Goes without saying

There are certain facts of human nature that cannot be twisted by Machiavellian motives no matter how extreme or sensitive the political circumstances may be surrounding them. The facts of the matter are that human lives need air to breath, water to drink, and food to eat in order to survive. Regardless of the well from which you sip, these facts are undeniable, inescapable, and inalienable. There are no legislations, declarations, or manifestos that can undo these facts of human nature. No academic citations are needed for verification. And yet as hard as these facts may be, the political reality of today will have you think that accepting these facts are a free choice to be made.

Political reality is no match for physical reality. As the world stands, our civilizations’ air, water, and food supplies are gravely threatened by global forces — not by terrorists, not by warring nations or economies, and not by those who we may easily find disagreeable. The greatest global threat to humanity is ourselves. Now political reality will have you believe that the threat is external, that if we remove the danger that lurks outside or the enemy that hides within, we will have saved ourselves. Physical reality would say otherwise.

Physical reality would remind us that there are nearly 8 billion human lives that all depend on natural resources; that these resources can only exist in an environment where they can be replenished; and that there is a quantifiable chance that we will wipe ourselves out by not being good stewards to an environment that has been so life-giving as our Earth. Physical reality would also remind us that extinctions occur. There could be no self-inflicting wound that is greater.

To be reminded must mean to remember, and to remember must mean there is a history. But history, for some, has a capricious tendency to be memoryless or even ungrounded in facts. History has its way of cleaving political reality from physical reality. Some histories are written by those who are powerful, other histories are written by those who are powerless. Political reality will prey on whatever histories it may find convenient given the circumstances, but it can never divorce itself from physical reality as deluded as it may become. Physical reality trumps political reality. Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or liberal, Tea Party or Green Party, alt-right or alt-left, citizen or non-citizen, physical reality remains intact: all of us need air, water, and food.

There was a time when political reality was once grounded in physical reality, when bipartisanship transcended political bickering, when environmentalism was a shared and not a party-affiliated value. History would remind us that a Republican, Richard Nixon, in the 1970s created the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He did so by appealing to the shared values of both Republicans and Democrats. History would remind us that a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, created the United States Department of Energy. He did so by appealing to the shared values of both Republicans and Democrats. We witnessed an expression of this shared value in successive presidencies — in the Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

On January 20, 2017, a new administration, an administration which has articulated its intent to divorce itself from physical reality and buck the trend of its predecessors, will assume office. This new administration has promised on its “first day” to renege on his predecessor’s promise to deliver billions of dollars in mitigation funds to countries facing extreme stresses on their survivability due to more frequent and intense natural disasters. This new administration has promised on its “first day” to cancel his predecessor’s executive orders limiting the construction of energy infrastructure projects that are prone to lethal accidents. This new administration has also promised on its “first day” to lift restrictions on businesses notorious for heavily polluting the country and the planet at large.

All these promises sound like good news to anyone who wants jobs and free-flowing capital without consequence. But for anyone who is mindful of the consequences of our actions, there are real risks and liabilities we are adding to humanity’s survivability balance sheet — risks and liabilities all of us will have to pay on a long enough time horizon. Certain risks and liabilities are worth taking, others are not. The dangers attributed to these risks and liabilities are real, and are grounded in hard facts.

It would appear that the new administration and its followers are unaccustomed to facing consequences such as these, and have chosen their own facts. Perhaps this opinion piece did not meet the editorial standards of Breitbart, and did not reach you. Perhaps you worship conspiracy theories, and you deemed this to be propaganda spouted by the globalist liberal elite. Perhaps making America great for some is a nobler pursuit than making this planet habitable for all. Perhaps my reality is different from your reality.

We have a terrific opportunity to truly unite all Americans, if not the whole world, by reconciling our realities and making environmentalism bipartisan again. The ratification of the Paris Agreement testifies to all of us that we can prevail as one people under a common, unifying goal irrespective of geopolitical orientation and national interest. The new administration has a responsibility to demonstrate by example to the nation and to the whole world how we can “come together as one united people” yet owes its success to irresponsibly peddling and pandering division, fear, paranoia, and hate within its ranks and among its followers. The optimists still watching the spectacle unfold are left wondering how much damage can be undone. Others are wondering how much more damage awaits.

To those followers of the new administration, this is an urgent appeal to you and your leaders: do you not need air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat just like me? Or shall we civilly (or uncivilly) agree to disagree?

The Global Food Crisis: more evidence

The research coming from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) this month reflects previous concerns I’ve made in earlier articles[1],[2],[3],[4],[5] about the relationships of biofuels and commodities market speculation with food prices and the mechanisms driving these prices upward. Although the evidence doesn’t unequivocally confirm these concerns, this NECSI research paper is a stepping stone toward a general theory of what I’d like to call “ecodynamics”: namely, the study of the interactions of capital flows with natural resources. The abstract of the paper summarizes the fundamental argumentative thread which is worthy of peer-reviewed investigation:

In a previous paper published in September 2011, we constructed for the first time a dynamic model that quantitatively agreed with food prices. Specifically, the model fi t the FAO Food Price Index time series from January 2004 to March 2011, inclusive. The results showed that the dominant causes of price increases during this period were investor speculation and ethanol conversion.

Timothy A. Wise (director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute — Tufts University) posted this very informative article on his “Triple Crisis” weblog (6 March 2012) regarding the NECSI data and food price model. A year earlier, he wrote another succinct piece on food price volatility that initially captured my interest and led me to the NECSI paper mentioned above.

“Fewer guns, more solar arrays”

There is a large swath of the business community that continues to push for alternative energy infrastructure projects as the stimulus to getting our nation out of the current economic slump and ridding our dubious involvement in strategic energy resource-rich nation-states such as Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Read full article.

Oxfam America releases new report on food insecurity

"power above all determines who eats and who does not" (Oxfam America 2011)

“Rising food prices are tightening the squeeze on populations already struggling to buy adequate food, demanding radical reform of the global food system, Oxfam has warned.”

Link to BBC article (31 May 2011)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13597657

Key findings of Oxfam report Growing a Better Future:

  • Traders: Four global companies control the movement of most of the world’s food. Three companies – Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill – control an estimated 90 percent of the world’s grain trade. Their activities help drive volatile food prices and they profit from them. In the first quarter of 2008, at the height of a global food price crisis, Cargill’s profits were up 86 percent and the company is now heading for its most profitable year yet on the back of further disruptions to global food supplies.
  • India: Despite doubling the size of it economy between 1990 and 2005 the number of hungry people in India increased by 65 million – more than the population of France – because economic development excluded the rural poor and social protection schemes failed to reach them. Today one in four of the world’s hungry people live in India.
  • The world’s poorest people now spend up to 80% of their incomes on food – with those in the Philippines spending proportionately four times more than those in the UK, for instance – and more people will be pushed into hunger as food prices climb.
  • 5-Point Solution:
    1. Investing in Small-Scale Food Producers
    2. Ending Excessive Speculation in Agricultural Commodities
    3. Modernizing Food Aid
    4. Stopping Giveaways to the Corn-Ethanol Industry
    5. Regulating Land and Water Grabs

Solar Under The Sun

Solar II attendee shows Solar I attendees the technical aspects of the solar-powered water system

Last week I spent some time in Little Rock, AR, attending the Solar Under the Sun (SUTS) training session at Camp Ferncliff. SUTS trains and equips volunteers to be build effective and successful community-oriented solar-powered water purification systems. As a crash course on solar PV installation I was quite impressed with the level of expertise demon- strated by the teachers as well as their commitment to helping those most in need in the world. Nearly all of the trainers had experience in-country working on solar projects or had professional engineering degrees. SUTS is a volunteer-run organization of Presbyterian Church members from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana and is partnered with other international programs such as Living Waters for the World and the Haiti Education Foundation. And although I’m not the most religious or church-going individual, I was thoroughly inspired by the dedication and commitment of everyone who attended.

From Sept. 9 until Sept. 12, attendees engaged in community building and teamwork exercises, cultural sensitivity workshops, technical training, and partnership modeling. The entire session was broken into two groups of attendees: Solar I (which focused on the community partnership models) and Solar II (which focused on the technical side of designing and building the systems). I bunched with the Solar II folks. In addition to learning the “blackboard” essentials of solar PV installation and the mechanics of water filtration, we built disconnector boxes (i.e. the heart of the system) that would be sent to Haiti. The hands-on learning was a huge plus for me.

Solar II attendees put together disconnector boxes from scratch

(From left to right) Tim, George, Grimsley, and Charles putting some last-minute touches to their disconnector box

Solar II team showing off the product of their labor

Camp Ferncliff had many amenities and the staff was very hospitable. Each training session cost about $500 and covers room, boarding, showers, linens, and three meals a day. The camp even had a solar-powered buggy that you could ride!

On-site solar-powered shuttle

I felt a bit out of place when I first arrived since I figured I might be the youngest of the crowd and maybe the only brown kid. But there was one person actually from Haiti who had been sponsored by SUTS and the Haiti Education Foundation to attend, and another woman from Kenya studying disaster management at Oklahoma State. All together, everyone was welcoming enough to break the ice.

Solar II trainer Jerry Goode wrapping up the camp during the final plenary

By the end of the camp, other than feeling drawn by a higher sense of urgency and duty to assisting those living in the direst of conditions in the world, I felt humbled by a renewed sense of purpose being more thoroughly immersed in nature. As the world turns, we as human beings are merely a footnote in the annals of nature’s history, yet recognizing our interconnectedness with the world, to one another, and with those living on the margins of  global society are fundamental steps toward working for a future in which humankind can live in balance with the world and with each other.

You can find more pics from the training session on my photobucket site.