s, that in the 26 countries it surveyed, rates of obesity have increased more among poor women than rich women. The countries with the worst inequalities – Australia, the United States, Portugal and the UK, also have the worst rates of obesity. The countries with the lowest rates of inequality have the lowest rates of obesity.(p.98)

Observing a relationship between anxiety and material and social inequality, the authors note that chronic stress stimulates the hormone, cortisol, of which high levels are associated with deposits of fat around the middle.(p.95) People with this kind of fat are at higher risk of other illnesses – notably diabetes. Diabetes is itself associated with depression.

The authors also refer to the concept of the ‘thrifty phenotype’ where birth weights are lower in women who have experienced stress during pregnancy. Are low-birth weight babies likely to squirrel away extra calories because the stress they encountered in utero led them to prepare for a harsh society, where they would expect to struggle for food? Instead, although they do grow up in a harsh society, it is a non-traditional variety where food remains plentiful but love and approval are at a premium. (p.98)

The book also notes that food may stimulate the brain in the same way as addictive drugs do in people who use food addictively. That is, that food may be used as a pain-killer. (p.96)

It is probably obvious that food marketing may also have a role in obesity, but what is that role? The authors find associations between eating for comfort and homely foods which remind people of childhood, but they note that fast food outlets aim to reassure and to provide the lower classes with a feeling of social mobility. They reassure through their reliability and clean surroundings, but they also provide an affordable opportunity to dine out, which was once the province of the rich. Of course when you dine out on fast food, you are taking in huge amounts of calories in the form of fats and sugars, to a degree not found in haute cuisine restaurants.(p.96)

The book also refers to a study which related obesity to people’s subjective sense of ranking low in the social pecking order. That is, how you feel you compare is more important than your absolute living standard.(p.101)

To recapitulate, this book is about how, once the basics are present, absolute living standard is outweighed by social ranking as measured by relative living standard.

Women as a sub-class within unequal first world nations

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

In Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls, (Riverhead Books, New York, 1994) the subject is also about inequality and anxiety within high GDP, purportedly progressive societies. Despite the rhetoric, she argues, girls receive a consistent message that they don’t deserve equal treatment and must go to outlandish lengths for mere acceptance. For this reason the whole basis of their identities become at risk as they identify as women rather than as children. They learn that their psychological identities depend on the approval of men. This explains the very high rates of anorexia and risky lifestyles among young women seeking some control over their social and personal environments.

Harking back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet as a young woman who lost the approval of the important males in her life and then suicided, this book observes the increasing difficulty since the 1980s that adolescent girls and the women they become have in preserving a sense of self and self-worth as they transition between childhood and maturity. It finds that they are victims of an increasingly sexualized and pornographic society that defines them almost exclusively as sexual objects, despite the official rhetoric of women’s rights. The girls feel the need to justify themselves against these media popularized and reinforced social standards and, in doing so, to suppress their real feelings and ambitions.

The author observes that, whilst her 1960s generation grew into a western society where the Women’s Liberation movement had overturned official institutional barriers to women’s rights to career, property and political candidacy, the mainstream media preserved, then enhanced over the next decades, a picture of women as inherently less-deserving of these rights than men. Unglamorous, older women (the majority) rarely receive attention in the mass media, and beautiful women often seem only to deserve violent attention, as victims of elaborate predator screenplays. Women are increasingly bombarded by this kind of view at younger and younger ages.

This book, Reviving Ophelia, was published in 1994, at a time when the pervasiveness of the internet was in its relative infancy. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

How does a girl, as her sexual personality awakens deal with the saturation marketing of femaleness as moronic and deserving of punishment and death? Mary Pipher argues that girl’s personalities die and that they often die with their personalities.

”Ironically, bright and sensitive girls are most at risk for problems. They are likely to understand the implications of the media around them and be alarmed. They have the mental equipment to pick up our cultural ambivalence about women, and yet they don’t have the cognitive, emotional and social skills to handle this information. They are paralyzed by complicated and contradictory data that they cannot interpret. They struggle to resolve the unresolvable and to make sense of the absurd. It’s this attempt to make sense of the whole of adolescent experience that overwhelms bright girls.

Less perceptive girls may miss the meaning of sexist ads, music and shows entirely. They tend to deny and oversimplify problems. They don’t attempt to integrate aspects of their experience or to ‘connect the dots’ between cultural events and their own lives. Rather than process their experience, they seal in confusion.

Often bright girls look more vulnerable than their peers who have picked up less or who have chosen to deal with all the complexity by blocking it out. Later, bright girls may be more interesting, adaptive and authentic, but in early adolescence they just look shelled.

Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed, or get angry. Whether girls feel depression or anger is a matter of attribution – those who blame themselves feel depressed, while those who blame others feel angry. Generally they blame their parents. Of course, most girls react with some combination of the four general ways.” (p. 43.)

Girls deal with painful thoughts, discrepant information and cognitive confusion in ways that are true or false to the self. The temptation is to shut down, to oversimplify, to avoid the hard work of examining and integrating experiences. Girls who operate from a false self often reduce the world to a more manageable place by distorting reality. Some girls join cults in which others do all their thinking for them. Some girls become anorexic and reduce all the complexity in life to just one issue – weight.” (p.61)

Mary Pipher observes that the loss of confidence in themselves that girls experience as they mature sexually occurs just at the time when more confidence is required to tackle increasingly complex work in the later years of school. Because of this socially-induced lack of confidence, even some highly intelligent girls will give up at the first sign of difficulty, where less bright male students will persist.

The book contains many succinct case histories and concludes with useful ways to approach these problems.

Male treatment of this subject - Turning Angel

How do men deal with these realities that affect their daughters, mothers and intimates so badly? In conclusion, I will mention a book by a man exploring these themes. spirit-level.jpg by novelist, Greg Iles, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2006) is a highly readable thriller that dramatises the stresses of the normalization of sexism and pornography on young girls [and men] in their last years of high school and the particular vulnerability of highly intelligent young women from dysfunctional homes. Iles looks at the temptation for upwardly mobile professional men to exploit such young women. It is also well worth a read and testifies to the continuing usefulness of the novel as a medium for social comment as well as entertainment.

NOTES

[1] Deidre Macken, “I’m starting with the man in the mirror,” Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011.

National Academy of Science member and Distinguished biologist and Professor in Geoscience endorses David Ray Griffin's work exposing the truth of 9/11

By Lynn Margulis

This article was first published as "Two hit, three down, the biggest lie," [pdf file] in the Rock Creek Free Press.

Two Hit, Three Down - The Biggest Lie

National Academy of Science member and Distinguished Professor endorses
David Ray Griffin’s work exposing the truth of 9/11

By Lynn Margulis

I comment here on the nanotechnology aspect of Jerry Mazza’s masterful review (Rock Creek Free Press, January 2010, page 6) of David Ray Griffin’s extraordinary 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False.

By the time we (Dorion Sagan – my eldest son and Sciencewriters partner – and I) met David Griffin in 2003 in his native habitat at the Center for Process Studies (which is on the campus of the Claremont School of Theology in southern California), he had written over two dozen books, none of which I had ever read or even heard of. We immensely enjoyed a three-day scientific-philosophical meeting on the Darwinian-evolutionary view of life that had been organized by Griffin’s sage mentor, the sweet-tempered but razor sharp, Jimmy Carter-sounding, octogenarian professor emeritus and director, John B. Cobb, Jr. The results of this fascinating meeting have since been published (Cobb, ed. 2008).

At that meeting, Griffin’s talk was sober, academic, competent, scholarly – and entirely new to me: Christian theology in a much broader philosophical context than any to which I had ever been exposed. The science-friendly philosophical outlook Griffin espoused apparently was developed by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the English mathematician-philosopher who became a Harvard professor, or by Cobb. Why would I have known anything about this theological-philosophical work? My own expertise after all is in protoctist and organellar genetics. With close colleagues I reconstruct the origin and evolution of nucleated cells in the Proterozoic Eon. Where I understood DRG’s talk at all, he made clear to me his honesty. Truth, especially scientifically/empirically established truth, seemed intrinsic to his Christianity. As a typical agnostic scientist overtly critical of organized, and even disorganized, religion, I was surprised by the scientific commitment to approaching empirical truth in a religious context rather than the usual authority-pleasing consensus.

Griffin went on to elaborate that, although as a Whiteheadian he embraces the methods and results of science, he is critical of the entire international scientific enterprise as generally practiced today. Not only do scientists extrapolate their intrinsically specialized empirical knowledge into intellectual territory where it does not belong, but they don’t heed Whitehead’s recognition that, after all, scientists –like all people – have an emotional life and an inner spirit. The acclaimed “objectivity of science,” on close scholarly inspection (by, say, Cobb, Griffin and other Whiteheadians), often translates into tribalism, jingoism, naiveté, denial of obvious truths, uncritical service to The State, and other forms of profoundly dangerous ignorance. Scientists, as do all groups of people, share unstated philosophical assumptions. For example, they not only have faith in the consistency and “knowability” of the real world, but they often assume that the concrete particulars of the world are adequately described by the abstractions that have proved useful for limited purposes in their own disciplines – an assumption that Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

On the return trip east from this meeting, I read, non-stop, DRG’s seminal book on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor. Since then I have watched the “aging theologian” (his self-description as quipped in the excellent video-graphed lecture “9/11 and Nationalist Faith” (or was it 9/11: Let’s Get Empirical? Both are highly recommended) metamorphose from a compelling, careful scholar to a brave and extraordinary orator (but still careful scholar). Griffin has become a superb politician with a single agenda item: We must re-open public inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001, especially the collapse of the World Trade Center.

I had personal reasons to be interested in this issue: I had watched a member of our Geosciences Department (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) realize that morning that his beloved brother was on the doomed Boston-to-LA “hijacked plane.” Two of my sons and both of their mates were on Manhattan Island on 9/11. My grandson, Tonio Sagan, the Problemaddicts hiphop lyricist and leader, was released from his Springfield probationary status to me that evening. Like everyone else close to the action, my global consciousness was instantly and permanently altered on that date. But I happily remained an academic evolutionist. So, I ask here, what happened to the “aging theologian” to cause such a radical shift in his personal and professional life: from ivory tower scholar expert in theology and philosophy to detective, orator, and political activist?

I will not try to answer this question, but will simply state: Griffin has become a scientist, in my view, and even more a science educator. He has undertaken the search for the solution to a relatively trivial scientific problem and has found it in the literature and through discussions with experts. Along with solving the scientific problem, however, he has burdened his life with a colossal science-education problem.

In spite of his authorship of eight excellent books on the subject, he is not winning the education skirmish. This is not surprising, because science education battles – I can tell you this from chronic painful experience – are far more intrinsically difficult to win than those of mere science. I illustrate this point with regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The scientific problem:

Why did three World Trade Center buildings (#1,#2 and #7) collapse on 9/11, after two (and only two) of them were hit by “hijacked airplanes”?

The scientific answer:

Because all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition. Ignited by incendiaries (such as thermate) and high explosives (including nanothermite), the steel columns were selectively melted in a brilliantly-timed controlled demolition. Two 110-story buildings (towers 1&2), plus one 47-floor building (WTC 7), were induced to collapse at gravitationally accelerated rates in an operation planned and carried out by insiders. The apparent hijacking of airliners and the crashing of them into the Twin Towers were intrinsic parts of the operation, which together provided a basis for claiming that the buildings were brought down by Muslim terrorists. The buildings’ steel columns, which would have provided irrefutable physical evidence of the use of explosives, were quickly removed from the scene of the crime.

Impeccable logic and addiction to reading inspire this truth-seeker. With his practiced scientific mind (he has organized professional philosophy-of-science conferences and published several books on this theme) coupled with investigation of evidence from not only us scientists but from witnesses, documentary film-makers, scholars, architects and engineers et al., he concludes that the virtuall free-fall collapse of the three (not two) World Trade Center buildings in 2001 was a premeditated, exquisitely executed operation. He recognized this “tragic publicity stunt” (my claim) was likely intended to provide the “new Pearl Harbor” desired by radical neoconservatives, some of whom had become members of the Bush administration (see Ch. 6 of Griffin’s 2006 book, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11).

The far-more-difficult science-education problem:

The persistent problem is how to wake up public awareness, especially in the global scientifically literate public, of the overwhelming evidence that the three buildings collapsed by controlled demolition. (Much has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, see Ch. 4 of The Mysterious Collapse). We, on the basis of hard evidence, must conclude that the petroleum fires related to the aircraft crashes were irrelevant (except perhaps as a cover story).We citizens of Earth within and beyond the boundaries of the United States who demand detailed evidence for extraordinary claims agree with Griffin: the rapid destruction of New York skyscrapers on September 11, 2001 was planned and executed by people inside the US government.

Griffin’s eight books about 9/11 (listed below) are his call to his kind of truly patriotic action. They show in appropriate detail, accurately documented, that the official government conspiracy theory can not be correct journalistically, scientifically, and morally. Muslim airline hijackers, in short, never triggered the collapse of high-rise steel-framed buildings at gravitational acceleration into neat removable pieces. They didn’t remove the remaining steel girders before they could be studied as evidence for a huge crime. They were not described in telephone calls by passengers and crew members from the four airliners –all the evidence for al Qaeda hijackers on the planes dissipates under close inspection (for example, even the FBI now admits that the reported cell phone calls from 25,000 to 40,000 feet never happened).

And to me the most compelling and obviously incorrect accusation is that Muslim hijackers caused the pulverization of cement high-rise office buildings into tons of dust that contain crystalline thermate and other minute metallic particles not found in the usual charred remains of fire rubble. Minute iron-aluminum-molybdenum rich spheres, steel perforated with swiss-cheese type holes and large quantities of unreacted nanothermite are not components of petroleum office fires. Besides the fact that building fire temperatures, even if fed by jet-fuel, could not have risen beyond 1,800°F, and hence they would be nowhere close to the of 2,800°F needed to melt iron (or for molybdenum that melts at 4,753°F). The facile appeal to the presence of gypsum (calcium sulfate) in the office wall-board fails to explain why sulfur was found in the intergranular structure of pieces of steel. (There was no detection of calcium!) The New York Times, in a rare example of honest reporting about the WTC collapses, called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation”).

Nor could “Muslim terrorists” have accessed and then planted in these buildings huge quantities of nanothermite. This recently developed high explosive was developed mainly in secrecy by professional scientists and engineers who enjoy government grant support for “nanotechnology” by the military. Significant quantities of red-gray crystals of nanothermite have been found in several independently collected samples of WTC dust studied by a team headed by physicist Steven Jones, formerly of Brigham Young University. Niels Harrit, a University of Copenhagen professor of chemistry who specializes in nanochemistry, is the first author of a peer-reviewed paper reporting this team’s results.

The two mutually exclusive “9/11-conspiracy theories”, the patently and nefariously absurd tale our government imposes on us and the true, criminal story yet to be entirely brought to light, deserve the attention of all literate people. Remember: Only two airplanes struck, but three buildings collapsed at free-fall velocities on that same day. Begin with Mazza’s review and Griffin’s book that detail the nanothermite scientific studies. Examine the government’s reluctant late admission that WTC 7 came down in absolute free fall for over two seconds to realize this is a scientific impossibility unless all the steel columns were partitioned into neat, removable pieces by explosives. Find out what happened to two men, Hess and Jennings, trapped inside WT7 in its abortive explosion before noon. Truth here, as David Ray Griffin tries to tell it, is (at least to me) stranger and far more dramatic than even the best fiction.

Suggested sources of evidence and explanation:
John B. Cobb, Jr. 2008 Back to Darwin: A richer account of evolution, Erdmann Publishers
Michael Ruppert 2009 Collapse: Peak oil, global politics, depletion of world resources and the end of “civilization” Chelsea Green Publishing Co. White River Junction VT
Lecutre by D.R. Griffin and M. Ruppert on DVDs.
DRG:
1. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004)
2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005)
3. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (2006)
4. 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (2006, co-edited with Peter Dale Scott)
5. Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007)
6. 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (2008)
7. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé (2008).
8. The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (2009)

SOURCE AND NOTES:

This article was "Two hit, three down, the biggest lie," [pdf file] first published in February 2010 issue of the Rock Creek Free Press.

With the revelation that the recently released carbon tax would exclude petrol, there was much protest and disappointment from climate change activists. But once again everyone missed the elephant in the room as far as meeting Australia’s emissions targets – the immigration rate.

With the revelation that the recently released carbon tax would exclude petrol, there was much protest and disappointment from climate change activists. But once again everyone missed the elephant in the room as far as meeting Australia’s emissions targets – the immigration rate. In the recently published online book Sleepwalking to Catastrophe first-time gen Y author Fiona Heinrichs argues in the same vein as Dick Smith’s Population Crisis. There are two sections in Fiona’s book which particularly highlight the elephant in the room: the hypocrisy of liberals in denying population impacts by focusing on consumption and modeling which verifies the ineffectiveness of the carbon tax without immigration reform. The former point is made in the following excerpt from Chapter 2:

environmental groups have had a mixed attitude towards population. Often they have a tendency to regard population growth as not a significant factor affecting environmental degradation, with resource use and consumption being more important. Global social justice issues typically come before local environmental sustainability.[156]

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) was relatively inactive on the immigration and population issue; however, this was within the context that questioning such issues threatened one’s career. As Ian Lowe, president of the ACF and Australia 2020 Summit participant experienced first hand:

[Lowe] explicitly rejects the per capita consumption argument and has stated that reducing per capita consumption won’t solve environmental problems unless we also stabilise population.

Yet even with Lowe the media rarely reports his concern over population. When Mark O’Connor wrote to him in 2006 asking why this was so, he replied, at length, with many examples of how his frequent references to population were ignored or excised by journalists. He also described how he was sacked as a columnist from one paper for insisting on it. He found that the most biased media were the grossly pro-growthist Murdoch papers.[157]

Recently though, the ACF has done good work in filing a formal nomination of population growth as a ‘key threatening process’ to Australia’s biodiversity under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth).[158] Interestingly enough, this action opens up the idea of suing the Federal government for the social and ecological damage done by its mass immigration policy, as has been attempted against governments in this on other jurisdictions in relation to climate change.[159]

Ecosocialists Ian Angus and Simon Butler, after making the standard argument that to be critical of immigration is to be a ‘racist’,[160] then argue that emissions from ‘carbon dirty’ industries in Canada, such as oil extraction from the Alberta Tar Sands are perhaps more worrying sources of greenhouse gas emissions than population growth.[161] Despite this claim, it does not follow that ‘the relationship between population growth and environmental destruction is shaped by how we use our resources, not by the number of people who use them’.[162] Population growth, along with affluence/resource use and technology, determine the environmental impact.[163] As Sara Parkin, former politician for the Green Party of England and Wales notes in the Foreword to the Forum for the Future publication, Growing Pains: Population and Sustainability in the UK:

As advisors to Barack Obama have pointed out, the future for everyone will be dominated by scarcity – of resources, of land, of airspace (for CO2 emissions) … The more people there are the harder that will be. The maths of sustainability is simple – the equation requires fewer people, consuming less – yet we find it difficult to talk about either.[164]

A Joint Statement by Fifty-Eight of the World’s Scientific Academics, Population Summit of the World’s Scientific Academies said:

‘The magnitude of the threat to the ecosystem is linked to human population size and resource use per person.’[165] Also: ‘There are warnings that the earth is finite and that natural systems are being pushed even closer to their limits.’[166]

The Australian Academy of Science, Population 2040: Australia’s Choice agreed and concluded that Australia should aim for a stable population of no more than 23 million by 2040.[167]

Penny Wong, Climate Change Minister in the government of Kevin Rudd and now Finance Minister, was asked: ‘Australia’s population is projected to increase by 65% … by 2050. During the same period, the government is committed to cutting our carbon emissions by 60%. Aren’t those goals or facts mutually exclusive?’

Wong said:

‘Absolutely not…Whereas the last few hundred years…growth in our carbon pollution has essentially tracked our population and economic growth … The key issue here is breaking that link, not trying to reduce population.’[168]

Wong’s style of thinking is replicated in South Australia; the driest state in the driest continent on Earth by fellow South Australian Labor Party politician Premier Mike Rann, who on the one hand tries to be seen as doing something about climate change, while on the other seeks to double South Australia’s population by 2050, with no limit in sight.[169] Professor Emeritus, Albert Bartlett, Physics, University of Colorado at Bounder, has shown the mathematical absurdity of claims such as Wong’s:

The average growth rate needed to increase Australia’s population 65% by the year 2050 is only 1.252 percent per year. The average annual reduction of emissions needed to reduce emissions 60% by 2050 is 2.291 percent per year. Add these two rates (1.252 + 2.291) and you will find that to accommodate the projection population growth AND to reduce overall annual emissions by 60% would require an annual rate of decrease of per capita emissions of polluting greenhouse gases of 3.543 percent per year over the next forty years. The per capita annual emissions would have to be cut in half every 19.6 years! What is the base for Minister Wong’s belief that this enormous reduction can be achieved, year after year for forty years? What progress towards this goal has Australia made during Ms. Wong’s leadership in her present position of Climate Change Minister? Does Minister Wong really believe this can be done? Or is she basing her policy recommendations on Walt Disney’s First Law:

‘Wishing will make it so.’

Let’s look a little farther. The present rate of growth Australia’s population is quoted as being 1.8 percent per year which is significantly higher than the 1.252 percent per year assumed above. If this current higher rate continues, Australia’s population will double by 2050 and would reach a density of one person per square metre over the whole continent in just over 700 years! Surely the Minister will admit that population growth in Australia will stop itself through starvation, pollution, warfare and the lack of resources long before the population density reaches one person per square metre. The critical question for the Minister then is,

‘Should Australia encourage continued population growth or should the people of Australia act to stop the growth before Nature stops it?’

If the Minister feels that Australians should act to stop population growth before Nature stops the growth, then why not stop it now while there are still some resources and some open spaces? It would be very helpful for the people of Australia if Climate Change Minister Wong would give these facts and options some serious consideration and then report the results of her considerations promptly to the people of Australia.[170]

However, with the recent portfolio shuffle following Julia Gillard’s election to government, such revelations now lie with the new Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Minister Greg Combet.[171] As to whether or not Minister Combet will come any closer to answering such pressing questions, only time will tell.

In the following excerpt from Chapter 4, Fiona makes the second notable point that a carbon tax implemented without stabilising population cannot reduce total emissions:

Prime Minister Gillard was told by her own Department, in a confidential briefing given in September 2010 that the quality of life in Australian big cities, measured by declining indexes of livability, is falling and could get worse.[315] A National Institute of Labour Studies report concluded that a high level of net overseas migration would have substantial adverse impacts on the quality of Australia’s natural and built environments.[316] Unless high levels of migration are cut, Sydney and Melbourne will require over 430,000 ha of new housing land and the loss in agricultural land will result in the need for imported key food stuffs, including dairy, lamb and vegetables, by 2050. Even if immigration ceased altogether, Australian capital cities will still grow by around 50 per cent within two decades, with a cost to each resident for congestion of $ 1,000 per year. For the present immigration level, capital cities will grow by 1.5 times within 50 years. At a net overseas migration level of 260,000 per annum, demand for oil will double by 2050 and greenhouse gas emissions from fuel combustion will increase by 200 percent from present levels.[317] Australian Treasury modeling accepts that greenhouse gas emissions grow, other things being equal, when population numbers grow. Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy did a disaggregation of Treasury forecasts to obtain an estimation of the contribution of population to greenhouse gas production and concluded that ‘83 percent of the forecast increase in greenhouse emissions to 2020 will be attributable to population growth’.[318] Further, Jorgenson and Clark examined data from 1960 to 2005 and found a large and positive association between national-level population growth and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions for both developed and developing countries, an association which has been so for at least the past 50 years.[319] So the pivotal question is:

What is the point of introducing an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax or any such policy on already struggling Australian working families, when Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions will continue to surge into the future anyway under the federal government’s unreformed surging immigration rate?

Any reduction in emissions made through a cap or tax would be cancelled out by the subsequent increase in emissions of aggravated population expansion.[320] Targets for reducing emissions cannot be reached without targets for reducing population growth. With population growth expected to contribute to 83 percent of increases in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions to 2020, surely any passionate climate change activist would tackle this environmental problem through immigration reform first? The much publicised battle[321] everyday Australian working families currently face struggling to pay their power bills, reduced quality of life from restricted water and power usage and genuine environmental conservation efforts are made a mockery of when the federal government sabotages these efforts through its unsustainable immigration policy. Mark O’Connor and William Lines make the same observation in Overloading Australia: How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population and subsequently suggest Australians should waste water as:

our analysis shows that until we get restraint in population there is no point in citizens saving water. If they do, this will not mean that their neighbours get more water for their gardens, or that tougher restrictions will be postponed. Rather, it means that politicians will be able to continue their irresponsible dream of putting over a million extra people in each of our three biggest cities over the next 25 years (and proportionately even more into Perth). So long as we have such misguided leaders, any water-restraint shown by the individual citizen will only allow our politicians to persist longer in their folly, and will lead – quite soon – to even worse shortages of water, plus many other environmental disasters.[322]

Certainly, the currently planned carbon tax should at the very least be postponed until after the government implements immigration reform first, and then reassessed on its capacity to reduce emissions.

Certainly indeed. Interestingly, Fiona’s book was published in May, so politicians, journalists, climate change activists and various public figures had plenty of time to digest her ideas before the current carbon tax was released. If only they’d listened to a gen Y female and Dick Smith for that matter.

An unusual thing about Dick Smith's book, "Population Crisis," is that it is written by a wealthy man who points out the failings of rich people. He says that most rich people give nothing away and describes them as very selfish. "Our economic system comes equipped with only one forward gear: foot to the floor growth. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to be richer. It's an endless treadmill, and none of our leaders appears to know how to get off." Also inside article: Win $1m if you are under 30 by solving the population puzzle.

Dick Smith's book, Population Crisis reminds me of the proverb that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," except that here we are talking about the kingdom of Earth.

The fascinating thing is that the camel may just fit through the eye of that needle in Smith's remarkable attempt to save the earth despite his millionaire wealth.

Books like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings are full of rich and powerful noble creatures standing up for truth and justice and the good of the earth in political systems that rely on the kindness and enlightenment of the powerful and their concern for lesser beings, like hobbits. The reality, however, is quite different, particularly in our global capitalist world, where rich people own or invest in corporations which perpetrate global injustices and manipulate public opinion against democracy and against our own nurturing planet.

Nazis and the business lobby - Déjà vu?

Smith looks into the future and sees a looming darkness which no good citizen can ignore, but he recognises that the fight against the vested interests of the growth lobby will not be easy.

"I'm not so idealistic as to believe the necessary changes will come quickly, or that the arguments over climate change will end soon. It seems to me that we are like the generation that existed in the late 1930s in Great Britain. Some predicted that there would be a catastrophe if Hitler was allowed to keep breaking treaties. Others - particularly the business community - said that it was unlikely anything would eventuate and that 'business as usual' was the way to go. That error alone resulted in more than 60 million people being killed. If we make a similar error now, the lives lost and related trauma could be far higher."

A risk taker

Australians with ecological bones and a sense of danger can only hope that Dick Smith's intervention on the subject of population numbers, democracy and ecological impact in Australia will survive the deadening blanket of growthist propaganda, even though Dick Smith himself has predicted that the Murdoch press will destroy him for coming out against population growth in Australia.

His unexpected success with other hard problems caused by powerful forces, offers some hope, however.

Smith's ability to remain an independent thinker and so surprise, straddle and surmount the political wedges created by the mainstream media and the political parties between terrorism, refugee rights and population numbers, makes him stand out in stature above high profile groups and individuals on both sides. It makes his ability and leadership so much more powerful.

When amorphous notions of terrorism and Afghanistan stigmatised David Hicks as untouchable for many, discarding prisoners of war conventions, Dick Smith funded Hicks's civilian defense in Guantánamo Bay - not, Smith precises, because he actually agreed with Hicks's politics, but so that Hicks could get a fair trial.

Smith also became involved in helping to extract hostages in Somalia and with refugee-asylum seeker Peter Qasim. Qasim was detained for nearly seven years by the Australian department of immigration due in part to inconsistencies in his story which others have explained as caused by his dispensing with an interpreter in the mistaken belief that his English was adequate for him to conduct his own defense. The main reason that he was kept imprisoned, rather than deported, was that he was stateless - and therefore had nowhere to go. After Dick Smith's intervention and with pressure from a small group of parliamentarians, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone invited Peter to apply for a new class of bridging visa that would allow him to live in the community while his situation was resolved. On 16 July 2005, the visa was granted.

Now Smith has written a book about population numbers in Australia. Smith makes an effort to get on top of this wide and difficult subject in a readable book that addresses the growing and reasonable concerns of both the poor and the aspirational classes of Australia and asks those who benefit from their growing insecurity to reconsider.

"Our economic system comes equipped with only one forward gear: foot to the floor growth. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to be richer. It's an endless treadmill, and none of our leaders appears to know how to get off."

Smith wants Australians to realise how they cannot rely on the mainstream press to inform them on population politics and gives the example of the Murdoch Press.

He says that he knows politicians are afraid of being attacked by the Murdoch media, but that should not stop them from speaking out against population growth. Despite his own (probably well-founded) belief that the Murdoch media will retaliate and destroy him for criticising growth, Smith actually took out a full page advertisement in the Australian telling Australians of the Murdoch media's investment in population growth.

It is indeed a major irony of Australia's predicament that it has a system that forces all major communications through a biased commercial press which inevitably drowns out any single original initiative with its own ubiquitous and repetitious propaganda.

The Electronics Wizard

Dick Smith also downplays his intelligence and qualifications. On Margaret Throsby's show on the ABC on 21 June 2011, he said that his only formal qualification was the Baden Powell Scout award.

Smith's intelligence is however uncontestably demonstrated by the fact that at age 38 he had the good sense, self-confidence and self-control to sell the business that made him a millionaire so that he could enjoy his life. That's a bit like Golem (continuing the Tolkein metaphor) ditching the magic ring before it saps his strength.

He writes:

"I was a relatively young man when I sold my Dick Smith Electronics business. When I could no longer see all the weekly figures in one quick look, I felt it was growing too large. [...] For me it seemed the right time to sell the business to Woolworths. They have built it into a billion-dollar business, and many people have told me I was crazy to sell such a growing concern, but I haven't regretted it for a moment. It was the best thing I ever did, because it allowed me to have the freedom to do worthwhile things - to go adventuring, fly around the world and enjoy my life. "(p.129)

That's the kind of intelligence that can see through growthism. It seems that it is rare in the rich.

He goes on:

"I have successful friends, some of them billionaires, and they often say to me that they wish they could do what I did and get out before the business takes over their lives. I tell them they can, but they just shake their heads as if to say, 'Dick, you don't understand. There are all these pressures that make it impossible to just walk away.' Like most of us, rich or poor, they are trapped inside the delusion that we must forever keep growing."

Maybe the Baden Powell Scout award deserves to be taken more seriously. Smith described to Margaret Throsby how being a cub, then a scout, then a rover was formative. The scout movement allowed him "to be an individual, to organise himself, and get into risk taking."

Smith's parents went through bad luck and poverty. At one stage, Smith's father took to his bed for 12 months causing his mother to go out and get a job for the very first time in her life, in a hat factory. Somehow Smith has missed out on that common rich man's delusion that he deserves to be rich because he is special. He sees himself as having drawn good results in life's lottery, but he has demonstrably retained a feeling of solidarity with ordinary Australians.

Wilberforce Million Dollar Prize to a young person who can solve the population puzzle

An example of this fellow-feeling is Smith's Wilberforce Award.
The Wilberforce award is designed to give a one million dollar prize to anyone under 30 who can impress Dick by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy.

How the few that benefit financially from growth do it

I can think of one other thing I would have included in the book, had I been Dick Smith. I would have given a detailed account of how, for some very rich people with control over assets, population growth improves the chances of making money. As Smith implies, what makes the rich richer past what he refers to as the "sweet point" tends to make ordinary people poorer. (The "sweet point" is where the cost of growth is less than the gains to be made from it.) I would have liked to have read more detail on how population growth helped Smith make his fortune. It is important to educate Australians on the how and why of this, so that they can see where the corporate growth spruikers are coming from and what they may have to gain from population growth. It would also educate Australians about how difficult having a few people and corporations controlling most of the assets and means of production in this country and elsewhere makes it for everyone else.

A follow-up book?

One senses that Smith tried to keep things simple in this book. Perhaps he could write another book, to follow up, giving some details on how growth economics and population growth work in favour of the rich and against the rest?

Nothing is more vital to the survival of human populations than an abundant flow of cheap energy. Most well-informed persons are vaguely aware that oil and gas supplies are peaking or have now peaked; yet there are still government departments and many news media that would prefer to know and think about this as little as possible.

First published in People and Place magazine Volume 17 No 2 of 2009. See also: Final Energy Crisis blogs, Mark O'Connor's web site, australianpoet.com, review of Mark O'Connor's Overloading Australia.

Survival

Nothing is more vital to the survival of human populations than an abundant (if possible an infinite) flow of cheap energy. This is what we thought we had all through the 20th century, and what we now find we do not. Most well-informed persons are vaguely aware that oil and gas supplies are peaking or have now peaked; yet there are still government departments and many news media (including as yet ABC TV Current Affairs) that would prefer to know and think about this as little as possible. Despite warnings from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Academy of Science, the possibility that a future Australia might lack the fossil energy to transport food to its cities, or to make the nitrate fertilizers and import the heavy rock phosphates without which crops won't grow, has had as yet no effect on Australia's population or immigration policies.

Growth Economics and Australia's population numbers

Growth economists and many who see themselves as experts in fine-tuning immigration policy do not find it easy to accept limits to growth. Yet a piece of stockmarket wisdom runs: 'If something can't go on for ever, sooner or later it won't.' The current population boom, which has Australia's population growing at nearly two per cent a year and, if this growth rate continues, on course to pass 100 million by the end of the century, almost certainly won't.

A World running out of energy

This collection of essays on a world running out of energy first appeared in 2005. It has now been re-edited, and updated. Twenty of the twenty-four chapters are new or substantially re-written. Sheila Newman, the Australian polymath who co-edited the first edition with the international energy economist Andrew MacKillop, is now the sole editor. Indeed much of the book is the Sheila Newman show. She has pulled together an impressive range of technical experts, including Seppo Korpela and Colin Campbell, then expanded the book's range through her wide-ranging introductions to each section. She also contributes nine of the book's 24 chapters, plugging what might otherwise be gaps in the argument.

How the world energy system works

Population and demography are not the main focus of this book, but they are issues waiting in the wings of every chapter. It is taken as read that if there were fewer people our energy options would expand, and vice versa. Yet the main focus is on why the world's energy system currently works the way it does -- and why it can't go on like this much longer.

A chilling future dystopia for Australia

However the chapter, 'France and Australia after Oil', canvasses a chilling future dystopia for Australia. A century or more into the future, if we keep on growing Australia's population while energy runs short, she predicts a much leaner Australian society -- one that its present inhabitants might not recognise. (Note though that Mark Diesendorf's Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy, UNSW Press 2007, argues that renewable energy can, if very carefully managed, sustain the present population.)

Bilingual author pitched to compare different political systems

Bilingual in French and English, Sheila Newman regularly contrasts the economic culture of three pioneering Anglophone countries (Australia, USA, Canada) with the more conservative economic and energy policies of France and much of Europe. By contrast the Anglo cultures, she writes, allowed the drawdown of fossil fuels to be 'multiplied by the needs of a much greater population'.

Different energy sources, different population carrying capacities

The population that can be sustained by oil is vastly larger than the one that coal could have made possible, which in turn dwarfs the less than one billion humans that wood and natural biomass could have powered. How many of the present six to seven billions will be able to survive when the age of cheap oil and gas (and therefore, presumably, of cheap fertilizers) ends? Will Caspian oil, solar power, wind, or nuclear fusion save us?

Many peaks investigated in this book

The book's experts take us through the fascinating problems of peak oil, peak nitrate fertilizer, peak phosphorus, peak soil, geopolitical struggles for oil, China's car explosion, natural gas, coal emissions, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion—and possible alternative (or post-disaster) life-styles. I for one emerged vastly better informed -- and about issues I thought I had more or less known.

The Final Energy Crisis, edited by Sheila Newman, Pluto Press, UK, 2008, ISBN 0-7453-2717-6, A$44.50 in Australia, from Palgrave Macmillan, US$26.66 from Amazon

Author note: Mark O'Connor is a co-editor of Protected Area Management (Oxford University Press, 2001), and co-author of Overloading Australia (Envirobook, 2008)

This review first published in People and Place magazine Volume 17 No 2 of 2009.
See also: Final Energy Crisis blogs, Mark O'Connor's web site, australianpoet.com, review of Mark O'Connor's Overloading Australia.

“Si spegne, signori, si chiude”
("Lights off, gentlemen, we are closing down”)

Recently a well-known professor of Siena University, a hydrology expert and director of FAO development projects in Africa, launched an extraordinary thesis, using instruments of cultural anthropology, in an Italian publication.

In the middle of the renewed interest in demography, with one side decrying the population dearth and the other denouncing the obscene threat of overpopulation, professor Pietro Giuliano Cannata has introduced what amounts to a new world vision, challenging both views.

Liberation from the shackles of determinism is at hand.

For Cannata, the long and anguished process of evolution, dictated by biological necessity, but without a design (telos) has been overtaken by culture, which now governs evolution.

Reading the book is in itself an experience regarding the revelation of the psychological forces that impel our behaviour and preoccupy every human being. Fear of death and attempts to dominate and exorcise it, using a variety of means from civilisation to civilisation, define those civilisations in major leit-motifs.

I use the editor’s comment to convey the main thesis:

“Suddenly one day, it became clear that the human species was taking control of its own destiny, because humans started to “choose”, in a confused and intermittent way, between life’s accidentally encountered bifurcations, in the long story of biological blind evolution.

Among these choices one triumphed over others: the decrease of births and the consequences of this, plus a significant new element: the refusal to procreate.

What were the reasons for this reluctance? Apart from the usual causes of economic difficulties, lack of social services, demand for political and professional participation by women, and aspirations for a continuously higher quality of life, another reason appeared. This one is a guiding anthropological, psychological and cultural factor, the unconscious determination to shirk the call for procreation, to refuse to transmit life.

After winning the competition for nourishment and space, after madly multiplying and achieving extraordinary levels of well being, consuming to satiety almost all the world, the human species refuses to grow anymore. Humans are getting ready for the final decline, in a disciplined way.”

The author wants to show an ontological transformation of evolution, no more driven by blind necessity and condemned to repeat the past. Life then, as glimpsed through the testament of some great philosophers and poets, is an insensate flight towards Nothing. The question about our final destination has no answer since the faith in a divine origin and destiny has dwindled.

The old fertility paradigm

The old paradigm imposed the fertility imperative on women. The female of the species will however soon everywhere be liberated by contraception and the possession of her body. History points to a rather different view of the maternal instinct: "Against the terror of repeated pregnancies, reality shows abortion and infanticide to be common practices. The casual smothering of the new born (which resulted in the canonical law of the suspended cradle), exposure to freezing weather, the fable of the children lost in the woods…”

Did men invent the maternal instinct?

Was the notion of maternal instinct invented by men, to better subjugate women and insure their cooperation in the propagation of their genes?

These and other strange questions run through the book, supplied and documented with vast philosophical, environmental and anthropological knowledge. The mind boggles and is taken over by a sense of despair, an outcome which I am sure the author did not intend. On the contrary, he seems to present the vision of a future without humans as the best solution to this absurd eternal flight towards death, the only sure thing in the uncertainty of life.

To be born - "Ed è rischio di morte il nascimento" - ("To be born is to risk death" - G.Leopardi) is the same as being mortal. Mortality is a state of being so intolerable that every century, every culture has invented a way to exorcise and justify it. The thirst for meaning cannot be satisfied: the enlightenment has eliminated all dogmas and the crumbling edifice of faith brings with it isolation and alienation.

Challenging paradigm of dominant males' reproductive success

Among the numerous themes to be dissected is the presumption that dominant males dominate natural selection in reproduction, denying the weak the chance to reproduce themselves.

“But the examination of DNA explodes this theory, showing more exceptions than confirmations of the dominant male theory, revealing six different fathers for each of the six kittens born to one female cat. Every male cat had a chance. Selection is therefore dictated by chaos.”

"It is clear that the health of the planet is a human task. It depends on humanity. Humanity is freeing itself from the unbearable weight of the world. This liberation will be the end of the future and maybe the end of history, because our descendant’s won't continue to get on and off the merry-go-round. Inexorably, the merry-go-round will slowly empty itself and finally stop. Nobody will get on anymore."

"Lights off, gentlemen, we are closing down."

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. ... unaffordable housing drives young families into debt slavery (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires)... strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services... traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives...hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve... water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms... pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment; greenhouse gases ...and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.
Click here to purchase book
"Review by Katharine Betts of Mark O’Connor's and WilliamJ. Lines's book,Overloading Australia,"
People and Place, vol. 17, no. 1, page 76.

Australia’s population is growing rapidly. In March 2009 it stood at 21.6 million. The current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, takes it for granted that it will grow to 35 million by 2051.[1] In 1999 when Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration he told Australians that there was no need for a population policy because we were unlikely to grow much beyond 23 million. He added that the ‘nation cannot afford to return to [an immigration] program characterised by big numbers and little thought’. [2] Nonetheless the current growth surge, keenly embraced by the new Labor Government, began quietly under the Coalition soon after Ruddock’s 1999 statement.[3]

Much of Australia’s growth is directly due to immigration (nearly 60 per cent in 2007–08) and much of the growth from natural increase is attributable to the Australia-born children of immigrants. For example, in 2007, 25 per cent of all births were to overseas-born mothers.

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. There is the unaffordable housing that drives young families into debt slavery [4] (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires).[5] There is strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services, and to traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives. [6] There are hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve;[7] water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms;[8] pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment;[9] greenhouse gases that refuse to abate;[0 ]and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.

But while stories of water shortages and degraded infrastructure abound, few of the public figures who comment on them acknowledge the role of population growth in creating these problems and making them harder to overcome. Here Mark O’Connor and William Lines have done us an important service; they have joined the dots between these social and environmental ills and our rapid growth.

From the picture they create a reader could, at first, believe that Australia’s pattern of growth was promising. It is mainly due to government immigration policy, so shouldn’t it be relatively easy to rein it in? Besides immigration is not popular; support for the post-2000 increase is minimal among both the Australia-born and migrants themselves.[11] But as O’Connor and Lines make clear, immigration in fact makes it harder to halt growth because the businesses that profit from it lobby for it, and property developers with deep pockets appear to have bought the favour of some of the politicians who create it.[12]
High migration means more customers, cheaper labour, and minimal training costs. All of these boons intensify pressures from self-interested groups to keep the numbers coming. As O’Connor and Lines put it: ‘It is no surprise that the housing industry lobbies not for the size of housing industry that Australia’s population needs but for the size of Australia’s population that the industry needs’.[13] The concentrated benefits enjoyed by special interests (on the right of the political spectrum) trump the unorganised interests of the majority who bear the costs.

At the same time many opinion makers on the left are quick to decry criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as scapegoating immigrants, even as racism.[14] As if this were not enough, business interests fund academic research into demography and immigration, naturally channeling their money towards those likely to produce results friendly to growth. This is a chilling circumstance at a time when universities are starved of money and academics are under crushing pressure to bring in research grants.[15] Other sources of research funds include state and federal government departments, most of which are committed to the growth targets set by politicians.[16] Researchers who might otherwise point to the costs of growth are unlikely to win such grants; they also risk the disapproval of their left-liberal peers.

The authors point out that the left’s fixation on seeing criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as racism is ‘a good cloak for elitism … the people must not be given power because their views are barbaric’.[17] Thus even though high migration is unpopular, a pro-growth right and a left that is anti-anti-growth mean that voters are unorganised and voiceless.
The authors marvel at the way in which the motives of the occasional reformer who questions growth are earnestly probed while no one examines the growth lobby as it enjoys the handsome profits brought to them by each plane load of new consumers. O’Connor and Lines assert that left-wing xenophobia hunters are not interested in old fashioned rent seekers despoiling the community for their own advantage; they prefer to enjoy the comforts of their moral superiority.[18]

Why must O’Connor and Lines be the ones to point to the damage done to Australia by this blend of greed and snobbery? Why have the media failed to show it to us? Here the authors have a telling vignette about Ian Lowe, a distinguished scientist who takes population seriously. He is also president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a frequent media commentator. O’Connor asked him why he so seldom spoke out about population. Lowe replied that he often did but that when he did he was ignored. He also told O’Connor ‘how he was sacked as a columnist from one paper for insisting on it. He [Lowe] found that the most biased media were the grossly pro-growthist Murdoch papers’.[19]

Media silence on the question is not always an accidental byproduct of pleasing pro-growth advertisers while deferring to the sensibilities of the intelligentsia. It can be deliberate.[20] O’Connor and Lines argue that just as other vendors to the domestic market have a product to sell, so too do the commercial media; it is always easier to sell to a growing market rather than to compete for market share, or indeed to export. The commercial media have their own vested interests in growth. While the ABC should be immune from these interests, it is more likely to be infected with the racism virus, the infection that makes its host see any scepticism about growth as racism in disguise.[21] Nonetheless, perhaps because it does not profit from growth, the ABC has proved more receptive to Overloading Australia than have other media outlets.

Both authors are accomplished writers and the book is brief and clear; so far it has achieved a fair degree of media coverage. It was launched in February 2009 by Bob Carr, former premier of New South Wales, and a rarity among Australian premiers in that he is a critic of growth. At the launch Carr said: ‘There is a hardly any significant process at State or Federal level today that is allowed to proceed without an environmental impact statement ­ except the pushing up of population’.
O’Connor’s account of the launch goes on to report how Carr ‘spoke of his frustration, when he was Premier, at having a vastly increased Sydney population forced upon him by decisions made in Canberra. … He was then in the invidious situation of having to destroy amenities and allow developers to invade protected areas. As he put it, people don’t want Sydney to be crowded and built up, but they also don’t want it to expand into places like Kuringai Chase and Botany Bay; yet one of those two things has to happen if a million extra people are put into Sydney’.[22]

Some of the media reports have been neutral [23] or even favourable. For example O’Connor was invited to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald,[24] and the Adelaide Advertiser.[25] He was also interviewed on the ABC Radio National station on Counterpoint,[26] Breakfast [27] and Late Night Live.[28] But press coverage has been more ambivalent and its tenor bears out the authors’ analysis.

A former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, said that ‘the extent to which population influenced environmental policy depended on how selfish Australians wanted to be’ and that ‘some people citing environmental reasons for reduced migration were simply opposed to immigration’.[29] Charles Berger, in a generally sympathetic piece in The Canberra Times, wrote that: ‘Overloading Australia … has sparked another round of debate about Australia’s population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. …’[30] He did, however, go on to exonerate O’Connor and Lines.

Brigid Delaney in the Melbourne Age was not so generous. She wrote that to rein in growth was to risk ‘the development of our inner lives’ because immigrants energise their adopted countries. But there was worse:

Environmental issues can be a handy Trojan horse with which to wheel in policies and debates about immigration that we are too squeamish to discuss baldly. After all, no one wants a rerun of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 that led to race riots across England, nor Pauline Hanson’s polarising comments on immigration that brought Australia to the brink of a spiritual crisis.[31]

But O’Connor and Lines do not advocate an end to immigration, just a balanced intake which would still leave room for refugees.[32] This is a humanitarian position; they write that deliberately ‘pushing up our own population … cannot be justified on environmental grounds. It could only be justified on international humanitarian grounds if we could believe that it would leave us, somehow, very much more able and more willing to help our neighbours’.[33] They also point to the immorality of Australia continuing to pirate doctors and other health workers from poor countries to compensate for our own reluctance to invest in local training.[34] Xenophobia hunters, however, are more interested in displaying their self-righteousness than in understanding and debating an opposing point of view.

How can serious advocates of a moral and sustainable position on population growth cut through in such a climate? One way is to write the kind book that O’Connor and Lines have written, well researched, cogent and readable. Another is put forward a shocking policy proposal.

This concerns both sacrifice and exploitation. We can see its outlines in debate about the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. This will cap Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions through the sale of permits to industry, but it will also set a floor under which emissions are unlikely to fall. As community awareness of this has spread many householders are dismayed; their individual sacrifices to lower emissions are not only going to count for nothing, they will actively help polluters to pollute. Private spending on solar panels, solar hot water, and on low-emission cars will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases; it will just enable dirty industries to emit more. But the same can be said of many sacrifices that individual Australians make for the environment; they are all nullified by the extra people brought in to pander to the growth lobby.

Here O’Connor and Lines put forward their suggestion. Instead of washing up only once a day and letting the garden die, we should all waste water. Saving water just makes it easier for growthists to increase the population. (They do say that would never suggest that we waste a non-renewable resource.)[35] But why struggle to cut your shower to less than two minutes when the Government is bringing in more than 200,000 extra people a year?

The answer? Take a deep bath and bring the crisis to a head. And while you are enjoying your bath you could read this excellent book.

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines, Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobook, Sydney, December 2008, ISBN 9780858812246, A$19.95

Available online from , and .

References
1 See Rudd quoted in M. Franklin, ‘Rudd warns Australia must prepare for emerging arms race across Asia­PM flags major naval build-up’, The Australian, September 10 2008, pp. 1, 6
2 P. Ruddock, ‘The Coalition Government’s position on immigration and population policy’, People and Place, vol. 7, no. 4, 1999, pp. 6–12
3 See P. Kelly, ‘Restocking the nation’, The Weekend Australian, 3 August 2002, p. 28.
4 J. Hewett, ‘Under mortgage pressure’, The Australian, 20 October 2007, p. 21; B. Day, ‘How to plan for a fiasco’, The Australian, 22 April 2008, p. 14
5 Editorial, ‘A tragic week in Australian history’, The Australian, 14 February 2009, p. 16
6 AAP, ‘Heatwave claims lives’, The Age, 1 February 2009; AAP, ‘Qld: Labor plan to cut southeast traffic conges­tion’, Australian Associated Press General News, 26 February 2009; J. Gordon and R. Sexton, ‘National road chaos looms’, The Age, 8 March 2009, p. 1; C. Lucas, ‘Connex hit with commuter squeeze’, The Age, 5 March 2009, p. 10
7 R. Wallace, ‘Hospitals fail to meet most targets’, The Australian, 3 October 2008, p. 7
8 G. Roberts and P. Murphy, ‘Recycled sewage “will have bugs”’, The Australian, 29 October 2008, p. 9; B. Doherty, ‘Water plan may not go far enough’, The Age, 23 October 2008, p. 1
9 M. Clayfield, ‘There’s a hole in our suburb, dear Labor, oh dear’, The Australian, 7 March 2009, p. 5
10 G. Readfearn, ‘Pollution skyrockets ­ Coal and gas for electricity blamed’, The Courier-Mail, 12 January 2009, p. 11; T. Arup, ‘Emissions heat up in economic meltdown’, The Age, 14 March 2009, p. 4
11 See M. O’Connor and W. J. Lines, Overloading Australia, Envirobook, Sydney, 2008, p. 107.
12 Others may not need persuading. See ibid., pp. 4, 8–9, 26, 88ff, 98, 106, 145, 162.
13 ibid., pp. 125–6
14 ibid., pp. 141ff, 160, 164, 167, 172–3
15 For the role of the Scanlon Foundation with its mission to create ‘a larger cohesive Australian society’, see ibid., p. 82 and p. 205 n. 199. The Foundation believes that the future prosperity of Australia is ‘underpinned by continued population growth’. See accessed 9/3/09.
16 For example academics critical of the high growth trajectory of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne 2030 strategy, and who are likely to apply to it for research contracts, are well advised to keep their criticism to them­selves. A public servant conveyed this warning, as a friendly gesture, to a group that I was a member of in late 2003.
17 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 144
18 See ibid., p. 145. 19 ibid., p. 171
20 ibid., pp. 38, 133–34
21 O’Connor and Lines devote a chapter to the pro-immigration bias of the ABC. See ibid., pp. 158–164 and p. 141ff.
22 Email from Mark O’Connor to [email protected] 10 February 2009
23 See P. Ker, ‘Population Australia’s “big threat”’, The Age, 24 January 2009, p. 3; P. Ker and A. Morton, ‘Popula­tion debate booms’, The Age, 30 January 2009, p. 2.
24 M. O’Connor, ‘Many in denial over rising population’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2008, p. 27
25 M. O’Connor, ‘Australia’s bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our worst problems’, The Advertiser, 3 March 2009, p. 18
26 Monday 1 December 2008, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
27 Wednesday 28 January 2009, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
28 Tuesday 5 March 2009, audio available at accessed 9/3/09
29 Quoted in Ker and Morton, 2009, op. cit.
30 C. Berger, ‘Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration’, Canberra Times, 13 February 2009, p. 15
31 B. Delaney, ‘Murky agenda behind this green debate’, The Age, 27 January 2009, p. 11
32 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 72ff
33 ibid., p. 57
34 See ibid., pp. 69, 110.
35 ibid., pp. 182–184

Book Review

A. Peter Klimley, The Secret life of Sharks, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003.

“There was a massive procession of whales and fish passing by us and moving in the direction of Seamount Espiritu Santo. The first in this animal parade were twenty or so pilot whales. Then came a crescent-shaped formation of dolphin-fish. Then followed a large school of tuna. Were we privileged to be witnessing the slow migration of this whole assemblage toward its next destination, Espiritu Santo? Could this massive assemblage of whales and fishes be using the magnetic lineation on the seafloor below to guide its procession?” Peter Klimley, The Secret Life of Sharks, p.125.

Ichthyologist (fish scientist) Peter Klimley has an ethologist’s eye for communities in the sea. His book describes his own research into shark behaviour, particularly into schooling habits, communication, and navigation methods of particular species. The navigation methods are mind-spinningly different from our own. Klimley concentrates on the navigation skills of schools of hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of Mexico (more below). This focus also leads him to observe ecological communities on the move along the same lines, in the extraordinary procession of whales and fish described above, moving between geological saliences where plant species and therefore fish, aggregate.

Repairing the damage from Benchley's Jaws

When I was about 9 years old, my favorite book - long lost - was by Jeannie Lewis, My life as an ichthyologist. This was a rollicking tale of a woman's adventurous career amid the brightly coloured waters of the South Seas. It was illustrated with perky drawings of kinky little animals, like trigger-fish. It also described strange legends of frogs and stones falling from the sky into thatched huts, and revealed some secret women's business.

I wanted to be an ichthyologist because of it, but unfortunately I read Peter Benchley's Jaws Doubleday & Company, NY, 1974, which almost ruined my enjoyment of swimming in the sea. I now see it as a book about developers taking over a town and corrupting its government, but the scene where a huge serrated man-trap silently surges up beneath the slightly drunk swimmer, has imprinted my mind indelibly.

To cope with this after-image of human swimmers as shark cocktails, I have tried to learn more about sharks.

Seeing fish as individuals

What made me buy Peter Klimley's scientifically rich Secret Life of Sharks, as I riffled through its pages in a Brisbane store that markets remaindered books, was noticing how the author made a personal connection with one of the sharks he studied. He had taken Huey, a foot-long baby grey nurse, from the 'Shark Channel' in the Miami Seaquarium, because he felt sorry for him, knowing his certain fate was to be eaten by other sharks in the Channel. The author also has a strong aesthetic sense of nature.

"One day, I couldn't restrain myself from scooping one up in a dip net to keep in an aquarium above my desk at the marine laboratory. The baby shark that I held in my hands was very attractive. It was brown with alternating dark and light bands, each of which merged into the other with a gradual shift in the hue of its color. Speckling his body were small green iridescent spots. Both the bands and spots would gradually disappear as he grew up. Protruding from the forward edge of his nostrils were long barbels. These gave the foot-long nurse shark, whom I named Huey, a comical touch.

Klimley takes the reader on amazing journeys

Klimley is able to take the reader to some amazing places and share with us some unique experiences, such as feeling as if we are also looking up at the sun-silhouetted bodies of sharks above us in the gulf of Mexico. Another strength of this book lies in the author’s skill in relating clearly, but in an interesting and useful way, the details of his experimental work measuring, testing and describing the behaviour of the creatures he swims amongst. We are introduced to a variety of scientific fields and their application in real life. We also get a good picture of the behaviour of the teams of human observers and neighboring fishermen, of the techniques, skills and the risks required to do unusual tasks in unusual environments.

Routine feats of endurance

Feats of endurance were routinely required in much of this marine field-work. These are interesting for the scope they reveal in human performance, especially that of young men, for instance doing repeated free dives to around 100 feet below in order to tag hammerheads. On one occasion, in another situation, the author notices a colleague becoming disoriented and clumsy from fatigue, whilst swimming against a current in choppy waters, and he comments on how unconscious competition between himself and the other swimmer probably contributed to this.

Shark attacks described in accumulated detail

Klimley describes a shark attack on a collegue in the same way he describes shark attacks on seals and other prey. The account is humbling because it is totally unjudgemental, unanthropocentric. (The diver survived.) This doesn’t mean that the author has no feelings for his colleages, for he reveals a strong and appropriate concern in many situations. The difference is that this account falls into a range of accounts from scientific observation of many many feeding behaviours over a period of time off the coast of a remote island where Great White sharks made their living. We are also grateful to learn what turns sharks on and what doesn’t, and the posture they display when they feel challenged.

Klimley outlines his hypotheses and then instructively describes the problems he encounters looking for ways to test these. Any student would benefit from these descriptions. The author shows versatility and breadth in his scientific knowledge, particularly of earth physics.

Stunning findings on undersea animal navigation

Perhaps the most stunning research he describes are his findings on the use of magnetic lineation on the sea-floor to navigate. In this he demonstrates a huge new dimension to life. He shows that some sharks and other sea-creatures have senses which we humans, and most terrestrial animals simply don't suspect exist. He verifies this sensory world through painstakingly devised techniques to measure, repeat, record and locate patterns of behaviour in individuals in hammerhead schools near the Espiritu Santu Seamount in the south western coast of Mexico. He repeats his measurements at night.

"[Salmon] were certainly skilled navigators, but the scalloped hammerheads might be even better: they made nightly migrations far out into the featureless ocean and were able to find the seamount every morning. (…) There was simply no light to guide the shark … Yet she was swimming away from the seamount in a perfectly straight line."

Klimley describes the different forms of magnetization: "The total magnetic field measured at the earth’s surface is the sum of two magnetic sources, the earth’s inner core and its outer crust. Circulation of electrically conductive molten metals in the earth’s core creates the [very strong dipolar magnetic fields of the (…) north and south poles. (…)"

The author explains that magnetic minerals (oxides of iron and titanium) produce smaller dipolar magnetic patterns on the earth, including undersea. Because of the volcanic origin of underwater mountains you often get such dipolar patterns in different locations on the same sea-mount because the north-south poles reversed their polarity between one eruption and the next. This means that the magnetic particles in those eruptions remain aligned according to the prevailing polarity of the north-south poles at the time of eruption.

30 years of diving with sharks tells us another story about ourselves.

People should not be surprised to hear that, as this story of one man's study of sharks is told, over a period of about 30 years, between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 21st century, the numbers of sharks decline markedly.

Sharks are threatened by human predation because it takes them a long time to mature reproductively and they are often taken by fishing well before they reproduce.

Handy tips to avoid the sharp end of sharks

There are many handy tips for those of us concerned to avoid being on a shark's menu.

Here are some humorous ones I have synthesised from Klimley's more sober observations:

Keep your fat to muscle ratio low: To generalize over shark-species, they seem to prefer prey with high fat-content, and will frequently spit humans out because their fat-content compares poorly with preferred prey, such as seals.

Perfect your killer-whale vocalisations: Several shark species have been shown to react with extreme fear to the sound of an orca’s vocalizations.

Wear black and white swimsuits: In some of his early interactions with sharks, Dr Klimley adapted his wetsuit and wore a fin to make himself look like a killer whale (orca) and some species of sharks in certain circumstances made themselves scarce when they saw him. Perhaps this idea might inspire some swimsuit and wet-suit fashion designers.

A. Peter Klimley is an associate professor at the University of Davis, California https://wfcb.ucdavis.edu/www/faculty/Pete
[24reads-to-edit smn]

The final version of Jaws dwarfs all the others. This new monster is eating towns up alive. This is not just a battle to the death; this is WAR! In the novel, Jaws, the monster was not really a white pointer shark, it was the property development lobby, which metastasized with the colonisation of a modest fishing town by rich people from other places. Developers drew power from the wealthy tourists and sea-changers. They took over the original fishing town for their own purposes and democracy seemed fatally wounded. Right to the point of the shark (the developers) trying to eat the boat (symbol of the fishing industry which had begun the town). Until an odd bunch of people had the guts to stand up to the big developers.

How many people stopped swimming in the sea after reading the Peter Benchley blockbuster of the 1970s, Jaws? Well you can stop looking down now, because there is a much worse enemy and it has two legs.

In the novel, Jaws, the monster was not really a white pointer shark, it was the property development lobby, which metastasized with the colonisation of a modest fishing town by rich people from other places.

Developers drew power from the wealthy tourists and sea-changers. They took over the original fishing town and the mayor listened to them more than he did to the citizens. The local police became confused about their powers because of this. People were encouraged to risk their lives for the sake of 'economic growth'. They shut up in case they sounded stupid.

Sound familiar?

Because the mayor's ear was tuned to the tourism and development business it was tuned out to local democracy.

Local government and democracy looked as if it was fatally wounded. Right to the point of the shark (the developers) trying to eat the boat (symbol of the fishing industry which had begun the town). Until an odd bunch of people had the guts to stand up to the big developers. But were those people really so odd or was the rest of the town in a trance?

Hard to imagine anything worse than that shark, isn't it? But, since 1975 the problem has got so much bigger. The monstrous cold black-eyed machine of 'economic development'; sub-prime species, which only exists to patrol the world in search of food for its disgusting and insatiable appetite is now so big that it is engulfing the world. Destroying whole forests. Digesting democracies in a single livid gulp.

Are you ready to stand up to the developers?

You will need to understand ecology, be able to think against the tide, and get your ideas somewhere else besides television and the Murdoch and similar newspapers, because all these media-sources are major real-estate marketers and barrack for population growth.

In an article published on Freedom Arizona, bankruptcy is reportedly racing through the US, threatening governments at all levels.

46 Of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy In 2009-2010

"There is a high chance a majority of the States within the United States of America could file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. There are currently 46 states with high budget deficits, Arizona being one of them."

"The ... State of Arizona has 90 to 120 days before they completely run out of money. After that, all bills and tax refunds owed to the citizens will go unpaid. ... With neighboring California on the verge of bankruptcy this year, many States will follow in their steps.

"Many States are already scurrying to cut unwanted costs, cut State-funded programs, raise taxes, not issue tax refunds to their citizens, and borrow money just to survive in 2009.

[...]Many banks — the same banks the Fed bailed out — are refusing to loan money to the States and their Treasury agencies.

At the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website you can see that 46 of the 50 States are clearly in the financial red.

Freedom Arizona comments, "It’s very possible you’ll see the end of the United States as we know it. If the Fed doesn’t bailout the States when their cash dries up and the banks don’t loan them money, then our States will be left in financial ruin. This would be a tragic and unprecedented event never experienced in the United States. No State has ever filed bankruptcy, but it could be coming to a State near you this year."

"We are on the brink of something far worse than the Great Depression," the article concludes.

Canada, Australia and Britain are in the same ... um... boat

Unfortunately Canada, Australia and Britain have all fallen prey to similar population-growth-and-land-speculation systems. Spain has also managed to become the premier basket case in Europe due to its having abandoned its economy to the construction industry and now has 20% unemployment.

Land sharks belong in prison

We have to get rid of the property development lobby which is running our country and ruining our ability to democratically restrain such excesses. We have to find some real ecological heros. We won't find them in the traditional places. They won't be ordinary people. They won't be well-known. They will come from the outside.

We have to find or make laws to stop our governments from engineering population growth against our welfare and from serving our countries and citizenship up to the developers and bankers. Work that is necessary can be shared. Wealth can be shared. Sharks are just fine in the sea, but property developers and their hangers-on belong in zoos, museums and prisons.

This book paints a picture of the ecological mechanics of this continent, using clear, concise prose. It is a painlessly educative book. The bold claim of its subtitle, "How Australia's landscape can be saved," stands up to scrutiny.

Take a new look at thistles, dock plants and other hardy weeds. Enjoy trialling the author's theories in your neglected front garden or replot your broadacre farm. Re-examine the cause of total re-nativisation in the light of galloping desertification. Peter maintains that his simple hydrological theory holds true for the entire continent. He re-interprets the history of this land; he may well be right.

It is a pleasure to read an inspired ecological work by an Australian farmer for Australian farmers. This book is full of practical experience and experiment. The author tells a tale of several farms in his life, of discussions with other farmers and with scientists. He has acted in his life with confidence and conviction, in accordance with his observations. He has learned and remembered lessons, which he knows to be important and hopes to teach the reader. He has lived his research.

If you break down what he says, he is a systems thinker and he has a systemic theory and methodology, which means that his arguments are logical and testable.

Australian deserts are man-made

I found the chapter, "Australia's deserts are man-made" very satisfying because it linked the removal of trees to the drying of climate. God knows why this isn't being shouted from the rooftops everywhere. (Well, perhaps because you cannot package it and sell it as toilet paper or recycle it as plastic.) Andrews doesn't say this, but I will; we should not wait for climate change policy and practice to be agreed at the global, national or even state level. We can start locally - by paying attention to the landscape and protecting the trees and other plants it already has, and adding many more. Trees lower temperature and increase humidity locally, below and above ground; they are not just carbon sinks.

Peter argues clearly that aboriginal use of fire massively transformed Australia's landscape by changing and reducing the vegetation varieties. The effect of this was drying. On top of this, the effect of 220 years of mechanised agriculture, with industrial fertilisers (like feeding soil vitamin pills and no food, as Alice Friedman writes(1)) and half-baked economic propaganda has brought us right to the brink of ruin.

Landscape Fractals

Without mentioning Gaia - or fractals for that matter - Andrews conveys the idea of Australia as a huge organism with fractal systems which can be managed from micro to macro, using the hydrological properties of trees and other plants, like reeds, and identifying topographical forms peculiar to the Australian landscape. The swale and contour system writ large. But he says it like this, "Unless we all come to understand how the Australian landscape functions and then conduct our agriculture in harmony with it this country is dead. It will collapse, no question."

He describes familiar landscape elements like deeply eroded streams and shows that they are produced by damage to live systems, causing water to flow faster and more forcefully than it otherwise would. The immediate solution is weeds, reeds and trees.[video] The finer choices of trees can be worked out later in cases of emergency.

Reviewer's aside

(Andrews' familiarity with the concepts of erosion, salt and fresh water tables, and transpiration comes as a relief. I could contrast this with three days I once spent at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), trying to defend an ancient coastal creek against more development of its catchment. The question of run-off was crucial. Engineers claimed that they could reduce run-off by putting in mechanical devices - basically holes - to retard the flow of water into the creek after rain. Quite apart from the question of biodiverse habitat, this incredibly dumb and clunky non-solution failed to replace the hydrology that trees provide - in their ability to stabilise the water table, through osmosis and transpiration. It completely ignored the heat and moisture exchanges involved in transpiration above the canopies. It was blind to the remarkable ability of trees to vary the amount of water they pump from the ground and transpire through their leaves according to the weather and the moisture in the ground. After a while I realised that the sitting member and the barristers had absolutely no idea of what transpiration was. What was more they did not intend to find out. That was the point where I gave up on Australia's medieval legal system and just another thing that made me an activist. This kind of self-defeating institution that maintains a fatal system is what Australia is up against.)

Why underground water?

The author retells the story of the importance of Australia's underground water, as part of his theory of Australia as a living continent. Why is so much of our water stored underground? Because of the huge risk of evaporation above the ground. With this principle in mind, he has a whole chapter about farm dams - should we damn them or not? Dig them much deeper and shade them, he suggests, and build them along landscape contours and so that the water can overflow usefully. Make your own little flood-plain. There is much more; simple, practical and effective, in line with his hydrological theories.

At the end of the book Andrews congratulates the reader for coming so far, but I found this a direct and refreshing book. Not a hard read. True, some complex bits, which one can always return to. Secondary school children could and probably should read this book.

Fixing the Murray-Darling

Andrews writes, perhaps tongue in cheek, of "well-intentioned people [who] have come up with proposals for constructing a pipe or canal to transport excess water from the tropics in the north to water deprived areas in the south..." Then he says, "(...) yet the objective - bringing excess water to where it's needed - is certainly a sensible one. What's more, we don't need a pipe or a canal. We already have a conduit capable of moving huge volumes of water from one side of the continent to the other at virtually no cost to anyone. It's called the Darling River."

Peter's recipe for fixing the Murray could be undertaken by the people who live and farm there, together. Once again it isn't top down; but bottom up. It requires careful observation of the natural topography and the lie of clay and sandy soil.

It requires vegetation - trees and reeds. Livestock would have to be managed so that they did not destroy the reeds. Peter Andrews reluctantly suggests that the major part of the early work of fixing the river system could no longer be done by native trees. It could be done by willows - the latest in a series of trees which governments have been ripping out. Remember, our land is dying - any plant is better than man-made desert. If the flood plains were restored, the natives might grow back again; at the moment they are all dying. (For more on natives following willows see Peter Andrews video)

Andrews patiently deals with the issue of trees and reservoirs... Governments have been taking trees away from water-reservoirs in the belief that they use up water. This is totally half-baked, since it completely ignores the greater fact that trees shade water stores above and below ground, preventing evaporation.

As Peter Andrews says, talking elsewhere, about irrigation, "In other words, you want a system where there is transpiration, not evaporation."

Human, not corporate

But he isn't talking about millions of kilometers of expensive pvc pipes and engineering works. That is the only reason, I am sure, that his ideas have not been taken up by government and agribusiness and promoted. The engineering and construction and corporate lobbies want a totally prosthetic environment, paid for by the rest of us, to their great profit. They seem to be trying to turn Australia into a huge concrete drain punctuated by retardant basins. (Consider the North-South pipeline currently being pushed down our throats by the Victorian government, or the costly pipelines they have cruelly inflicted on the Wimera-Mallee farming communities.)

Andrews doesn't say we must relocalise government and economy and get rid of centralised bureaucracies and big-engineering; he doesn't say that we should start using our eyes and ears and stop listening to people who are paid to tell us what their masters want us to believe, but that is the message I get out of this book.

Apparently Peter Andrew's story, when first told as television, was the most popular in the history of the ABC program, Australian Story. Obviously a lot of people care about this message getting out. Andrews has created something very valuable and true, which can unite us, city and country.

Here is Peter Andrew's site, Natural Sequence Farming at http://www.nsfarming.com/principles.html

(1)Alice Friedemann, "Peak Soil" in Sheila Newman, The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Books, UK, 2008

The The Final Energy Crisis (2nd edition), Pluto Press, UK, 2008 is a book like no other on the topic of energy and peak oil of which I am aware.

It went well beyond the usual formulaic basics and it satisfied my appetite for stimulation rather than repetition and reinforcement. It is designed to be read in parts and in no particular order. However, nearly all of the articles are a subject in their own right, to be absorbed and considered slowly. The sections and chapters are:

1. Introduction by Sheila Newman

Part I: Measuring Our Predicament

2. 101 Views from Hubbert's Peak by Sheila Newman
3. Prediction of World Peak Oil Production by Seppo Korpela
4. The Assessment and Importance of Oil Depletion by Colin Campbell
5. Coal Resources of the World by Seppo Korpela

Part II: Geopolitics

6. The Caspian Chimera by Colin Campbell
7. Update to the Caspian Chimera by Sheila Newman
8. The Battle of the Titans by Mark Jones
9. Dark Continent, Black Gold by Andrew McKillop
10. The Chinese Car Bomb by Andrew McKillop
11. Venezuela, Chavez and Latin american Oil on the World Stage by Sheila Newman

Part III: The Big Picture - False Solutions, Hopes and Fears

12. No Choice but International Energy Transition by Andrew McKillop
13. Population, Energy and Economic Growth: The Moral Dilemma by
14. by Ross McCluney
15. Peak Soil by Alice Friedemann
16. Notes on Terra Preta by Sheila Newman
17. Nuclear Fission Power Options by Sheila Newman
18. Fusion Ilusions by Michael Dittmar
19. Geothermal by Sheila Newman

Part IV: After Oil

20. France and Australia After Oil by Sheila Newman
21. North Korea: The Limits of Fossil-Energy Based Agricultural Systems by Antony Boys
22. How will Japan Feed itself without Fossil Energy? by Antony Boys
23. The Simpler Way by Ted Trainer
24. In the End: Thermodynamics and the Necessity of Protecting the Natural World by Sheila Newman

Like other books on the subject of 'peak oil' The Final Energy Crisis, (with engineering professor, Seppo Korpela and oil geophysicist Colin Campbell) does examine and test Hubbert's theory - for gas and coal as well as oil (and gives you the maths to test yourself in an appendix) - but the book doesn't stop with the usual (updated) depletion curves.

It is really the beginning of the elaboration of a new paradigm, which seriously examines (among other possibilities) nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, geothermal, terra preta/agrichar and the logistics of energy distribution in different social systems. It is like most books before this were explaining that society depends on fossil-fuels, but this book assumes you know that, and discusses the world within that knowledge perspective. It is for people who have already looked into the subject broadly but would like help to understand the limitations of different proposed technologies and political solutions. I read somewhere that the Editor had said that it was written for people who dealt with problems and fear by learning as much as they could.

Not limited to the 1000 word article or the one minute sound-bite, it also engages relevantly in original and sophisticated geopolitical and economic analysis, for instance about the history and future of Latin American oil and the possibility of realignments among ex-Soviet Union and third-world oil and gas producers.

The "Battle of the Titans", written in 2002 by the late Mark Jones, and also included in the first edition, is a prophetic piece which shows how the reckless and wasteful 'free market' energy policies since the days of President Reagan have caused the economy of the US to have become vastly less efficient than those of Europe and Russia. In coming months and years the energy vulnerability of the US will compound the problems caused by the collapse of its finance sector.

Newman assumes that her readers will be intelligent and adventurous and doesn't limit her authors to basic reviews of simple flow-energy technologies. Rather, she invites us to jump in the deep end and follow particle physicist, Michael Dittmar, as he dissects nuclear fusion technology in the 10 billion Euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project on the basis of the durability of nuclear 'carpets' and the half-life of tritium.

Dittmar's description of the staggeringly complex and difficult technical problems to be overcome before the dream of unlimited cheap power held out by the proponents of nuclear fusion is to be realised left me in little doubt that further expenditure on ITER is a massive wast of public resources.

Similarly, in the chapter, "Peak Soil", Alice Friedemann, shows, in a lively and pithy analysis, that industrial bio-fuel production on a large scale will only make our energy and environmental circumstances worse and not better. Friedemann plunges head-first into a meter of topsoil to see the damage which destroying crop-stubble for cellulosic ethanol might pose to world food supply by destroying an environment which supports "ten 'biomass horses' underground for every horse grazing. Sadly, some of Friedemann's forebodings have become reality in recent months as the diversion of agricultural production to bio-fuels has caused food shortages in many countries.

Other technologies, which are somewhat more promising than the above two described in the book are geothermal and the other more familiar forms of renewable energy such as wind, solar, hydro-electric, tidal, etc, and even nuclear fission. However, as Ross McCluney shows in the chapter "Renewable Energy Limits", all have their limitations and problems. Ultimately we have no choice but to scale back our consumption of energy. We must certainly dispense with any expectation that we can continue to raise both our own material living standards and those in the Third World in a planet with an ever increasing population.

Nuclear fission writing is usually limited to very polemical argument for or contra. These polemics are discarded and nuclear is examined from a host of unusual perspectives, including the importance of trade economics and income from fuel recycling in preserving certain nuclear proliferation treaties, the influence of insurance costs in preserving old designs, why no-one is building thorium fueled fast breeder-reactors, but why India might take a lead in breeder reactor technology and thorium fuel. Newman admits that it is very difficult to evaluate the costs and returns of nuclear power plants, including the dangers, but describes a relatively simple method by which one might begin to evaluate and compare any fuel source and technology, including nuclear.

In the chapter "How Will Japan Feed Itself Without Fossil Energy", agricultural scientist, Antony Boys explores Japan's carrying capacity in the Edo period (1603-1867) and contrasts it with import reliance and nitrogen overload in the twenty-first century.

Already some societies have been forced to confront the challenge of depletion of fossil fuel, particularly petroleum. Two examples are given, both from the 'socialist' camp, Cuba and North Korea; one reputedly successful, the other a disaster. As Cuba transformed itself, in the 1990's, to cope with a dramatic drop in oil imports following the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989, North Korea, also without its own deposits of gas or oil, descended into famine when its imported oil and gas supplies fell by more than 50% after 1990. This is described in the Chapter "North Korea: The limits of Fossil Energy-Based Agricultural Systems" by Antony Boys.

Sheila Newman, in the chapter "France and Australia after oil", raises the "Cuban solution" as an example of the principle of relocalisation. After analysing pre-fossil fuel France and her options for the future, Newman makes surprising and frightening political predictions for Australia, based on whether it adopts relocalisation or 'big' power options, such as nuclear and massive coal-operations. She identifies the big power options with the interests of infrastructure development lobby groups that are promoting big power developments in the expectation that these will service huge new cities of new immigrant consumers, supplied by Australia's huge and unpopular mass immigration program. Newman points out that the democratic interests of Australians are unlikely to be served by these corporate agendas, which she notes have also distorted the Australian water supply situation. She also seriously questions the costs of financing such schemes and the logistics of building and maintaining them. Reading her analysis, one starts to seriously doubt that the 'important people' who decide these things have actually done the maths.

For me, this is one of those rare books which left few questions begging. It seems as if the editors and the contributors had already gone nearly everywhere I had intended to go and a good many other places, besides, and had thoroughly researched the issues and thought through the questions posed. The orthodoxies of the mainstream environment movement and scientific community are held up to critical scrutiny and often rejected. This is particularly the case with the last two sections which are focused on proposed solutions and future prospects. Andrew McKillop's critique of 'free market' 'solutions' to the energy crisis, in particular the 'carbon finance and credits circus', in the chapter "No Choice But International Energy Transition" was particularly satisfying.

This is an enlightening rather than a depressing book. The editor, who writes the introductions for each section, has a good feeling for the absurd and finds humour and hope in unusual places. A message comes through not to panic, but to think. For all the absurd beliefs and ugly outlooks exposed by the various authors in this book, we find hope in unusual and unexpected places and a sense that, although answers will not necessarily come from the expected authorities, and the problems we face are extraordinary, there are ways we could slow down the crisis to a manageable pace, there are choices about the values that dictate our decisions, and politics are important.

See also: Review of The Final Energy Crisis by Mark O'Connor author of Overloading Australia (RRP AU$20) on page 8 of the December 2008 newsletter (pdf 923K) of Sustainable Population Australia, other customer reviews at amazon.com.

Naomi Klein was interviewed on 16 July 2008 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) TV show "The Hour", for 15 minutes, about her book, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007. Her biography and her family background show a deep concern for social justice and human rights. Unfortunately there seems to be an environmental naivety which could cancel out many of her efforts and her family's on these issues.

Klein was born in 1970, two years after Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, 1968, was published. Her husband is Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis, former NDP leader of Ontario and the man devoted to feeding Africa and preventing death in Africa. Lewis seems, however, to have failed to look at African land-rights and rights to family planning in a continent where Western interference with long-term settlement patterns and local economies, has caused appalling overpopulation, hunger, environmental devastation and species loss, in a country which for centuries had the richest biodiversity and no major population, hunger, or environmental problems.

Klein's brother Seth is a member of the left wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Vancouver. This is a think tank dedicated to economic and social issues. It challenges free market solutions, school vouchers, privatisation and what it considers "right wing" immigration ideas. Unfortunately, it considers 'right wing' any opposition to open borders.

It is clear that Naomi Klein has been very careful on the issue of immigration and open borders in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Nonetheless, throughout her book, she criticises policies of invasive development and their accompaniment by the importation of foreign workers - for instance in Iraq and in Sri Lanka. She recognises the problem of the alienation of public and village land by multinationals, and through international gentrification in the service of rich tourists, although she does not overtly link this to immigration, but to class and exclusive exploitation. There is therefore a danger that some readers may miss the connection between the buying up of real-estate by foreign individuals and corporations and the migration to those sites by large quantities of first world immigrants. Closer to home, her book flags opposition to immigration in the 'developed world', but she is obviously uneasy with the legitimacy of this. For some reason she fails to identify as strongly with the lower classes in the US, Canada and the UK, as she does with those further from her own home range. So she, or her staff of writers in these chapters, talk about how the people of the first world should be criticising the corporate take-over of land and government everywhere, and they warn against people displaced in the developed world targeting incoming immigrants with their resentment. It seems to me that she thus does a disservice to the disempowered of the West, who exist alongside its fabled and rightly deplored affluent upper classes. If the people of Iraq, Sri Lanka, South America etc., have her blessing to resent the stealing and repopulating of their regions by footloose multinationals and the importing of foreign workers to service the projects of those multinationals, then why shouldn't those dispossessed in the 'developed' world, not have the freedom of expressing their right to control over what happens locally and to their countries, including control over borders?

Psychologically, Klein is firmly ranged against the evil corporations who are waiting for the next disaster to impose their free market agenda on the next helpless victims. On the ground, however, she is strangely reluctant to sheet home the way the evil corporations benefit financially from the open borders policies they lobby for whilst they prone a committment to human rights. What is stopping Klein from seeing - or if she sees it, what is stopping her from expressing - that the impact on the poor in North America, Canada, the UK, Australia etc of the transfer of cheap labour from desperately poor developing countries, is just as damaging and unjust when it happens in the West as it is when applied to developing countries? In the West, wholesale import of labour destroys hard-won working class conditions. In the West, the sale of property overseas and the importing of cashed up immigrants to stoke up demand for US, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc real estate, puts basic shelter out of the reach of people on low wages. It also pushes infrastructure further out into the fragile ecosystems bordering the intensive conglomerations in those countries, trashing the environment and accelerating climate change in the process.

Is there, I wonder, some way to get Naomi and her staff and publishers to see that the disempowerment of the modest middle classes and the poor in the industrialised world, is only extending the third world into the Richworld, and shoring up the exploiting classes and their corporate servants - the banks, property developers, international tourism, the military, the mass-media - the whole globalisation machine?

In the interview, Klein was exercised by the fact that Hurricane Katrina allowed the rich an opportunity to finally gentrify a devastated housing project long denied the poor. The poor who might have benefited from that housing project had been wiped out by the cyclone.

The bigger issue of climate change and what was behind it - the intensity and huge scale of our activities and populations - was not considered. Economic growth and the population growth it markets as inevitable and necessary, were never questioned.

Klein rightly highlights the growing inequities of the already starkly imbalanced distribution of wealth across the regions and classes of the world, except in the worlds of the readers she is writing for. She minutely documents crying injustices in a manner more effective than has hitherto been achieved. But why does she not stand back for just a moment to see the role that overpopulation and mass movements of people has in disorganising communities and networks, the better to be exploited by those who push for this and benefit from it?

And why does she not stand back and see that, if the great writers of the world fail to also dramatise the terrible conflicts between human population growth and the environment and food production and human rights, then all her work is for nothing?

By Sheila Newman, from an idea and notes by Tim Murray

Finally, something sensible and well-written to counteract the marketing horrors of the growth merchants. MarkO'Connor and Bill Lines’s next prose book on the topic Overloading Australia is due out in late 2008  from Enviro Books, Australia. O'Connor hass co-authored with William Lines (whose latest book is Patriots, a history of the Australian conservation movements). Here is a collation of extracts: Extracts from Overloading Australia :

• #clarke">Colin Clark and the myths of growth economics
• #monbiot">The Monbiot Fallacy
• #rrf">The Replacement Rate Fallacy

Colin Clark and the myths of growth economics Denialist claims have changed remarkably little in 35 years. Almost all the arguments and tactics were already on show in 1973 when the internationally famous Australian economist Colin Clark published a pamphlet with the British Catholic Truth Society, Putting the ‘Population Explosion’ in Perspective. He followed this a few months later with a small book, The Myth of Over-Population. Conservative think-tanks and rightwing church groups remain fond of recycling its pungent assertions. Clark had the ability, rare among economists, of writing simply and clearly. Unfortunately, this great virtue exposed his errors and muddled predictions. Let’s take the scientific howlers first. Clark assures his readers that carbon dioxide is harmless so long as it can be ‘discharged into the atmosphere.’ As for greenhouse effects, it is clear that recent fluctuations in the Earth’s climate ‘are not due to the burning of fuel.’ Despite being supposedly a chemist and an agricultural economist, Clark displays near total ignorance of agriculture. For instance, he assures us that the then heavy use of fertilizers would soon fade away: ‘Farmers now apply fertilizers heavily, to make their soils more fertile. Once these have reached a satisfactory level, fertilizers can be applied more lightly.’ Perhaps for this reason, Clark was sure that world food production ‘could easily be increased to 50 times its present level’. This would be easy if all suitable land ‘was properly farmed or grazed’. Clark persistently confuses the maximum yields of experimental plots, under ideal conditions, with what can be expected in the field. For instance he notes that meat production of 1000 pounds per acre a year from grazing lands has been recorded in temperate regions. From this he deduces that since grass grows faster in the tropics, five times the yield should be possible there! In practice tropical yields are often lower. Like latter-day deniers, Clark is contemptuous of the very notion that resources are limited. He argues that most of the things we call resources, like wood pulp or fish are really products of human labor. This is a classic case of an economist treating the natural world as a ‘free good’. Clark could not grasp that fish-catches and lumber-extraction depend not just on investment and labour but also on nature’s fecundity. Instead, he assures us that fish supplies are increasing much faster than population. He defends DDT as a blessing to mankind, claiming that scientists ‘cannot find that its levels have done any harm to human health’. He assures us that climate change is natural. Alarmists like Paul Ehrlich, he claims, ‘want to have it both ways, and prove that we are in danger of making the world hotter and colder simultaneously’. This perverse misunderstanding of warnings about climate instability is still a standard tactic for Clark’s successors. One can make allowances for Clark who was meeting a new idea, but not for those who perpetuate his muddle. Despite his scientific ignorance, Clark had no hesitation in predicting the future — wrongly. He ridiculed the idea that our use of fossil fuels might change the climate but did concede that ‘Some centuries hence, our descendants may decide that it is unwise to add further carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.’ In fact just two decades later governments began negotiating the Kyoto agreement on greenhouses gases. Clark also assured his readers that serious energy problems will come only when world population is ‘over a million times what it is now’. He mocked Ehrlich for suggesting that the US (whose oil production, unmentioned by Clark, had peaked in 1970) was already having some trouble in buying in enough foreign oil. Clark claimed the only problem the US had was ‘restricting the quantities of oil which other countries wish to supply’. (Today the quest for overseas oil dominates US foreign policy.) In any case, said Clark, cheap abundant energy from nuclear fusion was coming soon, and ‘will be vastly more efficient’ than the nuclear fission of current reactors. Thirty-five years later nuclear fusion remains a distant hope. Clark’s current disciples overlook these embarrassing errors while citing his authority and persisting with the same assumptions that produced the errors. But Clark’s ignorance of history and science was not quite what it seems. He was perversely erudite in ferreting out scraps of fact that might suit his theories, yet studiously ignored well-known facts that didn’t. In short, Clark, like most later deniers, is betrayed less by ignorance than by powerful prejudices that distort his vision. The Monbiot Fallacy Some environmentalists invent ingenious arguments for not thinking about population. In early 2008 the British environmentalist George Monbiot invented the Monbiot Fallacy. As a man who prides himself on recognising that economic growth is incompatible with preserving environments, Monbiot has long argued that total economic growth is a good surrogate for total environmental destruction. Granted that economists demand a minimum of 3% growth per year, he predicts massive destruction of the natural world by the year 2100. This seems right, since at that 3% rate we will see the world’s economy double four times — grow 16-fold. Yet current projections are that in that time the world’s population will only increase by half. Therefore, Monbiot suggests, that ‘economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth.’ He thus feels justified in not being too bothered about Britain’s rapid population growth — and in hinting at unpleasant views of those environmentalists who are. Yet as we saw at the end of Chapter 5, even if the planet could provide such a quantity of services and products, there is no precedent for assuming that economic growth can owe so little to population growth. Existing statistics show population growth and growth in per capita consumption as almost equally important. In Australia for instance ― as John Coulter pointed out to Monbiot ― over the past 25 years the economy has been growing at 3.2% while the growth of per capita GDP has averaged 1.9%. This indicates that, in terms of growth in environmental impact, 60% of the growth is due to rising per capita demand and 40% to increase in population. Monbiot has also scrambled the maths. Even on his figures, 16-fold economic growth divided by 1.5-fold population growth, means about 11-fold per capita growth: a ratio of about 1 to 7 between the two factors, not 1 to 32! A better way out of the Monbiot Fallacy is to argue thus. If the nature of our economy ensures a doubling of total consumption every 20 years or so for ever, then most hopes of saving the environment and warding off climate change are lost. The present population of the Earth, plus the increases in per capita consumption that economists will demand of them, is enough to doom the Earth. However if we are serious about fighting such runaway growth, then both the factors that drive it (population and per capita consumption) must be kept as low as possible. Granted that per capita consumption, even of necessities like energy and food, may need to be voluntarily pinched in, the larger the number of individuals to be supplied and fed, the less chance there will be of them agreeing to do so. Monbiot should also have considered the scenario where nature or lack of resources does the job for us — relieving the pressure on the environment but giving us the problem of human misery to alleviate. Imagine that peak oil bites sooner than expected, the economy goes into recession, there is so little fuel oil that private cars can run only by permit and homes can be heated only a few hours a day. Will not these privations be crueller for an expanded population than for a smaller one? Numbers matter.   On the Replacement Rate Fallacy   The late pro-natalist B.A. Santamaria once informed his readers in The Australian that for Australia’s population not to fall rapidly the average woman must have 2 surviving children.  Such views are quite common, and often lead to a false belief that population is either falling or about to fall.  Thus in July 2008, when the Pope visited Sydney for World youth Day (just after World Population Day), Australia’s Cardinal Pell told the media that Western nations faced a population crisis fuelled by ‘ruthless’ commercial forces, and that ‘No country in the Western world is producing enough children to keep the population stable.’ If Pell was thinking about his native Australia he was right―but not in the way he imagined. Australian women are having far too many babies to keep the population stable. In fact almost twice as many as necessary. Births in Australia (about half a million a year) are twice deaths (about a quarter of a million) and have been so for the past twenty years―even though Australian women have been averaging significantly less than two children each for at least that long. Clearly there is something cock-eyed about this “replacement rate” argument. It involves a common, but elementary, error in demography. Can  you spot it? In fact to keep stable and just replace itself, a relatively young population like Australia’s would currently need something even lower than Western Europe’s rate of around 1.3 children per completed family. More like 0.93. And that’s without immigration! Misunderstandings like Pell’s often come from those who a decade earlier might have tried to argue that we need more people for defence, or for “respect” in the world. As those older props are discredited, more weight has fallen on the Replacement Rate Fallacy. Underlying all this is a natural bias of human beings towards pro-natalism   The replacement rate was a useful, if theoretical, concept back when couples everywhere were having 4 and 5 children as a matter of course. Since couples often justified this by saying that the world must be populated, demographers would point out that all a couple need do to replace itself, was to have 2 children. More exactly, about 2.05 children, to allow for the odd child that dies before reaching reproductive age, and for the slight excess of male births. But basically, if women in their reproductive years average two surviving children, or one surviving daughter, a generation will simply replace itself, won’t it?    Well, no! Humans are not fruitflies, where the generation of parents dies as their offspring are born. Children don’t replace parents, or even grandparents these days, but more often they replace great-grandparents. Hence if a generation of parents were to produce an equal-sized generation of children this would not mean the population had stabilized. In fact the population would not stabilize, at that rate, until the last generation to have more than 2.05 children had departed the scene. For instance, if India achieved so-called “replacement fertility” now, with all its couples in future averaging just 2.05 children, its population would still double, adding an extra 1 billion people! Demographers need to clearly explain to journalists the difference between the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) and the Current Replacement Birth Rate (CRBR). The latter is the birth-rate that would currently (though not indefinitely) produce as many births as deaths.  The only replacement rate that Australia could claim to be safely below is the Theoretical Long-Term Replacement Rate (TLTRR) of just over two children per completed family. But that is the replacement rate of an imaginary Australia, an already stabilized Australia, a society in which there would now be equal numbers in each generation. By rights we should distinguish birthrate from fertility rate. The birthrate is the number of babies born per thousand people per year (and hence the replacement birthrate is that at which births per year would equal deaths); whereas ‘the fertility rate’ is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime ― which is the demographers’ justification for speaking of 2.05 children per woman as ‘replacement fertility’. If only non-demographers could be got to observe this distinction, Santamaria’s error could be succinctly described as confusing the birthrate with the fertility rate. Since fertility rates are always below 10, and birthrates may be nearer to 100, the two terms ought not to be confused! However one must despair of getting the media to distinguish between birthrate and fertility rate. The ANU demographer Dr Christabel Young has pointed out another hole in the replacement rate argument. When you take Australia’s current fertility rate of around 1.8 children per couple and factor in even a low net migration gain of just 80 000 per year, she calculated, it is still the equivalent of having a total fertility of around 2.4 children per woman. That of course is well above any estimate of the long-term replacement rate. And in reality our current net migration gain is now some 178,000 per year.   Some demographers are simply careless in talking about “the” replacement rate to journalists who almost invariably misunderstand “below TLTRR” as meaning “below the CRBR”; but there may also be pro-natalist demographers, and politicians, who do so deliberately to create concern about “our falling population”.  For instance the pro-natalist Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) recently put out a media release that suckered ABC TV News (26 February 2008) into reporting that Australia’s low birthrate was a disaster because there were, "not enough babies being born to replace people dying." In fact AIFS had merely said that fertility in Australia was “below the level required for population replacement” –which left them free to blame the ABC (and several other news media) for the error. Similarly, some of the business-lobby groups who try to create concern about “falling population” may be well aware from their own research that population is in fact rising rapidly. (Australia’s is rising at 1.6% a year, faster than Indonesia next door, and one of the fastest rates in Asia.) Reporters who are tempted by such nonsense” should  apply a common-sense reality-check. Anyone who drives around Australian cities ought to be aware that population growth is extremely high!   NOTE: The above is not an exact quotation from the book but combines passages from several chapters.

It is amazing that so many of us accept that it is our lot to work for others and to pay rent. Was it always so or did this come about through sophistry?

Whilst in part a review of aspects of Ellen Meiksins Wood's stimulating book,
The Origin of Capitalism, a longer view, Verso, London and New York, 2002, this article features a passage from that book. The passage analyses how John Locke's philosophy of the Law of Property characterises capitalism and documents changes to property law in England which created a massive landless labour force by facilitating dispossession on the pretext of efficiency.

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John Locke's work on property goes back to the end of the 17th century. To many it will seem eerily familiar because we hear constantly its echo in arguments about efficiency and enclosure. In Orwellian Waterworks: big-agribusiness and Victorian Government, the reader of this article may recognise that the same excuses are still being made for new enclosures of land. It is false to believe that these are the good old days and that our society protects us from legally sanctioned predation. For instance, it is no wonder that the people of the Riverina have scheduled a demonstration in front of Parliament in June 3 at 12.30pm. What is happening close by in country Victoria is of utmost seriousness.

In her book, Ellen Meiksins Wood sets out to find the origins of capitalism. Personally I think they go back further, but she is on the right trail and you won't find her work disappointing. Woods agrees that capitalism originated in England and recognises that things were and still are different in continental Europe, albeit she also recognises that capitalism culminates in the globalisation movement.

Half the book consists of a very thorough literature review where she disputes a number of well-known theories, both Marxist and ‘liberal’, on the grounds that they all wrongly assume that capitalism sort of emerged organically from simpler societies. This is in fact the deadening ideology preached daily by the world's syndicated Anglophone media and Anglophone governments. In jingles and visual noise more invasive than the muezzin, we constantly hear that "Capitalism is the culmination, the natural way, the only way, and we must overcome all its problems by being more productive in order to have endless growth. To go 'backwards' is to perish etc."

Yes, Wood also disputes the widespread inference that capitalism was an inevitable kind of human social progress. She disagrees with the idea that capitalism confers overwhelming benefits. Whilst many theories identify capitalism with cities, she sees capitalism as being born in rural agricultural society.

She describes capitalism as a special arrangement of capital, labour and market. She sees both the owners of capital and those who work for them as subservient to the market. In her view, the market is something that developed from the separation of power and economy.

She constructs an original and useful thesis that the commercial market in capitalism has developed a life of its own. The market now controls people rather than their controlling it and that it is a source of much unhappiness. Whilst she concedes that those who own the capital benefit from this situation for longer than those whom they oppress, no-one will escape in the end. At the bottom of it all is the elevation of profit above all other things, which means we cannot protect anything if destroying it will make someone a big enough profit.

At no time does she display an awareness of the role of fossil fuels in capitalism, but those of us who are aware of this, can supply the gaps. What she has done is create a framework.

Wood correctly identifies dispossession as fundamental to the emergence of capitalism in England. She locates the “first major wave of socially disruptive enclosure” as having occurred in the 16th C. (Some have placed it earlier but she does not mention this. Neither does she identify the mechanism which first permitted private property.)

She does, however, also correctly identify English society as different from societies on the European continent, with France typifying continental societies. She acknowledges that Dutch society was also different from other continental societies, but still dissimilar to England. She does not explain how Holland came to be different from the continental roman societies.

She does identify changes in the law as an important part of capitalism. The changeover from traditional (oral) and customary (mutual, often inherited, obligations) is known to be a fulcrum of abuse which permitted and still permits land-owners who were educated in written law to take advantage of peasants and hunter-gatherers who were and are not. She notes that written laws replaced tradition in passing, without dating the phenomenon or otherwise particularising it in relation to her theory. She stresses, however, a change in philosophy of property law, of which she does date some documents and events. These are, notably,

Document: Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516)
Event: The Expropriation of Ireland (1610)
Document: Locke’s Theory of Property. (1690s)

John Locke

John Locke,, (1690s), cited by Ellen Meiksins Wood, pp110-115:

“Lock begins with the proposition that God ‘hath given the world to men in common’ (II.26), but he goes on to show how, nevertheless, individuals come to have property in particular things. In fact, he writes, such private, individual property is a God-given natural right. Men (and in his argument, it is always men) own their own persons, and the labour that they do with their hands and bodies is therefore their property too. So, he argues, a natural right of property is established when a man ‘mixes his labour’ with something, when, that is, by means of his labour he removes it from its natural state or changes its natural condition.

"Locke was certainly not the first thinker to propose that unoccupied land could be claimed by those who would render it fruitful, but, as he developed his labour theory of property, he introduced some enormously significant innovations. We shall consider some of their implications more closely in Chapter 7, in connection with the ideology of imperialism. For now, the central point is that Locke’s whole argument on property turns on the notion of ‘improvement’.

"The theme running throughout his discussion is that the earth is there to be made productive and profitable, and that this is why private property, which emanates from labour, trumps common possession. Locke repeatedly insists that most of the value inherent in land comes not from nature but from labour and improvement:

"‘tis labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything’ (11.40).

"He even offers specific calculations of value contributed by labour as against nature. He suggests, for example, ‘it will be but a very modest Computation to say, that of the Products of the Earth useful to the Life of Man, 9/10 are the effects of labour,’ and then immediately corrects himself: it would be more accurate to say that 99/100 should be attributed to labour rather than to nature (II.40).

"Locke also makes it clear that the value he has in mind is not simply use value but exchange value. Money and commerce are the motivation for improvement; and an acre of land in unimproved America, which may be as naturally fertile as an acre in England, is not worth 1/1000 of the English acre, if we calculate ‘all the Profit an Indian received from it were it valued and sold here’ (II.43).

"Locke’s point, which not coincidentally drips with colonialist contempt, is that unimproved land is waste, so that any man who takes it out of common ownership and appropriates it to himself – he who removes land from the common and encloses it – in order to improve it has given something to humanity, not taken it away.

"There is, of course, something attractive about Locke’s idea that labour is the source of value and the basis of property, but soon becomes clear that there is something odd about it too. For one thing, it turns out that there is no direct correspondence between labour and property, because one man can appropriate the labour of another. He can acquire a right of property in something by ‘mixing’ with it not his own labour but the labour of someone else whom he employs. It appears that the issue for Locke has less to do with the activity of labour as such than with its profitable use. In calculating the value of the acre in America, for instance, he talks not about the Indian’s expenditure of effort, labour, but about the Indian’s failure to realize a profit. The issue, in other words, is not the labour of a human being but the productivity of property, its exchange value and its application to commercial profit.

"This emphasis on the creation of exchange value as the basis of property is a critical move in the theorization of capitalist property. Locke certainly was not the first to claim that people have a right to take possession of unoccupied and unused land, if they are able and willing to render it fruitful. His idea that property derives from labour is not so distant from that traditional notion. What makes his thesis truly distinctive is the association of ‘labour’ with the creation of exchange value, and the derivation of property from the creation of exchange value. This had implications not only for domestic property relations but also, as we shall see, for the justification of colonial expropriation. It could be used to defend the enclosure of ‘unprofitable’ land at home, as well as territory in the colonies that was not being put to commercially profitable use by indigenous populations.

"In a famous and much debated passage, Locke writes that ‘the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property …’ (II.28). Much ink has been spilled on this passage and what it tells us about, for example, Locke’s views on wage labour (the labour of the servant who cuts the turfs). But what is truly striking about the passage is that Locke treats ‘the Turfs my Servant has cut’ as equivalent to ‘the Ore I have digg’d’. This means not only that I, the master, have appropriated the labour of my servant, but also that this appropriation is in principle no different from the servant’s labouring activity itself. My own digging is, for all intents and purposes, the same as my appropriating the fruits of my servant’s cutting. But Locke is not interested in simply passive appropriation. The point is rather that the landlord who puts his land to productive use, who improves it, even if it is by means of someone else’s labour, is being industrious, no less – and perhaps more – than the labouring servant.

"That’s a point worth dwelling on. One way of understanding what Locke is driving at is to consider common usage today. When the financial pages of the daily newspaper speak of ‘producers’, they do not normally mean workers. In fact, they are likely to talk about conflicts, for example, between automobile ‘producer’s and auto workers or their unions. The employers of labour, in other words, are being credited with ‘production’. We have become so accustomed to this usage that we fail to see tis implications, but it is important to keep in mind that certain very specific historical conditions were required to make it possible.

"Traditional ruling classes in pre-capitalist society, passively appropriating rents from dependent peasants, would never think for themselves as ‘producers’. The kind of appropriation that can be called ‘productive’ is distinctively capitalist. It implies that property is used actively, not for conspicuous consumption but for investment and increasing profit. Wealth is acquired not simply by using coercive force to extract more surplus labour from direct producers, in the manner of rentier aristocrats, nor by buying cheap and selling dear like pre-capitalist merchants, but by increasing labour-productivity (output per unity of work).

"By conflating labour with the production of profit, Locke becomes perhaps the first thinker to construct a systematic theory of property based on something like these capitalist principles. He is certainly not a theorist of a mature, industrial capitalism. But his view of property, with its emphasis on productivity and exchange value created in production, already sets him apart from his predecessors. His idea that value is actively created in production is already vastly different from traditional views that focus simply on the process of exchange, the ‘sphere of circulation’. Only William Petty, often called the founder of political economy, had suggested anything like a ‘labour theory of value’ in the seventeenth century, and that too in the context of agrarian capitalism – a theory he tested as a colonial agent in Ireland, where he served as Cromwell’s Surveyor General, just as Locke and his mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, looked upon the American colonies as a laboratory of improvement.

"Locke in his economic works is critical of those landed aristocrats who sit back and collect rents without improving their land, and he is equally critical of merchants who simply act as middlemen, buying cheap in one market and selling at a higher price in another, or hoarding goods to raise their price, or cornering a market to increase the profits of sale. Both types of proprietor are, in his view, parasitic. Yet his attack on proprietors of this kind should not be misread as a defence of working people against the dominant classes. He certainly has good things to say about industrious artisans and tradesmen, but his idea seems to be the great improving landlord, whom he regards as the ultimate source of wealth in the community, what he calls, significantly, the ‘first producer’ – a man like Shaftesbury, capitalist landlord and investor in colonial trade, a man who is not only ‘industrious’ but whose vast property contributes greatly to the wealth of the community.

"Locke’s view of property is very well suited to the conditions of England in the early days of agrarian capitalism. It clearly reflects a condition in which highly concentrated landownership and large holdings were associated with a highly productive agriculture (again, productive in the sense not just of total output but also of output per unit of work). His language of improvement echoes the scientific literature devoted to the techniques of agriculture that flourished uniquely in England at this time – especially emanating from the Royal Society and the groups of learned men with whom Locke and Shaftesbury were closely connected. More particularly, his constant references to common land as waste and his praise for the removal of land from the common, and indeed for enclosure, had very powerful resonances in that time and place.

"We need to be reminded that the definition of property was in Locke’s day not just a philosophical issue but a very immediate practical one. As we have seen, a new, capitalist definition of property was in the process of establishing itself, challenging traditional forms not just in theory but also in practice. The idea of overlapping use rights to the same piece of land was giving way in England to exclusive ownership. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, there were constant disputes over common and customary rights. Increasingly, the principle of improvement for profitable exchange was taking precedence over other principles and other claims to property, whether those claims were based on custom or on some fundamental right of subsistence. Enhancing productivity itself became a reason for excluding other rights.

"What better argument than Locke’s could be found to support the landlord seeking to extinguish the customary rights of commoners, to exclude them from common land, and to turn common land into exclusive private property by means of enclosure? What better argument than that enclosure, exclusion, and improvement enhanced the wealth of the community and added more to the ‘common stock’ than it subtracted? And indeed, there were in the seventeenth century already examples of legal decisions in conflicts over land where judges invoked principles very much like those outlined by Locke, in order to give exclusive property precedence over common and customary rights. In the eighteenth century, when enclosure would accelerate rapidly with the active involvement of Parliament, reasons of ‘improvement’ would be cited systematically as the basis of title to property and as grounds for extinguishing traditional rights.

"This is not the only way in which Locke’s theory of property supported the interests of landlords like Shaftesbury. Against the background of his emphatic pronouncement that all men were free and equal in the state of nature, he nevertheless, like others before him, justified slavery. More particularly, as we shall see in Chapter 7, his views on improvement could easily be mobilized to justify colonial expansion and the expropriation of indigenous peoples, as his remark on the American Indian makes painfully obvious. If the unimproved lands of the Americas represented nothing but ‘waste’, it was a divinely ordained duty for Europeans to enclose and improve them, just as ‘industrious’ and ‘rational’ men had done in the original state of nature."

For any student of capitalism, Wood has produced a key book.

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

A review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ( Penguin Australia, 2007)
By Sheila Newman. Also published on Web Diary. (2233 words)

Klein is a Canadian political scientist. She put this book together over a four year period, employing different teams of researchers for each chapter. The documentation is awesomely solid, making her assertions difficult to tear down, and thus supporting a theory which would otherwise seem almost fantastic, were it not also supported by more and more freestanding works.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

But the robber-barons, land-sharks and bankers were only waiting for an opportunity to break down any political system which would stop them from having anything they wanted. Their method was tried and true: a religion embracing trickle-down economics, endless growth and total deregulation. I have wondered for some time how so many dim-witted, narrowly educated people going by the tag of ‘economist’ came to inhabit the corridors of power in our society. This has been somewhat explained to me by Klein, who identifies the genesis of a theoretical basis, defence and propaganda effort for corporatist free-market replacing real government. She places the rise of the shock doctrine of economic rationalism at Chicago University in the Chicago School of Economics, led by economist Milton Friedman, the author of Capitalism and Freedom.

She describes how this school set about training people in its atrocious doctrine all over the world. Its practitioners sought to break down all examples of egalitarian, community oriented democratic states, speciously linking ‘democracy’ to the imposition of ‘free-market’ economics.

Although Klein does not make this connection, their program began in 1973 which was the time of the first oil-shock. She describes a course of corporatised looting, torture, slavery and repression which begins with Pinochet’s rise in Chile, with Milton Friedman as his advisor, and passes through similar horrors in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Poland, South Africa, Russia, and Irak. She finishes this incredible expose by describing the nauseating excesses of developers masquerading as foreign AID in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the tsunamis which so many Australians and others contributed their money to help.

Within 24 hours of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, where land had been 80% publicly owned, processes demanded by the World Bank, US AID, and the Asian Development Bank began to change the laws to transfer public land to private ownership, and to privatise public utilities and resources. Indeed those seem to be the signs that the shock doctrine is operating in a country – privatisation of public land, telephones, water, power and pharmaceutical distribution. Obviously I think that Australians should act quickly to familiarise themselves with Naomi Klein’s book and to begin to appreciate the danger to what remains of our democracy, public wealth and institutions. The possibility for land redistribution in South Africa by Mandela’s government had been similarly hamstrung.

Familiar bland illogical assertions come up along with the names of familiar corporations. Klein quotes (p. 355), “Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine, saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.”

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park (Melbourne central) to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Klein argues convincingly that the Chicago school acolytes have supported reigns of pure terror where peoples have, almost overnight, been reduced to poverty and starvation, with their states brought from sovereignty to economic indigence and crippling debt to the International Monetary Fund and other private agencies as they paid for ridiculously expensive, publicly resisted corporate projects and sold off state assets.

Klein tells how the IMF came about through an international agreement to prevent countries from falling into desperation and war by loaning them money to get through rough spots. It was modelled on the post WW2 Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan for Germany was particularly careful to preserve protection for Germany’s industry and workers. But Chicago-school economics came to rule the IMF, she says, and the book is about how this doctrine stripped its victims of democracy, labour protection and public assets, and, when war broke out or torture and imprisonment were rife, its practitioners turned a blind eye, instead celebrating the chaos as a clean slate for the birth of a rational economy.

The hypothesis is that democracy is destroyed by causing social shocks to countries and, in the ensuing panic and disorientation, the political system is dismantled and the economy pillaged through privatisation and government contracted debt. The International Monetary Fund is severely implicated in this as are a number of international corporations.

Examples of things which socially shock a country, most of which are dealt with by Klein using examples in many countries, are:
- The Breaking down of labour laws and trade regulations
- Mass immigration and the Contracting of business to foreign imported labour in preference to local labour
- Falling wages
- bank privatisation, deregulation of the economy
- Breaking down of the public service, public welfare
- Loss of public subsidy of therapeutic drugs
- Privatisation of public hospitals, schools…
- Privatisation of public technology, power and utilities – telephones, electricity, water and energy resources like oil and gas
- Unaffordable privatised housing and land development
- Land speculation leading to homelessness
- Unaffordable justice systems
- Privatisation of the military – use of mercenaries and contractors
- Torture, disappearance, and war
- Natural disasters

Signs of the dismantling of a political system and its reinvention as a corporatocracy include:
- education of young people, educators and politicians, in economic rationalist doctrines as the only true way
- growth economics
- the normalisation of theft of the public wealth through its transfer to the private sector
- loss of restrictions on investment by political regulators
- acceptance of ostentatious lifestyles in politicians and their public frequentation of corporate figures
- Phoney enquiries
- Commercial-in-confidence activities which make it impossible for the public to obtain information
- the privatisation of areas normally administered by government, for instance mercenaries for soldiers, corporations for military support and logistics like accommodation, clothing and food, immigration (immigration agents)
- The institutionalisation with public funded support for corporations. (The Victorian Government’s gift to Australand of public land and $80 m in exchange for what many would call very little, comes to my mind).

At the end of the book Naomi Klein tells us about countries which are fighting back against the robber-baron corporatisation of their governments, land, and industries. Examples are described in Latin America, Lebanon, Thailand, and many other places.

Chavez Venezuela:

(p.455) “In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”

Lebanon:

(p.459) “So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon’s government would accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist, estimated that, as a result, ‘household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices’ – a classic peace penalty. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or subcontract locally - ” …

(p.460): “Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party, Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt – the first national revolt specifically targeting post-war disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival.” … “The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class peoples’ revolt.”

Thailand:

(p. 402), “Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within 24 hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children. The Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters group was hastily convened to deal with the land grabs.”…

(p. 463) “…villagers approached all government promises with intense scepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called ‘land reinvasions’. They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been…” (p.464) A Thai NGO, commented that, ‘With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.’”

[Should the homeless in Australia and those who stand to lose their overly expensive homes due to government facilitation of land-speculation consider such a move?]

New Orleans:

And, with the dispossession by corporations and public private partnerships in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (with which the book begins): (p.465) “In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to demolish began ‘reinvading’ their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.”

Klein concludes (p. 466), “The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping – having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”… “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people , taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits.”

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

This has been cross-posted to the site of the Southern Cross Party

This book, by by Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews, the authors of "How to Kill A Country", is a damning expose of how the same Howard Government which cites "Australia's national Interest" as an excuse to sabotage international efforts to act against the threat of global warming, has, in fact, betrayed those very same interests. Subjects covered include Energy, Rural Industries, Culture, Defence and Blood.

In fact, the list is not comprehensive, as, of course, a comprehensive coverage of all of John Howard's betrayals of our national interest would be a truly massive undertaking. Some I would have also included are:

• The Privatisation of Telstra,
• the ongoing export of Australian jobs to low-wage third world economies,
• ramping up immigration to a stratospheric annual rate of 300,000 from only 58,000 in 1996, in spite of Howard having won the 1996 elections largely on the basis of dissatisafaction with Labor's high immigration policies
• the flogging of Australian real estate on the international market, thereby pricing beyond the means of Australians what was affordable to single income working class families barely more than a generation ago.

#defence">Defence

The chapter on defence(#fn1">1) shows how the Government has overruled all the normal defence equipment procurement procedures in order to impose a "Buy American" policy. As a result this country's defence forces will be forced to use inferior equipment, largely unsuited to our defence needs, that won't be delivered for years. In the case of the Joint Strike Fighter we are to be kept waiting until 2018. The book describes how this deal was secured:

How was this deal sold to a gullible Australian ministry? It was first and foremost the Prime Minister's decision, taken unilaterally during a visit to Washington in early June 2002. Discussions with President Bush were followed by a private briefing from the plane's makers, Lockheed Martin, in John Howard's hotel room. Howard seems to have succumbed easily and enthusiastically. So enthusiastically it appears, that even senior Lockheed Martin executives commented that they were 'flabbergasted' that Australia decided to make the purchase so quickly. "That was just amazing, it stopped everything in the room at the time," said Lockheed's international programs director for the JSF, Mike Consentino, about Australia's surprise announcement. "This was our first international customer so it was a memorable day." (pages 150-151)

In order to fill the gap until 2018 which exists as a result of the PM's hasty decision, we are to spend an additional $6 billion on the purchase of 24 Super Hornet (F/A 18 F) fighter aircraft, which were designed to operate from aircraft carriers rather than from land.

Other disastrous Howard Government defence equipment acquisition decisions put under the microscope include:

• The AU$539million purchase of 59 reconditioned second-hand M1A1 Abrams tanks, which require special road transporters, which cannot be airlifted by any Australian Defence Forces (ADF) transport plane, nor be loaded onto any of Australia's six heavy landing craft. The tanks cannot be used for the defence of the Australian continent because they are too heavy for Australia's roads and bridges. In spite of their reputation for indestructability, at least 80 had been put out of action by 2005 by Iraqi insurgents who found that their armour could be penetrated with surprising ease by low-tech bombs and rocket propelled grenades.
• The decision to purchase the US Raytheon combat system for Australia's conventionally powered Collins class submarine fleet. This was in spite of the fact that more suitable European alternatives had been developed for conventionally powered submarines whilst the Raytheon had been scaled down from a combat system designed for nuclear powered submarines.

Energy

The chapter on Energy shows how the Howard Government has undermined tentatitve efforts to establish renewable energy industries in order to satisfy the wishes of Australia's climate changing fossil fuel lobby. This chapter does to some degree suffer from an uncritical acceptance of all alternatives to fossil fuels, the worst example being bio-fuels. It is not altogether clear whether bio-fuels actually increase the world's stock of energy given that fossil fuel derived fertilsers are necessary to grow bio-fuels in the first place. Further the expansion of bio-fuels is exacerbating the loss of bio-diversity in the Third world as rainforests are cleared in order to grow bio-fuels. They are also responsible for making food less affordable for many of the world's poorest as more corn crops are diverted to the manufacture of ethanol.

Neverthless the case for the need alternatives to fossil fuel is indisputable and the Howard Government is deservedly condemended for its wanton sabotage of a number of viable alternatives. Whilst the previous Keating and Hawke Labor governments have vastly better records than the Howard government in this regard, a decision made, upon winning office in 1983, by the Hawke Labor government to close down a government-funded renewable energy program(#fn2">2) did also unnecesarily set back Australia's development of alternatives.

Another fact of significance, not alluded to in this work, was that Whitlam Government Energy Minister the late Rex Connor attempted, in response to the oil crisis of 1973 to make Australia independent. This was the purpose of the AU$4 billion loan that Connor attempted to secure through the Pakistani broker Tirath Khemlani. Of course, this was blown up into the "Khemlani Affair" by the Australian media establisment, most notably Rupert Murdoch's 'evil empire', and was used to destroy Connor's career as well as, ultimately, the Whitlam government in 1975.

Rex Connor died tragically early in 1978 and the since corrupted Australian Labor Party has turned its back on the legacy of this visionary and great Australian political leader(#fn3">3).

Rural Industries

The chapter on rural industries shows how the Howard government has undermined the competitive advantage enjoyed by Australia's rural industries in order to please various US agricultural lobbies. This includes the undermining of Australia's strict quarantine regime and measures to keep out 'Mad Cow' disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - BSE), which has compromised the U.S. beef industry. Australia has done the bidding of the U.S. on the international market to break down Japan's resistance to U.S. Beef imports because of the BSE threat. This would in fact remove the competitive advantage that Australian Beef enjoys over U.S. beef in the Japanese market.

"National Insecurity" also describes how Australia's competitive advantage in the Pork industry has been similarly undermined to suit U.S. rural commercial interests.

The chapter describes the subordination of industry groups ostensibly acting on behalf of Australia's primary producers and counter-moves by ordinary rural producers including the creation of the Australian Beef Association.

One concern I have with this issue is that all forms of large scale international trade in primary produce are largely unsustainable whether they are into or out of Australia. They are unsustainable because they depend upon non-renewable petroleum to export them to the other side of the globe and because the constant extraction of nutrients from the soil and the need for irrigation in the longer term will destroy the fertility of the soil. For further information read chapter "Farming and Food Production under regimes of Climate Change" by Edward R. D. Goldsmith in the Final Energy Crisis co-edited by Sheila Newman. A second edition is due to be published next year.

The chapter on Culture about contains more damning evidence of the Howard government's complicity in the destruction of Australia's film, television and performing industries.

The book suffers from being not sufficiently critical of the previous Keating Labor Government which, in its time made its own sterling contribution to undermining Australia's economic, cultural and environmental security. It could also use an index, but it is still a very useful and courageous contribution to a necessary debate and well worth the AU$24.95 recommended retail price.

---

Footnotes.

#fn1" name="fn1" id="fn1">1. Disclaimer: I write this as one who has been, on occasions, outspoken against Australia's military adventures, notably the bloody and destructive Vietnam War and the

current inferno in Iraq

. Nevertheless, in a world which is becoming increasingly unstable, it would be suicidal for any nation in a region such as south East Asia not to have a capable national defence force. Of course, the first recourse should be to try to achieve international justice and not engage in any unjust wars.

#fn2" name="fn2" id="fn2">2. I can't cite the source for this fact but I can remember it being mentioned on the radio, probably Radio National, perhaps, 15 years ago.

#fn3" name="fn2" id="fn2">3. For further information, please see chapter 7 of "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France", Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's thesis (pdf 2.6MB) downloadable from http://candobetter.org/sheila )