Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Or you pick up the newspaper and see that your state legislature is considering a bill that declares that accepted sciences like global warming (and evolution, of course) are “controversial issues” that require “alternatives” to be taught.

Incidents like these have happened in one or more states, and they are likely to continue to happen. Teachers are encountering pushback from many directions as they try to teach global warming and other climate science topics.

The importance of climate change education is, to the RealClimate community, a no-brainer. Numerous professional science organizations, from the American Chemical Society to the American Geophysical Union to the Geological Society of America have stressed the imperative of climate science being an integral part of science education.

So What’s a Teacher to Do?

Long a defender of the teaching of evolution, the National Center for Science Education has recently launched an initiative to support and defend the teaching of climate change science.

The “support” part has challenges all its own. Unlike evolution, which easily fits into biology and other life science courses, climate science spans multiple disciplines and can fall through disciplinary cracks in biology, chemistry and physics, or appear briefly in more specialized disciplines like ecology or Earth sciences. Moreover, climate science is complex and often non-intuitive, and students (and all too often teachers) stumble over misinformation and misconceptions that are hard to overcome. Many educational institutions are wrestling with how to support climate science in the K-12 curriculum.

But the “defend” part is where NCSE will make a unique contribution. Our experience over the decades helping teachers and school boards resolve the problems that have arisen over the teaching of evolution should stand us in good stead in helping them deal with this newer “controversial science”. Of course, there are many perspectives affecting the objections to climate science education, and each requires its own response.

Some of the denial is literal (It’s not happening! The science is bad!), some of it may be interpretive (it’s maybe happening but people aren’t to blame), and some of it stems more from the implications of climate change (it’s happening and maybe humans are responsible, but someone else is to blame and/or there’s nothing I can do about it). We’re going to help teachers understand where pressure against climate science education comes from, as the first step in helping them construct a response. From the evolution education controversy we learned long ago that one does not solve these problems merely by piling on more or better science: the underlying, motivating issues must be addressed. The science is essential, but not sufficient.

Climate change education should be an integral part of science education. Students should graduate from high school and certainly college with at least a basic understanding of the foundational concepts of climate science so they can understand human activities and how they are impacting climate and other aspects of the earth system.

This is no small task, and obviously NCSE as a relatively small non-profit can only do so much. We need your help.

We have been successful because we marshal allies, like scientists, teachers, parents, and other citizens, at the grassroots. NCSE’s success over recent decades in defending the teaching of evolution has been due in large measure to scientists and others who are willing to support good science education locally and at the state level. We also need scientists to provide us with their scientific expertise.

If you are a climate scientist, please give us your contact information so we can consult with you. Also, your contact information will be helpful to us if something occurs in your region or state where we need a scientist to write a letter, testify before a committee, support a teacher, or help in some other way.

Of course, an obvious way you can help is to join NCSE, but even if you don’t, your expertise will be helpful to us.

Visit our website, and contact our new Programs and Policy Director, Mark McCaffrey, who will be helping spearhead the new initiative, to let us know you support our effort. Teachers will thank you.

Eugenie Scott, a former university professor, is the Executive Director of National Center for Science Education (NCSE.) She has been both a researcher and an activist in the creationism/evolution controversy for over twenty-five years. She holds eight honorary degrees from McGill, Rutgers, Mt. Holyoke, the University of New Mexico, Ohio State, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Colorado College, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Scott is the author of Evolution vs Creationism and co-editor, with Glenn Branch, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.

We need to develop a new economy because the current version is not working. The industrial economy is destroying every aspect of the living planet. And, as it turns out, we need a living planet for our own survival.

In this essay, I briefly describe the horrors of the current interconnected, globalized, planet-destroying house of cards. Then I articulate another way, which is not difficult to do: It would pose quite a challenge to come up with a worse way, and we have several models from which to choose. I will focus on two such models, agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

What’s wrong?

Detailing all that is wrong with the industrial economy would require libraries full of books. The cryptic version includes, at a minimum, the following: (1) an industrial economy at the apex of western civilization, a set of living arrangements that transfers financial wealth from the poor to the wealthy; (2) human-population overshoot on an overcrowded planet; (3) runaway climate change on an overheated planet; and (4) wholesale destruction of the living planet. The latter brings an extinction rate of a few hundred species each day, along with destruction of potable water and living soil.

In short, as I wrote in the leading journal in my discipline, “the modern world essentially requires one to live immorally. There is no doubt that a society that enslaves, tortures, and kills people and abuses the lands and waters needed for the survival of our species and others is immoral, yet these actions are produced with stunning efficiency by the world’s industrial economy, as epitomized by American empire. Most people know that Big Energy poisons our water, Big Ag controls our food supply, Big Pharma controls the behavior of our children, Wall Street controls the flow of money, Big Ad controls the messages we receive every day, and the criminally rich get richer through exploitation of an immoral system. This is how America works. And, through it all, we think we live moral lives in the land of the free.”

It should be clear that the industrial economy is making us sick, mentally and physically, and also greatly reducing habitat for our species on Earth. As a result, I’m a big fan of terminating this set of living arrangements — that is, I’m a fan of terminating industrialized civilization — and replacing it with a more sane and durable set of living arrangements.

Alternatives

Alternatives abound, and generally rest along a continuum ranging from the current system to the post-industrial Stone Age. I will consider three points along the continuum: (1) the current system, which must be replaced if we are to persist as a species beyond a few decades, (2) agrarian anarchy, and (3) the post-industrial Stone Age.

The current system: industrial economy

The contemporary version of civilization is creating a dire set of predicaments: human-population overshoot, climate chaos, and an unparalleled extinction crisis. It is the primary problem we face. As such, I think it’s time to leave it behind before it leaves us. Considering the ongoing, accelerating collapse of the industrial economy and the virtual absence of national- or international-level discussion about mitigation, I strongly suspect our society is headed for the post-industrial Stone Age within a matter of years, not decades. But communities and the individuals comprising communities have the option of choosing between agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

Agrarian anarchy

Anarchy assumes the absence of direct or coercive government as a political ideal, while proposing cooperative and voluntary association between individuals and groups as the principal mode for organizing society. This close-to-nature, close-to-our-neighbors approach was the Jeffersonian ideal for the United States, as evidenced by Monticello and the occasional one-liner from Thomas Jefferson. It was also the model promoted by Henry David Thoreau and, more recently, radical thinkers such as Wendell Berry (farmer, writer), Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher), Howard Zinn (recently deceased historian), and Tucson-based iconoclastic author Edward Abbey.

Consider, for example, a few well-known lines from Thomas Jefferson: (1) “The result of our experiment will be, that man may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”; (2) I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it”; and (3) “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Although Jefferson did not call himself an anarchist, his words and ideals indicate he strongly supported the rights and role of individuals, as well as a small government that minimally oversaw the citizenry. The Greco-Latin roots of anarchy suggest the absence of a ruler, which seems like a good idea to me.

Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” To my knowledge, no state governments believe we’ve yet reached that point.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, but the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989: (1) “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”; (2) “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others”; and (3) “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

In my dreams, industrialized nations are headed for agrarian anarchy. Many countries have been there for years and can show us the way, if only we allow them. If a region never acquired ready access to cheap fossil fuels, agrarian anarchy was an obvious approach. How else but a strong sense of self-reliance and dependence on neighbors to grow and distribute all food locally? How else but reliance on those same traits to secure the water supply, and protect it from the insults of industry? How else to develop a human community dominated by mutual respect and mutual trust? Contrary to our current set of living arrangements, no currency is needed: barter fills the bill. Better yet, a gift economy is well-suited to agrarian anarchy.

Post-industrial Stone Age

The first two million years of the human experience, and the first few hundred thousand years for our own species, was spent with relatively small communities living close to the land that supported them. These humans knew each other and they knew the plants and animals with which they shared the area. They had minimal impact on the lands and waters that supported them. These humans spent a few hours each week doing what we call “work,” making sure the members of the community were well-hydrated, well-fed, and warm. This was a durable set of living arrangements, as characterized by its longevity and minimal impact on Earth.

We arrogantly and disparagingly refer to this time as the Stone Age.

The first civilization arose a few thousand years ago. Civilization is characterized by cities. In other words, civilization is defined by by human populations too large to be supported in the local area. Cities require use of clear air, clean water, and healthy food from adjacent wildlands, as well as materials to ensure body temperature is maintained at about 37 C. In exchange, cities export dirty air, polluted water, and garbage to outlying areas. Most civilized people think this is a wonderful exchange, although it is unsustainable by definition because there are limits on nature’s abundance.

The current version of civilization, the world’s industrial economy, is the least sustainable model to date, in part because it requires growth for its survival: Civilizations, like organisms, grow or die. This finite planet cannot support infinite growth.

The world’s industrial economy mainlines ready supplies of inexpensive crude oil. The lifeblood of western civilization, cheap oil infuses our daily lives. Petroleum products transport us easily and conveniently, thus allowing for exchange of materials and ideas. Without inexpensive crude oil to deliver water, food, and building materials, the world’s industrial economy declines.

Each of the six worldwide economic recessions since 1972 was preceded by a spike in the price of crude oil, and the days of cheap oil are behind us. At the global level, peak extraction of crude oil occurred in May 2005. A modest decline in available crude oil, coupled with increased industrialization in lesser-developed countries such as China, India, and Brazil, indicates further spikes in the price of oil lie in our future. That the world has nearly a trillion barrels of crude oil remaining to exploit hardly matters: The price of oil is key to growth of the industrial economy. There is little doubt that future spikes in the price of oil will prove sufficient to terminate the industrial economy, taking us on a one-way trip to the post-industrial Stone Age. Already, expensive oil is overwhelming the ability of central banks and central governments to provide the illusion of economic growth by printing fiat currency. As nearly occurred in 2008 in the wake of oil priced at $147.27 per barrel, western civilization faces an abrupt termination in the face of expensive crude oil.

It is unclear what the future holds. I suspect completion of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy will engender short-term but large-scale mortality of humans. Shortly thereafter, all “renewable” energy systems will fail because they depend heavily on maintenance and support from oil-driven industries. The batteries associated with most home-based PV solar and wind-energy systems have a life of a decade or so. When collapse of the industrial economy is complete and is followed by inability to generate electricity via “renewable” systems, it seems humans will be forced to live — yet again — close to our neighbors and close to the natural systems that allow for our survival. That is, we’ll be immersed in the post-industrial Stone Age, albeit with plenty of technology that was not present during the Neolithic period. The simplest of these technologies, including knives and jars, will be readily usable for a long time. The more complex technologies, especially those relying on electricity, will fade quickly from our memories.

An economy based on gift exchange

The current version of the industrial economy has most people obsessed with the tertiary economy (symbolic, green pieces of paper and magnetized particles on hard drives). A few thoughtful individuals focus instead on the secondary economy (the items we use in our daily lives), which rests firmly on the foundational but rarely contemplated primary economy. The primary economy is comprised of the raw materials we use to survive, and perhaps even thrive. Faith in the symbols characterizing the tertiary economy will be lost when people recognize there are too few items of use (secondary economy) and too few underlying materials (primary economy). One result will be a profound loss of power in the symbols.

An economy based on exchange of gifts worked for the first two million years of the human experience and, due to collapse of the industrial economy certain to result from ongoing decline of fossil-fuel energy, we’re headed toward a similar set of circumstances. We would do well to allow history to serve as a guide to our fossil-fuel-free future. Our current monetary system is based on faith in symbols and it appears to give us something for nothing. Instead, it steals our sense of community.

People with an abundance of paper wealth have no need to build their human community. Their wealth allows them to buy goods and services, so they need not know the names of the people providing the services. Ditto for the names of the plants, animals, soils, and water providing the services on which we depend for our survival.

On the other hand, financially poor people depend heavily on their neighbors. The rural poor recognize that those neighbors include non-humans as well as humans. True community is woven from gifts, and the gifts come from the lands and waters that support us, as well as from our human neighbors.

A personal example

I had the brass ring. And I let it go. My parents were lifelong educators. So are my only brother and my only sister. Among them, only I reached the pinnacle of the educational world: I was a tenured full professor by the age of 40. I walked away from that life, which I loved, an act that made most people think I’d lost my mind. I walked away after trying to change the morally bankrupt system in which we are immersed when I realized the system was changing me, and not for the better.

I let go of the brass ring after I realized the first step toward destroying this irredeemably corrupt system is to leave it. Because I was born into captivity and assimilated into the normalcy bias of a world gone bonkers, I left later than I should have, and long after I realized the immorality of the system. A large part of this delay resulted from my inability to identify where and how to leave the system. I had come to see the industrial economy at the apex of western civilization as a horrific system but, because it was the only system I ever knew, I didn’t know how to escape it. Finally, after several years of thought and a few aborted attempts to reach escape velocity, my wife and I developed a set of living arrangements on a small property with another small family where we try to model agrarian anarchy.

When I finally tossed aside the brass ring, I worked cooperatively with others to develop to transition toward a gift economy embedded in agrarian anarchy. I live in a small, sparsely populated valley where gifts are the rule, not the exception. I share a small property with a small family of humans, as well as goats, ducks, chickens, and gardens. We have attempted, and continue to attempt, to develop a durable set of living arrangements with particular attention to securing potable, healthy food, appropriate body temperature, and a decent human community. Living in agrarian anarchy in a human community at the edge of empire, I’ve taken responsibility for myself and my neighbors, human and otherwise.

This way of living is far superior to my former life. I drink pure water extracted from a local well with PV solar and hand pumps. I eat healthy, whole foods, much of which is grown on this property. I burn no fossil fuels during my daily life in a well-insulated, off-grid home. I know my neighbors, human and otherwise, and they know me.

Finally, very late in an unexamined life, I came to see the horrors of the way we live, and I let go. Please join me.

Guy McPherson is professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for 20 years. He's written well over 100 articles, ten books, the most recent of which is Walking Away From Empire, and has focused for many years on conservation of biological diversity. He lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house where he practices durable living via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and working with members of his
rural community. Learn more at guymcpherson.com or email Guy at grm@ag.arizona.edu

Fossil fuels are going to disappear, whether we like it or not. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are becoming scarcer, harder to extract and a greater danger to the global climate. If we proceed with business-as-usual, energy companies will take advantage of increasing scarcity to dominate the world economy by vacuuming up more money from the 99%. They will be able to ally with military and financial institutions to construct an energy-military-financial complex that could eventually reduce most of the rest of us to a form of debt peonage. On the other hand, if we could possibly elect a government that does what governments do best – build infrastructure – we can avoid a world of global warming and economic collapse by building enough wind farms, solar panels, and geothermal systems to power our economy and ignite a sustainable, broad-based period of economic growth. Of course, this will require a sea-change in the direction of the political system, along the lines of the Occupy movement, but there is too much at stake to throw up our hands in despair.

The unfolding energy drama presents progressives with several dilemmas. Some are suspicious that oil scarcity can be used as a ruse by the oil companies and speculators to spike prices. Roger Altman recently argued that a larger supply of fossil fuels will lead to less international tension. More generally, progressives sometimes fear that advocating for less oil use will be seen by the public as an attack on the American Dream of a car in every garage and a single family home for every family.

But in addition to problems of scarcity and extraction, fossil fuels are bringing us towards extremely dangerous climate change. We need to have some answers or else the Right will simply keep up with the chant of “Drill baby drill.” It's time to counter with, “Build, build, build!"

Dirty fuels Create an Unsustainable economy

The question of the future of the supply of fossil fuels is not an easy one to answer. Oil producing nations, for instance, are not at all transparent about their supplies. Technologies constantly change, and so do environmental hazards. However, if we look at the current state of fossil fuel industries, it should be clear that we are in trouble.

1) Natural gas. Natural gas production is being kept alive by the development of hyrdrofracturing technology, or “fracking." As AlterNet has reported, an official with New York State stated that fracking will contaminate water supplies. His is only the most recent statement of a widespread concern about the dangers of this new practice. France has temporarily banned fracking, and New York State is considering how to proceed, but one would hope that the possibility of making New York City uninhabitable because of contaminated water would focus minds considerably.

Beyond environmental concerns, the corporate hype surrounding fracking as a “game changer” is false. Even the Energy Information Administration, generally a cheerleader for the industry, predicts that with fracking American natural gas production will increase by only 31 per cent by 2035. That increase probably won’t even cover growth of the economy, and even so there is talk of exporting natural gas, which will decrease the amount available for domestic use even further. The problem is one that is endemic to the current fossil fuel industry – the conventional methods of extraction are leading to precipitous drops in production as fields are sucked dry, so extreme extraction is the only route left.

2) Oil. The environmental situation is at least as bad in the case of petroleum production, as we saw in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Despite industry trumpeting of new technological breakthroughs, the underlying fact is this: oil companies would not be oil-fracking, drilling multi-mile pipes underwater, exploring the Arctic and cooking tar sands if they could do what they did for the first 100 years of the oil age -- drill into pressurized deposits of oil that are conveniently situated below solid, dry, accessible land. The energy gained compared to the energy needed to discover oil has collapsed from 1200 to 5 in the last 100 years. By contrast, wind energy now returns 25 times the energy needed to provide it.

Despite all of the new oil extraction techniques, global production of petroleum has stagnated since about 2005. This plateau in production is referred to as “peak oil” by activists who are concerned about how a civilization that requires oil for its transportation needs will survive if the supply should start to shrink precipitously. As scarcity leads to higher gasoline prices, economies stop growing, which leads to less demand for gasoline and then, temporarily, lower prices, until demand lifts the price again, and the cycle repeats itself.

Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, societies encourage dirtier and dirtier methods of extraction. Nigeria, a major oil exporter, illustrates this irony. The problem of peak oil is exacerbated by the decrease in exportable production, because big exporters like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia keep using more oil for their own use. When the Nigerian government tried to eliminate gasoline subsidies, riots ensued, a process that has repeated itself throughout the oil-producing nations, thus decreasing the amount of oil available for oil importers. This rioting occurred at the same time that Nigeria’s oil rich delta experienced a terrible oil spill, an area that endures an Exxon-Valdez-sized spill every year.

The Canadian tar sands may be the worst of all fossil fuel disasters, not only because thousands of miles of forest and large deposits of water are destroyed, but because the extra carbon emitted from these formations may mean “game over” for the climate, to use eminent climatologist James Hansen’s phrase. The reason Hansen is so worried about the tar sands is because his scenario for avoiding the worst of global warming is to stop using coal, but only if oil production peaks and declines, as peak oil activists predict. If more, dirtier oil flows, then you could shut down all the coal plants and the biosphere would still be in big trouble.

3) Coal. Coal use, at least in the U.S., is indeed declining , although not fast enough – and it is still increasing rapidly in China.  But even coal is experiencing supply problems, as China has to import 40 percent of its supplies. The data on coal is even less reliable than the data for petroleum, but some experts have predicted a peak in production as early as 2020. Meanwhile, coal, like oil and increasingly natural gas, continues to wreak death and destruction on its environment.

4) Nukes and biofuels. Uranium is not a fossil fuel, but it is a fuel, as are biofuels, which also have very negative consequences for the environment. Fukushima may have begun to sound a death knell of the nuclear power industry. Even the French nuclear industry, which generates 80% of France’s electricity, has had to lay off employees because contracts to build nuclear power plants have been cancelled. It is becoming clear that biofuels usually cause more damage than benefits, by replacing food production, encouraging deforestation, and increasing pollution. The challenge for humanity is to stop using fuels and to only use renewable sources of energy from the sun, wind, and earth.

Transitioning to a renewable energy society

For progressives, the fossil fuel crisis provides a great opportunity for equitable, sustainable economic growth. Since energy impacts all sections of society, all parts of the economy must become more just in order to solve the problem. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of petroleum. While it would be much easier if Sammy and Susie Suburban could wake up in the future and drive their electric cars in just the same way they drive their oil-powered ones, this scenario seems very unlikely.

The best way to reduce and eliminate the use of petroleum is to increase the density of town, suburban, and city centers, so that people can choose to walk, bike, or take electric trains such as subways and light rail, and so that slow, low-range actually-existing electric vehicles can cover the shorter distances needed. To make dense city centers attractive, however, a good educational system is required. As the current candidate for Senate in Massachussets, Elizabeth Warren, has argued, much of the expansion of the suburbs and the increased expenditure of family income has occurred in order to live in a good school district. Thus, because of the interconnected nature of the modern economy, it might turn out that the single most important way to solve the energy crisis is to improve urban schools!

The technology now exists to supply all the electricity we need by constructing wind farms, solar panels, and energy-efficient buildings. If progressives want to argue for the positive benefits of government, then they can advocate for a multi-trillion dollar program of government-led new energy infrastructure, which would employ tens of millions of people and rebuild the key to our economic prosperity, our manufacturing base.

It is exactly because the energy, military, and financial elites will benefit from fossil fuel scarcity that progressives need to tackle the problem head on. In rebuilding the infrastructure, the economic fortunes of the 99 percent can be revived as well.

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Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded.  An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings.  The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion -- and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.

In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2003.

Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever.  And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it. 

Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival.

These days, big government gets big press attention -- none of it anything but terrible.  In the United States, especially in an election year, it’s become fashionable to beat up on the public sector and all things governmental (except the military).  The Right does it nonstop.  All their talking points disparage the role of an oversized federal government. Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist famously set the tone for this assault.  "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government,” he said. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." He has managed to get 235 members of the House of Representatives and 41 members of the Senate to sign his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” and thereby swear never, under any circumstances, to raise taxes.

By now, this viewpoint has taken on the aura of folk wisdom, as if the essence of democracy were to hate government. Even many on the Left now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful, bureaucratic, corrupt, and oppressive, without giving serious consideration to how essential it may be to our lives.

But don’t expect the present “consensus” to last.  Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis.  Private security firms won’t help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups -- each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.

Consider Hurricane Irene: as it passed through the Northeast, states mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City opened 78 public emergency shelters prepared to house up to 70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine, and tarps to thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in 13 stranded towns -- all free of charge to the victims of the storm.

The damage to Vermont was estimated at up to $1 billion. Yet the state only has 621,000 residents, so it could never have raised all the money needed to rebuild alone. Vermont businesses, individuals, and foundations have donated at least $4 million, possibly up to $6 million in assistance, an impressive figure, but not a fraction of what was needed. The state government immediately released $24 million in funds, crucial to getting its system of roads rebuilt and functioning, but again that was a drop in the bucket, given the level of damage.  A little known state-owned bank, the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank, also offered low-interest, low-collateral loans to towns to aid reconstruction efforts. But without federal money, which covered 80% to 100% of the costs of rebuilding many Vermont roads, the state would still be an economic basket case.  Without aid from Washington, the transportation network might have taken years to recover.

As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5 million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2 trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market, for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000 policies in a given year.  In other words, that is less than 5% of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized program underwrites the other 95%. Without such insurance, it’s not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to rebuild.

Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?

Facing Snowpocalypse Without Plows

The early years of this century have already offered a number of examples of how disastrous too little government can be in the face of natural disaster, Katrina-inundated New Orleans in 2005 being perhaps the quintessential case. 

There are, however, other less noted examples that nonetheless helped concentrate the minds of government planners.  For example, in the early spring of 2011, a massive blizzard hit New York City. Dubbed “Snowmageddon” and “Snowpocalypse,” the storm arrived in the midst of tense statewide budget negotiations, and a nationwide assault on state workers (and their pensions).

In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was pushing for cuts to the sanitation department budget. As the snow piled up, the people tasked with removing it -- sanitation workers -- failed to appear in sufficient numbers. As the city ground to a halt, New Yorkers were left to fend for themselves with nothing but shovels, their cars, doorways, stores, roads all hopelessly buried. Chaos ensued.  Though nowhere near as destructive as Katrina, the storm became a case study in too little governance and the all-too-distinct limits of “self-reliance” when nature runs amuck. In the week that followed, even the rich were stranded amid the mounting heaps of snow and uncollected garbage.

Mayor Bloomberg emerged from the debacle chastened, even though he accused the union of staging a soft strike, a work-to-rule-style slowdown that held the snowbound city hostage. The union denied engaging in any such illegal actions. Whatever the case, the blizzard focused thinking locally on the nature of public workers. It suddenly made sanitation workers less invisible and forced a set of questions: Are public workers really “union fat cats” with “sinecures” gorging at the public trough? Or are they as essential to the basic functions of the city as white blood cells to the health of the human body? Clearly, in snowbound New York it was the latter. No sanitation workers and your city instantly turns chaotic and fills with garbage, leaving street after street lined with the stuff.

More broadly the question raised was: Can an individual, a town, a city, even a state really “go it alone” when the weather turns genuinely threatening? Briefly, all the union bashing and attacks on the public sector that had marked that year’s state-level budget debates began to sound unhinged.

In the Big Apple at least, when Irene came calling that August, Mayor Bloomberg was ready. He wasn’t dissing or scolding unions.  He wasn’t whining about the cost of running a government.  He embraced planning, the public sector, public workers, and coordinated collective action. His administration took unprecedented steps like shutting down the subway and moving its trains to higher ground. Good thing they did. Several low-lying subway yards flooded.  Had trains been parked there, many millions in public capital might have been lost or damaged.

The Secret History of Free Enterprise in America

When thinking about the forces of nature and the nature of infrastructure, a slightly longer view of history is instructive. And here’s where to start: in the U.S., despite its official pro-market myths, government has always been the main force behind the development of a national infrastructure, and so of the country’s overall economic prosperity.

One can trace the origins of state participation in the economy back to at least the founding of the republic: from Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States, which refloated the entire post-revolutionary economy when it bought otherwise worthless colonial debts at face value; to Henry Clay’s half-realized program of public investment and planning called the American System; to the New York State-funded Erie Canal, which made the future Big Apple the economic focus of the eastern seaboard; to the railroads, built on government land grants, that took the economy west and tied the nation together; to New Deal programs that helped pulled the country out of the Great Depression and built much of the infrastructure we still use like the Hoover Dam, scores of major bridges, hospitals, schools, and so on; to the government-funded and sponsored interstate highway system launched in the late 1950s; to the similarly funded space race, and beyond.  It’s simple enough: big government investments (and thus big government) has been central to the remarkable economic dynamism of the country.

Government has created roads, highways, railways, ports, the postal system, inland waterways, universities, and telecommunications systems. Government-funded R&D, as well as the buying patterns of government agencies -- (alas!) both often connected to war and war-making plans -- have driven innovation in everything from textiles and shipbuilding to telecoms, medicine, and high-tech breakthroughs of all sorts.  Individuals invent technology, but in the United States it is almost always public money that brings the technology to scale, be it in aeronautics, medicine, computers, or agriculture.

Without constant government planning and subsidies, American capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the world’s largest economy. Yes, the entrepreneurs we are taught to venerate have been key to all this, but dig a little deeper and you soon find that most of their oil was on public lands, their technology nurtured or invented thanks to government-sponsored R&D, or supported by excellent public infrastructure and the possibility of hiring well-educated workers produced by a heavily subsidized higher-education system. Just to cite one recent example, the now-familiar Siri voice-activated command system on the new iPhone is based on -- brace yourself -- government-developed technology.

And here’s a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit socialist.  However, it’s not considered proper to discuss government planning in open, realistic, and mature terms, so we fail to talk about what government could -- or rather, must -- do to help us meet the future of climate change. 

Storm Socialism

The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely to change how we think about the role of the state.  But attitudes toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we’re hardly at that moment yet.  In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional Republicans, eager to starve it of funds.  One look at FEMA explains why.

Yes, when George W. Bush put an unqualified playboy at its helm, the agency dealt disastrously with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Under better leadership, however, it has been anything but the sinister apparatus of repression portrayed by legions of rightists and conspiracy theorists.  FEMA is, in fact, an eminently effective mechanism for planning focused on the public good, not private profit, a form of public insurance and public assistance for Americans struck by disaster. Every year FEMA gives hundreds of millions of dollars to local firefighters and first responders, as well as victims dealing with the aftershock of floods, fires, and the other calamities associated with extreme weather events.

The agency’s work is structured around what it calls “the disaster life cycle” -- the process through which emergency managers prepare for, respond to, and help others recover from and reduce the risk of disasters.  More concretely, FEMA’s services include training, planning, coordinating, and funding state and local disaster managers and first responders, grant-making to local governments, institutions, and individuals, and direct emergency assistance that ranges from psychological counseling and medical aid to emergency unemployment benefits. FEMA also subsidizes long-term rebuilding and planning efforts by communities affected by disasters. In other words, it actually represents an excellent use of your tax dollars to provide services aimed at restoring local economic health and so the tax base. The anti-government Right hates FEMA for the same reason that they hate Social Security -- because it works!

As it happens, thanks in part to the congressional GOP’s sabotage efforts, thousands of FEMA’s long-term recovery projects are now on hold, while the cash-strapped agency shifts its resources to deal with only the most immediate crises.  This represents a dangerous trend, given what historical statistics tell us about our future.  In recent decades, the number of Major Disaster Declarations by the federal government has been escalating sharply: only 12 in 1961, 17 in 1971, 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and in 2011 -- 99!  As a result, just when Hurricane Irene bore down on the East Coast, FEMA’s disaster relief fund had already been depleted from $2.4 billion as the year began to a mere $792 million.

Like it or not, government is a huge part of our economy. Altogether, federal, state, and local government activity -- that is collecting fees, taxing, borrowing and then spending on wages, procurement, contracting, grant-making, subsidies and aid -- constitutes about 35% of the gross domestic product. You could say that we already live in a somewhat “mixed economy”: that is, an economy that fundamentally combines private and public economic activity.

The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it.  Think of what’s coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.

After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change. We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades.  In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather.

In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold.

To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government.  Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?

It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all. 

Christian Parenti, author of the recently published Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Writing Fellow, and a professor at the School for International Training, Graduate Institute. His articles have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, TomDispatch, and the London Review of Books, among other places. 

A few years ago, Cheryl Manning assigned a research project on climate change to her high school environmental science class in Evergreen, Colo. She presented the basic facts and data from peer-reviewed studies, then asked the students to look into the issue themselves and report back on what they learned.

Halfway through the unit, three students came to class up in arms. They questioned whether the data was made up and if government scientists were part of a plot — “like conspiracy theorists that say we never went to the moon,” Manning said. At a PTA meeting the students’ parents accused her of trying to undermine their children’s religious belief system.

“Peer-reviewed science is the Kool-Aid of the left-wing liberal conspiracy,” they said, adding a warning: “Be on your guard.”

Manning’s superintendent backed her up, and the parents eventually pulled their kids out of school. But she said her experience is common enough that many teachers shy away from the subject of climate change.

Manning’s experience in Colorado is just a microcosm of a larger fight being waged in classrooms across the country. Reminiscent of the evolution-vs.-creationism clash, the overwhelming scientific evidence that says humans are causing the warming of the planet has emerged as the new battlefield in middle and high schools in the U.S.

“Lots of teachers I talk to just won’t teach it,” said Manning, a geologist before turning to teaching 16 years ago. “They’ll teach about the historical changes but not current trends. Science teachers already get so much pushback on evolution vs. creation that they’re reluctant to invite more controversy. And some teachers don’t know that much about climate change themselves. They’re not sure how firm the ground is they’re standing on.”

Manning is a member of the National Science Teachers Association. Last year an online poll of its 60,000 members found that 82 percent had faced skepticism about climate change from students and 54 percent had faced skepticism from parents. Some respondents added comments: Students believe whatever it is their parents believe. . . . Administrators roll over when parents object. In a recent survey of about 1,900 current and former teachers by the National Earth Science Teachers Association, 36 percent reported they had been influenced directly or indirectly to teach “both sides” of the issue.

That concerns the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, Calif. For 25 years the Center has worked to keep creationism and “intelligent design” out of public schools. Now it has expanded its scope to defend and support the teaching of climate change science, against the efforts of skeptics or deniers to intimidate teachers.

“We have been hearing for several years now that teachers were getting pushback on teaching climate change, and some of the playbook used by those promoting teaching ‘both sides’ was very similar to the attempt to have evolution ‘balanced’ by creationism and intelligent design,” said Mark McCaffrey, who is spearheading the Center’s new initiative. “From my experience working with teachers, it is clear that the so-called ‘controversy’ about climate change science is a major impediment to teachers and the polarized political climate around teaching the topic is a big problem.” 

McCaffrey is a pioneer in climate change education. He’s cofounder of the Climate Literacy Network and while at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) helped develop the Essential Principles of Climate Science, endorsed by the federal government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program.

As in Manning’s case, many times it’s individual parents who challenge individual teachers. Last year, in a Portola Valley, Calif., high school, a teacher who had shown her class Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was challenged by a parent who demanded that the school provide “balance” with a debate between a climate change scientist and a global warming denier. The teacher’s union representative contacted NCES, and the Center argued that while policy issues — energy consumption, cap-and-trade, global warming adaptation — were legitimate subjects to debate in a social studies class, a science class should deal only in consensus science. School officials agreed and the debate was cancelled.

But there are also well-organized campaigns to get school districts and state legislatures to mandate teaching “balance.”

• In 2010, in Grand Junction, Colo., a Tea Party activist gathered 700 signatures on a petition that teachers stop talking about climate change. The effort was supported by the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group that had targeted Grand Junction to kick off a national “Balanced Education for Everyone” campaign. When the petition failed, the campaign was scrapped.
   
• Last summer, the school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., voted unanimously to require the teaching of “multiple perspectives” on climate change in an environmental science class. The issue was pushed by a school board member who maintained there are “legitimate, mainstream, normative opinions that differ from the liberal dogma of belief in global warming.” After the action received national and international attention, the mandate was rescinded.
   
• State boards of education in Texas and Louisiana have introduced standards to require teachers to present climate change denial as a valid scientific position. Legislators in Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Kentucky have introduced bills to require equal time for climate change skeptics. 

Attacks on the teaching of climate change often go hand-in-hand with efforts to insert creationism or “intelligent design” into public schools. In 2009, the Texas Board of Education mandated that teachers present all sides of the debate on both evolution and climate change. Leslie Kaufman of The New York Times wrote that the linkage was a canny legal strategy:

Courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Campaigns against climate science and evolution are part of a national crisis in science education, said NCSE’s McCaffrey. 

“Teachers are overburdened and often teaching out of their area of expertise,” he said. “Environmental education tends to be heavy on ‘get the kids out in nature’ and light on science. By middle school, many students start to be turned off by science. Our efforts are geared toward re-invigorating science education for the 21st century in order to prepare our young people to become informed citizens and leaders of tomorrow.” 

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Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com

Contrary to everything we have been taught, there is no actual United States of America. The U.S. is an occupied territory that could more accurately be described as the Corporate States of America. If the geopolitical states are united, the people are not. We are a nation divided by ideology and by social and economic class. The U.S. is not a democracy and it never was. The systems of power do not allow the voice of working people to be heard or their collective will to be acted upon.

Despite the subterfuge of freedom and democracy, the rights of corporations have consistently superseded the sovereign rights of the individual and those of the community. Labor history and a litany of environmental catastrophes bear this out. For instance, everywhere one looks government agencies, ostensibly created to protect the public welfare, are allowing hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale, even when it poisons municipal drinking water and causes incalculable harm to the environment.

Our diverse forests are commodified, measured in board feet to be clear-cut and off-shored at prodigious bargain rates, like a liquidation sale. World class biodiversity is yielding to desertification and monoculture. Money changes hands. The few are getting rich at the expense of the many. The world and the people who live in it are treated like products to be exploited. We are told that nothing is sacred, save for the dollar and markets.

Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that no human being, including corporate CEOs and members of Congress, can live without potable water or breathable air. We are literally sacrificing the Earth’s life support systems and mortgaging the future, while attempting to satiate the greed of a few grotesquely wealthy individuals. Through lifelong indoctrination, Americans are persuaded that self-interested greed is in their best interest.

The rich and powerful have decreed that corporate profits, the Holy Grail of American capitalism, are more precious than life itself. The remorseless people in power are without conscience. History confirms that sociopaths do not hesitate to take what they want from their unsuspecting victims by any and all means.

But surely, even among Friedmanites, it must be allowed that some things cannot be commodified or bought and sold. For instance, clean air and potable water are the birthright of every living organism. These are necessities that belong to the commons; they cannot ethically be privately owned. In contrast to this assertion, two edicts of modern capitalism are private ownership and the commodification of workers and nature.

Capitalism, and the market fundamentalism that is associated with it, has stripped bare the Earth’s biodiversity and substituted a world of commodities in its stead. What we see and think we know is not real. It is the product of marketing and perception managers—a hologram.

There is growing conflict between capitalism and the planet’s ecology, its essential life support systems. A fierce struggle between capital and democracy is in progress. The booted foot of capitalism is pressing upon the throat of democracy. We inhabit a dying world and are inheriting dying freedoms. Corporate greed and over-population is the culprit. Conflict is everywhere.

Virtually all of the social upheaval, inequality, and environmental problems of today in some way ensue from capitalism, including overpopulation and armed aggression. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and a burgeoning market for consumers. This is simply not possible on a finite planet.

These tensions are manifested no more clearly than throughout the coal belt and mountains of West Virginia, where I make my home. Here, mountains are cleared of forests before being blown to smithereens in order to cheaply extract coal to enrich Massey Energy Corporation. The process, known as mountaintop removal, has poisoned streams, altered their courses, and changed the contours of the land and its hydrology. It has devastated both human and biological communities while filling the coffers of the timber and coal industries.

Conventional underground mining has claimed the lives of thousands of coal miners trying to scratch out a modest living from the Earth. At times, it has led to armed conflict between miners and the Pinkertons hired by the mining companies in places like Matewan and Blair Mountain.

In West Virginia, King Coal and the gas and oil industry run the state’s legislature. The government is effectively owned by corporate lobbyists. As a result, it is futile to make legal and moral appeals to government for redress of our grievances. If we limit ourselves to the tools that our oppressors provide us, the entire region will become a sacrifice zone. Working people and the poor make the sacrifices; billionaires and industry carry off the profit. We are left to deal with the aftermath.

The illusion of democracy, including voting in the absence of meaningful choice, is a poor substitute for direct action and anarchy. Democracy cannot flourish in the sterile soil that capitalism leaves in its wake. Either we have democracy or we have capitalism, or we create something entirely different. Radically opposing ideas cannot be reconciled.

Modern humans inhabit a human-engineered world of absurdities and contradictions. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s assertions, corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Every sentient human being knows this. However, the law says otherwise. We must deny the corporate state that victory by refusing to capitulate.

The struggle for community rights, egalitarianism, and social, economic, and environmental justice must occur outside of the system that creates inequality and fosters wanton destruction of the commons. Countless species of plants and animals that provide essential ecological services are being eliminated to create space for strip malls, gated communities, gambling casinos and golf courses. As a result, ecological and economic catastrophe loom. We are facing global famine in an anthropocentric over-heated world.

Globally, wealthy multi-national corporations are gorging themselves on the biological and mineral wealth of the commons. What could be more absurd or unethical?

The brainchild of Adam Smith, capitalism, which replaced feudalism during the French Revolution, is founded upon demonstrably false premises, many of which were unknown in Smith’s time. Nevertheless, classically-trained economists assert that capitalism is a primal force of nature rather than the defective human construct that it is. Modern capitalism has produced pathological symptoms and endorsed an ethos that is antithetical to life and to liberty. It is killing the world and foreclosing evolutionary possibilities.

Indeed, ethical considerations aside, and speaking purely from a biological perspective, one may emphatically state that modern capitalism is an aggressive cancer that is devouring its host. But most of us are in denial. People like me are asked not to utter the “C” word in public spaces. It might offend the well-intentioned believers. Whenever this occurs I am reminded of Thoreau, who uttered, “Any truth is better than make believe.” One has an ethical obligation to state what one knows succinctly and clearly.

It is not in dispute that the ideology of constant expansion on a finite planet is contradicted by inviolable ecological dictums—among them, carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, and die-off. But classical economists act as if these laws do not apply, or they are mysteriously overridden by the irrational exuberance of capitalism.

In reality, every political economy is underlain by ecology and by living, evolving, biological systems. Ecology is the only economy that really matters.

By possessing even a modest degree of ecological literacy, one can make some revealing predictions with mathematical certainty. For example, the continuation of capitalism as the primary political economy can have one of two possible outcomes: the virtual destruction of the biosphere, meaning the death of the host organism, or the abolition of the capitalist system.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work?

Global capitalism, with its dependence on the availability of cheap fossil fuels and petrochemicals for food production, must give way to small-scale local economies and organic agriculture. Food must be locally grown and, as far as possible, other necessities locally produced. The age of cheap fossil fuels is ending. Industrialized man must bravely confront his addictions and embrace sobriety or he will self-destruct.

It is said that nature bats last. Humans do best when they emulate natural systems that have evolved over eons of time.

A moneyless economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Accordingly, goods and services may then be exchanged without the conduit of markets. These exchanges would be of equal value and thus inherently fair.

The classic business models will be replaced by worker-owned and worker-operated cooperatives. In this arrangement, workers—not a board of directors—make all of the business decisions. They share the risks and benefits and distribute the surpluses of production, while significantly reducing the work day and the work week. A portion of the surpluses of production is allocated to the betterment of the community and to the protection of the commons.

New economic models must be predicated upon ecological principles or they will fail. Existing alternatives to capitalism, such as Spain’s Mondragon Worker Cooperative, must be critically analyzed and evaluated as a model that could, with modifications, be implemented elsewhere.

There is no better teacher than evolution and natural selection. History confirms that the most revolutionary ideas are occasionally the oldest. For instance, anthropological studies indicate that early Homo sapiens evolved by implementing egalitarian principles into their tribal clans. People and the cultures they create must either evolve or perish.

The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. Political campaigns and elections will recede into history and quickly forgotten. Evolved societies do not need leaders or elected officials.

Every member of an egalitarian community is a leader. Power flows in a circular form rather than a linear, top-down hierarchy. It is derived directly from the people. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. All people will have equal access to opportunity. Healthcare and higher education, like pure water and clean air, will be regarded as a right of birth and provided without cost.

Direct action will replace voting in political elections. Rather than consent to be governed, sovereign people can create the world they want to live in. In communities where people are empowered and where they have an equal stake, they will want to participate. Everyone brings something to the table. Everyone contributes and all of society benefits.

Communities will become as interconnected and interdependent as ecological systems. But each will remain autonomous within the larger matrix of nature. States and nations as we know them may eventually recede into history and disappear.

Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities can be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. As in healthy ecosystems, the welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community—and vice versa. No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together.

All living organisms share a common origin and a common destiny. Ecology and economy must merge into an integrated natural system suited to long-term survival in a world already ravaged by industrialized man. Ecological and social healing must be part of the process of building sustainable communities.

The transition from capitalism to cooperation will be neither smooth nor easy. There will be many false starts. At first, there will be fierce resistance to revolutionary change. People cling to the familiar and the comfortable, to what they know, even when the dominant paradigm and popular culture does them harm.

The first tentative steps of a journey are often the most difficult. There are no clear blueprints to follow. There will be trepidation and uncertainty. But we must commit to beginning. The alternative is oblivion. But if we embark on the voyage the survival of the species, and a new age of enlightenment will be possible.

Charles Sullivan is a Master Naturalist, community activist, and free-lance writer residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia.

“Fiddling while Rome burns” may seem a stale analogy, but when talking of “green growth” and “green economy” (GGE, for short), it is appropriate. Despite assertions to the contrary, the only thing innovative about the GGE concepts is the buzz that surrounds them. Getting excited about them when they are hardly new or creative notions blithely ignores their critical limitations for dealing with the social and ecological challenges facing us today.

The modern environmental movement emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to two centuries of industrial growth that produced everything in varied and vast quantities — including pollution. As political scientist Albert Weale has helpfully discussed, the initial policy strategy to emerge from this disquiet was confrontational. Governments sought to regulate corporations whose effluents despoiled nature and human health. Regulations were designed to mandate certain practices and penalize pollution in an attempt to change business behaviour. The confrontational arrangement of the 1970s was obviously problematic, inefficient and even ineffective.

The alternative was to frame environment and economic growth as mutually supportive partners. Indeed, “Our Common Future” (the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, also known as the Brundtland Report) of 1987 observed, somewhat inexplicably, that “poverty reduces people’s capacity to use the environment in a sustainable manner; it intensifies pressure on the environment” and therefore suggested that rapid economic expansion is essential for a healthy environment. In the same breath, though, the report also recognized that there are “ultimate [biophysical] limits” and pinned its hopes of resolving this contradiction and realizing sustainability in the world on “ensuring equitable access to resources and reorienting technological efforts to relieve the pressure” long before these limits are reached.

The practical implementation of this prescription relied on realizing greater efficiencies and technological sophistication, and the appropriation of nature under expert management and market-based allocation. The report was less explicit — and subsequent policy even more so — on exactly how to enable “equitable access to resources” in practice.

The sustainable development agenda has been around for more than two decades. However, apart from some successes at cleaning up air and water, largely at the local level in affluent societies, its accomplishments in bringing about an arrangement of nature–society relations that is on the whole equitable and sustainable still appears limited. The basic problem is that the implementation of sustainable development unevenly emphasizes economic growth, and equity is seen as a managed outcome of applying modern science and technology to expand the economic pie and its subsequent allocation through free markets.

This approach has been unable to engage equity as a politically negotiated arrangement of fair social relationships. It should be evident to a casual observer today that while this strategy has succeeded in growing the economic pie, it has failed in arriving at a fair allocation of affluence and it effluents.

Efficiency is a necessary but insufficient condition today, when the imperative is to find sufficiency in a finite and deeply inequitable world.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the recent attention to “green growth” and “green economy”. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) describes GGE as an economic arrangement that “enhances growth, social progress and environmental stewardship”. It recognizes biophysical limits and notes that the “objective of the green economy is to ensure that those limits are not crossed”. It proposes a “Great Green Technological Revolution” to make technologies “more efficient in the use of energy and other resources and minimize the generation of harmful pollutants”.

In a similar vein, UNEP’s Toward a Green Economy observes that GGE is an arrangement where “growth in income and employment should be driven by public and private investments that reduce carbon emissions and pollution, enhance energy and resource efficiency, and prevent the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services”. Reviewing these foundational assumptions of GGE, one must ask: What has changed in over two decades?

These ideas were innovative in 1987 when“ Our Common Future” was released. But to talk of them in 2011 as new solutions for persistent, unresolved problems is, to put it generously, unhelpful. They are good strategies, and policy must continue to emphasize them and expand their applicability. However, efficiency is a necessary but insufficient condition today, when the imperative is to find sufficiency in a finite and deeply inequitable world.

The scope of this challenge is unprecedented. The recent “great recession” revealed our inability to arrange an acceptable society without constant economic growth. Prevailing against this challenge requires a wellspring of imagination and creativity. Focusing on more efficient growth without situating questions of ecological limits, equity and distribution into the foundations of these discussions is rather futile.

Science and technology for sustainable societies

Ideally, the puzzle that GGE should help solve is how sufficiency can be approached practically, creatively and institutionally. Toward that end, some reflection on the dynamic interrelationships between technology and society is helpful.

Developing countries, especially low-income ones, with relatively low rates of electricity usage, may be able to “leapfrog” into electricity generation based on renewable forms of primary energy, for instance. As this assertion from UNDESA illustrates, the GGE discourse holds that developing countries and transition economies can advance directly to a green economy. The problem with the assertion of “leapfrogging”, however, is it fails to recognize that putting in place more efficient technology does not necessarily bring about the goals of equity and sustainability. This is because technology implicitly embodies normative positions and engenders patterns for mediating the interaction between nature and society.

Technology implicitly embodies normative positions and engenders patterns for mediating the interaction between nature and society.

Modern human’s encounter with fossilized energy illustrates this attribute of technology and the unprecedented social, political and economic dynamics that ensued. Long ago, Lewis Mumford eloquently reported on this sudden encounter that put “mankind in a fever of exploitation”, so much so that the logic of mining pervaded the “economic and social organism” and became the norm for subsidiary economic and industrial organization. This logic of “disorderly exploitation and wasteful expenditure” acquired a life of its own and continued to propagate quite independently of whether or not the initial mine of energy was depleted.

Two attributes of the relationship between technology and society must be highlighted here. First is their reciprocal influences, wherein a portfolio of technical capabilities and an accompanying economic logic lit that “fever of exploitation” and subsequently the “animus of mining affected the entire economic and social organism.”

The second attribute is the phenomenon characterized as “technological momentum” by Thomas Hughes (1994), wherein “disorderly exploitation and wasteful expenditure remained, whether or not the source of energy itself disappeared”. Whether we consider a specific instance such as breaking the addiction to oil, or the considerable difficulties of figuring out a steady-state economic arrangement, the momentum of past choices is evident.

In this context, the common duality of technology as socially “neutral” (its impacts are largely accidental and, therefore, society only needs to focus on fiddling with it so as to avoid or mitigate its unwanted consequences), or of society as being “technologically determined” (its social impacts are inherent to its design) are half-truths that reduce it to a spectator sport controlled by the key players in the field. Yet, the evolution of technology choices ought to be anything but a spectator sport.

In certain forms, technology holds the potential to be liberating and emancipatory and is at par with, or even more influential than, politics and legislation in shaping society. Thus, it is imperative for society to have at least a comparable (if not greater) influence on its evolution and form.

As Andrew Feenberg eloquently offered in 1991, “the design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is the underlying cause of many of our problems”. He further notes that “technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an ambivalent process of development suspended between different possibilities. It is a social battlefield … a parliament of things on which civilizational alternatives are debated and decided”.

Thus, fundamentally, what appears to be lacking is the ability for society to influence the evolution of technology and to impart to it values of sufficiency that are already visible in some conceptions and practices of human development and economic organization. The crucial need is for emerging green technology infrastructure to be able to embody these changes from the status quo. An attendant emergent requirement for green technology innovation, then, is that it be “democratic” as opposed to being “authoritarian” (after Lewis Mumford).

What appears to be lacking is the ability for society to influence the evolution of technology and to impart to it values of sufficiency.

A democratic technological infrastructure

In addition to addressing the question of scale (discussed above), a democratic technological infrastructure is also crucial for pursuing equality. Democratic technologies are particularly helpful in distributing means to generate wealth, a theme that was central to Mahatma Gandhi’s critique of modern technology.

This vision was eloquently captured by the gifted polymath D. D. Kosambi in the context of debates over the choice of civilian nuclear power in India. In 1960, Kosambi reasoned that there were significant difficulties in centralized generation and subsequent supply of electricity to a population as vast and dispersed as that of the sub-continent. In this context, he noted that the solar energy brought with it the distinctive advantage of “decentralization”, not just from the technical point of view but for a political and economic perspective as well. He argued that solar power was particularly conducive to “dispersed small industry and local use…” and that “if you really mean to have socialism in any form, without the stifling effects of bureaucracy and heavy initial investment, there is no other source so efficient”.

Going forward, our great faith in technological fiddling must be balanced by the burning fact that an unconditionally expanding economy (efficiency notwithstanding) is no longer feasible, not least because of the biosphere’s energy and material limits and the inequality it presupposes. Thus, as countries seek material infrastructures to mediate nature-society relations, the focus must move so that designs being considered can internalize and engage valuations of sufficiency, and realize a realignment of control over production and consumption arrangements from capital to community.

A truly green economy, in short, must be a revolution of democracy and equality as manifest in the technology infrastructure that is shaped by society, and which, in turn, is shaped by it.

Dr. Manu V. Mathai is a Research Fellow in the Science, Technology for Sustainable Societies Programme at United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies. Formerly a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, Society and Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, Dr. Mathai’s research and teaching interests centre around interlinkages between the themes of energy, environment and development, with a focus on science and technology policy and conceptions of human and economic development amenable to sustainability and equality.