Global Civilization issues, values, solutions, and vision of the world for survival as a species.

A recent episode of CBC Radio’s Day 6 featured an interview with David Levy, artificial intelligence expert and author of Love and Sex with Robots. Levy discussed a line of robotic sex dolls to be released in 2017 that can speak and respond to touch. He reaffirmed his 2007 prediction, in his book Love and Sex with Robots, that humans will be marrying robots by 2050. He suggests this will be a step forward.

“There are millions of people out there who, for various reasons, don’t have anyone to love or anyone who loves them. And for these people, I think robots are going to be the answer,” he said.

I suspect that Levy sees this as a lucrative business opportunity for Intelligent Toys, Ltd, a company the article mentions he founded.

The profit potentials of automation are not limited to robot spouses.

Front and center is the issue of jobs. Donald Trump promised to bring back millions of jobs that globalization outsourced at the expense of U.S. workers. According to a 2014 MIT study recently cited by the New York Times, 2 million to 2.4 million jobs have been lost to China alone since 2000. People living in areas of the country most impacted by those job losses suffer long-term unemployment and reduced income for the rest of their lives. They are understandably angry and constitute an important segment of Trump’s political base.

But, as former President Barack Obama noted in his farewell address, those jobs are gone forever—not because of globalization, but because of automation. “The next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”

Gartner, an information technology consulting firm, estimated in 2014 that by 2025, a third of current U.S. jobs will be replaced by some form of automation. Indeed, China itself has become a world leader in automation, threatening both Chinese and U.S. workers.

Trump touted United Technologies as his first victory in convincing a corporation to keep a factory in the U.S. But UT has announced plans to use automation to do the jobs it would have moved. So, in the name of saving jobs, Trump is subsidizing with tax breaks their elimination by automation.

We are seeing a flood of predictions in business media from artificial intelligence experts that jobs at risk include pharmacists, cashiers, drivers, astronauts, soldiers, babysitters, elder care workers, sports writers, and news reporters—among others. On Wall Street, the jobs of most floor traders have already been automated, and the jobs of hedge fund managers and stock market analysts may soon be on the chopping block.

These predictions suggest we face the prospect of an economy with little need for humans. As with any technology, however, artificial intelligence is not inherently good or bad. The issue is how we choose to use it and who makes the choice.

The economy is a human creation. The only reason for its existence is to support people—all people— in securing material well-being sufficient for their good health and happiness. For most people, there is no happiness without relationships, a sense of being needed by others, and opportunities to express their creativity. That most always includes some form of work. Thus, while the automation of dirty, dangerous, and boring tasks can be a blessing for humanity, the need for meaningful work remains an imperative.

Our vision of how to deal with the coming workforce disruption must be guided by our common quest to actualize the fullness of our human possibility, not by the quest for corporate profits. The primary decisions regarding how to use artificial intelligence and how to distribute the benefits must be in the hands of self-governing human communities rather than profit-maximizing corporations.

The social isolation of which Levy speaks is real—the product of economic forces that undermine the family and community relationships that for millennia sustained our species and defined our humanity. Our need to relate to one another is foundational to our humanity.

Attempting to meet that need by turning to machines that look, feel, and act like humans would be a further step toward our dehumanization. If we want our children to learn to relate to humans and if we are more comfortable being treated by human doctors—then let our primary care providers be humans aided by machines as appropriate. But let us not confuse the two. The creation of machines that look, feel, and act like humans should be prohibited. If it looks, feels, and acts like a human, it should be a human.

In our current political climate, everything is up for grabs. This is a timely moment to stretch our imaginations and envision the lives and the society we want. Let us be clear that a world in which we are distracted from our loneliness by electronic games, animated videos, and robot sex is more appropriate as a horror movie plot than as a desirable vision for society.

Let us strive for an economy in which a primary goal and responsibility of business is to make work meaningful, build relationships of internal and external community, and heal the Earth. A combination of the appropriate use of automation and of worker and community ownership would make this possible. This might be a foundational element of a positive democratic vision for a living Earth economy, around which all people of good will can enthusiastically unite.

David Korten wrote this opinion piece for YES! Magazine as part of his series of biweekly columns on “A Living Earth Economy.” David is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including When Corporations Rule the World and Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty. Follow him on Twitter @dkorten and on Facebook. As do all YES! columnists, he writes here in his personal voice.

What follows is a summary of this article, ‘A System of Food Production for Human Need, Not Corporate Greed’, and is a preamble to something that was recently forwarded to me by Emeritus Professor Stuart B. Hill, Foundation Chair of Social Ecology, School of Education, Western Sydney University.

In 2007, as part of a requested submission to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), Professor Hill submitted a very useful and concise table comparing the philosophies and practices of organic-based agriculture (including agroecology) and chemical-intensive, industrialised agriculture.

I’ve taken the time to present Prof. Hill’s work here because, although it is 10 years old, it is a valuable reminder of the differences between the two models and why the world must step off the chemical treadmill and move towards a more organic-based system of farming.

Introduction

There has been an adverse trend in the food and agriculture sector in recent times with the control of seeds and chemical inputs being consolidated through various proposed mergers. Over the past couple of decades, there has already been a restriction of choice with the squeezing out of competitors, resulting in higher costs for farmers, who are increasingly reliant on corporate seeds (and their chemical inputs).

Big agribusiness players like Monsanto rely on massive taxpayer handouts to keep their business models on track; highly profitable models that have immense social, health and environmental costs to be paid for by the public. Across the globe healthy, sustainable agriculture has been uprooted and transformed to suit the profit margins of transnational agribusiness concerns. The major players in the global agribusiness sector fuel a geo-politicised, globalised system of food production that result in numerous negative outcomes for both farmers and consumers alike (listed here: 4th paragraph from the end).

The extremely wealthy interests behind these corporations do their level best to displace or dismantle alternative models of production – whether agroecology, organic, public sector agriculture systems or anything that exists independently from them – and replace them with ones that serve their needs. Look no further than attempts attempts to undermine indigenous edible oils processing in India, for instance. Look no further than the ‘mustard seed crisis‘ in India in 1998. Or look no further than how transnational biotech helped fuel and then benefit from the destruction of Ethiopia’s traditional agrarian economy.

Whether it’s on the back of US-backed coups (Ukraine), military conflicts (Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India), transnational agribusiness is driving a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit.

Increasing profit and shareholder dividends are the bottom line. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their business model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose.

Despite the promise of the Green Revolution, hundreds of millions still go to bed hungry, food has become denutrified, functioning rural economies have been destroyed, diseases have spiked in correlation with the increase in use of pesticides and GMOs, soil has been eroded or degraded, diets are less diverse, global food security has been undermined and access to food is determined by manipulated international markets and speculation – not supply and demand.

Food and agriculture have become wedded to power structures that have created food surplus and food deficit areas and have restructured indigenous agriculture across the world and tied it to an international system of trade based on export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for a manipulated and volatile international market and indebtedness to international financial institutions.

Ultimately, the problem is centred on a system of international capitalism that is driving a globalised model of bad food and poor health and the destruction of healthy, sustainable agriculture.

Organic & Conventional Agriculture Compared by Prof. Stuart B. Hill

A new publication by The Great Transition Initiative provides an inspiring vision of a more equal, vibrant and sustainable civilisation. From STWR’s perspective, all that it lacks is a sufficient focus on the critical needs of the very poorest citizens—which could ultimately forge the global solidarity needed to bring that new world into being.

‘Journey to Earthland’ is a recently released book by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI), a worldwide network of activist scholars with a unique purpose—to advance “a vision and praxis for global transformation”. Few civil society organisations have such a broad focus on transformational strategies towards a new global social-ecological system, as condensed and overviewed in this latest publication by GTI’s director, Paul Raskin. The short and accessible book presents a majestic overview of our historic juncture and expounds the urgent need for systemic change, with a hopeful vision of a flourishing civilisation that has long inspired Share The World’s Resources (STWR) in our complementary proposals for peaceful mass civic engagement.

The phrase ‘Earthland’ adopted by Raskin relates to the Planetary Phase of civilisation that GTI conceptualise as the coming era, in which humanity embraces its increasing interdependence through a new ethos of global solidarity and a transformed political community of cooperative nations. With the first part of the book summarising the evolving phases in human history since the earliest dawn of man, the Planetary Phase is finally “born of systemic crisis”, requiring a corresponding systemic response that can shape an inclusive and sustainable future for all.

Earthland is the idealised outcome of this great transition, brought to life in the final part of the book where three archetypal regions are explored: Agoria (with its market emphasis and socialised economy, or ‘Sweden Supreme’), Ecodemia (distinguished by its economic democracy and collectivist ethos), and Arcadia (accentuating self-reliant economies and a ‘small-is-beautiful’ enthusiasm). Raskin argues that such a compelling vision of “One World, Many Places” may seem remote, but should not be dismissed out-of-hand—just as sovereign states may have once seemed an implausible dream to eighteenth-century sceptics.

Central to the book’s thesis is the question of collective action, and the need for a “vast cultural and political arising” that can bring this new world into being. The rationale for a new form of global citizens movement is made throughout the book, drawing upon much of the analysis and propositions in GTI’s canon. It is the missing actor on the world stage, an overarching systemic movement that includes all the many struggles for peace, justice and sustainability, yet remains united under a broad umbrella of common concerns and universal values. Raskin and the GTI make a convincing case that such a movement may be our only hope of avoiding a “Fortress World” or “Barberisation” future, as long as a movement for a great transition can fill the vacuum in political leadership and lay the foundations for a “post-growth material era”, and a true “global demos” or “planetary democracy”.

From an STWR perspective, the book hits all the right notes in sketching out a more equal and vibrant civilisation that exists within planetary boundaries. It envisages a new paradigm in which economies are a means for attaining social and environmental ends, not an end in themselves; in which economic equity is the prerequisite in a shift towards post-consumerist societies, while poverty elimination is “a galvanising priority”; and in which continued economic growth is equally shared both within and between regions, until Global North-South disparities have vanished.

In the imagined social dimensions of Earthland, we also find a more leisured society where everyone is guaranteed a basic income, and where the pursuit of money has given way to non-market endeavours that enable genuine “sharing economies” and the art of living to flourish. Raskin even outlines the new modes of trade and global governance for a Commonwealth of Earthland, including world bodies that marshal “solidarity funds” to needy areas, thus ensuring a truly communitarian and interdependent economy.

What’s most interesting about ‘Journey to Earthland’ is its almost spiritual exhortations for a shared planetary civilisation, often expressed in eloquent passages that variously define the need for an enlarged sense of human identity that extends beyond national boundaries. “Interdependence in the objective realm of political economy cultivates, in the subjective realm of human consciousness, an understanding of people and planet as a single community,” the author writes. Similarly, he states: “This augmented solidarity is the correlative in consciousness of the interdependence in the external world.”

The author also depicts the “three-fold way of transition” in diagrammatic form, illuminating the need for a fundamental change in human consciousness (the “ontological” and “normative” realms), as well as in the social model (or “institutional” realm). Stressing the “longing for wholeness” that distinguishes the values of a Great Transition, he also cites the origin of these universal values that remain the sine qua non of human life: “All along, the tangible political and cultural expressions of the Great Transition were rooted in a parallel transition underway in the intangible realm of the human heart.”

The real question, however, is how a global citizen’s movement can actually emerge in these socially polarised times, when even the prospect of uniting Western societies to welcome refugees is a forlorn challenge. Raskin provides a cogent theoretical perspective on how a mass movement can be galvanized, built on cultural or “normative solidarity” and a sense of “emotive unity”. Emphasis is placed on the need for proactive organising strategies, as well as an “integrated strategic and intellectual framework” that can connect the full spectrum of global issues. The times cry out, writes Raskin, for large-scale campaigns with the explicit purpose of catalysing a transformative social movement along these lines. But still we await a truly international effort of this nature to emerge, while most single-issue movements are increasingly entrenched in local or regional struggles as the trends of inequality, conflict and environmental degradation generally worsen.

This is where STWR’s advocacy position departs from the GTI, despite fundamentally agreeing with their broad analysis and vision for a consciousness shift towards a Planetary Phase of civilisation. To be sure, the greatest hope for the future rests with new solidarities being forged on the global stage, with the welfare of the collective whole being prioritised above the welfare of any one particular group, class or nation. But what does this actually mean in the present moment, when discrepancies in global living standards are so extreme that millions of people are currently at risk from dying of hunger or other poverty-related causes, while 8 billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world? Furthermore, is it realistic to expect the 4.3 billion people who subsist on less than $5-a-day to join a global citizens movement, if their basic socioeconomic rights are not at the forefront of any such planetary endeavour?

From this immediate perspective of a starkly divided world, the answer for how to catalyse a united voice of engaged citizens may be unexpected in the end. For perhaps what’s missing from most Western-led campaigning initiatives and protest actions is not the right intellectual strategy, but a sufficient focus on the hardships and suffering experienced by the very poorest citizens within the world population. Perhaps the spark that will initiate an unprecedented demonstration of global unity is not to be found in the human mind at all, but in the simple attributes of the human heart—as Raskin himself appears to intuitively recognise. He writes: “As connectivity globalizes in the external world, so might empathy globalise in the human heart.” The question that remains is: how can that collective empathy be initially catalysed, and on what basis—given the fact that tens of thousands of neglected citizens are needlessly dying each day without sufficient help from governments or the public-at-large?

This is the starting point for STWR’s understanding of how to unify citizens of the richest and poorest nations on a common platform, based on the awareness of an international humanitarian emergency that our mainstream Western culture tends to largely ignore. Hence our proposal for enormous, continuous and truly global demonstrations that call upon the United Nations to guarantee Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—for adequate food, housing, healthcare and social security for all—until governments finally commit to an emergency redistribution programme in line with the Brandt Commission proposals in 1980.

As STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi has explicated in a different kind of political treatise titled ‘Heralding Article 25: A people’s strategy for world transformation’, such unprecedented protests across the world may be the last chance we have of influencing governments to redistribute resources and restructure the global economy. It may also be the only hope for initiating a global citizen’s movement, bringing together millions of people for a shared planetary cause—and ultimately paving the way for all the social, economic and political transformations that are inspiringly promoted by the GTI.

Further resources:

www.greattransition.org

Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization, by Paul Raskin

Reflections on Journey to Earthland by diverse global thinkers, November 2016

The Widening Circle: Campaign for Advancing a Global Citizens Movement

Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, by Paul Raskin et al, April 2002

Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources (STWR), www.sharing.org

The plight of immigrant families in the United States facing threat of deportation has provoked a massive compassionate response, with cities, churches, and colleges offering sanctuary and legal assistance to those under threat. It is an inspiring expression of our human response to others in need that evokes hope for the human future. At the same time, we need to take a deeper look at the source of the growing refugee crisis.

There is nothing new or exceptional about human migration. The earliest humans ventured out from Africa to populate the Earth. Jews migrated out of Egypt to escape oppression. The Irish migrated to the United States to escape the potato famine. Migrants in our time range from university graduates looking for career advancement in wealthy global corporations to those fleeing for their lives from armed conflicts in the Middle East or drug wars in Mexico and Central America. It is a complex and confusing picture.

There is one piece that stands out: A growing number of desperate people are fleeing violence and starvation.

I recall an apocryphal story of a man standing beside a river. Suddenly he notices a baby struggling in the downstream current. He immediately jumps into the river to rescue it. No sooner has he deposited the baby on the shore, than he sees another. The babies come faster and faster. He is so busy rescuing them that he fails to look upstream to see who is throwing them in.

According to a 2015 UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) report, 65.3 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution in 2015, the most since the aftermath of World War II. It is the highest percentage of the total world population since UNHCR began collecting data on displaced persons in 1951.

Of those currently displaced outside their countries of origin, Syrians make up the largest number, at 4.9 million. According to observers, this results from a combination of war funded by foreign governments and drought brought on by human-induced climate change. The relative importance of conflict and drought is unknown, because there is no official international category for environmental refugees.

The world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees.

Without a category for environmental refugees, we have no official estimate of their numbers, but leading scientists tell us the numbers are large and expected to grow rapidly in coming years. Senior military officers warn that food and water scarcity and extreme weather are accelerating instability in the Middle East and Africa and “could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.” Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, former military advisor to the president of Bangladesh and now chair of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change, notes that a one-meter sea level rise would flood 20 percent of his country and displace more than 30 million people.

Already, the warming of coastal waters due to accelerating climate change is driving a massive die-off of the world’s coral reefs, a major source of the world’s food supply. The World Wildlife Federation estimates the die-off threatens the livelihoods of a billion people who depend on fish for food and income. These same reefs protect coastal areas from storms and flooding. Their loss will add to the devastation of sea level rise.

All of these trends point to the tragic reality that the world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees that we must look upstream to resolve.

This all relates back to another ominous statistic. As a species, humans consume at a rate of 1.6 Earths. Yet we have only one Earth. As we poison our water supplies and render our lands infertile, ever larger areas of Earth’s surface become uninhabitable. And as people compete for the remaining resources, the social fabric disintegrates, and people turn against one another in violence.

The basic rules of nature present us with an epic species choice. We can learn to heal our Earth and shift the structures of society to assure that Earth remains healthy and everyone has access to a decent livelihood. Or we can watch the intensifying competition for Earth’s shrinking habitable spaces play out in a paroxysm of violence and suffering.

David Korten wrote this opinion piece for YES! Magazine as part of his series of biweekly columns on “A Living Earth Economy.” David is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including When Corporations Rule the World and Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty. Follow him on Twitter @dkorten and on Facebook. As do all YES! columnists, he writes here in his personal voice.

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

“The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence.”

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning,What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

What is “value” and how shall we protect it?  It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer.

For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple:  value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value:  price.  That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.”

This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same. 

Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”).  These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.”

My colleagues and I wondered if it would be possible to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value.  Could we develop a theory that might have the same resonance that the labor theory of value had in Marx’s time?

Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place.  Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist.  Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets.

So we were wondering:  If modern political/economic conceptions of value are deficient, then what alternative theories of value might we propose? In cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and anthropologist David Graeber, who has a keen interest in these themes, we brought together about 20 key thinkers and activists for a Deep Dive workshop in September 2016 to explore this very question.  So much seems to hinge upon how we define value.

I am pleased to say that an account of those workshop deliberations is now available as a report, Re-imagining Value:  Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (pdf download). The 49-page report (plus appendices) explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things – and therefore what kind of political agendas we pursue.

Here is the Contents page from the report:

Introduction

I.  THE VALUE QUESTION 

A.  Why “Value” Lies at the Heart of Politics

B.  Should We Even Use the Word “Value”?

II.  TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF VALUE

III.  KEY CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A NEW THEORY OF VALUE 

A.  Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

B.  How Shall We Value “Nature”?

C.  Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

IV.  COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING VALUE?                       

A.  Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

B.  The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

C.  But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

V.  NOTES TOWARD A COMMONS THEORY OF VALUE 

CONCLUSION 

Appendix A:  Participants

Appendix B:  A Commons Theory of Value

Appendix C:  Readings for Value Deep Dive

Below, some excerpts from the report:

The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives.  Especially since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of “rational” free markets as a fair system for allocating material wealth has become something of a joke in some quarters.  Similarly, the idea of government serving as an honest broker dedicated to meeting people’s basic needs, assuring fairness, providing ecological stewardship and advancing the public interest, is also in tatters.

“We cannot do without a value regime,” said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.  “Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.”  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value-creating – a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system.

Bauwens said that his work in fostering peer production communities is an exploratory project in creating a new type of “value sovereignty” based on mutualism and caring.  An important aspect of this work is protecting the respective community’s value sovereignty through defensive accommodations with the market system.  “The peer production system lives a dichotomy,” explained Bauwens.  “It is based on contributions for which we don’t get paid.  We therefore have to interact with the market so that we can earn a living and get paid for what we have to do.”  Maintaining a peer community within a hostile capitalist order requires that the community “create membranes to capture value from the dominant system, but then to filter it and use it in different ways” – i.e., through collective decisionmaking and social solidarity, not through the market logic of money-based, individual exchange.

…. One participant, Ina Praetorius, a postpatriarchal thinker, author and theologian based in Switzerland, asked a provocative question:  “Do we need to use the word ‘value’ at all?”  She explained that as an ethicist she does not find the word useful.  “Value is not part of my vocabulary since writing my 2005 book, Acting Out of Abundance [in German, Handeln aus der Fülle].  It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  Praetorius believes the word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Praetorius is also suspicious of “value” as a word associated with the German philosophical tradition of idealism, which she regards as “an unreliable authority because of its strange methodological origins” – “Western bourgeois men of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, who created an invisible sphere of abstract concepts meant to denote certain qualities, as a means to forget their own belonging to nature and their own basic needs, especially towards women.”

But ecophilosopher Aetzel Griffioen, based in The Netherlands, regards the word “value” as “a necessary abstraction that can be used in some places and not in others.”  In his dealing with a labor union of domestic workers, for example, Griffioen considers the word too philosophical and abstract to use.  However, “for commoners trying to tackle what so-called economists call ‘value-creation,’ it is a practical necessity to use the word in trying to create commons based on their own values.”

Again, the value/values dichotomy cropped up.  Economics claims the word “value” for itself while everyone else, in their private and social lives, may have their own personal “values.”  This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome.  Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience.  This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.”  For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term.  Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle.

Towards a Relational Theory of Value

The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems.  It purports to precisely quantify and calculate “value” into a single plane of commensurable, tradeable units, as mediated by price.

Through discussion, workshop participants set forth a rough alternative theory of value based on a radically different ontology.  This theory sees value arising from relationships.  Value does not inhere in objects; it emerges through a process as living entities – whether human beings or the flora and fauna of ecosystems – interact with each other.  In this sense, value is not fixed and static, but something that emerges naturally as living entities interact.

“In a commons, value is an event,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group.  “It is something that needs to be enacted again and again.”  The difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, said Helfrich.

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, this idea aligns with Marx’s thinking.  While some observers say that a Marxist theory of value ascribes value to things, Dyer-Witheford disagreed, noting that “Marx condemned the idea of value inhering in objects as commodity fetishism.  He believed in a relational theory of value – the relations between workers and owners – even if Marx may not have considered the full range of social relationships involved in the production of commodities.”….

Everyone agreed that a relational theory of value has great appeal and far-reaching implications.  It means that the “labor” of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded, said Neera Singh, the geographer.  Indeed, this is a point made in a John Holloway essay on Marx’s ideas about “wealth”:  the nonhuman world produces such an excess of wealth that it overflows what capitalism can capture in the commodity form, said Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University.  “This of course leads to the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place.  It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

The report deals with a wide variety of other issues related to the “value question”:  Can abstract metrics help build a new value regime?  How shall we value “nature”?  Should we attempt to de-monetize everyday life?  The report also includes a major discussion of commons-based peer production as a fundamental shift in understanding value.  This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems such as those used by Sensorica, and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

While workshop participants did not come up with a new grand theory of value, they did develop many promising lines of inquiry for doing so.  Each prepared a short statement that attempted to identify essential elements for a commons theory of value.  (See Appendix B in the report.)  We hope that the record of the workshop’s discussions will help stimulate further discussion on the question of value – and perhaps bring forth some compelling new theories.

David Bollier is an author, activist and independent scholar of the commons. He is Co-Founder of the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting project that works to promote the commons internationally. He was Founding Editor of Onthecommons.org and a Fellow of On the Commons from 2004 to 2010. His books include Viral Spiral, Brand Name Bullies, Silent Theft, Wealth of the Commons (co-edited with Silke Helfrich), and Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (New Society Publishers) 2014. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Originally published by David Bollier blog

Almost a full decade since first applying for a presidential permit, TransCanada looks set to finally receive go-ahead in the U.S. for its massive $8-billion Keystone XL pipeline.

But here’s the thing: U.S. approval, while a great leap forward for TransCanada, doesn’t guarantee the Keystone XL pipeline will ever be built.

New U.S. President Donald Trump was elected with the explicit promise to get the 830,000 barrel per day pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska built, under the conditions that the U.S. would receive a “big, big chunk of the profits, or even ownership rights” and it would be built with American steel; his administration has already flip-flopped on the latter pledge.

On January 24, 2017, Trump signed an executive order, inviting TransCanada to reapply for a presidential permit, which the company did two days later. It’s now in the hands of the State Department, which has to issue a verdict by the end of March.

Sounds like a slam dunk, right? Not so fast. Here are three key reasons why.

1) Economics

Even Enbridge CEO Al Monaco recently stated that Canada only needs two more export pipelines.

“If you look at the supply profile and you look at our expansion replacement capacity for Line 3 and one other pipeline, that should suffice based on the current supply outlook, out to at least mid-next decade,” Monaco said on a fourth quarter earnings call last week.

Wood Mackenzie analyst Mark Oberstoetter seconded that: “There’s not an evident need to get three or four pipelines built.”

Add to that the rapidly declining long-term prospects in the oilsands.

Those include Exxon’s writing off of 3.5 billion barrels in bitumen reserves, ConocoPhillips’ cutting of 1.2 billion barrels in reserves and Shell’s forecasting of global peak oil demand in 2021.

Just last week, Shell sold off almost all of its oilsands assets to Canadian Natural Resources Limited. This follows divestitures by Statoil and Total SA in recent years.

“There will be no more greenfield projects if the price of oil stays at what it is,” says David Hughes, expert on unconventional fuels and former scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada.

Hughes adds that Western Canadian Select already sells at a discount of around $15/barrel due to transportation and quality discounts.

Pipeline companies thrive on long-term contracts with producers, with lower rates for longer terms (such as 10 or 20 years).

Such contracts are huge financial gambles, especially given uncertainty about oil prices. In a low oil price scenario, oilsands take a hit because of the high cost of production.

“The economic case is not there for the three pipelines,” says Amin Asadollahi, lead on climate change mitigation for North America at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “And should the massive expansion happen, I don’t think the financial benefits for the sector … would be there.”

2) Landowners

We’ve already seen what lawsuits and protests can do to proposed oil pipelines, including crippling Enbridge’s Northern Gateway and seriously delaying Energy Transfer Partner’s Dakota Access Pipeline.

Same goes for Keystone XL. Lawsuits have plagued the company for years. In 2015, over 100 Nebraska landowners sued TransCanada over the proposed use of eminent domain; the company eventually withdrew from the case and its plans for eminent domain, but it appears such conflicts will reignite with the federal approval. Landowners have already started to meet to plot out how to resist the pipeline.

TransCanada requires a permit from Nebraska in order to proceed. Last week, two-thirds of Nebraska’s senators signed a letter petitioning the state’s Public Service Commission to okay the proposed route; the original route was altered in April 2012 due to public opposition.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Canada, says: “They’ll probably get the federal approval, but state-level and other legal challenges will go ahead to try to stop it.”

Adam Scott of Oil Change International notes that he expects a lot of resistance to the Keystone project on the ground in Nebraska, especially given that the project still doesn’t have a legal route through the state.

There’s also growing resistance from Indigenous people, especially in the wake of Standing Rock. Thousands of Indigenous people recently gathered in Washington, D.C. for a four-day protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In 2014, the Cowboy Indian Alliance united potentially affected farmers and Indigenous people to protest against the Keystone XL project. The recently signed continent-wide Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion specifically identified Keystone XL as a proposed pipeline to be stopped.

3) Environment and climate

Then there’s the fight north of the border over greenhouse gas emissions and climate obligations.

The Canadian government’s approvals of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain and Enbridge’s Line 3 added a bit over one million barrels per day in potential capacity to the oilsands network.

Unless there are significant breakthroughs in technology to cut per-barrel emissions, those two pipelines alone will allow for oilsands production and associated greenhouse gases to hit Alberta’s 100 megatonne (Mt) cap; Stewart says companies have been talking about the possibility of emissions-cutting technologies such as solvents since 2007, but they still haven’t materialized in a commercial setting.

Unconventional fuels expert David Hughes has calculated that if the 100 Mt cap is reached and a single LNG export terminal is built, Canada will need to cut non-oil and gas emissions by 47 per cent cut in order to meet the 2030 target, which will be impossible “barring an economic collapse.”

Adding an additional 830,000 bpd of export potential via the Keystone XL — allowing for the kind of expansion hoped for by the National Energy Board and Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers — could result in the breaching of Alberta’s emissions cap and the country’s climate targets.

Stewart points to Chevron’s recent submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which acknowledged the increasing likelihood of climate-related litigation as a related sign of looming danger for companies.

It’s a rapidly growing trend. Climate-based litigations are grounding fossil fuel projects around the world. A lawsuit based on constitutional rights to a healthy environment filed on behalf of 21 children during the Obama administration threatens to bring a similar precedent to the U.S.

“We’re actually looking at a variety of ways to put pressure — including possible legal challenges — on companies that are basing their business model on the failure of the Paris Agreement,” Stewart says. “If you’re telling your investors, ‘We’ll make money because the world will not act on climate change’ are you actually engaging politically to try to produce that outcome? Are you lobbying against climate policy?’ ”

Education is a basic human right and all education should be free for all. However the commodification and corporatizing of higher education has meant that free university education presently only obtains in about 25 countries, and the young are brainwashed into acceptance of fee-charging  higher education. The present ruling generations should grant free university education to the young who are inheriting a dying planet. Below are 50 reasons why we must have free university education now.

1. Education is a fundamental human right. Learning has been crucial in the evolution of the behaviour of man (Homo sapiens) whether through selection of genes (DNA) or of  memes  (socially selected ideas and behaviours). Education underpins science-based personal and societal changes to maximize personal and societal health, happiness, dignity and opportunity as espoused by social humanists  (democratic socialists, socialists, ecosocialists) , and accordingly all education should be free, whether pre-school (kindergarten), primary education (elementary school),  secondary education  (high school), tertiary education (university, technical training) or life-long learning. Indeed all education can and should be free.  Education is regarded as a basic human right, which is why all developed countries make basic primary and secondary education free (although Educational Apartheid in some countries  determines differential access to good quality education  depending upon parental wealth, race or home location) [1-7].

Article 26 of the Universal  Declaration of Human Rights states: “(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” [2].

Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states in part: “1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular: (a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;  (b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need;  (c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means;  (d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children” [3].

2. All education, including higher education,  can and should be free for all. Article 26 of the Universal  Declaration of Human Rights demands free education for children and states that : “Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit” [2]. Article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child demands free education for children and that “higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means”. Once literacy,  numeracy and access to libraries (conventional or on-line) are established, there should be no impediment to all education being free for all. Unfortunately class-, race- , ideology- and wealth-based greed has intervened to pervert and deny the fundamental demand that “All education can and should be free for all.” As outlined below, higher education can be very low cost and hence can be free.

3. Society needs experts but why should impoverished young pay for them? All societies and nations need to have a complement of expert scholars and scientists for variety of economic, health, national security  and national prestige reasons. However,  one must ask why impoverished, circa 20 year old undergraduate students barely out of childhood  should have to pay for this  complement of experts that disproportionately and  immediately  benefits the society-dominating, mature adult population  and the richer and older citizens in particular. I started 4 decades of teaching at an  Australian university in 1972.  The reformist  Australian Labor Government led by Gough Whitlam abolished university fees in 1974 but  was removed in a CIA-backed Coup in 1975. Fees were re-introduced in 1989 by the pro-US, neoliberal Hawke Labor Government, but with the sop of a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) enabling students to repay their education debt in small instalments when able to do so through suitably rewarded future employment [8]. Students were brainwashed into accepting the HECS system and I used to ask HECS-supportive students “You are so nice being willing to pay for the university system . Why don’t you also pay for the health system and defence as well?” The present endlessly mendacious,  reactionary, pro-One Percenter, neoliberal and ultra-conservative Australian Coalition Government would like to see university fees rise (the average HECS debt is currently about A$20,000) but the Labor Opposition fulminates against  the prospect of “one hundred thousand dollar degrees”. The decent and humane Australian Greens want to abolish university fees as did Democrat socialist Bernie Sanders and as do the American Greens and the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

4. Universal free education and minimizing preventable death. Education correlates with increased life expectancy. Thus on a global comparative scale, avoidable deaths (avoidable mortality, excess death, excess mortality,  untimely deaths) is the difference between actual deaths in a country and deaths expected for a  peaceful country with the same demographics (birth rate and age distribution) [9]. High literacy correlates with low avoidable death and avoidable mortality is almost zero in these prosperous, high literacy countries of Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), Western Europe, North America, and East Asia. However zero avoidable mortality on this global comparative basis also occurs in the poor but high literacy countries of Cuba and China, despite these countries having annual per capita GDP values of only about $7,000 as compared to $53,000 for Australia [10].

However, within prosperous Western countries having zero avoidable deaths annually on this global comparative basis one can determine that there are numerous preventable deaths from all kinds of notionally preventable causes ranging from adverse hospital events, smoking, and obesity to guns, suicide and homicide. Thus in rich Australia, rich Canada, the rich UK and  rich America, annual preventable  deaths total about 85,000, 100,000, 150,000 , and 1.7 million, respectively, as assessed on this “rich country comparative” basis [11-15]. Professor Sir Michael Marmot, president of the World Medical Association and director of the UK Institute of Health Equity, gave a series of ABC Boyer Lectures addressing the relationship between morbidity, mortality and social deprivation and stated “The link between deprivation of social conditions, ill health and crime is all too obvious in Australia” [16].  Thus there is a circa 11 year life expectancy gap between the impoverished and relatively poorly educated Indigenous  Australian population and White Australians. Indeed on a global comparative scale the avoidable Indigenous Australian death rate as a percentage of population per year is 0.6%  as compared to 0.4% pa for impoverished South Asia and 1.0% for impoverished sub-Saharan Africa but occurring in one of the world’s richest countries (per capita GDP $53,000 per head per year) i.e. about 4,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably from deprivation every year as compared to zero (0) White Australians  on this comparative basis   [9, 17]. Education decreases untimely deaths and dishonestly charging people for educating themselves is an obscenity that contributes to preventable death within societies. A major argument for university fees is cost recovery for service provision but this argument is not applied to cost recovery for life-saving medical services in countries  like Australia, Canada and the UK with substantial, taxpayer-funded  universal health care.

5. Charging fees for life-time social advantage from education suggests fees for life-time advantages from rich parents, beauty, intelligence, ethnicity etc. A further major argument for charging university education fees is that university graduates have a life-time advantage of higher income due to their education. This argument is beginning to lose traction as a Law degree becomes the new Bachelor of Arts degree  in Australia, and as plumbers and electricians prosper without a university degree. However applying a huge life-time  debt burden on university graduates (and university drop-outs) for this arguable advantage suggests that such life-time taxation could be equitably applied to people with the  life-time advantages of  rich parents, beauty, intelligence, or ethnicity. Thus, for example, in America it really pays big-time to be White rather than Black – 27.4 percent of African Americans are  living in poverty; there is a $34,598 median income for African Americans versus $55, 257 for Whites; 15.9% of African Americans lack health insurance  versus 12.8%  of Whites; $75,040 average home value for Black Americans versus $217,150 for Whites;   $154,285 average household assets for Black Americans versus $783,224 for Whites; 2 times higher unemployment rate for African Americans than for Whites since 1963; and African Americans are 8 times more likely to murder and 6 times more likely to be murdered than Whites [18].
6. Obscenity of taxing learning while subsidizing physical, sexual and intellectual child abuse. In Trumpist Australia an estimated circa $30 billion per year (equivalent to the defence budget) continues to be given in tax breaks and schooling grants to religious organizations despite an ongoing $500 million Royal Commission  finding massive child sexual abuse by members of religious and government organizations. However the charter for this judicial  investigation excludes a vastly wider sexual abuse burden in which it is estimated that 4.4 million adults in  Australia (population 24 million)  have been sexually abused as children. In America 25% of females and 10% of males have experienced childhood sexual abuse as compared to 34% of females and 16% of males having experienced  child sexual abuse in Australia. The Australian Institute of Criminology and other experts have determined that in Australia 1 in 3 females and 1 in 6 males will be sexually abused as children [19]. Despite the supposed separation of church and state in the US , Trump America wants to go the Trumpist Australian way and subsidize home and religion-based mal-education of children. Australia has an Educational Apartheid system in which the 2 out of 3 children who attend poorly-funded state schools are disproportionately  excluded from a good education, access to university, access to top universities and access to top professional courses such as Law and Medicine. However the privileged 1 in 3 of children attending state-subsidized,  religion-based private schools  are  subject to the intellectual child abuse of being brainwashed into variously accepting anti-science religious claptrap, miracles, virgin birth, transubstantiation, creationism, intelligent design, misogyny, homophobia, exceptionalism, sexism, sexual guilt and the genocidal racism of the asserted  right to invade,  occupy, devastate and ethnically  cleanse other countries [20].

7. Obscenity of taxing learning means students are paying for war, deadly corporate greed, and climate criminality. The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries  (the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) charge students huge fees for university education while committing trillions of dollars to the cost of  war, corporate tax evasion and terracidal climate crimes. Thus the US War on Terror (actually a genocidal US War on Muslims) has been associated with a long-term accrual cost of $6 trillion just for  the Iraq War and Afghan War and 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries  invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [21, 22]. Rapacious capitalism means that millions of American workers live as the “working poor” in dire poverty and 1.7 million Americans die preventably each year [15].  The rich US Alliance Anglosphere countries are among the world leaders in income-weighted annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution [23]. Students’ university fees are inextricably part of the wealth pool paying for deadly war, deadly corporate greed, and deadly climate criminality.

8. Free education can help minimize existential nuclear, poverty and climate threats. The 3 key, existential   threats to humanity are nuclear weapons (that could wipe out all of Humanity), poverty (that presently kills 17 million people annually) and man-made climate change (that unaddressed could wipe out all but 0.5 billion of Humanity [9, 24, 25]. The informed young and future generations will have to solve these problems and free university education will accordingly help Humanity find the solutions.

9. Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference achieved a consensus that a  maximum temperature rise limit  relative to 1900 of 1.5 degrees Centigrade ( 1.5C) was  most desirable and that a universally-agreed catastrophic plus 2C must be avoided. However the world got to +1.2C in 2016, +1.5C will now be reached in 4-10 years, and a catastrophic +2C temperature rise is now effectively unavoidable [26-28]. Presently about 7.5 million people die avoidably (prematurely) each year due to carbon fuel burning and climate change – from the consequent  deadly effects of carbon burning pollutants (7.0 million) or of climate change (0.5 million).  This latter estimate of presently about 0.5 million climate change-related deaths annually may be an under-estimate  because  presently 17 million  people die avoidably (prematurely) each year (half of them children) due to poverty and deprivation in the Developing World (minus China), with these impoverished, tropical or sub-tropical Developing countries already being severely impacted by global warming [9].  The direst estimates are that the death toll due to climate change could rise to 100 million such deaths per year this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed [25].

The young and future generations have a daunting task of achieving a required draw-down of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) back to the pre-Industrial Revolution level of circa 300 parts per million (300 ppm CO2)  from the present damaging and dangerous record level of  405 ppm CO2 that is increasing at a record level of 3 ppm CO2 per year [29-31]. The  inescapable obligation that has been imposed on future generations can be described as an inescapable Carbon Debt – while conventional debt can be evaded by default, bankruptcy or printing money, Carbon Debt is inescapable because, for example, sea walls will have to be built or coastal cites will flood and highly productive  deltaic lands will be flooded and salinized. Dr. James Hansen and his NASA colleagues recently stated (2015): “There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m [metres], and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today”  [32]. The  total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent [33], this corresponds to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually [34]. One notes that science-trained, Green-Left Pope Francis (controversial as a defender of the unwanted unborn) demanded in his 2015  Encyclical  Letter “Laudato si” that the environmental  and human cost of deadly greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution be “fully borne” by the polluters (i.e. by a Carbon Price or Carbon Tax that are desperately resisted by the presently dominant neoliberal climate criminal governments) [35].

Dr. James Hansen: “If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty”   [36 ] – yet pro-fossil fuels neoliberal,  climate change denier, climate criminal and war criminal  Trump has already signed an executive order allowing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Canada to Texas (“game over for the climate” according to Dr Hansen). Free University Education is the least we can offer as we bequeath the young a dying planet that may well be doomed.

10. Reading-based free education, and Nobel Laureate Patrick White on reading and the life of the mind. A crucial element  of free, off-campus university education (and indeed of higher  education in general) is reading the prescribed books and texts. I am reminded of one of the last speeches of Australian Literature Nobel Laureate Patrick White at the time (1988) of the Australian bicentennial anniversary celebrations of British invasion in 1788. Patrick White declared (in my recollection): “They are flogging camels from East to West and West to East and running from City to Surf and Surf to City. Why don’t they just stay home, cook themselves a nice meal, and curl up with a good book”.

11. Democracy requires informed voters but why should young have to pay to join? Western democracies have been perverted into Kleptocracies, Plutocracies, Lobbyocracies, Corporatocracies and Dollarocracies in which Big Money purchases people, parties, policies, public perception of reality, more political power and more private profit. Only an informed and resolute public can resist this corporate perversion of democracy. If anything, democratic societies interested in the survival of genuine democracy should be paying the young to educate themselves rather than dishonestly imposing a huge financial penalty on education. .

12. Social humanism demands dignity and opportunity for all but why charge the young for their birthright? The world is presently dominated by a greed-driven neoliberal ideology that demands maximal freedom for the smart and advantaged to exploit the natural and human resources of the world for private profit. This perverse ideology already kills 17 million people annually and, unrestrained,  is set to destroy most of Humanity and the Biosphere [26-28, 32, 36].  A humane alternative to the neoliberal perversion is social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, ecosocialism, the welfare state, Green-Left sustainability) which aims to sustainably maximize the happiness, opportunity and dignity of everyone by evolving interpersonal, intra-national and international social contracts [37, 38].  Sustainably maximized happiness, opportunity and dignity surely constitute a birthright of all young people which is achieved by education and hard work. This birthright  should not be constrained or removed by discouraging or exclusionary financial penalties.  .
13. 25 variously rich and poor countries already have free university education. Many countries, both rich and poor,  have  made tertiary education free for their citizens (and in some cases also for non-citizens) , the list including (GDP per capita  in US dollars in brackets; UN data, 2014-2015): Argentina ($12,645) , Barbados ($15,429), Brazil ($11,387), Chile ($14,528), China ($7,617), Cuba ($7,274), Czech Republic ($19,470), Denmark ($61,294), Ecuador ($6,346), Estonia ($20,122), Finland ($49,678), France ($42, 802), Germany ($47,966), Greece ($21,414), Iceland ($52,048),  Libya ($6,602), Malta ($23,281), Mauritius ($9,945), Norway ($97,226),  Scotland ($24,060), Slovenia ($23,954), Sweden ($58,856), Trinidad and Tobago ($20,452), Turkey ($9,126) and Uruguay ($15,574) but not the Anglosphere countries of Australia ($62,290), Canada ($50,169), Ireland ($53,648), New Zealand ($44,189), UK ($46,461) and the US ($54,306) [1, 39, 40].

In addition, Nigeria ($3,203), university education is free for Science, Education & Technology students [41]. Some further  countries provide university education that is very cheap from a Western perspective, namely Austria ($44,118), Belgium ($40,278), India ($1,614),  Italy ($30,426), Mexico ($8,981), Spain ($25,865), and Taiwan ($22,263) In some further countries free university education is available based on means or ability e.g.  Canada ($43,206; means-based free places in Ontario) and Russia ( $9,243; competition-based free places) [42].

14. Free or trivial cost of accrediting existing linguistic, technical and other skills.  The US Alliance Anglosphere countries were  founded  on genocidal invasion and subsequent immigration. Postwar migration to the US, Australia and Canada brought many skilled people to new lives. Unfortunately in many cases their prior medical,  legal, engineering  or other qualifications  were denied formal  accreditation. However non-professional linguistic, technical and other skills were also denied formal accreditation. Thus a fluent Italian speaking brick layer with a deep love and knowledge of Italian culture, literature, art, music and history would  receive no formal accreditation for his proficiency, but a young person  attending a top, fee-charging university could part with $100,000 to achieve accreditation for  proficiency  approaching that of the uncredentialled  Italian worker. Implicit in the notion of free university education is fair  accreditation of existing linguistic, technical and other skills.

15. Tertiary education provision is vastly cheaper off-campus than on-campus. Once the need for a complement of expert scholars, scientists and other experts is separated from the need for education (see point #3 above), one can readily see that tertiary education provision can be vastly cheaper off-campus than on-campus. Thus off-campus university education can be essentially free by simply involving reading and addressing teaching materials,  with qualifications established by expert accrediting examination. In contrast, full-time, fee paying on-campus involves huge loss of income, huge support costs and huge fees. Indeed fee-demanding off-campus, on-line education dishonestly  ignores the reality that off-campus university education can be essentially free (see #16 below).

16. On-campus educators charge for on-line courses that can and should be free and accessible to everyone. Universities put their copyrighted lecture notes and other teaching materials on the web for the convenience of full fee-paying students. However such material should be available to everyone for free in the public interest, the more so when the university teachers are taxpayer-supported. All those running lecture-based  courses in state-subsidized universities should  be required to place lectures notes, a book/chapter/page-based syllabus, simple answers to model exam questions  and other teaching materials on the web for free access for all,  and provide minimum cost  accrediting examinations that anyone can sit for free or for a modest, real cost-based fee.

17. Criminal rip-off – university fees can charge 100 times the actual cost of provision. Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 10% of the current cost using part-time academic teaching staff (e.g. from other institutions, industry or from early retirement). Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 1% of the current cost  simply through provision by experts from public or private universities of minimum-cost, accrediting examination of  student understanding  of the top quality courses  (Massive Open Online Courses,  MOOCs) put on the web for free by top universities like 157-Nobel-Laureate Harvard and 85-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The present 10-100-fold cost mark-up of accreditable, tertiary educational material is criminal exploitation when one considers typical retail mark-ups of only circa 5%.

18. Criminality in collusive 10-100-fold over-charging by universities. The present 10-100-fold mark-up of accreditable, tertiary education courses is criminal exploitation when one considers typical  retail mark-ups of circa 5%. Universities are engaging in collusive 10-100-fold over-charging that should attract criminal prosecution by regulatory agencies e.g. the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in Australia (by way of example, the late billionaire Richard Pratt and his companies were fined a record $36 million for colluding in a price fixing deal with their chief rival in Australia’s cardboard industry).

19. All that students should conceivably pay for is the tiny cost of expert accrediting examinations. All the teaching materials (books, chapters, documents, syllabuses) from all   tertiary education courses involving universities or technical training should be put on the web for free access for everyone. All that students should conceivably pay for is the tiny cost of expert accrediting examinations.

20. Free accrediting examination of top Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from top universities. Current on-campus undergraduate education can be provided at 1% of the current cost  simply through provision by experts from public or private universities of minimum-cost, accrediting examination of  student understanding  of the top quality Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) put on the web for free by top universities like 157-Nobel-Laureate Harvard University and 85-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). How absurd that universities and colleges lacking Nobel Laureates or failing to measure up to Harvard or MIT in this respect, should be so precious in guarding the written materials of their vastly less well-credentialled courses.

21. Reading for degrees via Reading Only Tertiary Education (ROTE). For centuries students at the top UK universities of Oxford and Cambridge (institutions presently having 65 and 90 Nobel Prizes, respectively) would “read” their degrees e.g. go up to Oxford to “read philosophy”.  Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) or Reading Only Tertiary Education (paradoxical acronym ROTE) permit a student to study all the free course material off-campus and then submit themselves for accrediting examination for a miniscule, cost-recovery fee [6, 7, 43-45 ].  Numerous Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) or Distance Learning (DL) systems exist around the world [44].

22. Reductio ad absurdum re educated workers denied accreditation. Not only does the corporatized, money-making tertiary education  system  deny free university education to students when the teaching and learning involved can actually be done at very little cost,  it also refuses to grant accreditation to proficiencies in trade, technical and scholarly areas. A morally bankrupt profit motive in fee-charging universities and other fee-charging tertiary education bodies over-rides any possibility of decent accreditation of technical or scholarly proficiencies.

23. Reductio ad absurdum re the mobility challenged. Wealthy societies such as those of the Anglosphere variously go to great lengths to assist the mobility challenged e.g. with aides,  ramps and lifts. However, when it comes to university education, Anglosphere universities  reject the free university education of Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) that is ideal for the mobility challenged, but rather insists on the immense burden of daily physical attendance and charge the earth for the insult.

24. Reductio ad absurdum re the geographically isolated. Rural farmers and workers who are forced to live and work in relatively remote areas are excluded from expensive, fee-charging on-campus university education. They can access on-line off-campus higher education but are charged a fortune for what can and should be provided for free at very little cost to the provider. .

25. Reductio ad absurdum re denial of free university education to child-carers. Maternal child care is a vital occupation and a significant interruption to female earning and professional advance. However free university education based on Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) could actually turn the interruption due to maternal child care into an opportunity for further accredited learning and accomplishment. The on-campus, full-fee-charging, profiteering system allows for million dollar salaries to university bureaucrats (grossly overpaid refugees from scholarship) to the exclusion of readily achievable free university education for our iconic caring mothers (for huge 21st century  icons to Mother and Child see my Madonna series of paintings [46]).

26. Reductio ad absurdum re workers. Universities began as religion-based centres of “knowledge as power” and evolved into poor- and women-excluding bastions of social privilege, women only finally making it to some American and British universities in the 19th century.  The on-campus, full-fee-charging, profiteering university system significantly retains un-stated elements of academics as lackey mendicants, rich versus poor, and gentlemen versus workers. Free university education would smash the continuing reality of universities as  bastions of obscene social privilege. Presently in One Percenter-dominated America the notion of a “living wage” has long gone out of the window and has been replaced by the large-scale  reality of the barely surviving and utterly impoverished  “working poor” who, lucky to be employed at less than $10 per hour, have barely enough time to sleep [47].

27. Reductio ad absurdum re the poor. Free and accredited life-long university or technical education is fundamental to the social humanist (socialist) credo of maximizing happiness, opportunity and dignity for everyone. Free university education is anathema to the neoliberal One Percenters because it has the potential to destroy the lying by omission of the present “knowledge is power” system.

28. Reductio ad absurdum re overseas students. In my experience (nearly 60 years variously associated with Australian universities) many overseas students studying at Anglosphere universities have good reading comprehension of English but have difficulty with spoken English, especially when regional accents are involved (e.g. broad Australian accents). For such students the textbooks, printed lecture notes and other printed teaching materials are vital. Science practical work aside (for which there are all kinds of free alternatives),  such students are effectively doing  Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) but are charged full fees for what can and should be  provided for free. Charging full fees to overseas students for what can be readily provided for free represents a massive rip-off and massive dishonesty on the part of countries like Australia that have turned such dishonesty into a multi-billion-dollar  “education export industry”.

29. Reductio ad absurdum re the blind. Decent people are solicitous to the blind. Australia’s celebrated socialist writer Frank Hardy (author of “Power Without Glory”, a novel formerly banned in Australia) excoriated the callous and mean-spirited as “people who wouldn’t show their blind grandmother the way to the dunny [toilet]”. Yet societal insistence on the present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system excludes the blind in all kinds of obvious  ways (attendance and access difficulties, can’t see the power point display, can’t see the blackboard or whiteboard etc) . In contrast, free Accredited Remote Learning(ARL)  is ideal and empowering for the blind.

30. Reductio ad absurdum re the  deaf. The present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system excludes  the deaf just as it excludes overseas students with poor aural comprehension of English (see #28 above). Free, Reading Only Tertiary Education (ROTE) and free Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) are ideal for deaf students.

31. Reductio ad absurdum re rich student paying huge amounts to acquire the same skills as a non-accredited poor worker. University students (who on average come from wealthier families) are able to pay for accredited proficiencies that will enhance future earning capacity, if only as “accredited gentlemen” or ” “accredited gentlewomen” . However there is no accrediting of the existing proficiencies of ordinary workers. Thus, for example, a rich young student can pay scores of thousands of dollars for accreditation from a top university for Spanish 101, 201, 301 and 401, whereas a fluent Spanish speaking worker immersed in Spanish culture is excluded from any such accreditation.

32. Charging fees for off-campus on-line education is dishonest charging for what can and should be free.  On-line education is provided by many universities as a convenient option for students with full-time jobs but this involves 2 absurdities (dishonesties), specifically  (a) accrediting examination of the understanding of written material should be essentially  free , and (b) much full-fee on-campus education is effectively off-campus because  most “formally on-campus” students simply download the lecture  notes etc and don’t bother attending on-campus lectures (of course, overseas students could simply download in Asia and attend accrediting examinations at a local venue).

33. Societies pay for empowering the handicapped yet charge the philosophically or informationally handicapped young. Being philosophically or informationally deprived is a severe handicap but unfortunately  a severe handicap that is  not properly addressed by societies with fee-charging universities and technical training tertiary institutions. In contrast, decent societies quite properly spend billions on addressing what to many would be far less important disabilities. Indeed this dichotomy is recognized in prosperous  societies such as those of the Anglosphere that properly  provide very expensive nursing home care for people with confusion or dementia  while the cognitively unimpaired can continue to live happily at home despite severe physical handicaps.

34. Professor Stephen Hawking and the life of the mind despite physical handicap. The absurdity, dishonesty and inequity of the present fee-charging, attendance-based, on-campus university education system provides huge physical and financial barriers to intellectual liberation of the  physically handicapped and then obscenely charges the earth for the imposition. Yet transfer of facts, ideas, aesthetics and methodologies is readily achievable notwithstanding  massive physical handicaps and should indeed be free for all.   This is no better illustrated than by Professor Stephen Hawking, brilliant British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author of the immensely popular “A Brief History of Time” and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, UK. Yet this brilliant,  motorised wheel-chair-confined scientist suffers from an early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that began to manifest itself when he was about 20. Free university education simply involves free information transfer with consequent intellectual transformation that can be ultimately accredited by expert examination at trivial cost (indeed the trivial cost of expert accreditation should surely be waived as a reward for hard work and commitment to intellectual advance).

35. Societies hugely subsidize sport and games but enforce huge fees for learning. As most obviously evidenced at the Olympic Games, societies spend huge amounts of money on sport mostly children’s games) and the higher the degree of physical attainment, the larger the financial investment. However in the pro-One Percenter, neoliberalism-dominated Anglosphere free university education is resolutely abjured – the students must pay for perceived fee-for-service  despite the readily demonstrable reality that the so-called service can and should be provided for free. Conversely, sporting attainment is consonant with the neoliberal paradigm of individual attainment and demands generous societal subsidy, with huge payments for TV rights providing  a further  key utilitarian argument for such subsidy.

36. Mainstream non-discussion of free university education (except for the Socialists and Greens) is massive lying by omission. The ostensible surrender of political power to the masses in the 19th to 20th centuries  was too easy – the powerful effectively retained power through huge, democracy-perverting wealth and control of public perception of reality by lying Mainstream journalist, politician and academic presstittutes. Mainstream media censorship and Mainstream media lying typically involve false propaganda [48, 49]. .Lying by omission is worse than lying by commission because at least the latter permits refutation and public debate [50]. Thus John Pilger (outstanding expatriate Australian UK writer and journalist) reviewing “The First Casualty” by Phillip Knightley (2003): “When I read the first edition of this remarkable book twenty-five years ago, I was struck by the following quotations. During the First World War, Prime Minister David Lloyd George told C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know” [49] [about 1 million British died due to WW1, 90% being military casualties]. John Pilger crucially quotes Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko: “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie” [50]. Similarly, during WW2 the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in the 1942-1945 Bengali Holocaust (Bengal Famine)  but this atrocity that was bigger than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead from violence or deprivation) has been overwhelmingly deleted from British historiography and hence from public perception [51, 52]. Similarly deleted from public perception is that in post-1950 US Asian Wars from Korea to the Yemen have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or deprivation [9]. Ignored by Mainstream media, in the 21st century there have so far been 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries  invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [21, 22], although the UN has recently reported in alarm that 20 million of  people are now threatened by famine in a death zone including  some of these countries. The American Greens want free college education but only gained 1% of the vote in the 2016 US presidential elections. The Australian Greens want free university education but only have 10% electoral support. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants free university education but is opposed by most of the parliamentary Labour Party. Free university education is essentially off the table in the Anglosphere as far as public discussion  is concerned.

37. Free university education empowerment of the disadvantaged threatens neoliberal exploitation of the disadvantaged. Free university education cuts through Mainstream journalist, politician and academic censorship and thus can empower the disadvantaged and threaten the neoliberal One Percenter-dominated capitalist system. Free university education potentially opens the floodgates against One Percenter control of information and hence of Anglosphere societies.

38. Empowerment of refugees. There are 60 million refugees in the world today with about half being Muslim refugees generated in conflicts involving the US and Apartheid Israel. Accredited free university education and free technical education  can at least provide something useful for free that can benefit these desperate people who, while forced from their native land,  can at least still live free in the “kingdom of the mind”.

39. Commodification of higher education endangers academic freedom. An insidious aspect of the commodification of higher education has been corporatizing of institutions, the corporate “branding” of universities, and university control over what academics can say.  A “foot in the door” form of censorship is the institutional  demand that academics restrict public comment to their narrow discipline, but this immediately establishes a threat leading to self-censorship. Academic censorship and self-censorship is now entrenched in Anglosphere universities [45, 53] leading to appalling situations in which, for example, a very famous anti-racist  Jewish American scholar, Professor Norman Finkelstein,  was forced out of  De Paul University because of his objection to Apartheid Israeli human rights abuses [54] and the UK government recently sought, with some success,  administration censorship of views critical of Israeli Apartheid at  UK universities [55]. The universities-backed web magazine The Conversation – backed and/or funded by about 20 universities – has an appalling record of censoring and blocking academic opinion [56]. The Australia-United States  Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty-related Defence Trade Controls  Bill makes it an offence punishable by 10 years in prison for an academic without a permit to inform non-Australians  (in conversation, tutorials, lectures, conference papers, scientific papers etc) about numerous  technologies and thousands of chemicals and organisms  listed in a presently 353-page Defence and Strategic Goods List [57].

40. Commodification of higher education and corporatizing of institutions means misleading and exploiting  students. Bureaucratic bean counters have taken over fee-charging universities and this is appallingly apparent in Australian universities as set out in some recently published critiques [58-63]. Thus the book cover of Dr Richard Hil’s “Whackademia” puts the problem succinctly: “Despite the shiny rhetoric of excellence, quality,  innovation and creativity, universities face criticism over declining standards, decreased funding, compromised assessment, overburdened academics and never-ending reviews and restructures” [58].
41. Commodification of higher education subverts truth and rational risk management. Commodification of education and corporatizing of universities has led to institutional “branding” (akin to the “branding” of cars or soft drinks) and consequent corporate-style codes of conduct restricting truth-telling [64],  this involving censorship and self-censorship that is anathema to serious scholars. [53].  Rational risk management, that is crucial for societal safety, successively involves (a) accurate data, (b) scientific analysis, this involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses, and (c) informed systemic change to minimize risk. Unfortunately,  this rational risk management protocol is typically perverted at the individual,  family or local level,  or at the level of the family of nations by (a) lying, self-deception, spin, obfuscation, intimidation and censorship, (b) anti-science spin, this involving the selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position, and (c) blame and shame that is counterproductive because  it blocks reportage crucial for rational risk management and in the worst cases leads to war [65].
42. Commodification of higher education helps subvert democracy. Democracy depends upon (a) an informed electorate and (b) an entrenched social empathy to prevent “takeover” by the rich. Commodification of higher education   (a) subverts the truth that is vital for democracy, and (b) reinforces wealth-based class division (the rich can readily afford to pay for higher education but the poor are crippled with a higher  education debt for life).

43. Commodification of higher education entrenches commercial propaganda and lying. As an Australian scholar I never cease to be amazed at second-class Australian universities that are barely known of within Australia claiming to be top universities on the world stage. However, lying by omission is far, far worse than lying by commission because the latter at least admits the possibilities of reasoned  refutation  and public debate. Further, history is written by the victors and is typically written by mendicant academics or by brainwashed university graduates. Thus for example, White Australia has a particularly horrible history of invasion, dispossession and mass murder that is largely ignored by Mainstream media, politician and academics, an obscene and racist  tradition of academic lying by omission that derives from entrenched British  academic lying over genocidal British colonialism [51]. Thus Australia has invaded 85 countries with 30 of these invasions involving genocide but these atrocities have been overwhelmingly ignored by Australian academic historians [9, 11, 51,  67-69]  e.g. the ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (2 million Aboriginal deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or deprivation, 1.9 million, since 1788 and  a continuing Aboriginal Ethnocide involving 150 languages or dialects  surviving from an original 350-750 and all but 20 endangered) [17],  the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately  starved to death by the British in 1942-1945 while Australia sat on its huge wartime wheat stores) [51, 52, 69], the ongoing Muslim Genocide (32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million,  in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity) [21, 22],  the worsening Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust in impoverished countries (17 million avoidable deaths from deprivation annually on Spaceship Earth with the obscenely rich in charge of the flight deck) [9],  and egregiously climate criminal Australia’s disproportionate involvement in the worsening Climate Genocide (7.5 million annual  deaths from air pollution, 7 million, or climate change, 0.5 million, with 10 billion set to die this century in the absence of requisite action on man-made climate change) [23, 25].

44. Commodification of higher education entrenches argument by money and wealthy authority. Commodification of universities means that money-making utility trumps pure scholarship. Thousands of idealist academics who thought academic life was about critically pursuing  truth and beauty have been dumped in favour of utilitarianism. University presidents on million dollar salaries chase full fee-paying students and corporate research funds and it is these grossly over-paid refugees from scholarship  and their political and corporate associates , rather than the now largely silenced academic experts, who are the mouthpieces of academia and expertise. “Money talks” finds obscene expression today in the election of anti-science, climate change denying billionaire Donald Trump as president of the US. In his first formal Budget proposal Trump has taken an axe to federal funding of research from world-leading US biomedical research to critical and world-leading US climate change research [70].

45. Charging an entrance fee at 18 – why not at birth? The fee-charging Anglosphere countries have applied a huge entrance fee for adulthood on young people turning 18 and entering into university and technical tertiary education. However neoliberal Trumpists could well consider applying  such massive debt at birth so that all but the children of the rich would become indentured labourers for life. Indeed one reads of children in India who are enslaved for life because their parents are indebted to landlords and land owners.  The next step for obscene neoliberalism would be a debt scheme to pay for pre-school, elementary school and high school education.

46. Re-introduction and/or elevation of university fees in Australia and elsewhere was a  selfish betrayal  by those now  in power who are rich or had free university education. It has been gross hypocrisy for Anglosphere politicians who had free university education or whose parents were wealthy (and hence for whom money was no impediment to university education) to impose fees or elevate fees for university education on subsequent generations. Naïve reason might  suppose that these callous hypocrites would be punished at the ballot box  but reality is otherwise in the Anglosphere corporatocracies. Thus Democrat socialist Bernie Sanders argued for free university education but was ditched as a presidential candidate by the manipulated Democrats in favour of pro-One Percenter war criminal Hillary Clinton. The anti-racist Jewish American Greens presidential candidate, Dr Jill Stein, stood for free college education but received only 1% of the vote. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants free university education but is opposed by most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In Australia, the Greens demand free university education but only secure about 10% of the vote. Young people only have themselves to blame if they permit the present rip-off to continue.

47. Corporatized learning reinforces One Percenter dominance. A corporatized, utilitarian  learning environment seduces students to a misplaced pragmatism that accepts the obscene neoliberal One Percenter dominance as a fundamental economic given like the prevalence of drunkenness, drug-taking, dishonesty, sexism, racism and child abuse in Anglosphere societies. However prevalence and present dominance doesn’t make it right or good. The young must revolt and demand not only cessation of university fees but also abolition of all higher education and technical training debt. Such debt relief is hardly revolutionary in the neoliberal scheme of things that permits massive wealth transfer to the politically dominant  One Percenters through government agreement to massive subsidies,  massive tax reductions and massive tax evasion loopholes for the rich.

48. Huge university fees and Carbon Debt cripple students for life. It is now widely believed that the Baby Boomers born in the 1940s and possibly their children may be the last Anglosphere generations to be better off than their parents. In Australia even young professional couples now find home ownership an impossible dream in Sydney. In America the working poor can spend most of their paltry income on minimal housing rental. This is compounded by the imposition of huge tuition debt in the Anglosphere. However the real killer for the young is inescapable Carbon Debt. The damage-related cost of carbon pollution has been estimated by Dr Chris Hope (the Judge Business School of 90-Nobel-Laureate Cambridge University) at about $200 per tonne of CO2-equivalent (greenhouse gas pollution measured in terms of equivalently global warming  masses of carbon dioxide).  It can be readily estimated from historical greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution data that the total Carbon Debt of the world from 1751-2016 is about 1,850 billion tonnes CO2 (1.85 trillion tonnes CO2) and, assuming a damage-related Carbon Price of $200 per tonne CO2-equivalent,   this corresponds  to a Carbon Debt of $370 trillion, similar to the total wealth of the world and 4.5 times the world’s total annual GDP. The world’s GHG pollution is increasing at a recently re-calculated 64 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent per year i.e. the Carbon Debt in increasing at $12.8 trillion each year or at about one-sixth of world GDP annually. Unlike conventional  debt that can be simply wiped out by default, bankruptcy or printing money, this horrendous Carbon Debt for future generations  is inescapable – future generations will have to act or die. Thus climate criminal Australia has a Carbon Debt (in US dollars) of $7.5 trillion that is increasing at $400 billion per year and at $40,000 per head per year for under-30 year old Australians, this Carbon Debt dwarfing the average Australian lifetime university tuition debt of circa $20,000 [34].

49. Good memes overcoming bad genes,  bad memes and fee-based education. Man’s behaviour has evolved through selection of favourable genes (altered by mutation of DNA) that hard-wire reproduction-enhancing behaviour, and through societal selection of favourable memes (or ideas and behaviours) that also favour reproduction and survival of offspring [71]. Some of these evolved behaviours are contradictory. Thus greedy behaviour has been selected and has led to the dominance of the One Percenters who now own half the wealth of the world. However neoliberal greed is opposed by the meme of “love thy neighbour” from the wonderful Palestinian  humanitarian Jesus. While the Ninety Nine Percent presently outnumber the One Percenters 99-fold, the worsening Climate Genocide may result in only 0.5 billion people surviving, and these survivors will be comprised of the more prosperous of Humanity [25]. As sentient creatures, humans  can overcome bad genes and bad memes including  user-pays, fee-charging higher education. The meme of educating the young as a fundamental and altruistic obligation will overcome the greed meme.

50. A new and decent social contract – socially-enriching  humanism versus terracidal neoliberalism. The presently dominant neoliberal ideology demands maximal freedom for the smart and advantaged to exploit the natural and human resources of the world for private profit. This perverse ideology already kills 17 million people annually and, unrestrained, is set to destroy most of Humanity and the Biosphere as a blindly speciescidal, ecocidal, omnicidal and terracidal ideology [32, 36].  A humane alternative to the neoliberal perversion is social humanism (socialism, democratic socialism, ecosocialism, the welfare state, Green-Left sustainability) which aims to sustainably maximize the happiness, opportunity and dignity of everyone by evolving interpersonal, intra-national and international social contracts [37, 38]. It is natural for a mother  to teach skills to her children and it would be absurd and obscene for mothers to hand a cost-recovery bill to their children when the kids turn 18.  All education can and should be free and that includes free university education, free tertiary technical training and free life-long learning

Conclusions.

With the world now facing the inevitability of catastrophic global warming beyond a plus 2 degrees Centigrade temperature rise,  the least our present ruling generations can do to the young (and unborn) that they  have betrayed is to grant them free university education to empower them to help make the future “less bad”. Young people (born and unborn) face the daunting task of reversing several centuries of profligacy  and returning the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to a safe and sustainable circa 300 parts per million (ppm) CO2 (300 ppm CO2) from the present damaging,  dangerous and coral-killing 405 ppm CO2 that is increasing  at a record 3 ppm CO2 per year [30, 31].

We need a climate revolution now [72], and if the young cannot even secure free university education using the above arguments, what hope is there for a world needing a return to 300 ppm CO2 ASAP? The American Greens and the Australian Greens demand free university education and young people who are serious about saving what remains of their world must utterly reject the mendacious, endlessly greedy, speciescidal, ecocidal, omnicidal and terracidal neoliberal scum who have egregiously betrayed them, support the Greens and the  like-minded Green-Left folk, socialists and ecocsocialists, and insist on free university education now that predicates by example, and will assist  in substance, an informed climate revolution now.

The massive downsizing of academic staff in recent decades in the name of institutional profitability could notionally work to the benefit of free university education. It would be nice to see free Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) instituted globally,  backed by the intellectual and professional  credentials of existing, downsized or otherwise  retired academics.

In American activist Michael Moore’s recent  movie “Where to invade next”, Moore invades 9 countries to steal their ideas in order to “make America great again”. In Slovenia Moore discovers that university education is free and that when the government proposed university fees, massive  student protests stopped it and the government fell [73, 74]. Young people have the numbers and the energy, if not the money, and should be unstoppable globally in their demand for free university education.

Will we experience a Methane (CH4) Hydrate Feedback Loop that will place us on a repeat path like that of the Permian Triassic mass extinction? Or, to our horror, will there be some other self-induced something even more horrific and impossible to reverse?

“Biosphere” is a term used to define the relatively thin layer of the earth’s surface that can support life. It extends down to the deepest layers of soils and ocean trenches and up to the highest levels of the earth’s atmosphere. Change in the biosphere generally operates on “slow,” that is in multiples of many hundreds or thousands or even millions of years. But change can also operate on “fast.” The Permian Triassic mass extinction 252 million years ago and the Cretaceous extinction 66 million years ago are two examples of relatively rapid change. The Cretaceous came from a meteorite and the Permian Triassic came from high global temperatures triggering a Methane (CH4) Hydrate Feedback Loop. Both were accompanied by atmospheric change so extreme as to extinguish a very large percentage of planetary life. When such atmospheric change does occur, those species that inhabit precisely bounded biologic niches are the first to be affected. They die out. Then others follow. We are now in our Modern Age seeing the first signs of this due to our industrial civilization adding CO2 to the atmosphere. One result of this, climate change, is becoming a major threat to food production in areas of the planet. There are however many other changes. A recent one has been the die off of the Australian Great Barrier Reef. All of this has raised a wide range of scientific questions as to the continuance of our own species on the planet. We know that we are today totally dependent upon certain temperature and biochemical parameters within the earth’s biosphere as these parameters were developed over the past several million years.

We know that in a metaphorical sense we live in a cocoon. It allows our lives to take form and to develop biologically. We are born in that cocoon and then a short period afterward we die in that cocoon. As with all other life on the planet, while in our cocoon we are biologically dependent on our own evolutionarily constructed and unique “precisely bounded biologic niche.” We also know that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution our cocoon has been under attack and that there is no slowdown in sight. We also know that there is an awareness of this among many. Yet, we see no universal social, political or economic consensus as to a corrective course. So the following life or death question is now facing us: Will we experience a Methane (CH4) Hydrate Feedback Loop that will place us on a repeat path like that of the Permian Triassic mass extinction? Or, to our horror, will there be some other self-induced something even more horrific and impossible to reverse?

XXXXX

SOURCES

Arctic News June 10, 2014 “There are such massive methane reserves below the Arctic Ocean floor, that they represent around 100 times the amount that is required to cause a Permian style major extinction event, should the subsea Arctic methane be released in a short period of time into the atmosphere….The energy necessary to produce these Arctic methane release rates is relatively small; it requires only about one thousandth of the heat energy input from the Gulf Stream to dissociate the methane hydrates.”

A 2012 World Bank report stated that without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to increase by 4 degrees Centigrade (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above today’s normal during the 21^st century and that is dangerously close to the temperature of 6 degrees Centigrade above normal that initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago when 96%* of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates were wiped out. *(current estimate 81%)

Many scientists are now telling us that temperatures far in excess of the 4 C degrees figure are predicted to occur due to a runaway increase in CH4 as a result an Arctic methane feedback loop. That methane hydrate feedback loop will begin to “kick in” after a 2 C degrees (3.6 F degrees) increase. Our civilization is approaching that 2 C degrees figure. Global temperatures will then rise rapidly. During the Permian extinction; after 6 C degrees temperatures were reached, the ocean surface waters at their extreme eventually reached more than 40 degrees Celsius. (104 degrees Fahrenheit) That led to near total planetary life extinction.

Our problem today is that Massive methane reserves below the Arctic Ocean floor and Arctic land areas represent around 100 times the amount required to cause another Permian style major extinction event. These large quantities of Methane Hydrates are now trapped in a frozen state. As temperatures are rising from CO2 emissions, darkened land mass is being exposed to the sun, and as ice is melting and oceans are exposed, the waters are warming.

David Anderson brings together a wide range of interests in his writings, namely; theology, history, evolutionary anthropology, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics.

He has published three books. A fourth is near completion. It is about the necessary geo political, social, religious, economic paradigm shift needed for human survival.

The 21^st century global politics is fraught with conflicts, deaths and destruction of human lives, indifference to the vital problem of global warming and climate change and leadership failure to resolve the issues via peaceful dialogue. Those claiming to be the leaders of the elected masses, discard people’s voices of reason and accountability. Most leaders act in disconnect to the Nature of Things in which we breath and enjoin life – all fragmented by design or by the emerging crises,the so called leaders have failed to bridge the gaps of moral and intellectual decadence and human predictability. The reason being that global politics is not about the humanity’s mirror of the Nature reflecting ethical or spiritual bonds which are common across the global mankind, and therefore, humanity views the deliberate division as formidable blocks stalling its ideas and ideals for global change, progress and unity of the mankind. One of the major deficient appears to be the missing Reality of global consciousness as seen and observed by the citizenry of the humanity. The global affairs are led by mediocre leaders lacking rational vision and thinking for the unity of mankind but focused on egoistic ambitions of power and politics to dominate societies and people of the globe by means of lies, deceptions, militarization and political hegemonic control over others.

How to find a rational culture of holistic thinking encompassing peaceful dialogue and co-existence in global affairs? The response to this vital question has great deal to do with the thinking, role and policy behaviors of the contemporary political leaders holding positions of power and influence in making the global politics. In this evolutionary conjecture, individualistic thinking and animosity play significant part to determine the leadership attributes and competitive role-play. There are no visible characteristics of moral and intellectual traits which govern the global political affairs. Do most of the powerful leaders possess formidable mental microscope to scan the experiential observations for making favorable policies and practices in international affairs?  Leadership effectiveness must embody ethical values and learning aptitude to relate to the voices of the people. At times, you may find many morally and intellectually abhorrent people assuming leadership role to invite hollow laughters frompolitical opponents.  This is the forbidden reality of the 21^st century political world in which we try to cherish civic values, honesty and moral accountability from elected leaders. Today, in a Washington congressional hearing,the FBI Director and the NSA Chief denied President Trump’s claim that President Obama wiretapped his movements during the elections. But Mr. Trump and his press secretary continues to insist that it did happen. Could President Trump be using a strategy of distraction to divert attention from other critical issues facing his hurriedly done executive orders?  The critical lens has another angle that many European, Russian and others are concerned about what unscheduled political developments are taking shape and form in America with immense implications for global economic and political affairs. Comparatively, American politics is geared towards blame game on Russia for alleged election interference – the issue is disputed and still under scrutiny by the US agencies.  Often, it is convenient to blame others for your own errors of thinking, intellectual weaknesses and vocal judgment when facts fail to support the end-game.  The US political media accuses Russia of cyber incursion and interference in the presidential election system. This is a challenging new scenario in US-Russia relations. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin denied Moscow’s alleged meddling in the US election. Under Obama , all the IMF financial commitments to Russian projects were stopped.The wishful political metaphor is not the outcome of the history, ideology, knowledge or mythology but specific ideas aimed at degeneration of the civilized world. The masked agenda unfolds motives, phobias, fears and prejudices towards each other political culture and human values. Most often such framework ushers dereliction, unknown fear, and transfers chaos and uncertainty as new normal in global relations. You will imagine that all elected politicians are mature and accountable in their thoughts and behaviors. Not so, as you could analyze the recent war torn stories of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and many others, how they victimized the mankind.

The West and Russia on a Collision Course

Formal foreign policies and practices are not abrupt but highly thoughtful course of actions often with available alternatives and deliberate pauses for reactionary behavior. The Russian stance on Ukraine and its overwhelming powerful cultural-political relations with the eastern broken parts of Ukraine are point of great anxiety and political reaction across the Western hemisphere. NATO is search of new animosities has worsened the geo-politics of the region. Russia is under economic embargo by the EU and America. Who suffered most, not Russia but the farmers and agricultural exports of Italy, Spain, Portugal and perhaps Greece? The EU-US economic embargo against Russia did not seem to work to change the status-quo of problematic situations in eastern Ukraine to anybody’s favor. What if all the leaders were at one table and some intellectual like Immanuel Kant would have told them that all of you are immature and emotionally unbalanced to use economic embargo as a reactionary remedy when it really hurts the common masses, not the political elite making the decisions on vital issues. What if you will prefer a leadership dialogue on equal terms while sitting face to face – without agreeing or disagreeing, just listening to each other’s contentious claims? Listen fellows, your claims and counter-claims do not open-up the wonderlands of any plausible futuristic probabilities of peace and human understanding. There is tension between your ego and authority to face the facts of human life. You desperately need an intellectual and leadership advisory from an impartial scholar of global affairs. You are engaged in penalizing the humanity in a useless game, wasting time and opportunities for change and new thinking to cope with wrongful human policies and practices. All of you appear to be on a wrong path of moral and intellectual pursuits. Your individuality and sense of belligerency is the cause of troubles that you seem to cherish the form and forgot the essence of collegiality and human excellence in bridging the invisible gaps by human communication.None of you will ever win-win but lose-lose in all humanitarian corridors of accountability. Likewise, none of the superpowers havecapacity to strike peace or resolve political issues at a global scale. It is clearly demonstrable from their behaviors at the UN Security Council. What did Europeans achieve in the scourge of the Two World Wars except killings several millions of innocent people on all the fronts. The Earth and environmental devastations have not fully recovered from the wrongful human belligerency of the Two WW.  Are you forging a Third World War as another option against the humanity? If so, it will leave nothing in tact except inhumanity of the human follies. There are inborn illusions and intellectual contrasts still governing the world politics. Sochi Winter Olympics had not started yet, but the Western political media campaigns were in progress to zero-in on insults against President Putin and mental reservation against the functionality of successful Sochi games. None of the prominent Western leaders went to see the Sochi games. Then Russian engagements in Ukraine were the center piece of political rebuttal. What if all these issues were part of an agenda for face to face continuous dialogue for political resolution in Ukraine and the Middle East? In all earnest, many such problems could have been resolved without much bloodshed, be it Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and /or NATO military exercises or Russian inroads into Ukraine.

Late Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr- Nobel Address, December 11, 1964   (“The Quest for Peace and Justice”) tried to put the same essence of his message into a rational context:

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. …. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

Global Leaders to Rethink about a Navigational Change

America and its politics envisage a global outlook and influential power.  Its leadership is in desperate need of change and realignment to the global perspectives of Human Reality for a sustainable future.  The 9/11 attacks on America have transformed the country into a disjointed incrementalism, not knowing how to cope with challenges of the future. John W. Whitehead (“The Tyranny of 9/11-The Building Blocks of the American Police State from A-Z” www. Rutherford.com: 9/06/2016), is an American Attorney in Constitutional Law and Human rights and President of Rutherford Institute. He points out that “These past 15 years have indeed been an unbearable, choking hell…..The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.This is not freedom. This is a jail cell….Since the towers fell on 9/11, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process….In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, underwear bombers and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the true enemy to freedom was lurking among us all the while.

If time and history are a reference point, we the global humanity stand at a critical juncture of our own complicity to have allowed ignorance, hatred, fear, failure and animosity to destroy our life, culture and existence. How should we think of making a navigational change?  The informed global humanity no longer believes in the usefulness of international institutions, classic leadership of the few, economic advancement for the 99% of the masses in democracies or in the sufficiency of redistributive social programs, equality, law and justice? How can global institutions, people-oriented and accountable system of governance, responsible leadership and result-oriented policies and practices be reconstructed to suit the progressive goals of the 21^st century mankind?  Global humanity looks for rational attitudes and realistic rethinking to deal with sensitive issues of humanitarian concerns. While Europeans and the US have imposed economic embargo and cultural boycott of Russia, it has no meaningful impact except evolution of more discards and animosity when human communication is deliberately neglected. The similar problems of imbued animosity and hatred persist across the Middle East.  Foreign interventions and killing machines are destroying the ancient lands of human culture and civilizations. To destroy the Arab people, they are collaborating in military interventions. Wars suck out positive human thinking and creative energies to articulate a sustainable human future. Arab leaders are entangled willfully in catastrophic and bloody sectarian warfare. They have consciously put on hold the focal issue of the Middle East -that is, Palestine and normalization of relations with the State of Israel. They appear to have lost the sense of strategic and moral direction to restore normalcy in thinking and policy behavior. Leaders of America, Europe and Russia need to rethink, how they could facilitate a peaceful ending of the sectarian cruelty rather than taking sides and bombing the innocent civilians and causing destruction of the human habitats.  How should the global humanity view the contemporary Arab societies, their war-torn bloody cultures operated by foreign mercenaries and few egoistic authoritarian leaders?  Every day is a killing day in Syria, Iraq, Egypt,Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. What kind of message of civility, moral and intellectual values do they convey to the watchful eyes of the global observers?  Leadership is an art, it can be improved if leaders are open to listening, flexible and adaptable to the challenging facts of human affairs and have passion for facts, not fantasy. The informed and spirited global humanity could help the entrenched leaders to make a navigational change for global peace and One Humanity.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international relations-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Germany, May, 2012). His next publication is entitled: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution

In the weeks since the election of President Donald J. Trump, sales of George Orwell’s “1984” have skyrocketed. But so have those of a lesser-known title, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” by a German Jewish political theorist named Hannah Arendt.

“The Origins of Totalitarianism” discusses the rise of the totalitarian movements of Nazism and Stalinism to power in the 20th century. Arendt explained that such movements depended on the unconditional loyalty of the masses of “slumbering majorities,” who felt dissatisfied and abandoned by a system they perceived to be “fraudulent” and corrupt. These masses sprang to the support of a leader who made them feel they had a place in the world by belonging to a movement.

I am a scholar of political theory and have written books and scholarly essays on Arendt’s work. Published more than 50 years ago, Arendt’s insights into the development of totalitarianism seem especially relevant to discussions of

Who was Hannah Arendt?

Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906 into a secular Jewish household. She began studying the classics and Christian theology, before turning to philosophy. Subsequent developments made her turn her attention to her Jewish identity and political responses to it.

It began in the mid-1920s, when the nascent Nazi Party started spreading its anti-Semitic ideology at mass rallies. Following the arson attack on the Reichstag (the German Parliament), on Feb. 27, 1933, the Nazis blamed the Communists for plotting against the German government. A day later, the German president declared a state of emergency. The regime, in short order, deprived citizens of basic rights and subjected them to preventive detention. After Nazi parliamentary victories a week later, the Nazis consolidated power, passing legislation allowing Hitler to rule by decree.

Within months, Germany’s free press was destroyed.

Arendt felt she could no longer be a bystander. In a 1964 interview for German television, she said,

“Belonging to Judaism had become my own problem and my own problem was political.”

Leaving Germany a few months later, Arendt settled in France. Being Jewish, deprived of her German citizenship, she became stateless – an experience that shaped her thinking.

She remained safe in France for a few years. But when France declared war on Germany in September 1939, the French government began ordering refugees to internment camps. In May 1940, a month before Germany defeated France and occupied the country, Arendt was arrested as an “enemy alien” and sent to a concentration camp in Gurs, near the Spanish border, from which she escaped. Assisted by American journalist Varian Fry’s International Rescue Committee, Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, immigrated to the United States in 1941.

Soon after arriving in America, Arendt published a series of essays on Jewish politics in the German-Jewish newspaper “Aufbau,” now collected in The Jewish Writings. While writing these essays she learned of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. In a mood she described as “reckless optimism and reckless despair,” Arendt turned her attention back to the analysis of anti-Semitism, the subject of a long essay (“Antisemitism”) she’d written in France in the late 1930s. The basic arguments from that essay found their way into her magnum opus, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Why ‘Origins’ matters now

Many of the factors that Arendt associated with the rise of totalitarianism have been cited to explain Trump’s ascendancy to power.

In “Origins,” for example, some key conditions that Arendt connected with the emergence of totalitarianism were increasing xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism, and hostility toward elites and mainstream political parties. Along with these, she cited an intensified alienation of the “masses” from government coupled with the willingness of alarming numbers of people to abandon facts or to escape from reality into fiction.” Additionally, she noted an exponential increase in the number of refugees and stateless peoples, whose rights nation-states were unable to guarantee.

Some scholars, such as political theorist Jeffrey Isaacs, have noted “Origins” might serve as a warning about where America is heading.

Although that might be true, I argue there is an equally important lesson to be drawn – about the importance of thinking and acting in the present.

Why people’s voices and actions matter

Arendt rejected a “cause and effect” view of history. She argued that what happened in Germany was not inevitable; it could have been avoided. Perhaps most controversially, Arendt claimed the creation of the death camps was not the predictable outcome of “eternal anti-Semitism” but an unprecedented “event that should never have been allowed to happen.”

The Holocaust resulted neither from a confluence of circumstances beyond human control nor from history’s inexorable march. It happened because ordinary people failed to stop it.

Arendt wrote against the idea that the rise of Nazism was the predictable outcome of the economic downturn following Germany’s defeat in World War I. She understood totalitarianism to be the “crystallization” of elements of anti-Semitism, racism and conquest present in European thought as early as the 18th century. She argued that the disintegration of the nation-state system following World War I had exacerbated these conditions.

In other words, Arendt argued these “elements” were brought into an explosive relationship through the actions of leaders of the Nazi movement combined with the active support of followers and the inactions of many others.

The redrawing of European states’ political boundaries after World War I meant a great number of people became stateless refugees. Post-war peace treaties, known as minority treaties, created “laws of exception” or separate sets of rights for those who were not “nationals” of the new states in which they now resided. These treaties, Arendt argued, eroded principles of a common humanity, transforming the state or government from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.”

Yet, Arendt warned, it would be a mistake to conclude that every outburst of anti-Semitism or racism or imperialism indicated the emergence of a “totalitarian” regime. Those conditions alone were not sufficient to lead to totalitarianism. But inaction in the face of them added a dangerous element into the mix.

Not submitting quietly

I argue that “Origins” engages readers in thinking about the past with an eye toward an uncharted future.

Arendt worried that totalitarian solutions could outlive the demise of past totalitarian regimes. She urged her readers to recognize that leaders’ manipulation of fears of refugees combined with social isolation, loneliness, rapid technological change and economic anxieties could provide ripe conditions for the acceptance of “us-against-them” ideologies. These could result in ethically compromised consequences.

In my view, “Origins” offers both a warning and an implicit call to resistance. In today’s context, Arendt would invite her readers to question what is being presented as reality. When President Trump and his advisers claim dangerous immigrants are “pouring” into the country, or stealing Americans’ jobs, are they silencing dissent or distracting us from the truth?

“Origins” wasn’t intended to be a formulaic blueprint for how totalitarian rulers emerge or what actions they take. It was a plea for attentive, thoughtful civil disobedience to emerging authoritarian rule.

What makes “Origins” so salient today is Arendt’s recognition that comprehending totalitarianism’s possible recurrence means neither denying the burden events have placed on us, nor submitting quietly to the order of the day.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Kathleen B. Jones is Professor Emerita of Women's Studies, emphasis on politics, San Diego State University.

The following excerpt is adapted from The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters, by Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther, copyright 2017. Reprinted by permission of Wharton Digital Press.

Among the many possible negative consequences of climate change, sea level rise is the least controversial. Since reliable records began in the 1800s, sea levels have been steadily rising worldwide, something that poses an obvious risk to the trillions of dollars in real estate that now sit at our coastlines. Yet, sea level rise is also a deceptively subtle hazard. While sea levels are indeed steadily rising, that rise is at such a slow rate, about three millimeters a year, that it would likely go unnoticed by all but the sharpest of eyes. The Miami and New York City waterfronts today, for example, look pretty much the same as they did a century ago. Ships still land at the same ports, waterfront parks are as reliably dry today as they were in the past. 

Yet there are strong indications that this is about to change. The consensus among climate scientists is that we are soon approaching an irreversible “tipping point” in the rate of sea level rise, such that by the turn of the next century, sea levels may be three feet (or more) higher than they are today. Such an increase would not just require the relocation of vast numbers of people and infrastructure currently adjacent to the coast, but also create a wide range of spillover effects, including amplification of the effects of storm surges and, in the case of South Florida, seawater intrusion into the local fresh groundwater supply. 

While this threat is a very real one, the good news is that we have plenty of time, at least in principle, to prepare for it. In South Florida, for example, there is ample time for builders and city planners to start the slow process of elevating streets and buildings, installing pumping technologies, and planning for the construction of desalination plants to deal with saltwater intrusion in the water supply. Better yet, because in Florida the money for such preventive actions needs to come from real estate tax revenue, the fact that the threat is some years off should allow the area to sustain its appeal to tourists and investors, filling the coffers with the money needed to pay for it all. One might think sea level rise would be an easy risk to manage: We know it’s coming, and we have the time and resources to deal with it preemptively. 

Yet, what we are about to say won’t surprise you: None of this is happening. Planners in coastal cities are sounding the alarms, but the pleas to take action are widely falling on deaf ears. The City of Miami Beach, for example, recently invested $400 million to build pumps to deal with the increase in nuisance flooding that has been seen in recent years, but the investment is designated only to remedy the problem as it exists today, not the much larger problems that will come as the century wears on. The City of New York has approved spending to prepare for sea level rise, but all in anticipation of a two-foot rise by the end of the century, not the three-foot rise that most climate scientists warn about.

This conundrum, of course, is by no means limited to sea level rise. Climate change poses a broad range of other threats whose consequences lie beyond the planning horizons of current residents, and our society faces long-term social and economic risks that are similarly difficult to fathom. Yet ignoring these risks is clearly an unacceptable option. We have a moral responsibility to care for future generations, even in the absence of immediate paybacks to ourselves. 

How might we achieve this? We propose four guiding principles as an umbrella for how societies should approach the management of long-term risk: 

Guiding principle 1: Commit to long-term protective planning as a major priority. 

This principle, of course, is fundamental; decision makers in the public and private sector need to place reduction in future losses and the required investments in protection near the topic of their agendas, and provide rationales for individuals to support their proposals. 

Guiding principle 2: Commit to policies that discourage individual and community actions that increase their exposure to long-term risks. 

The simplest means of managing risk is to avoid it. Policies regulating land use, building codes, and insurance need to be designed to reflect the expected benefits and costs associated with exposure to future risks. Insurers should be permitted to price their coverage to reflect the nature of the risk and encourage those at risk to invest in loss-reduction measures. Building codes could complement insurance by requiring structures to meet specific standards. 

Guiding principle 3: Create policies that consider the cognitive biases that inhibit adoption of protective measures. 

Regulatory policies designed to dissuade risk exposure will be effective only if they are widely adopted and enforced. People are naturally prone to a range of biases that inhibit long-term thinking. Therefore, policies have to be designed in ways that recognize and overcome these biases. 

Guiding principle 4: Commit to addressing problems equitably.

A transformative shift toward long-term protection will lead to costs that will differentially impact different groups in society. Long-term protective policies must be designed with these inequalities in mind, addressing the hardships faced by low- and middle-income households facing budget constraints, so that those households have economic incentives to adopt the protective measures.

If we as a society are to commit ourselves to reducing future losses from natural and man-made disasters in the truly long run, we need to do more than hope that individuals and policy makers will see wisdom in these investments on their own. Rather, we need to engage the private and public sectors in innovative partnerships that create environments where safety is the social norm, encouraged by appropriate regulations and well-enforced standards, and where the costs of this transformation are equitably distributed across society—ideas that follow from these four guiding principles.

Robert Meyer is the Frederick H. Ecker/MetLife Insurance Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and codirector of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. His work has appeared in a wide variety of professional journals and books, including the Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Marketing Research; Journal of Risk and Uncertainty; Marketing Science; Management Science; and Risk Analysis.

Howard Kunreuther is the James G. Dinan Professor of Decision Sciences and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and codirector of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. His recent books include At War with the Weather (with Erwann Michel-Kerjan), winner of the Kulp-Wright Book Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association in 2011; Insurance and Behavioral Economics: Improving Decisions in the Most Misunderstood Industry (with Mark Pauly and Stacey McMorrow); and Leadership Dispatches: Chile’s Extraordinary Comeback from Disaster (with Michael Useem and Erwann Michel-Kerjan).

It looks like Donald Trump’s “great, great wall” is actually going to happen. Its likely impact on human society has been well-noted, but in the longer-term a barrier across an entire continent will also have severe ecological consequences.

The US-Mexico border is around 1,900 miles (3,100 km) long and some of it has already been fenced off. According to Trump the proposed wall will cover approximately 1,000 miles and “natural obstacles” such as rivers or mountains will take care of the rest.

Aside from the debates over whether or not the wall will do much to stop drug trafficking or illegal immigration, how much it will cost the US taxpayer, or whether Mexico will pay for it, a 1,000-mile wall has significant environmental costs. For a start, all that concrete will generate millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions. And then you have the fact the wall will ravage a unique desert habitat that straddles the two countries and will prevent the movement of local animals.

US Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has estimated that the wall will threaten 111 endangered species as it passes through four key wildlife reserves on the US side of the border and several nature reserves on the Mexican side.

Some of the affected species are obvious: animals with cross-border populations include bighorn sheep, ocelots and bears. Splitting plant and animal populations by building a concrete wall promotes inbreeding and a decrease in genetic diversity, which makes many species susceptible to diseases and epidemics. The wall is also likely to wipe out the few jaguars still lingering in Arizona and New Mexico by cutting them off from breeding populations south of the border.

There are fewer than 200 Sonoran pronghorn left – and the wall would run right through their home. (credit: Florin Chelaru, CC BY-SA)

Other species are more unexpected: the bald eagle, America’s national bird, can obviously fly over any barriers yet the disruption to its habitat means it makes the FWS’s list of affected migratory birds. Even marine animals such as manatees or sea turtles can’t escape the wall’s impact.

Long division

The Trump wall may never become anything more solid than a metaphor for increased border surveillance, aided by technology, to keep illegal immigration under control. However, if a vast concrete wall really is built, and if it is as tall and impenetrable as Trump hopes, it will presumably last for thousands of years. This will have long-term ecological consequences.

July 2100 on the US-Mexico border if we maintain high carbon emissions. (credit: climateinternational.org / NASA)

The glacial and interglacial cycles of ice ages and warm periods unfold over thousands of years. Over the past 11,000 years we have had a relatively stable climate, but anthropogenic warming is delaying the arrival of
the next ice age.

As species start to feel the pressure of a warming climate, they will need to move towards the poles as their habitats shift. Plants and animals currently found in central Mexico may find their “natural” home moves north of the border. The wall will make such movement impossible and will make these species vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Equally, in the much longer term, if or when the next ice age eventually begins and ice sheets start to expand southwards, species from the north of the wall will need to move south to escape the freezing temperatures. The Trump wall will pose a significant obstacle for such movements.

On evolutionary timescales of millions of years, such an obstacle in the movement of animals and plants will drive extinctions and the emergence of new species. A political act of this kind can have far-reaching consequences for the ecological and even evolutionary landscapes.

Build bridges instead

Preexisting security barriers across the US-Mexico border are already making life difficult for local wildlife, according to peer-reviewed research.

Researchers found fewer racoon-like coatis in areas with border fences. (credit: Francesco de Marco/Shutterstock)

Scientists across the world consistently call for more permeable border fences in order to allow animals to move through them. One 2011 study even looked specifically at the US-Mexico border. The authors warned species were being forced into risky unfenced “bottlenecks” and called for better planning tailored towards wildlife movement.

Our knowledge of how to conserve animals across international borders has come a long way. Many nations have embraced shared responsibility for shared wildlife, and a number of international legal instruments also set out the “dos and don'ts” for conservation in transboundary regions.

If Trump really wants to show his prowess in construction, and wants to leave a long-term infrastructure legacy, then he should build bridges for wildlife on the US-Mexico border – not walls.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Shonil Bhagwat is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at The Open University. He is an environmental geographer with broad research interests at the cross-section between natural and social sciences. Most of his research investigates ‘social-ecological systems’ at various spatial scales, from landscapes to continents; and at various temporal scales, from seasonal to millennial. Follow him on Twitter @shonilbhagwat.

The conditions for extreme and catastrophic wildfires could increase by 20% to 50% as the world warms and the climate changes, according to new research.

An analysis of 23 million wildfires between 2002 and 2013 has identified 478 of the worst – scientists call them “extreme wildfire events”.

“Extreme fire events are a global and natural phenomenon, particularly in forested areas that have pronounced dry seasons,” says David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, who led the study with US colleagues.

“With the exception of land clearance, the research found that extremely intense fires are associated with anomalous weather – such as droughts, winds or, in desert regions, following particularly wet seasons.

“Of the top 478 events, we identified 144 economically and socially disastrous extreme fire events that were concentrated in regions where humans have built into flammable forested landscapes, such as areas surrounding cities in southern Australia and western North America.”

The study of what the researchers call “pyrogeography”, in Nature Ecology and Evolution journal, comes as forest fires devastate Chile.

It follows a series of warnings of increased wildfire hazard as global temperatures rise in response to the ever greater levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as a consequence of the increasing combustion of fossil fuels.

Fire poses a threat to the entire warming world. US authorities spent more than $2bn suppressing wildfires in 2015, but greater conflagrations are expected in the US west, and wildfire damage could eventually double, according to other studies.

But the hazard is not confined to the Americas. The researchers began their analysis to identify the range of conditions that turn a chance lightning bolt, or a carelessly discarded cigarette, into the kind of conflagration that kills people and destroys townships. And they found a pattern: in more than nine out of 10 cases, “anomalous” weather conditions made the hazard worse. 

These could be high winds, high temperatures and drought, and, in desert regions, unusually high rainfall the preceding season that triggers greater growth and more fuel for the next fire.

“Climate change is causing fire seasons to start earlier and finish later, with an associated trend towards more extreme wildfire events in terms of their geographic extent and duration, intensity, severity, associated suppression costs, and loss of life and property,” the scientists write.

The sharpest increases will be on Australia’s east coast and in the Mediterranean basin, in particular Portugal, Spain, France, Greece and Turkey. Some of these landscapes are naturally adapted to fire. But in the US, a higher proportion of all fires became disasters for precisely identified reasons. 

“What makes a fire event a disaster in the US is when key factors combine – low-density housing amidst dense forests, the right climatic conditions and a lack of fire preparedness on the part of humans,” says co-author Crystal Kolden of the University of Idaho in the US.

“We can’t stop big, intense fires from happening here, and they are increasing under climate change. However, in the western US, we can reduce the potential for fire disasters by both reducing forest density and improving mitigation and preparedness through the development of fire-resilient communities.”

Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988. Tim won the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times, and a lifetime achievement award in 2005.

Since the 1950s, almost everything about work in the developed world has changed dramatically. Rapid technological advances continue to render many jobs obsolete. Globalization has shifted employment to parts of the world with the lowest costs and standards. Most households have gone from one income-earner to at least two. Women have fully integrated into the workforce, albeit often with less-than-equal opportunities, conditions and pay. A lot of our work is unnecessary and often destructive — depleting resources, destroying ecosystems, polluting air, water and soil, and fuelling climate change.

Yet we're still working the same or more hours later into life within the same outdated and destructive system, furiously producing, consuming and disposing on a wheel of endless growth and conspicuous consumption. The gap between rich and poor is widening and working people — and those who can't find work — are falling further behind, crushed by growing debt, increased competition for scarce jobs and declining real wages and benefits. 

Although unions deserve credit for many gains working people have enjoyed over the past century or more, they also merit some criticism. In the face of technological advances and globalization, unions have failed to fight for steadily reduced work hours, focusing instead on higher wages and better benefits — although lately it's more fighting to prevent drastic cuts to jobs, wages and benefits.

Many people are tired, too stretched to become politically engaged or even to spend as much time with family and friends as they'd like, and the grinding consumer cycle doesn't bring them real joy or fulfilment. 

As with climate change, gradual reform could have forestalled the drastic actions now needed, but addressing the issue now will do far more good for a greater number of people than doing nothing — and it will become more difficult and costly the longer we put off necessary action. 

It's absurd that so many people still work eight hours a day, five days a week — or more — with only a few weeks' vacation a year, often needing two incomes to support a household. Our economic system was developed when resources seemed plentiful if not inexhaustible, and physical infrastructure was lacking. We need an overhaul to meet today's conditions rather than those that existed decades ago when we were unaware of many of the potential negative consequences of our actions. 

Research points to many advantages of reforms such as reduced work hours and universal basic income. In Gothenburg, Sweden, workers at a care home for the elderly were put on a six-hour workday as part of a two-year controlled study. Although hiring 15 new employees to cover the workload drove costs up by about 22 per cent, spending was reduced in areas like covering sick leave, which dropped by 10 per cent. Workers reported health improvements at rates 50 per cent higher than workers at institutions with regular working hours. Patient care also improved. Women with children benefited substantially. 

Many global warming impacts could also be lessened with small work-hour reductions, through shorter workweeks and increased vacation time, a 2013 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington-based think-tank, concluded. 

"By itself, a combination of shorter workweeks and additional vacation which reduces average annual hours by just 0.5 per cent per year would very likely mitigate one-quarter to one-half, if not more, of any warming which is not yet locked-in," report author and economist David Rosnick said.

A four-day workweek (as David Suzuki Foundation staff enjoy) cuts pollution and emissions from commuting and, in many cases, reduces energy consumption. When Utah went to a four-day week for government employees in 2007, the state saved $1.8 million in energy costs alone. Fewer commutes led to an estimated reduction of more than 11,000 tonnes of CO2. 

A better work-life balance also brings many individual and societal advantages. Family life is strengthened, people have more time for creative or educational pursuits, and happier, rested employees are more productive. As more people share in available jobs, social service costs go down and more people are able to contribute to economic prosperity. 

A lot needs to be done to reform our economic systems and to address critical issues like pollution and climate change. Reducing work hours is one way to make substantial gains.

Several Republican lawmakers want to give much of the public land that is now under federal protection to the states. Recently Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a bill that would have transferred more than 3 million acres of public land in the Western U.S. to the states. After an intense public outcry, the bill was dropped. To the uninitiated, this might seem fairly innocuous. What difference does it make if the federal government or states control our public lands, as long as we keep them wild?

Well that's just it. The public land we all use to hike, camp, hunt or fish becomes much more endangered when it is transferred to the states. The reasons are simple. Often lacking resources to manage public land, many states see public land as something to be sold and developed  or financial gain—particularly to extractive industries like oil, gas and mining. These activities don't just take away the public enjoyment of those lands and ruin the natural landscape, they further exacerbate the effects of climate change, which is already impacting many regions of the United States.

Handing wildlands over to states isn't the only way that some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are threatening the environment and the outdoor enjoyment for millions of Americans. "Congress is expected to further cut funding for conservation programs and land agencies, already sitting at less than 1 percent of the federal budget," writes Brad Brooks, the associate director of the Idaho office of the Wilderness Society, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting natural areas and federal public lands, in a recent AlterNet article. "We must keep our eyes open and our voices loud for the wild places that can’t speak for themselves."

Travis Belote, a biologist and research ecologist who works in the Northern Rockies office of The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana, led a team of scientists in a recent study to help understand how the nation's various ecosystems are coping with climate change. Working with data sources from AdaptWest, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Census Bureau, NatureServe, and others, the researchers produced what they call a "national assessment of conservation values and climate change vulnerability." Belote explained why wildlands are so important and must be protected:

In contrast to agricultural lands or urban and residential areas, wildlands are relatively ecologically intact and relatively free of human influence. A small forest preserves in the Chicago suburbs are important wildlands, and so are large protected areas in the Rocky Mountain West. They provide habitat for wildlife, serve as sources of drinking water, and offer opportunities for rejuvenating quiet recreation in nature. They give us a sense of a world bigger than the one we typically experience in our day-to-day lives. They are lands where nature is still free and intact remind us of our old and living planet beyond our daily worries.

The study comes at a time when—in part, due to the far-reaching effects of anthropogenic climate change—wilderness advocates and conservation scientists are rethinking the long-held belief in a "hands off" conservation strategy based on the notion that nature can take care of itself. Anthony J. McMichael, who was professor emeritus at the Australian National University, noted in his posthumously published book Climate Change and the Health of Nations that "we face a change in global climatic conditions far greater and faster than anything in recorded human history." But, he also points out that we are also in a good position, evolutionarily speaking, to respond effectively:

Humans, as products of evolution's central "survive the present" criterion lack a strong hardwired instinct to act on behalf of the distant future and on behalf of species and ecosystems that are far away and unfamiliar. Earlier societies typically made reactive responses to climatic adversity, and often did so too late. … Today, we know much more about the workings of the planet, the biosphere, and the climate system, as well as the mounting pressures on those systems. This knowledge, teamed with our cerebral capacity for abstract thought and imagining the future, should enable us to respond in a more proactive fashion.

If we do respond proactively, the Wilderness Society's national assessment should help. The goal of the study was to determine locations where certain strategies—ranging from restoration to protection—should be emphasized to protect specific wildlands, based on existing conditions as well as projected climate conditions. Scientists combined maps of established conservation qualities, such as wildness, connectivity and habitat representation, to create a composite wildland conservation value to each region of the 48 contiguous states.

They studied conservation values like wilderness protection and restoration processes as well as a number of variables, including how much human modification the land has experienced, how important the land is as a natural linkage between protected areas, how well the land's ecosystems are represented within existing protected areas, and whether a place is rich in rare and endemic species. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that conducts environmental research, said that the map "highlights wild, connected places that encompass a comprehensive range of ecosystems or rare species: It shows patterns that can help identify conservation priorities and provide a quantitative estimate of land's existing value."

Map of conservation values that include wildness, connectivity, and habitat representation in protected areas. (U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit via NOAA)

"We mapped areas important for added conservation," Belote told AlterNet. "Adding these lands to conservation reserves may help build a more resilient system of protected areas, so that species can be maintained across national or regional networks for future generations to appreciate."

Belote said that the very tops of the western mountains and the central Great Plains and prairies in the United States are "particularly vulnerable … mostly because species that are accustomed to living in high alpine environments can’t typically move any further upslope to track warming climate conditions. They are already at the tops of mountains and can’t go higher. At the same time, species that live in large flatlands can’t easily escape to climate refugia by moving upslope or to a favorable mountain or canyon environment."

By contrast, the researchers also identified that regions that had low wildland values and low climate vulnerability, such as New York and Massachusetts, as well as regions that have already been altered by humans, not critical for connecting protected areas, or are already well-represented in protected areas. "These regions may not experience much impact from climate change," according to the study, "so a historical model for restoration may be appropriate."

Other areas, such as Iowa and Illinois, have low wildland values and high climate vulnerability. For these areas that have experienced more degradation and are more vulnerable to climate change, the researchers suggest that "attempting historical restoration may be less useful because the future climate is expected to be very different than the past." In other areas, such as much of California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico, wildland values are high and climate vulnerability is low.  These areas are often wild and the climate in these places may be relatively stable, making them low risk areas to be affected.

The scientists found a significant challenge in areas that had high marks in both wildland conservation values and climate vulnerability—and which "may experience substantially new conditions as climate changes," including eastern Maine, central Oregon and parts of Nevada, Missouri and Arkansas. "Given the uncertainties associated with climate change and the unintended consequences of management, it isn’t easy to identify a single best solution," the researchers said of these regions. (Click here to launch NOAA's Climate Explore to explore maps and graphs of historical and predicted climate trends in your local area.)

While the Wilderness Society's national assessment will help conservationists in the fight to protect wildlands, it's clear that climate change isn't the only hurdle facing climate resiliency. In addition to a Trump administration filled with climate deniers, and that wants to gut the EPA and cut NASA climate research funding, the schemes by many GOP lawmakers to transfer control of public lands—which includes national parks, national forests, wilderness areas and wildlife preserves—presents a unique, yet ultimately avoidable problem.

But as Tania Lown-Hecht, communications director of the Outdoor Alliance, a nonprofit public lands conservation group, points out, calling the GOP plan a "transfer" is a misnomer. "Right now, you own these places, and as state lands, they are effectively privatized," she told AlterNet. "Congress is trying to give away something that belongs to you. That sounds more like stealing than like transfer." Brooks of the Wilderness society agrees. "Protected forests and red rock lands belong to vacationing families in Massachusetts and New Mexico," he writes. "Parks and refuges in Montana and California belong to campers and birdwatchers from South Carolina and Illinois."

Brian Whitney's writing has appeared in Paste Magazine, The Fix and Pacific Standard Magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming book "Subversives in Their Own Words" (Headpress, 2017).

An independent review of the state of Australia’s environment has found the impacts of climate change are increasing and some of the changes could be irreversible.

The latest State of the Environment report, a scientific snapshot across nine areas released by the federal government every five years, says climate change is altering the structure and function of natural ecosystems in Australia, and is affecting heritage, economic activity and human wellbeing.

It warns climate change will result in “location specific vulnerabilities” and says the most severe impacts will be felt by people who are socially and economically disadvantaged.

Record high water temperatures caused “widespread coral bleaching, habitat destruction and species mortality” in the marine environment between 2011 and 2016, it says.

The minister for energy and the environment, Josh Frydenberg, was due to release the report card on Tuesday morning.

In a column for Guardian Australia, Frydenberg says the report indicates the impact of changing weather patterns is being felt in the ocean, on the Great Barrier Reef and on land, affecting biodiversity and species habitat.

“While carbon emissions per capita have declined from 24.1 tonnes in 2011 to 22.2 tonnes in 2015 and energy efficiency improvements are reducing electricity demand, the report makes clear that, for the world to meet its Paris goals, there is much more to do,” Frydenberg says.

The minister says the report makes clear Australia needs to prepare for changes in the environment and “put in place a coordinated, comprehensive, well-resourced, long-term response”.

He warns that failure to do so “will have a direct and detrimental impact on our quality of life and leave a legacy to future generations that is inferior to the one we have inherited”.

The minister says the report presents the government with a mixed picture. “Good progress has been made in the management of the marine and Antarctic environments, natural and cultural heritage and the built environment – while pressures are building in relation to invasive species, climate change, land use and coastal protection,” he says.

Frydenberg says the doubling of Australia’s population in the past 50 years and growing urbanisation “have all combined to contribute to additional pressures on the environment”.

Australia’s heavily populated coastal areas are under pressure, as are “growth areas within urban environments, where human pressure is greatest”, the report finds.

Grazing and invasive species continue to pose a significant threat to biodiversity.

“The main pressures facing the Australian environment today are the same as in 2011: climate change, land use change, habitat fragmentation and degradation, and invasive species,” the report’s summary says. “In addition, the interactions between these and other pressures are resulting in cumulative impacts, amplifying the threats faced by the Australian environment.

“Evidence shows that some individual pressures on the environment have decreased since 2011, such as those associated with air quality, poor agricultural practices, commercial fishing, and oil and gas exploration and production in Australia’s marine environment.

“During the same time, however, other pressures have increased — for example, those associated with coal mining and the coal-seam gas industry, habitat fragmentation and degradation, invasive species, litter in our coastal and marine environments, and greater traffic volumes in our capital cities.”

The report criticises the lack of “an overarching national policy that establishes a clear vision for the protection and sustainable management of Australia’s environment to the year 2050”.

It points to poor collaboration, gaps in knowledge, data and monitoring and a lack of follow-though from policy to action.

“Providing for a sustainable environment both now and in the future is a national issue requiring leadership and action across all levels of government, business and the community,” it says. “The first step is recognising the importance and value of ecosystem services to our economy and society.

“Addressing Australia’s long-term, systemic environmental challenges requires, among other things, the development of a suite of stronger, more comprehensive and cohesive policies focused on protecting and maintaining natural capital, and ongoing improvements to current management arrangements.”

Late last year, the government established a review of its Direct Action climate policy. The current policy has been widely criticised by experts as inadequate if Australia is to meet its international emissions reduction targets under the Paris climate change agreement.

Shortly after establishing the review, Frydenberg ruled out converting the Direct Action scheme to a form of carbon trading after a brief internal revolt. Many experts argue carbon trading would allow Australia to reduce emissions consistent with Paris commitments at least cost to households and businesses.

The Direct Action review still allows for the consideration of the potential role of international carbon credits in meeting Australia’s emissions reduction targets – a practice Tony Abbott comprehensively ruled out as prime minister – and consideration of a post-2030 emissions reduction goal for Australia.

The review also requires an examination of international developments in climate change policy, which is code for an assessment of what is happening on global climate action in the event the US pulls out of the Paris climate agreement.

The New York Times reported last week that the White House was fiercely divided over Trump’s campaign promise to cancel the Paris agreement.

Its report said Trump’s senior strategist Steve Bannon wanted the US to pull out of the Paris agreement but Bannon’s stance was being resisted by the new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who are concerned about the diplomatic fallout.

The Turnbull government has already indicated that it intends to stay the course with the Paris agreement, and has argued it would take the US four years to withdraw from the deal under the terms of ratification.

But if the US withdraws from Paris, internal pressure inside the Coalition will intensify, and the prime minister will face calls from some conservatives to follow suit.

In his column for Guardian Australia, Frydenberg says the Coalition is doing good work on the environment and the conservative parties in Australia have been responsible for establishing legislation such as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, and programs such as the Natural Heritage Trust and the first mandatory Renewable Energy Target.

“The task now is to build on this proud Coalition tradition and to use this report to continue the good work the Turnbull government is already doing across so many areas of environmental policy,” he says.

Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia's political editor. She has worked in Canberra's parliamentary gallery for 15 years. In 2008, she won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism, while in 2012 she was a Walkley award finalist in the best digital journalism category.

NOAA ships spent the last several days preparing for their Arctic missions. Here, Chief Bosun Jim Kruger (front) works with Jason Kinyon and Lindsey Houska on NOAA Ship Rainier as they get ready to depart this week for the summer's first Arctic survey project, in Kotzebue Sound.(Credit: NOAA)
Photo Credit: NOAA

On Friday, the meteorology community was riding a major high as stunningly high-definition images came in from the nation’s newest and much-anticipated earth observation satellite. The high came crashing down that evening, though, as the first hints of significant cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to emerge.

NOAA oversees weather forecasting and is a major funder of weather and climate research. If these cuts — which an Office of Management and Budget document obtained by the Washington Post pegged at 17 percent agency-wide — materialize, they could significantly hamper improvements in weather forecasting and climate modeling and put the public at risk, experts warned.

The Environmental Protection Agency has withdrawn an Obama-era request for methane emissions information from 15,000 oil and gas companies nationwide — a decision the Trump administration made after 11 states said the request amounted to “harassment.”

The EPA responded to the states’ complaints within one day, saying it will look into whether it’s necessary for the agency to collect information about the industry’s methane emissions.

Flaring excess natural gas at oil well sites in North Dakota is source of methane emissions causing climate change. (credit: Tim Evanson/flickr)

The withdrawal on Thursday is a sign that the EPA under new administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who has expressed doubts about established climate science, is beginning to reconsider and possibly reverse the Obama administration’s efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The decision will hobble the EPA’s ability to accurately calculate methane emissions in its annual tally of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which is provided to the United Nations to track America’s progress in addressing climate change, said Danny Cullenward, an energy economist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Oil and gas wells, pipelines and other equipment leak a large, but not fully understood, quantity of methane into the atmosphere. Methane can be a serious climate change problem because it has 86 times the power to warm the atmosphere over a span of 20 years compared to carbon dioxide.

The EPA’s annual climate pollution tally has long been considered imperfect because its methods were known to be unable to fully capture all of America’s greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration tried to revise those methods, but more revisions are necessary in order to more effectively account for all U.S. emissions, Cullenward said.

As part of the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan, the EPA began to take steps last year to better understand how oil and gas equipment leaks methane and how those leaks can be plugged as a way to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The agency announced last May that it would strictly regulate the oil and gas industry’s methane emissions, a process that would begin by requesting 15,000 industry owners and operators nationwide to provide information about their methane emissions and the technology they could use to control them. The information request was finalized in November, sparking pushback from the industry.

Oil wells in North Dakota's Bakken shale oil fields are major sources of methane emissions. These wells are near Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (credit: National Parks Conservation Association/flickr)

“This information request furthers the previous administration’s climate agenda and supports the next and most onerous phase of the Obama administration’s regulations targeting the oil and gas industry — the imposition of burdensome climate rules on existing sites, the cost of which will be enormous,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a letter to Pruitt on Wednesday.

The letter was signed by Paxton and the governors or attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia.

“We believe the EPA’s requests to be an unnecessary and onerous burden on oil and gas producers that is more harassment than a genuine search for pertinent and appropriate information,” Paxton wrote.

Pruitt responded, saying the EPA takes the oil and gas industry’s concerns seriously and the withdrawal of the information request will reduce burdens on business.

Recently released emails from Pruitt’s tenure as Oklahoma attorney general reveal his close relationship with the oil and gas industry. In 2014, the New York Times reported that Pruitt accused the EPA of overestimating the quantity of methane emissions the oil and gas industry emits — claims he made by using a letter written by lawyers for a large oil and gas company.

“The notion that EPA won't be collecting and monitoring data is cause for concern,” Cullenward said. “How is the public supposed to be confident that EPA policy is striking an appropriate balance without any data?”

Bobby Magill is a Senior Science Writer at Climate Central, focusing on energy and climate change.

Pollution is responsible for one in four deaths among all children under five, according to new World Health Organisation reports, with toxic air, unsafe water and and lack of sanitation the leading causes.

The reports found polluted environments cause the deaths of 1.7 million children every year, but that many of the deaths could be prevented by interventions already known to work, such as providing cleaner cooking fuels to prevent indoor air pollution.

“A polluted environment is a deadly one – particularly for young children,” says Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO. “Their developing organs and immune systems – and smaller bodies and airways – make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water.”

The harm from air pollution can begin in the womb and increase the risk of premature birth. After birth, air pollution raises the risk of pneumonia, a major cause of death for under fives, and of lifelong lung conditions such as asthma. It may also increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer in later life.

The reports present a comprehensive review of the effect of unhealthy environments and found 570,000 children under five-years-old die each year from respiratory infections such as pneumonia, while another 361,000 die due to diarrhoea, as a result of polluted water and poor access to sanitation.

The WHO estimates that 11–14% of children aged five years and older currently report asthma symptoms, with almost half of these cases related to air pollution. It also suggests that the warmer temperatures and carbon dioxide levels linked to climate change may increase pollen levels, making asthma worse.

“Investing in the removal of environmental risks to health will result in massive health benefits,” said Dr Maria Neira, WHO director of environmental and social determinants of health. For example, tackling the backyard recycling of electrical waste would cut children’s exposure to toxins which can cause reduced intelligence and cancer.

In October, the UN’s children’s agency Unicef made the first global estimate of children’s exposure to air pollution and found that almost 90% – 2 billion children – live in places where outdoor air pollution exceeds WHO limits. It found that 300 million of these children live in areas with extreme air pollution, where toxic fumes are more than six times above the health guidelines.

The WHO announced in May that air pollution around the world is rising at an alarming rate, with virtually all cities in poorer nations blighted by unhealthy air and more than half of those in richer countries also suffering.

Research in 2015 revealed that more than 3 million people a year die early because of outdoor air pollution, more than malaria and HIV/Aids combined. Chan told the BBC on Monday that air pollution is “one of the most pernicious threats” facing global public health today and is on a much bigger scale than HIV or Ebola.

Damian Carrington is the head of environment at the Guardian.

There are three interrelated challenges facing agriculture over the next 50 years.

The first is soil loss.

In the United States, soil is swept and washed away 10 times faster than it is replenished. That costs $37.6 billion every year. Globally, all of the world's topsoil could be gone within 60 years.

The second challenge is diet-related disease.

About half of all American adults have one or more preventable chronic diseases related to diet. Diet is now the number-one risk factor for disease. More than two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of children are overweight or obese. This costs $190 billion a year. Obesity is the new malnutrition. Globally, a growing number of people have plenty to eat and yet remain malnourished.

The third challenge is climate change.

Floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme or unseasonable temperatures cause crop and livestock losses. In 2011, exposure to high temperature events caused over $1 billion in losses to U.S. agricultural producers.

Phasing out greenhouse gas emissions is important, but it won’t reverse climate change. Until we remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to get back down below the dangerous tipping point of 350 ppm, the impacts of climate change will persist.

Luckily, there’s an inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for reliable carbon dioxide removal and sequestration. Soil.

Agricultural activities have removed roughly 660 GtCO2 from terrestrial ecosystems. The good news is we can put it back.

Shifting to agricultural practices that can draw that carbon back down to the soil would:

• Reduce atmospheric CO2 by 40-70 ppm by 2100,
• Build soil instead of losing it, and
• Improve resilience to drought and floods, while
• Producing more food that’s more nutritious, and
• Generating higher farm incomes from increased production of nutrient-dense food.

We need more research on the microbial communities in the soil that generate carbon storage. Plants give the carbon they get from photosynthesis to soil microorganisms in exchange for water and nutrients. It works best when there are lots of different plants exchanging lots of different nutrients with lots of different microbes. The greater the plant biodiversity, the more carbon gets stored. The best way to reverse soil loss and sequester carbon is to continuously cover soil with a diverse array of living plants.

Scientists are currently documenting microbial soil carbon sequestration using carbon-13 isotope pulse labeling. Using this method, they can track the carbon flows from plants to and through soil microorganisms and identify the plants and the microorganisms that store the most carbon.

Fence line comparisons have demonstrated greater resilience to droughts and floods in carbon rich soils. Now, scientists can measure water flows through soil in three dimensions and accurately document soils’ water infiltration and holding capacity.

Grazing and pasture-raised animals can be managed to increase plant biodiversity and microbial activity. Well-managed pastures can sequester even more soil carbon than cropping systems. But we need a deeper understanding of how methanotrophs in the soil utilize methane emitted from grazing animals.

Finally we need an assessment of the socio-economic impediments to, and opportunities for, realizing the full potential for soil carbon sequestration.

If increasing soil carbon can help produce more food than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine, as John Jeavons would say, then why don’t more farmers do it?

If increasing soil carbon produces food that is flavorful, aromatic, and so healthy and nutritious that it could cost-effectively reverse diet-related diseases, why aren’t more consumers demanding it?

The above text was given as testimony by Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director at the Organic Consumers Association,at the Visioning of U.S. Agriculture Systems for Sustainable Production Listening Session held by the USDA on March 2, 2017.

Alexis Baden-Mayer is the political director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Editor’s note: This Voices contribution is published in collaboration with the academic journal Elementa. It is based on “Leveraging agroecology for solutions in food, energy and water, a peer-reviewed article published March 2, 2017, as part of Elementa’s Food-Energy-Water Systems: Opportunities at the Nexus forum.

The past several years have been rough for many U.S. farmers and ranchers. Net farm incomes this year could fall to 50 percent of 2013 levels in a fourth consecutive year of income declines that is leading some producers to seek alternatives. At the same time, rural and urban Americans share growing concerns related to agriculture: worries that water pollution will be increasingly costly and harmful, that water supplies are at risk from extreme swings in rainfall, and that global warming due to fossil fuel burning threatens our food system and will necessitate changes in how we farm.

What if all of these challenges could find a common solution? It might just be that they can. In a commentary published this week in the scientific journal Elementa, we contend that agroecology offers a promising approach to solving food system problems while mitigating, water and energy concerns — and propose a way to overcome the obstacles to fully embracing it.

U.S. agriculture has trended for several decades — as a result of policy, economics and other drivers — toward systems that are more simplified over both space and time. This has had adverse consequences for food, energy and water.

Agroecology takes a different approach, applying ecological concepts tocreate and maintain diverse, resilient food systems. Promising research demonstrates that bringing diversity back to farms can begin to reverse the problems simplification has created. For example, scientists have found that strategically incorporating perennial plants (including food, energy or non-crop plants) into small areas of commodity crops can significantly reduce water pollution and soil loss. Studies also show that using multiple crops rather than a monoculture is associated with improvements in the amount of carbon (important to help soils hold onto more water and mitigate climate change) and nitrogen (critical for plant growth and soil function) in the soil.

If better farming systems exist, why don’t more producers use them, and why aren’t they more encouraged? Among the reasons:

• Government policies and economics influence many producer decisions that contribute to landscape simplification. For example, biofuel incentives greatly expanded markets for ethanol, leading farmers to replace grasslands withendless acres of monoculture corn rather than leaving them native or planting more diverse crops.
• Research has also found that the need to focus on immediate cash flow rather than long-term benefits just to stay afloat can make it difficult to adopt more resilient systems
• Agroecology research is woefully underfunded. This means that up-to-date examples of innovative practices suited to specific regions are not sufficiently available for many farmers.
• Change is hard and it can take support for producers to get started. It is critical to find peers and peer networks to learn from — and these are rare.
• Benefits are narrowly defined. When farmers, policy-makers, and scientists focus primarily on simple measures of progress like crop yields, we lose track of the many other benefits of agroecology — including those related to water and energy.

In spite of these and other obstacles, innovators have begun to demonstrate that diversified land management can be good business, from a cover crop seed company in rural Nebraska, to a food hub supporting local diversified food production in western Iowa, to a consulting group helping farmers optimize land management and costs with a “precision conservation” approach. The dire need for economic opportunity in rural America was a major discussion point in the 2016 election, and these examples suggest how a more diverse and sustainable agriculture can help meet that need.

A shift in perspective that recognizes relationships among food, water, and energy systems and new metrics that value co-benefits to water and energy could go a long way toward further advancing agroecology. In fact, recently published research refutes the idea that we must solely focus on doubling crop production to meet future demand. These researchers believe the actual future yield increases needed are smaller and that we must explicitly define environmental goals to match the production demands that always seem to dominate the narrative around food.

Fortunately, we know that solutions do exist, and with agroecological approaches we can solve these multiple challenges at the same time. 

Andrea Basche is a Kendall Science Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Marcia DeLonge is an agroecologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Christian Vinces Gallito de las rocas (Rupicola peruviana) national bird of Peru.
Photo Credit: Gallito de las rocas (Rupicola peruviana) national bird of Peru. (Christian Vinces/Shutterstock)

Just under half of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites are under threat, the WWF asserts. Sites deemed threatened include the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Pantanal in Brazil and the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo - and 111 others.

But what about the Manu National Park in Peru’s Amazon, which UNESCO calls the most biodiverse place on earth and was declared part of a biosphere reserve in the 1970s? In south-east Peru and stretching for 1.7 million hectares from the tropical Andes to the lowland forest, Manu is home to extraordinary biodiversity and Harakbut, Matsigenka, “Matsigenka-Nanti,” “Mashco-Piro,” Nahua, Quechua and Yine indigenous peoples.

The WWF told the Guardian that Manu didn’t make its threatened list because “at the time of the analysis it did not have any large-scale commercial mining, oil or gas concessions within or overlapping with the park’s borders, and was not listed by the IUCN as at “high” or “very high” threat from any non-extractive industrial activities.” However, as the Guardian has reported over the last few years, Manu and its inhabitants do face numerous threats—including from mining, oil and gas.

1. A highway through the park.

Peru’s government is planning to build a national highway along the course of the River Manu right through the middle of the park, effectively extending a route called the PE-5S. According to Transport Ministry maps, the highway will run all the way to the border with Bolivia, for 1,130 kms (702 miles). This would also mean entering the Bahuaja Sonene National Park and the Tambopata National Reserve, as well as linking up with the Inter-Oceanica Highway which ultimately connects Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic coast.

Map showing how the PE-5S national highway would run right through Manu national park and all the way to the border with Bolivia. (Photograph: Screenshot from a Peruvian transport ministry map)

2. Oil/gas operations in the park.

A Guardian exposé in 2013 revealed how oil and gas company Pluspetrol was planning “geological fieldwork” in—and “the development of”—the far west of Manu, and how it had applied to enter the park in 2011 but was denied by the Environment Ministry agency, SERNANP, which manages it.

Pluspetrol responded to the Guardian by saying it had no interest in exploring in Manu, but reports and rumors have emerged from the region suggesting that one company or other has operated there in recent years. In 2015 the Guardian published a leaked Pluspetrol map again showing its interest in Manu. The oil and gas industry has long eyed the park, and companies—including Shell—have conducted seismic tests there in the past.

Map demonstrating the reasons for the oil and gas industry’s interest in Manu. The yellow blobs are ‘undrilled prospects’, while the red blobs are ‘discovered deposits.’ (Photograph: Screen shot from a Perupetro presentation)

3. Gas operations in the buffer zone.

Pluspetrol heads a consortium, including the US’s Hunt Oil, Spain’s Repsol and South Korea’s SK Innovation, extracting and exploring for gas in the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others Reserve (KNNOR), which is part of Manu’s western buffer zone. The concession, called Lot 88, forms part of what is known as the Camisea gas project. It is almost immediately to the west of the very same area in Manu in which the Guardian, in 2013 and 2015, argued that Pluspetrol was interested.

Over the years operations in Lot 88 are reported to have had devastating impacts on the indigenous peoples in the KNNOR, which was established specifically for those living in “isolation” and “initial contact.” In 2013 the Culture Ministry warned that expansion eastwards, towards Manu, could “devastate” the Nahuas and make the “Matsigenka-Nantis” and Kirineris “extinct,” while SERNANP expressed concern it would lead to new settlements being established in Manu, increase pressure on natural resources, and potentially generate conflict among communities living there.

But expansion was permitted, with plans to explore so far east that some seismic tests would be approximately 7.5 kms (4.6 miles) from Manu’s western border and one well would be approximately 10 kms (6.2 miles) away. According to Perupetro, Pluspetrol drilled that well in 2015.

4. Coca cultivation and narco-trafficking in the park and buffer zone.

The UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2016 report on coca cultivation in Peru states that coca has been growing in Manu’s buffer zone “for various years.” In 2015 there were 809 hectares of coca in the buffer zone, the UN reports, although none in the park itself.

The official Management Plan for Manu acknowledges the threat posed by coca cultivation to the buffer zone, as well as the recent “appearance of maceration pits” which it fears that “at any given moment ... will be dug inside the park” too. In 2016 Peruvian media outlet Ojo Publico reported that an anti-drugs prosecutor based in Cusco had “detected various maceration pits even within the jurisdiction of the Manu National Park, one of the Amazon’s last natural paradises.”

5. Illegal logging in the park and buffer zone.

The Management Plan calls illegal logging in Manu’s buffer zone, particularly on the eastern side, “the real problem.” Some indigenous communities have permission to extract wood from that area, but SERNANP holds no authority there and the Environment Ministry argues that the communities’ operations are not properly supervised by the regional government. Loggers are sometimes reported to enter the park itself.

6. Mercury contamination from gold-mining outside the park.

Gold-mining has been estimated to have destroyed over 150,000 hectares in Peru’s southern Amazon, mostly in the Madre de Dios region, and involved dumping 100s of tons of mercury into the rivers. In May 2016 the government—pathetically—announced a Declaration of Emergency across all Madre de Dios because of mercury contamination.

According to a map based on preliminary research by scientists at the Duke Global Health Institute in the U.S., the most contaminated area in Madre de Dios is upriver from the mining along the stretch of the River Madre de Dios between towns called Boca Colorado and Boca Manu, a significant part of which is in Manu’s buffer zone. The map suggests the second worse-hit area is inside the park, immediately upriver from Boca Manu, along the River Manu’s left bank. The right bank is reported to be affected too.

7. A road through the buffer zone.

A road has been cleared along the right bank of the River Madre de Dios in the buffer zone of the supposedly “protected” Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, just across the river from Manu. Members of two local indigenous communities, Shipetiari and Diamante, are reported to be in favor and detained approximately 40 people in 2015 to make themselves heard on the issue, but the road has provoked vigorous concern and/or opposition—from regional indigenous federation FENAMAD, local indigenous organization COHARYIMA, a Cusco judge, the Culture Ministry, the Environment Ministry and even UNESCO.

According to SERNANP, which set in motion an official complaint about the road made by the Environment Ministry to a prosecutor in Madre de Dios against the regional governor and two others, it is “clearly related to gold-mining and illegal logging interests.” Ultimately, it is slated to run to Boca Manu and then along the River Manu to Boca Colorado through Manu’s buffer zone—effectively the same route identified for the PE-5S extension.

8. Deforestation in the park and buffer zone.

Between 2010 and 2014 Manu had more forest cleared than any other national park in Peru’s Amazon with the exception of the Rio Abiseo National Park in the San Martin region, according to a 2015 report by the Environment Ministry. That same report states that in its buffer zone 583 hectares were cleared. No possible causes were suggested, but the Management Plan cites coca and other agriculture as reasons for the deforestation in the buffer zone.

9. “Human safaris.”

The appearance of a group of indigenous people living in “isolation” along the left bank of the upper River Madre de Dios in 2011 has led some tourist operators to offer trips to “spot” and photograph or film them. Such “human safaris” have been vigorously condemned by FENAMAD and others - not only for the obvious ethical reasons, but because of the danger that contact poses to the “Mashco-Piros,” as they are widely-known, because of their lack of immunological defenses which means potentially fatal diseases can be easily transmitted to them.

These “human safaris” are arguably the most obvious indication of how the “Mashco-Piros” and other indigenous peoples in “isolation” in Manu are being increasingly boxed in by what is going on around them—by the oil/gas operations, the road, the logging, the gold-mining, coca, colonization and even some tourism. Severe tension and conflict between them and their most immediate neighbors—Diamante and Shipetiari—has resulted in two men from those communities being killed in recent years.

10. Oil/gas operations to the park’s east.

Hunt Oil, partnered by Pluspetrol and Repsol, runs an oil and gas concession immediately to Manu’s east and overlapping most of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve. The concession, Lot 76, includes parts of Manu’s buffer zone, Shipetiari and another indigenous community bordering the park, although the area where Hunt has explored until now is to the east and on the other side of the River Madre de Dios. The prospective deposits—marked on the map above—appear to be part of the same trend as those in Lot 88 and Manu.

David Hill is a Guardian environment writer reporting on human rights and environmental issues in Latin America, and a consultant for Global Witness researching Peruvian forest governance. Follow him on Twitter @DavidHillTweets.

Kirkpatrick Sale is a prolific scholar and author of more than a dozen books—including Human Scale, Rebels Against the Future, After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination and Human Scale Revisited. He has been described as the “leader of the Neo-Luddites,” is one of the pioneers of the bioregional movement, and throughout his career has been a regular contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, CounterPunch, Lew Rockwell, The New York Review of Books, and The Utne Reader, which named him one of 100 living visionaries. Sale is currently the director of the political think tank the Middlebury Institute for the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination.

The fiscal year 2018 budget proposed by the Trump Administration would herald a new low for America’s shared public lands. It’s fitting for President Trump to release his budget in March, because this is simply madness.

This budget would decimate the very foundation of what makes America great: our parks, public lands, and historic leadership on conservation. Instead of investing in conservation programs that provide clean drinking water, protect public health, and support a booming outdoor recreation economy, the Trump Administration is rigging the system to solely benefit oil and gas special interests and private developers at the expense of essential conservation programs that benefit all Americans.

The nation’s land management agencies have seen their budgets cut and their workforces dwindle for years. This had led to many tough decisions: reduced visitor services and recreational investments, reduced scientific research and monitoring, compromised conservation and management decisions, growing maintenance backlogs, and other impacts. There is a significant and growing need for Congress and the Administration to invest in conservation programs.

The Trump administration FY18 proposal requests $11.6 billion for the Department of the Interior, a $1.5 billion or 12 percent decrease from the 2017. Funding for land acquisition and the essential Land and Water Conservation Fund, which invests in parks in virtually every county in the U.S., would also be slashed. Cuts of at least $120 million to federal land acquisition would basically end public land investment under the Land and Water Conservation Fund, crippling enhancements to public access and national parks.

Over the past several decades, investments in conservation have fallen dramatically. The Congressional Budget Office projects that in the next decade federal spending on non-military programs will fall to the lowest level ever recorded.

In total, conservation and natural resource programs account for barely one percent of the federal budget, yet they provide invaluable benefits: clean air for children to breathe, clean water for families to drink, healthy public lands that support a booming outdoor recreation economy, vibrant wildlife populations, resilient ecosystems, and renewable energy that powers a clean, sustainable future. These benefits are foundational to the U.S. economy, and create high quality American jobs that cannot be exported.

Americans deserve a federal budget that protects public health, prioritizes conservation, and ensures the world we leave our children is cleaner, healthier and more sustainable than the one we inherited.

Federal agencies are doing everything in their power to meet their obligations, and they have been tremendously successful in doing more with less, tightening belts in every way possible before making decisions that impact program funding. Nevertheless, as a forthcoming report from The Wilderness Society will show, years of funding and staffing constraints have taken their toll.

Cameron Witten is a government relations and budget specialist at The Wilderness Society.