December 2003 January 2004
Our
Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed
Bill Moyers
Reclaiming
Local Media
Paul Cienfuegos
What
You Need to Know About Electronic Voting
William Rivers Pitt
Will
the 2004 Election by Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?
William Rivers Pitt
Myths
of the Hermit Kingdom
Eric Sirotkin
Heresies
in Pursuit of Peace
Eric Sirotkin
The
Empire Strikes Out
Kenny Ausubel
Relationships
and Culture
Nita Simons
The
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
Tai
Chi and Qigong
Bill Douglas
A
Relationship Practice
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
The Empire Strikes Out
By Kenny Ausubel
Bioneers, a non-profit organization, was conceived to conduct educational and economic development programs in the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, traditional farming practices, and environmental restoration. With a network of practical visionaries working on behalf of the environment and people, Bioneers uses solutions-oriented stories—including both ecological models and social strategies—for restoring the earth.
The Bioneers vision of environment encompasses the natural landscape, cultivated landscape, biodiversity, cultural diversity, watersheds, community eco-nomics, and spirituality. Seeking to unite nature, culture and spirit in an Earth-honoring vision while creating economic models founded in social justice, Bioneers believe the success of these ideas can only come about by addressing the inter-dependence of economics, jobs, ecologies, cultures and communities. The following text is from Kenny Ausubel’s introduction to the 14th Annual Bioneers’ Conference last October in San Rafael, California.
• • •
Speaking once here at the Bioneers conference, Paul Hawken reframed the famous defining image from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As you may recall, while the horizon fills with a flotilla of space ships, the earthbound scientists are feverishly fumbling to make contact with the ET’s. Awestruck, they try sending out a sequence of musical tones to establish communication. Meanwhile, unseen behind them rises the Mother Ship, dwarfing everything else, blotting out the entire horizon. The Mother Ship is the biology of the planet. The Mother Ship is the Mother Earth. And it is bigger than anything we can imagine.
That’s about the size of it. For all the chatter about the Age of Information, what we are really entering is the Age of Biology.
We didn’t invent nature. Nature invented us. Nature bats last, the saying goes, but even more importantly it’s her playing field. We would be wise to learn the ground rules and how to play by them. That’s in great part what this conference is about.
When I founded Bioneers in 1990, the impulse originated from my exposure to the work of biological pioneers searching to rediscover nature’s own operating in-structions. Their quest has been to glean what we might learn from four billion years of evolutionary intelligence and apply it in practical ways.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what the bioneers are doing is mimicking nature in order to help nature heal and serve human ends harmlessly. In many cases their knowledge is prefigured by ancient indigenous science from First Peoples, the world’s original bioneers. These are the true biotechnologies.
The great ecological play takes place in a food web that makes no waste. It’s powered by a solar economy that neither mines the past nor mortgages the future. Some of its guiding principles are diversity, kinship, symbiosis, reciprocity and com-munity. It’s all alive. It’s all intelligent. It’s all connected. It’s all relatives.
One of the beauties of biology is that its facts can become our metaphors. These underlying codes may also serve as inspiring parables for how as human beings we might organize a more just, humane and authen-tically sustainable society.
If there is a single story woven within these many stories, it’s the grand tale of interdependence. Life is intimacy inter-connected, and as a culture we’ve made a basic systems error to believe that we exist somehow separate from nature, or from one another. That illusion could prove fatal at this momentous cusp where our turbo-charged technologies and overwhelming numbers have given us, for the first time in history, the capacity to blow it on a planetary scale.
Today a globalized corporate empire is menacing the future of the entire biosphere. We all know that empires are castles made of sand that always crumble and fade away, but by the time this empire strikes out, the biological game could be all but over. Corporate globalization is killing off its host—and ours—Mother Earth.
Gary Larsen once did a cartoon that sums up the empire express. A ship is sinking, and a pack of dogs crowded into a lifeboat are watching it go down. The lead dog says to the others, “OK—all those in favor of eating all the food all at once, raise your paws.” That’s economic globalization in a nutshell.
The real-world situation that’s spon-taneously combusting today is a perfect storm of extreme environmental degra-dation and rolling infrastructure collapse. It’s by no means the first time this has happened. Previous civilizations bought the farm because of self-induced environmental catastrophe, but in the past the damage was localized.
As Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, has pointed out, these societies met their demise by cutting down forests, eroding topsoil and building burgeoning cities in dry areas that eventually ran short of water. Sometimes hastened by sudden climate change, the ensuing disintegration occurred suddenly—in a matter of a decade or two after a society reached its peak of population, wealth and power. Because that pinnacle also marked maximum resource consumption and waste production, it produced unsupportable environmental impacts.
But there’s more to it, Diamond says: “They had foolish leaders … who embroiled them in destabilizing wars and didn’t pay attention to problems at home. They were overwhelmed by desperate immigrants, as one society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the societies that weren’t collapsing.” When Diamond studied the ecological downfall of Mexico’s ancient Mayan civilization, he determined that the final strand in its unraveling was a crisis of political leadership. He said, “Their [leaders] attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monu-ments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities.” Sound familiar, my fellow peasants?
Today we’re going mano a mano with the whole biosphere, and she’s responding with her own form of deregulation. Just take global warming. The planet is reeling from record-smashing temperatures, violent storms, long-term droughts, hundred-year floods, unstoppable fires, massive insect infestations, migrating disease patterns, rising seas, and wholesale species extinctions not seen in 65 million years. Fifteen-thousand people died in France this summer from record-setting heat. In Phoenix, Arizona, people’s flip-flops melted on the pavement. One woman who tripped and fell face-first on the sidewalk was rushed to a burn unit. As if the atmosphere weren’t already unpleasant enough, global warming is just getting going.
Earlier this year, the White House pressured the EPA to hit the delete key in its state-of-the-environment report regard-ing the forty-weight connection between global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. The US political class says we need more scientific study while they march us backwards into the 21st century carrying a sack of coal. In fact, the science is une-quivocal. It’s no longer a matter of con-necting the dots. It’s a matter of connect-ing the elephants in the room.
Global warming means more and bigger storms, and one of the most striking images from the relatively mild Hurricane Miserabel was the battered mall of the Washington Monument. A large stand of flagpoles forlornly flew the stars and stripes, shredded to tatters by the violent weather. As the great urban farmer Michael Abelman once said here at Bioneers, “After all, what good is a country and a flag if there is no more fertile soil, no ancient forests, no clean water, no pure food? If you really love your country, protect and restore some wildness. Support local agriculture. Plant a garden. Those who work to protect and restore these things are the real patriots.”
In truth, the US political class is clueless. It has no plan, besides eating all the food all at once. Although the empire may seem awesomely powerful, it’s coming apart at the seams.
What is also true here and around the world is that people are stepping up with real solutions. There’s a new superpower: global popular movements. They are growing from the bottom up—to take back control over our lives, our communities, our economies and our cultures. People are starting to assume responsibility for the lands, the waters, the forests, and the global commons we all share with the web of life.
People worldwide are rejecting the deification of the market over environ-mental and human rights. As Amory Lovins has said, “Markets make a great servant but a bad master and a worse religion. Markets produce value, but only communities and families produce values. And a society that tries to substitute markets for politics, ethics, or faith is seriously adrift.”
There are brilliant scientific and social innovators among us who’ve been patiently incubating the seeds of successful local, regional and even societal plans for the transformation to a sustainable civilization. An alternative globalization movement of unprecedented proportions is taking shape, weaving a green web of innovative models grounded in true biotechnologies and social equity.
This new world is being born right now before our eyes. It mimics the decentralized intelligence of living systems, the innate democracy of life. It’s founded in the recognition that the first homeland security comes from environmental security. Our civilization’s out-of-body experience is screeching to a halt as we awaken to our absolute dependence on natural life-support systems and our interdependence with all life. And in a world where half the people live on $2 a day or less, we can have no peace. The Gulf War we need to wage is to end the gulf between rich and poor.
And in terms of global security, it’s no coincidence that the world’s most dangerous political hot spots and breeding grounds for terrorism are exactly the same places with the worst environmental devastation and poverty. Go figure.
We’re entering into unknown territory. There will be little to hold onto. It could be a time of unimaginable suffering and loss, but it will also be a renaissance of flourishing creativity and deep healing. The regenerative capacity of nature is powerful beyond our imagination. And the boundless nobility of the human soul is arising everywhere in waves of caring and kindness. Our social security is being woven in community, as people gather to mend our shredded social fabric and solve problems together. There is as much cause for hope as for horror. And we know we must prevail.
We can start by attending to our worst wounds. In very practical terms, the solution is to invest in our problems. We need a Green New Deal, a massive global in-vestment in repairing the environment, transforming our infrastructures, and restoring people. The measure of any solution is whether it solves for pattern by resolving multiple problems in one fell swoop.
What’s called for is strong government leadership to reboot the system. We need an immediate global Marshall plan of clean, renewable energy, and the redesign and rebuilding of our decaying infrastructures and clotted transportation systems. We can jump-start a permanent transition to an ecological agriculture that produces healthy, nutritious food in regionalized foodsheds—restores the land, air and water—and revives rural economies thriving with small and medium-sized farms. We need to revitalize public health with an Ecological Medicine anchored in the health of our ecosystems, which is the best investment any society can make. And we need a just legal system that puts human and environmental rights above property rights and corporate rights. All these programs will yield dramatically positive results—environmentally, econo-mically, socially and spiritually. All of it is do-able.
In great measure, we know what to do in practical terms to realize this vision. The work of the bioneers with us this weekend exemplifies the kinds of practices already in place that can get us from here to there. The vexing bottleneck we face is political, not technological. The other power blackout we have to fix is the corporate empire turning the lights out on democracy. As the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, known as
“The father of fascism,” said in a uniquely refreshing moment of candor, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” As the whole world becomes a company town, democracy is in peril of becoming a phantom limb, severed from the body politic while we imagine it’s still attached. Cleaning up the environment will happen when we clean up politics and reclaim our government.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. Voting is not something we can do just every two or four years. We need to vote every day with our lives. The coming envi-ronmental blowback and social dislocation could just as easily swing us toward martial law and totalitarian rule. If we don’t change directions, we might just end up where we’re heading.
In closing, I’d like to share some words spoken at Bioneers by Luisa Teisch, a woman-chief and initiated elder in the Ifa/Orisha traditions of southwest Nigeria:
“In the West African tradition, Oya, the goddess of Fall is the queen of the winds of change, the boss lady of the cemetery, the mother of catastrophe. Whenever I talk about Oya, the mother of catastrophe, people shudder. But the proper definition of catastrophe is a sudden structural change. Oya doesn’t move the furniture around in the house; she blows the roof off and knocks down the beams, and reduces the debris to compost so that we can start all over again. At this point at the turn of the century, this is what we have to do in terms of the way we think about our relationship to nature.
“The Earth is the mother and we are the children. We are the ones that come out of her. We are the ones who are learning from her and through her, and we are the ones who are going to return to her. Our alienation from this indigenous mind is what allows us to poison ourselves, kill each other and poison the environment.
“In this time of change, take note of the place in nature where you are regenerated, and go there. If you’re a child of the river, or the forest, or the mountain or the thunder—wherever it is in nature that regenerates you—go to that place. Declare yourself one who learns from that place and is nurtured by that place, and is a defender of that place and that energy. Then live it.”
Let’s live it.
Kenny Ausubel is the president of the Board, and the founder and president of Collective Heritage Institute. He is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and environmental entrepreneur who co-founded Seeds of Change, the organic seed company. Mr. Ausubel is also the author of Seeds of Change: The Living Treasure; Restoring the Earth: Visionary and Practical Solutions from the Bioneers; When Healing Becomes a Crime: The Amazing Story of the Hoxsey Cancer Clinics and The Return of Alternative Therapies. Bioneers Conference website is www.bioneers.org; their toll free phone is 1-877-BIO-NEER.
The Bioneers Film Series in Ashland, Oregon, sponsored by the Charter Wilderness School, will continue on Jan. 22, 29 & Feb. 5 at the Ashland High School Theatre on Mountain Ave at 7pm. The Film Series features plenary videos from the 14th Annual Bioneers Conference. Call Susannne Watkins, (541) 482-6089 for information. See the ad on page 4.
