Natural Economics

New Economics for the 21st Century: Natural Economics

There are two aspects about the term Economy.

(1) Economy means household management---societys household or the household of earth. The basic building block of any strong state is a strong household, strong family.

(2) Sound economy includes the avoidance of waste and is built on a sense of frugality. In many daily terms such as to economize or even the term fuel economy---to improve fuel economy does not mean using more and more gasoline for every new car you buy, it means the opposite. An improved economy is one that uses and wastes less, and yet today we are all urged to spend more, year by year by year.

What is needed today is a reformulated economics, which takes Nature as its framework, measure and model. We need a new discipline of Natural Economics which in detail spells out the why�s and how�s of a sound economy operating within the basic framework laid down by nature. It is not only possible to create such an economic system; it is also our only choice.

A few basic principles of Natural Economics.

(1) The acceptance of natural systems as the primary systems.
(2) Living off Natural Income, not Natural Capital.
(3) A re-evaluation of Value in modern society.
(4) Active reinvestment in the health of natural systems.
(5) A realization of the prime importance of resource productivity in production.
(6) A realization that consumption and accumulation of wealth cannot produce human happiness.

1. The acceptance of natural systems as the primary systems.
Nature is always the main system, other man-made systems such as, for example, economic systems, can only be sub-systems. If main system and sub-system collides, the sub-system cannot win, it will lose. If the mother company/Nature goes bankrupt, all subsidiaries will go bankrupt along with it. We cannot win a fight against Nature; we can only win the fight against ourselves and our own greed. This is a fight which we must win by finding a way to operate human society in such a way that it can function within the tolerance limits, the carrying capacity of Nature for thousands and thousands of years.

How many economists today would say that the environment is more important than the economy? How many business leaders would dare to utter the opinion that their companies cannot continue to grow forever? And how many politicians have the courage to free themselves from their blind faith in Capitalism and modern economics and their devotion to Gross Domestic Products as our main yardstick for economic welfare?

2. Living off Natural Income, not Natural Capital
Modern civilization was built on the exploitation of natural capital. Any corporate manager knows that if a company is run on the depletion of capital, instead of creating sufficient continuous streams of revenue, it is only a matter of time before the company goes bankrupt. The more employees you have, and the higher the costs they incur, the faster the road toward the abyss. Why is it then that we, the managers of Earth, Inc. have not yet learned this lesson? Why is it that we continue to build our materials and energy economy overwhelmingly on natural capital? With the very wasteful and luxurious ways of some of the richest employees of Earth, Inc., it should be crystal clear that this is suicidal behavior. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to with economics ---a sound and frugal use of available resources.

What is our natural income? It is quite simply the sources of energy that can be renewed endlessly and the use of materials which can be replenished, either through mindful and frugal use thereof or through the continuous reuse and recycling of materials.

We have no choice but to work with renewable energy and material sources.

3. A re-evaluation of Value in modern society
In modern economics, 20 dollars worth of oil, 20 dollars worth of wheat, 20 dollars worth of shoes and 20 dollars worth of hotel coupons are treated as if they were of the same value. However, there is a very fundamental difference between these different 20 dollar items. Oil and wheat are primary sources of value, from the Earth, Natural Capital. One of these is non-renewable, oil; the other is renewable, wheat.

Shoes and hotel coupons are secondary products created by men. Shoes are treated as products, with material substance, and hotel coupons provide a service without direct material substance. As long as our economic system treats these different categories of value as equal, there is no incentive to protect non-renewable natural capital, including the semi non-renewable natural capital, soil, which is the foundation for the production of many primary but renewable products as well as of many secondary products. Soil and water are preconditions for the production of most primary products and we cannot produce secondary products without a primary system that functions.

Our economic parameters, including taxes and incentives, must be structured so as to encourage the protection of primary value and the shift from non-renewable to renewable sources hereof.

What we are talking about here is a fundamental restructuring of entire systems based on a re-evaluation of what constitutes sustainable value creation.

Using up primary, non-renewable resources such as oil within another generation or two represents the ultimate selfishness. We take all this precious value for ourselves and leave nothing thereof for our children. Is that really the responsible behavior of mature adults? How can we face our children or our grandchildren without being embarrassed?

What will future historians say of us, if we do not change our ways, and do not do it so soon? One could imagine a history text in the year 2150 saying, There were some ten generations of human beings, living roughly from 1850 to 2050 who thought they had the right to use all of Earths resources just for themselves. They learned nothing from history and left virtually nothing for the Future. They are now known as the mindless spenders, people who knew only how to spend today and appeared to have no idea about how to conserve for tomorrow. Restoring natural systems after these ten generations was an enormous task which has still not yet been completed.

If we do not re-evaluate our notions of value now and recreate our economic systems to reflect this, I fear that this is what future historians may very well write of us.

4. Active reinvestment in the health of natural systems
A new notion o value naturally leads to the conclusion that makes a lot of sense, economically, socially, culturally, to invest and reinvest in the health of natural systems. If forests are depleted, we must invest in their replenishment. If top soil is deteriorating, we must invest in whatever recovery is possible. If crucial systems such as a stable climate of a sufficient ozone layer show signs of stress, it is obvious that we must invest in the restabilization of these. And, as most corporate managers will know, the earlier such investments are made, the lower the cost.

Every corporation today should have as part of its charter, the intention to reinvest in the health of natural systems.

5. A realization of the prime importance of resource productivity in production
Certainly, labor productivity will continue to be an important management issue, but the time has come to realize that another kind of productivity is today of far greater importance and urgency. That is the question of how to raise resource productivity immensely. That not only means how to squeeze more out of every kilogram of material, which would seem a rather out-dated way of looking at things, rather it includes the redesign of production processes so that the least possible amount of resources is used and the highest possible degree of resource recovery is allowed for.

Our crucial scarcity today does not lie in the lack of labor; it arises from the depletion of natural capital and the increasing dysfunction of our natural systems, including topsoil, water, climate, etc.

Resource productivity is not an issue for the environmental department; it is a vital top management issue.

However, since the increase in resource productivity relates to something that no single individual or organization could own---that which is often called the commons---commonly shared natural capital and natural systems---it may not be sufficient to let corporations decide whether or not they wish to increase resource productivity. As with the question of what is valuable, we also need legislative guidance to ensure that companies who increase resource productivity are rewarded and companies who do not care to make an effort are punished.

Without increasing resource productivity dramatically, it will not be possible for 9.3 billion people in 2050 or 10 billion in 2100 to live decent lives. Without increasing resource productivity---starting now and starting in the industrialized nations---we will never be able to overcome frictions between the North and the South. Bridging the gap between rich and poor---allowing more people on Earth to live a decent life---depends on our ability to achieve much higher levels resource productivity.

6. A realization that consumption and accumulation of wealth cannot produce human happiness
Of course, people who do not have enough food should have food. People without shelter should be allowed decent dwellings. People who have too little of everything should be allowed to consume more.

But whether it is for these people, or for the over-consuming people in the richer nations, it is not consumption which produces happiness. Consumption occurs everyday all over Earth; it is a basic function of life. Until a certain threshold, more consumption of material goods does indeed bring a greater degree of happiness, but beyond this threshold, more consumption does not really improve quality of life. Beyond a basic level of survival, it is not consumption but rather a complex combination of non-material factors which decide whether a person or a society enjoy a sense of happiness.

In natural economics, it is accepted that consumption is of vital importance in daily life. It is a sense of contentment that brings about happiness. The urge to consume ever more creates ever-lasting unhappiness---never can you have enough, always must you want more. Knowng how much is enough, on the contrary leads to a feeling of contentment, which is a critical factor in achieving any form of happiness.

Economics is the study of frugality---of knowing what you can spend, what the limits and possibilities are in the natural system.
People in ancient societies knew that consumption was not a virtue and knew that a society which had no restrictions on the consumption of natural resources would inevitably be brought to fall by nature. The basic message was: know how much enough is or perish. We must nurture a feeling of contentment unrelated to demands forever more consumption, or we must perish. We cannot live with the present economy, in which it is virtually a sin to economize. We cannot continue with a culture which falsely believes that the accumulation of wealth is a proof of your value as a human.

If we want to have a future, any future, if we want to leave some hope for our children and theirs again, we must take new choices today. This is not denouncing the great achievements of our forefathers; on the contrary it is building upon their work taking us one step further in human evolution.

Speech by Tachi Kiuchi - Chairman, Future 500

What is going on.

Cuts only affect dependent livestock.

If you are un-dependent, anti-dependent or independent, they won't affect you, you are not cattle belonging to the farm. You are wildlife!

The cuts are not real. No significant reduction of government financial control is taking place.

Fodder is being consolidated on the most compliant animals in the farm, like the pigs (or dogs used to help in herding the cattle)

Fodder is being redirected away from elderly and non productive cattle, who serve no useful purpose to the farmers.

Small farms are being dissolved and consolidated into larger more efficient units.

These changes must take place otherwise the farm system will break down, and return to nature.

from indymedia

Free market has turned us into 'Matrix' drones

A leading economist has likened the nation's acceptance of free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality.

...Chang's new book argues that, as in The Matrix, people are brainwashed into seeing things as inevitable that are not...

Independent 29/8/2010

The Story of Christ

Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the assistance of Christianity. The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.

No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom, there is some good in Christianity "itself." What about the teachings of Christ and - early Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand for the spirit of humanity, for right and justice?

It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced me to choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that the abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.

Here I must revert to the counterfeiters of ideas and words. So many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the teachings of Christ with the great struggles for social and economic emancipation. The two are irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength. The other preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in the will of others; it is the complete disregard of character and self- reliance, and therefore destructive of liberty and well-being.

Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society, whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence and misery, must turn his back on Christianity, on the old as well as the present form of the same.

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

The poor are to own heaven, and the rich will go to hell. That may account for the desperate efforts of the rich to make hay while the sun shines, to get as much out of the earth as they can: to wallow in wealth and superfluity, to tighten their iron hold on the blessed slaves, to rob them of their birthright, to degrade and outrage them every minute of the day. Who can blame the rich if they revenge themselves on the poor, for now is their time, and the merciful Christian God alone knows how ably and completely the rich are doing it.

And the poor? They cling to the promise of the Christian heaven, as the home for old age, the sanitarium for crippled bodies and weak minds. They endure and submit, they suffer and wait, until every bit of self-respect has been knocked out of them, until their bodies become emaciated and withered, and their spirit broken from the wait, the weary endless wait for the Christian heaven.

Christ made his appearance as the leader of the people, the redeemer of the Jews from Roman dominion; but the moment he began his work, he proved that he had no interest in the earth, in the pressing immediate needs of the poor and the disinherited of his time. what he preached was a sentimental mysticism, obscure and confused ideas lacking originality and vigor.

When the Jews, according to the gospels, withdrew from Jesus, when they turned him over to the cross, they may have been bitterly disappointed in him who promised them so much and gave them so little. He promised joy and bliss in another world, while the people were starving, suffering, and enduring before his very eyes.

It may also be that the sympathy of the Romans, especially of Pilate, was given Christ because they regarded him as perfectly harmless to their power and sway. The philosopher Pilate may have considered Christ's "eternal truths" as pretty anaemic and lifeless, compared with the array of strength and force they attempted to combat. The Romans, strong and unflinching as they were, must have laughed in their sleeves over the man who talked repentance and patience, instead of calling to arms against the despoilers and oppressors of his people.

The public career of Christ begins with the edict, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance. What is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful and beautiful come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world. Every one knows that nothing good ever came or can come of the poor in spirit; surely never liberty, justice, or equality.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it.

Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the "redeemer" of the people.

"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."

But did not Christ exclude the possibility of righteousness when he said, "The poor ye have always with you"? But, then, Christ was great on dicta, no matter if they were utterly opposed to each other. This is nowhere demonstrated so strikingly as in his command, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

The interpreters claim that Christ had to make these concessions to the powers of his time. If that be true, this single compromise was sufficient to prove, down to this very day, a most ruthless weapon in the hands of the oppressor, a fearful lash and relentless tax-gatherer, to the impoverishment, the enslavement, and degradation of the very people for whom Christ is supposed to have died. And when we are assured that "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled," are we told the how? How? Christ never takes the trouble to explain that. Righteousness does not come from the stars, nor because Christ willed it so. Righteousness grows out of liberty, of social and economic opportunity and equality. But how can the meek, the poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of affairs?

"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder.

Good and bad, punishment and reward, sin and penance, heaven and hell, as the moving spirit of the Christ-gospel have been the stumbling-block in the world's work. It contains everything in the way of orders and commands, but entirely lacks the very things we need most.

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.

How much more ennobling, how much more beneficial is the extreme individualism of Stirner and Nietzsche than the sick-room atmosphere of the Christian faith. If they repudiate altruism as an evil, it is because of the example contained in Christianity, which set a premium on parasitism and inertia, gave birth to all manner of social disorders that are to be cured with the preachment of love and sympathy.

Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.

"Think not that I come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

Precisely. Christ was a reformer, ever ready to patch up, to fulfill, to carry on the old order of things; never to destroy and rebuild. That may account for the fellow- feeling all reformers have for him.

Indeed, the whole history of the State, Capitalism, and the Church proves that they have perpetuated themselves because of the idea "I come not to destroy the law." This is the key to authority and oppression. Naturally so, for did not Christ praise poverty as a virtue; did he not propagate non-resistance to evil? Why should not poverty and evil continue to rule the world?

Much as I am opposed to every religion, much as I think them an imposition upon, and crime against, reason and progress, I yet feel that no other religion has done so much harm or has helped so much in the enslavement of man as the religion of Christ.

Witness Christ before his accusers. What lack of dignity, what lack of faith in himself and in his own ideas! So weak and helpless was this "Saviour of Men" that he must needs the whole human family to pay for him, unto all eternity, because he "hath died for them." Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.

Thousands of martyrs have perished, yet few, if any, of them have proved so helpless as the great Christian God. Thousands have gone to their death with greater fortitude, with more courage, with deeper faith in their ideas than the Nazarene. Nor did they expect eternal gratitude from their fellow-men because of what they endured for them.

Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail Spiridonova who underwent the most terrible tortures, the most horrible indignities, without losing faith in herself or her cause, Jesus is a veritable nonentity. They stood their ground and faced their executioners with unffinching determination, and though they, too, died for the people, they asked nothing in return for their great sacrifice.

Verily, we need redemption from the slavery, the deadening weakness, and humiliating dependency of Christian morality.

The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed because they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the race; they have failed because the very essence of that doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life, exposed to the manifestations of nature, to the strength and beauty of passion.

Never can Christianity, under whatever mask it may appear-be it New Liberalism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, or a thousand and one other forms of hysteria and neurasthenia-bring us relief from the terrible pressure of conditions, the weight of poverty, the horrors of our iniquitous system. Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom; of the denial of strength and beauty, against the affirmation of the joy and glory of life.

From a comment posted by Emma Goldman here

otium (leisure) and negotium (work).

Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper

One can learn a lot about a culture from the words and ideas it pushes into early retirement. Our own age is rich in such conceptual emeriti, as anyone who has pondered the recent careers of terms like "manly," "respectable," "virtuous," or "disinterested" (to take just four) knows well. One of the greatest casualties resulting from this policy of premature superannuation SuperannuationAn organizational pension program created by companies for the benefit of their employees.Notes:Funds deposited in a superannuation account will typically grow without any tax implications until retirement or withdrawal. concerns the word "leisure" an idea that for the Greeks and for the doctors of the Church was inextricably in·ex·tri·ca·ble adj.1. a. So intricate or entangled as to make escape impossible: an inextricable maze; an inextricable web of deceit.b. bound up with the highest aspirations of humanity. For Plato, for Aristotle, for Aquinas, we live most fully when we are most fully at leisure. Leisure --the Greek word is [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, a few symbols, and control characters. Originally designed for teletype operations, it has found wide application in computers. ], whence our word "school"--meant the opposite of "downtime." Leisure in this sense is not idleness, but activity undertaken for its own sake: philosophy, aesthetic delectation, and religious worship are models. It is significant that in both Greek and Latin, the words for leisure--[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and otium--are positive while the corresponding terms for "busyness"--[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and negotium (whence our "negotiate")--are privative priv·a·tive adj.1. Causing deprivation, lack, or loss.2. Grammar Altering the meaning of a term from positive to negative.n. : not at leisure, i.e., busy, occupied, engaged. And for us? Of course, we still have the word "leisure." But it lives on in a pale, desiccated des·ic·cate v. des·ic·cat·ed, des·ic·cat·ing, des·ic·catesv.tr.1. To dry out thoroughly.2. To preserve (foods) by removing the moisture. See Synonyms at dry.3. form, a shadow of its former self. Think for example of the phrase--and the odious object it names--"leisure suit": it goes quite far in epitomizing the unhappy fate of leisure in our society. At first blush Adv. 1. at first blush - as a first impression; "at first blush the offer seemed attractive"when first seen , it might seem odd that leisure should survive predominantly in such degraded form today. After all, the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. and Western Europe Western EuropeThe countries of western Europe, especially those that are allied with the United States and Canada in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (established 1949 and usually known as NATO). have never been richer or more concerned with "quality of life" issues. By every objective measure, we can certainly afford leisure. (The real question is whether we can afford to lose sight of it.) We are daily confronted by an army of experts and a library of self-help books urging us to salvage "quality time" for ourselves, our family, our friends. What time could be of higher quality than leisure, understood as Aristotle understood it? (Cardinal Newman was right when he observed that, about many subjects, "to think correctly is to think like Aristotle?") But all such remedial gestures serve to underscore the extent to which our society has devoted itself to defeating genuine leisure, replacing it where possible with mere entertainment (what the Greeks called [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "child's play child's playn.1. Something very easy to do.2. A trivial matter.
child's playNounInformal something that is easy to doNoun 1. "), and disparaging dis·par·age tr.v. dis·par·aged, dis·par·ag·ing, dis·par·ag·es1. To speak of in a slighting or disrespectful way; belittle. See Synonyms at decry.2. To reduce in esteem or rank. efforts to preserve oases of leisure as the pernicious indulgence of an outmoded elite. Probably the most profound meditation on the meaning of leisure is a little book by the German neo-Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904- November 6, 1997) was a German Catholic philosopher, at the forefront of the Neo-Thomistic wave in twentieth century Catholic philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues, Leisure, the Basis of Culture and called in English Leisure, the Basis of Culture. It consists of two essays, the title piece (in German Musse und Kult, "Leisure and Worship") and "The Philosophical Act" both of which Pieper wrote in 1947. The two were published together in English in 1952 in a volume introduced by T. S. Eliot. It has just been reissued in a new translation with an introduction by the English philosopher Roger Scruton Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a British philosopher. He is (or has been) an academic, editor, publisher, barrister, journalist, broadcaster, countryside campaigner, novelist, and composer. .(1) Pieper, who died in November 1997 at the age of ninety-three, is pretty much a forgotten figure today. But in the Fifties and Sixties he commanded wide respect and exerted considerable intellectual influence. The introduction by Eliot to Leisure, the Basis of Culture--the first of many books by Pieper to appear in English--is one sign of the seriousness with which he was regarded. Another sign was the book's reception by reviewers. (The present edition includes excerpts from the original reviews.) The Times Literary Supplement devoted a long and admiring piece to the book, as did The New StatesmanThe New Statesman is a British left-wing political magazine published weekly in London. The current editor is John Kampfner. The magazine is committed to "development, human rights and the environment, global issues the mainstream press often ignores". ..... Click the link for more information.. The Spectator was briefer but no less admiring: "These two short essays ... go a long way towards a lucid explanation of the present crisis in civilization." The book was also widely noticed in this country: reviews from The Nation, The Chicago Tribune Chicago TribuneDaily newspaper published in Chicago. The Tribune is one of the leading U.S. newspapers and long has been the dominant voice of the Midwest. Founded in 1847, it was bought in 1855 by six partners, including Joseph Medill (1823–99), who made the paper , Commonwealcom·mon·weal n.1. The public good or welfare.2. Archaic A commonwealth or republic.Noun 1. ..... Click the link for more information., and The San Francisco ChronicleThe San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young.[2] The paper grew along with San Francisco to become the largest circulation newspaper on the West Coast of the ..... Click the link for more information. are included here. The review by Allen Tate Noun 1. Allen Tate - United States poet and critic (1899-1979)John Orley Allen Tate, Tate in The New York New York, state, United StatesNew York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times Book Review probably did as much as Eliot's introduction to stimulate interest in Pieper. It is doubtful that this new edition will generate anything like that level of response. One reason, of course, is that we are dealing with a new edition of material first published fifty years ago. But a deeper reason is that the loss Pieper describes was fresher in the late Forties and early Fifties than it is now. We are farther than ever from inhabiting a culture that esteems genuine leisure. But that distance acts as an anaesthetican·aes·thet·ic adv. & n.Variant of anesthetic.
anaesthetic or US anestheticNouna substance that causes anaesthesiaAdjectivecausing anaesthesia ..... Click the link for more information., dulling the sense of loss and, hence, the pulse of interest. Pieper not only wrote about leisure, he also requires leisure (I do not mean simply "spare time") if his work is to be read properly. Not that he is "difficult" or overly technical. On the contrary, Pieper wrote with a glittering simplicity--for once a genuinely deceptive simplicity--but the tintinnabulation of unleisured life deafens us to such quiet dignity. We must stop to listen if we are to hear these arguments, and stopping and listening are among the most difficult things to accomplish in a world that rejects leisure. Pieper's simplicity is the hard-won simplicity that comes at the end of an intellecutual journey. It is the fruit of confident mastery, like The Tempest or Beethoven's Op. 135 quartet. Pieper had no use for jargon or technicalities. His favored form is the long essay made up of short sentences. His books--almost all are fewer than 150 pages--sport many quotations from philosophers--from Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant. And yet they somehow escape seeming academic. In a curious way, this is at least in part because of the subjects Pieper wrote about. Although he wrote important books about Plato, he was first of all a specialist in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. His Guide to Thomas Aquinas, for example, is a splendid introduction to the intellectual and social world inhabited by the philosopher. It is true that Aquinas does not always elicit clarity and simplicity from his commentators. But Pieper wrote about him not as an academic subject but as someone who had irreplaceable things to say about the moral and intellectual realities of life--our life. He manages to make Aquinas's vocabulary seem the most natural language possible for discussing the subject at hand. (He manages the same trick with Plato and Aristotle.) This is a testimony to Pieper's rhetorical skill, the highest rhetorical achievement being to make itself invisible. It also says something about the naturalness of the categories that Aquinas (like Aristotle and Plato before him) used to discuss moral questions. Pieper first made his name with a series of essays on the so-called Cardinal Virtues--prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. These terms--especially when taken all together--can seem curiously dated to modern ears. Yet in his book The Four Cardinal Virtues cardinal virtuesNoun, plthe most important moral qualities, traditionally justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude (1965) Pieper shows with beguiling straightforwardness that, by whatever names we choose to call them, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance are indispensable to the common realities of human life. As is often the case with things that are indispensable, the importance of these principles goes unnoticed until they collapse. Then their centrality snaps into focus. In No One Could Have Known (1979), an autobiography that takes Pieper from his birth in a small village outside Munster to 1945 and the end of World War II End of World War II can refer to:
End of World War II in Europe
End of World War II in Asia , he recounts a chilling story from 1942 when he worked as a psychologist in the German army. Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union had put German troops deep into Russia. Pieper encountered a young man of eighteen "who still had the look of a child about him." He wore the uniform of a volunteer "driver auxiliary" and worked for the Nazis behind the front. Pieper asked the boy what he did. "Lately we did practically nothing but transport Jews?"
I pretended to be puzzled, not to understand. "Were the Jews being
evacuated? Or where did you drive them?"
"No, they were driven into the forest. And there they were shot?"
"And where did you collect them?"
"The Jews used to wait in the market square. They thought they were
being resettled. They had suitcases and parcels with them. But they had to
throw them onto a big pile. And straight away the Ukrainian militia went
after the things."
"And then you drove them to the forest. But the shooting--you were told
about it later; it's only hearsay."
Then the boy got very angry in the face of so much distrust and
stupidity. "No! I saw it myself. I saw them being shot!"
"And what did you say about that?"
"Oh well, of course you feel a bit funny at first ..."
And then? And then, presumably pre·sum·a·ble adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. , moral anaesthesia anaesthesiaanesthesia. takes over and you stop thinking about it. In one sense, Pieper's work aims to provide an antidote to such moral insensibility in·sen·si·ble adj.1. a. Imperceptible; inappreciable: an insensible change in temperature.b. Very small or gradual: insensible movement. . Philosophy, of course, is a futile weapon against tyranny. (A point underscored by Stalin when he contemptuously asked how many divisions the Pope commanded.) But philosophy is not at all futile in helping to create a moral climate intolerant of tyranny. (Which helps to explain why it can be said that in end the Pope prevailed over the tyranny of Communism.) Not that we can necessarily trust everything that goes under the name of philosophy. In his introduction to the original edition of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, T. S. Eliot remarked on the widespread feeling that philosophy had somehow lost its way --philosophy, he added, in "an older meaning of the word" as a source of "insight and wisdom." Philosophy in this "ampler sense" had been overtaken by various technical specialities, of which logical positivism logical positivism, also known as logical or scientific empiricism, modern school of philosophy that attempted to introduce the methodology and precision of mathematics and the natural sciences into the field of philosophy. was a conspicuous example. (In retrospect, Eliot suggested, logical positivism will appear as "the counterpart of surrealism: for as surrealism seemed to provide a method of producing works of art without imagination so logical positivism seems to provide a method of philosophizing phi·los·o·phize v. phi·los·o·phized, phi·los·o·phiz·ing, phi·los·o·phiz·esv.intr.1. To speculate in a philosophical manner.2. without insight and wisdom.") Pieper's chief importance was to provide a compelling counterexample coun·ter·ex·am·ple n.An example that refutes or disproves a hypothesis, proposition, or theorem.Noun 1. counterexample - refutation by example . "In a more general way," Eliot wrote, Pieper's "influence should be in the direction of restoring philosophy to a place of importance for every educated person who thinks, instead of confining it to esoteric activities which can affect the public only indirectly, insidiously, and often in a distorted form." Well, Pieper did provide the example. But it cannot be said that he provided the influence or restoration Eliot hoped for. With some notable exceptions, philosophy--or the activity that goes under that alias in the university today--is every bit as impoverished and lost in bootless boot·less adj.Without advantage or benefit; useless. See Synonyms at futile.
[boot2 + -less.]
boot specialization as it was when Eliot wrote forty-five years ago. More so, perhaps, if for no other reason than that there are so many more people calling themselves philosophers today than then. Logical positivism was sterile. But at least it made sense. Examples prove little, of course, since in the realm of human endeavor there is never a drought of absurdity. Yet it tells us something about the current state of philosophy that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two much idolized i·dol·ize tr.v. i·dol·ized, i·dol·iz·ing, i·dol·iz·es1. To regard with blind admiration or devotion. See Synonyms at revere1.2. To worship as an idol. French philosophers, should have published a book called What Is Philosophy? (1991) in which we learn that philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one
another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up.
They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of
the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them
always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not
fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an "Omnitudo" that includes all the
concepts on one and the same plane.
Which means ... what? Perhaps, as Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari tell us a bit later on, that "if philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito This article is about the philosophical magazine. For the software used in the extended version of the current Linux revision system git, see Cogito (software). For the famous philosophical saying by Descartes, see cogito ergo sum. of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection." Or perhaps it is just ominous-sounding nonsense. If Pieper is right, the current disarray of philosophy should come as no surprise. For philosophy in that "ampler sense" that Eliot spoke of (and that Aristotle famously observed in the beginning of the Metaphysics) depends on leisure. Philosophy in this sense is not primarily a mode of analysis but an attitude of openness: it is "theoretical" in the original sense of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: i.e., a contemplative attitude of beholding. It is one of the many ironies of contemporary academic life that what is called "theory" today means more or less the opposite of what the word [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] meant for the Greeks. For any self-respecting practitioner of the more modish forms of Lit. Crit., "theory" involves the willful imposition of one's ideas upon reality. In its original sense, however, theory betokened a patient receptiveness to reality. In this sense, philosophy, the theoretical activity par excellence, not only depends upon leisure but is also the fulfillment or the end of leisure. Consequently, the obliteration A destruction; an eradication of written words.Obliteration is a method of revoking a Will or a clause therein. Lines drawn through the signatures of witnesses to a will constitute an obliteration of the will even if the names are still decipherable. of leisure naturally leads to the perversion PerversionSee also Bestiality.bondage and domination (B & D)practices with whips, chains, etc. for sexual pleasure. [Western Cult.: Misc. of philosophy. It also leads to a perversion of culture, at least in so far as culture is understood not as an anthropological datum The singular form of data; for example, one datum. It is rarely used, and data, its plural form, is commonly used for both singular and plural. but as the repository of humanity's spiritual self-understanding: "the best" in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "that has been thought and said in the world." Leisure guarantees the integrity of high culture, its freedom from the endless round of means and ends that determines everyday life. It was Pieper's great accomplishment to understand the deep connection between leisure and spiritual freedom. "With astonishing a·ston·ish tr.v. as·ton·ished, as·ton·ish·ing, as·ton·ish·esTo fill with sudden wonder or amazement. See Synonyms at surprise. brevity" Roger Scruton observes in his introduction, "he extracts from the idea of leisure not only a theory of culture and its significance, not only a natural theology natural theologyn.A theology holding that knowledge of God may be acquired by human reason alone without the aid of revealed knowledge.Noun 1. for our disenchanted dis·en·chant tr.v. dis·en·chant·ed, dis·en·chant·ing, dis·en·chantsTo free from illusion or false belief; undeceive.
[Obsolete French desenchanter, from Old French, times, but also a philosophy of philosophy--an account of what philosophy can do for us ... in a world where science and technology have tried to usurp u·surp v. u·surped, u·surp·ing, u·surpsv.tr.1. To seize and hold (the power or rights of another, for example) by force and without legal authority. See Synonyms at appropriate.2. the divine command." Of course, there are many obstacles. For one thing, as Scruton notes, "leisure has had a bad press. For the puritan it is the source of vice; for the egalitarian a sign of privilege." There is also the related problem of simple pragmatism. If "maximizing profits" is a kind of categorical imperative categorical imperative: see Kant, Immanuel.
categorical imperativeIn Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy, an imperative that presents an action as unconditionally necessary (e.g. , how can leisure--genuine leisure, not simply periodic vacations from labor--be justified? What is the use of something that is self-confessedly useless? Defending leisure is always an audacious undertaking. It was particularly audacious in 1947 when a war-torn Germany was desperately trying to mend its ravaged rav·age v. rav·aged, rav·ag·ing, rav·agesv.tr.1. To bring heavy destruction on; devastate: A tornado ravaged the town.2. physical and moral fabric. Especially at such times, leisure is likely to seem a luxury, a dispensable dis·pen·sa·bleadj.Capable of being dispensed, administered, or distributed. Used of a drug. indulgence that distracts from the necessary work at hand. Pieper acknowledges the force of this objection. "We are engaged in the re-building of a house, and our hands are full. Shouldn't all our efforts be directed to nothing other than the completion of that house?" The answer is that the task of building or rebuilding is never merely a problem of engineering. If it were, human life could likewise be reduced to a problem of animal husbandry animal husbandry, aspect of agriculture concerned with the care and breeding of domestic animals such as cattle, goats, sheep, hogs, and horses. Domestication of wild animal species was a crucial achievement in the prehistoric transition of human civilization from . Something more is needed: a vision of society, of the vocation of humanity. And the preservation of that vision is intimately bound up with the preservation of leisure. Even at a time of emergency such as faced Europe in the aftermath of World War II--perhaps especially at such times --the task of rebuilding requires a hiatus in which we can confront and reaffirm our humanity. The name of that hiatus is leisure. "To build our house" Pieper writes, "implies not only securing survival, but also putting in order again our entire moral and intellectual heritage. And before any detailed plan along these lines can succeed, our new beginning, our re-foundation, calls out for a defense of leisure." We are not now in the exigent EXIGENT, or EXIGI FACIAS, practice. A writ issued in the course of proceedings to outlawry, deriving its name and application from the mandatory words found therein, signifying, "that you cause to be exacted or required; and it is that proceeding in an outlawry which, with the writ of state of Europe in the late 1940's, but more than ever we live in a world ruled by the demands of productivity, the demands of work. Every human enterprise is increasingly subject to the scrutiny of the balancesheet. "Rest" vacations, "breaks" are acknowledged necessities, but only as unfortunate requirements for continued productivity. Consequently, "free time" no matter how ample, is not so much a leisuredlei·sured adj.Characterized by leisure.Adj. 1. leisured - free from duties or responsibilities; "he writes in his leisure hours"; "life as it ought to be for the leisure classes"- J.J. ..... Click the link for more information. alternative to work as its diastolicDiastolicThe phase of blood circulation in which the heart's pumping chambers (ventricles) are being filled with blood. During this phase, the ventricles are at their most relaxed, and the pressure against the walls of the arteries is at its lowest. ..... Click the link for more information. continuation. The world is increasingly "rationalized" as the sociologist Max WeberNoun 1. Max Weber - United States abstract painter (born in Russia) (1881-1961)Weber2. Max Weber - German sociologist and pioneer of the analytic method in sociology (1864-1920)Weber ..... Click the link for more information. put it, increasingly organized to maximize profits and minimize genuine leisure. Now, even more than when Pieper wrote, we face the prospect of a "leisure-less culture of `total work'" a world that excludes the traditional idea of leisure in principle. Pieper found the perfect motto for this attitude in a passage quoted by Weber in The Protestant EthicProtestant ethicValue attached to hard work, thrift, and self-discipline under certain Protestant doctrines, particularly those of Calvinism. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), held that the Protestant ethic was an important ..... Click the link for more information. and the Spirit of Capitalism: "One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one's work, and if there is no more work to do one suffers or goes to sleep" It is part of Pieper's task to show us how the attitude implicit in Adj. 1. implicit in - in the nature of something though not readily apparent; "shortcomings inherent in our approach"; "an underlying meaning"underlying, inherent this credo "turns the order of things upside-down." It is a measure of how far the imperative of "total work" has taken hold that the opposing classical and medieval ideal--that, in Aristotle's phrase, we work in order to be at leisure--seems either unintelligible UNINTELLIGIBLE. That which cannot be understood. 2. When a law, a contract, or will, is unintelligible, it has no effect whatever. Vide Construction, and the authorities there referred to. or even faintly immoral to us. Even purely intellectual activity is rebaptized as "work" in order to rescue it from the opprobrious charge of idleness. The image of "intellectual work" and the "intellectual worker" presents us with a vision of the world whose ideal is busyness. Rene Descartes promised that by using his scientific method, man could make himself the "master and possessor of nature." Three centuries of scientific and technological progress have done a lot to prove Descartes right. Pieper's question is what happens when that technological model of knowledge is taken to be definitive of human knowing tout court. Presented with a rose, we can observe and study it, or we can merely look and admire its beauty. For the intellecutual worker, only the former is really legitimate. Wonder is "a waste of time." It produces nothing, nor does it further understanding. In this context, it is worth noting that Descartes hoped to explain extravagant natural phenomena such as meteors and lightning in such a way that "one will no longer have occasion to admire anything about what is seen." Far from being a prelude to insight, wonder for Descartes was an impediment to the technology of knowledge. Of course, we should not wish to do without the extraordinary benisons of that technology. We live in a world deeply shaped by the Cartesian imperative, and the first response of any sane person must be "Thank God for that." But our first response needn't be our only response. Pieper's point is that the discursive knowledge--knowledge whose end is the analysis, manipulation, and reconstruction of reality--is not the only model of human knowing. The word "discursive" he points out, suggests a busyness, a "running to and fro to and froadv.Back and forth.
to and froAdverb, adjalso to-and-fro1. " (dis-currere). Such knowledge--"investigating, articulating, joining, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, proving"--gives us power over the world. But it says nothing about our vocation in the world. The simplex intuitus, the "simple looking" (in-tueri: to look upon) that leisure provides, alerts us not to our power over reality but to our ultimate dependence on initiatives beyond our control. Thus it is that leisure is both an openness to reality and an affirmation of mystery, of "not being able to grasp" that which one beholds. "Human knowing" Pieper writes, "has an element of the non-active, purely receptive seeing, which is not there in virtue of through the force of; by authority of.See also: Virtue our humanity as such, but in virtue of a transcendence over what is human, but which is really the highest fulfillment of what it is to be human, and is thus `truly human' after all." Both sides are necessary if we are to affirm our humanity fully. Human knowing is in this sense a "mutual interplay of ratio and intellectus," of discursive reason and receptive intuition. It is one of the ironies of what Pieper calls the "world of total work" that although it underwrites our objective control of the world it also insinuates a corrosive subjectivism sub·jec·tiv·ism n.1. The quality of being subjective.2. a. The doctrine that all knowledge is restricted to the conscious self and its sensory states.b. and relativism into our attitude toward the world. "The other, hidden, side of the same dictum ... is the claim made by man: if knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing `received' in it." The moral aspect of this refusal is a kind of spiritual imperviousness, "the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart that will not brook any resistance" In the end, it is like Humpty Dumpty Humpty Dumptyarbitrarily gives his own meanings to words, and tolerates no objections. [Br. Lit.: Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass]See : Arrogance
Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass Looking Glass - A desktop manager for Unix from Visix. : "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's
all."
As this story reminds us, imperviousness is no guarantee of invulnerability in·vul·ner·a·ble adj.1. Immune to attack; impregnable.2. Impossible to damage, injure, or wound.
[French invulnérable, from Old French, from Latin . It is worth noting that Pieper's brief on behalf of leisure is not an attack on work as such. "What is normal" he acknowledges, is work, and the normal day is a working day. But the question is this: can
the world of man be exhausted in being the "working world"? Can a human
being be satisfied with being a functionary, a "worker"? Can human
existence be fulfilled in being exclusively a work-a-day existence? Or, to
put it another way, from the other direction, as it were: Are there such
things as liberal arts?
In The Idea of a University, Pieper points out, Newman suggestively translates artes liberales as "knowledge possessed of a gentleman" that is to say, knowledge born of leisure. A good index of the spiritual plight that Pieper describes is the widespread collapse of liberal arts in our society. More and more, so-called liberal arts institutions are really vocational schools at best (at worst they are circuses of narcissismnarcissism (närsĭs`ĭzəm), Freudian term, drawn from the Greek myth of Narcissus, indicating an exclusive self-absorption. In psychoanalysis, narcissism is considered a normal stage in the development of children. ..... Click the link for more information.); the [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the leisure, has effectively been drained out of school as "job training" is taken to be the sole justification for education. Again, Pieper does not dispute the importance of training. We cannot do without "the useful arts"--medicine, law, economics, biology, physics: all those disciplines that relate to "purposes that exist apart from themselves" The question is only whether they exhaust the meaning of education. Is "education" synonymous with training? Or is there a dimension of learning that is undertaken not to negotiate some advantage in the world but purely for its own sake? To translate the question into contemporary language, it would sound
something like this: Is there still an area of human action, or human
existence as such, that does not have its justification by being part of
the machinery of a "five year plan"? Is there or is there not something of
that kind?
To answer yes is to affirm the province of leisure. It is to affirm the value of uselessness, the preciousness of a dimension free from the realm of work. Historically, the origin of this realm is in the world of the religious cultic festival, the "Kult" of Pieper's German title. Leisure in the end is human action on holiday, on holy-day. A temple is a templum, a bit of space marked off and exempt from everyday uses: so too with leisure. Just as "there can be no unused space in the total world of work" so there can be no unused time. Leisure snatches a measure of time from the precincts of purpose. What validates that exemption is the openness to reality that leisure presumes. The festival origin of leisure is ultimately a religious origin. In the formula of the Shakespeare scholar C. L. Barber, it traces a movement from "release to clarification" and yields "a heightened awareness of the relation between man and `nature'--the nature celebrated on holiday." This is what underlies the link between leisure and worship. In this sense, the justification for leisure lies not in the refreshment it offers but in the reality it affirms. It is only to be expected that a pragmatic age, an age dominated by the imperatives of work, would seek to counterfeit leisure in order to appropriate the appearance of receptivity without actually receiving anything. But the natural human appetite for leisure is not satisfied by simulacra. "A festival" Pieper writes, that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in
human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since
the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial
festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against
such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all
demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity,
what religious worship provides to a festival.
We may indeed be at the "dawn of an age of artificial festivals" But if so we are at the dawn of an age without leisure. It is fitting that in this encomiumen·co·mi·um n. pl. en·co·mi·ums or en·co·mi·a1. Warm, glowing praise.2. A formal expression of praise; a tribute. ..... Click the link for more information. to leisure, Pieper does not seek "to give advice or provide guidelines for action but only to encourage reflection." To the question "What is to be done?" the first answer must be: nothing. "There are certain things which one cannot do `in order to ...' do something else. One either does not do them at all or one does them because they are meaningful in themselves" In Ash Wednesday, Eliot asked, "Teach us to sit still." It is a difficult lesson. At the beginning of his introduction to Leisure, The Basis of Culture, Roger Scruton cites "an American president" (I wish I knew which one) who answered a fussy official with the command "Don't just do something: stand there!" It is a bit of advice all of us--even the presidents among us--should learn to take seriously.

Taken from the free library

Madhouse Medical Tyranny: when Health becomes Sickness

Dictatorships know that the battle for complete control is ultimately won or lost in the minds of the target population. As the oppression advances, it tends to move from propaganda mind control to the direct intervention into the mind via pharmaceuticals. We are now seeing the overt global coordination of the psychiatry profession to convince every resident of planet Earth that all clear thinking, healthy living, and wholesome innocence is some kind of disorder that needs to be corrected (suppressed) with drugs to render zombie-like those whose instincts afford them the ability of discernment.

We have seen this before -- the role of the medical establishment in dictatorships such as Nazi Germany is well documented. It is the pre-Endgame, if you will, before the final culling takes place. The proof that we are being led by a medical tyranny to soften us up for population reduction is of course not something to make light of. However, it is absurd, because it is a manufactured attempt to re-define the natural human condition. So, let us get up to speed on our mental disorders as a gallows humor descends.

Independent Thinking
This disorder is naturally a wide-ranging one, as each unique human being tends to have opinions. Some of the more deviant forms of individuality are questioning authority and anxious distress, which includes symptoms like the "fear that something awful may happen." Like the fear that individuality will be declared a mental disorder by a scientific dictatorship?

Emotions
The natural highs and lows that come with being a sentient human being experiencing the joys and sorrows of life apparently need to be eradicated. Happiness tests should be given to children to be sure that they feel elated at all times, and perfectly at peace with their indoctrination. If not, be sure to take your happy pills each day.

Healthy Eating
Concern for your own well-being is apparently in direct opposition to the goals of those who wish to keep the population fat, dumb, and toxic. Mike Adams gives a run-down on the latest crazy thinking associated with eating broccoli, taking vitamins and minerals, drinking purified water, and avoiding known toxins.

Pregnancy
The act of experiencing the emotions of childbirth is definitely something that needs strong legislation. Instead of thinking about creating life, and the family bonding process, it is much healthier instead to focus on the increasing numbers of disorders surrounding the most natural of processes and how the medical establishment can keep mothers worried sick about their babies.

And Now: BEING BORN
The Psychiatric Dictatorship has begun in earnest to target infants as mental patients. The amniotic world and the newly born are now under surveillance by agents of the medical elite such as John H. Gilmore, Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, for signs of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Gilmore is not an isolated mad scientist; this is a global initiative. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International recently covered the story of "Australian of the Year," Patrick McGorry, who would like Australia to lead the world in treating mental illness. Consulting fees and research grants are raining down on pre-detection initiatives from all of the major pharmaceutical peddlers.

Once again, it is up to us to resist this insanity. Let them write the legislation, design the drugs, and tell us that black is white, and health is sickness. We will not cooperate. Advice given to us by the mentally deranged should really be a laughing matter.

Posted by Activist

Money grows on trees

Who says money doesn't grow on trees?

More than sixty years ago the city of North Bend, Oregon found its way out of a financial crisis by using the richly-grained and multi-hued wood to produce emergency money. And it's money that is as good today as it was back in 1933!



This story begins on February 11, 1933, when North Bend's only banking facility locked its doors. This was more than a month before President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a nationwide bank closure to end depositors' "runs" and to reorganize the banking system under the Glass-Steagall Act. According to bank officials, the sudden and unannounced local closure was to be temporary, giving the institution time to gather additional resources.



Among depositors of the locked bank was the city of North Bend. Lacking access to their impounded funds, officials were unable to pay employee salaries and other bills for the city of nearly 4,000. The city was by no means insolvent; it just could not get its municipal hands on the monies needed. The First National Bank of North Bend remained closed, but was not bankrupt!



At the March meeting of the city council, Ordinance #653 was given its mandatory three readings and passed with "aye" votes from Councilmen A.E. Morten, William Dolan, M.H. Klockers, J. Ryan, and M. Richardson. The ordinance authorized the issuance of $1,000 worth of myrtlewood discs to be used temporarily to pay salaries and bills.



The tokens; in amounts of $.50, $1, $2.50, $5, and $10, were to be redeemed by the city from June 15 through July 15 of that year. The city council expected the bank to be fully operational by that time.



The mayor, Edgar McDaniel, and Irvin Ross, an employee of Duncan's Myrtlewood Crofters(our original namesake), collaborated on designing and printing a sample coin. The council rejected the sample. They ordered this first sample "run" to be destroyed. W.H. Wann, a public accountant and a very serious amateur coin collector, had a sense of value. He strongly advised the council that a more attractive design would be more suitable to convey community pride.



Only one two-sided example of that first experimental printing survives as it missed the furnace door, rolling unseen into a wall niche behind the furnace at the myrtlewood crofters. It was not found until nearly 20 years later during a remodeling project.



George Vaughn, a local artist, recalls being consulted about a design, but believes a commercial firm did the actual graphics. Rose prepared quarter-inch thick discs in five different diameters. Harold McDaniel did the actual stamping and printing on a small Chandler-Price press in his father's newspaper office.



The young pressman remembers the task as a slow and tedious one as each disc required varying amounts of pressure, according to the softness or hardness of the wood. Discs snapped too often when too much or uneven weight was exerted on the platen.

To preserve the printing, another employee, Mrs. Fred B. Hollister, wife of the City Recorder, brushed each circle with shellac.

The March 10 issue of the "Harbor" carried the news that the script would be issued under a surety bond to be secured by City Treasurer, Irwin N. Hartley. Hartley was also keeping all available city funds in a safe in his office.

A week later the newspaper printed the following article:



…"The money will go into circulation at once in payment of salaries of employees of the city. They in turn will pass it out to merchants for merchandise or purchases of whatsoever nature, and the merchant will pass it out to his employees. Those who receive the money through their regular channels of business should make an effort to keep the money in circulation, instead of storing some away. In this manner, the fullest possible benefit may be obtained."



Although exactly $1,000 was the amount authorized, no record is available of the amount actually put into circulation, nor of the exact number of coins of each denomination. It is interesting to note that the North Bend City Council minutes make no mention of the formal receipt of money. Also, there is no record of a surety bond guaranteeing the financial solvency of the emergency money.



A brisk demand for the mintage by souvenir hunters and coin collectors developed. Mrs. Etta Black, assistant in the March 24 edition of the "Harbor" urged the townspeople, "Bring your wooden money to us" because "Myrtlewood Money is Good Money". More than 30 stores, businesses, and professional services participated.



Due to the success of the first issue, Wann appeared before the April 11 meeting of the city council to present a plan for a second $1,000 issue of coinage. In just eleven days the new issuance was cut, printed, and in circulation, bearing a redemption date of December 1, 1933. Face values were altered so that the $2.50 was dropped and a 25-cent coin was added. The new set now had values of $.25, $.50, $1, $5, and $10, and were slightly smaller than the first issue. A circle of myrtlewood leaves formed the outside edge of the disc, thus helping to equalize the pressure during printing, and cutting down on the number of broken coins.

To remind citizens of the need to circulate the myrtlewood coins, the city sponsored a full-page newspaper ad in late May to congratulate the 50 graduates of North Bend High School, and to encourage district patrons to pay their street assessments with myrtlewood money.

Although bank funds remained impounded, the City Treasurer had managed to gather enough ready cash by early June to call for the redemption of the first issue. It was hoped that actual cash out in general circulation would be helpful to the economy of the entire area.


Later, several other appeals for redemption were made. Speculation grew on just how much money would be kept in private hands. (And, remember that there was no record of the actual value of the myrtlewood tokens issued.)



Perhaps one of the reasons North Bend citizens were able to put away a few pieces was that they did not feel the 1933 depression so acutely. The "real depression" had hit North Bend in 1926 when fire destroyed the city's principal employer, the "A" section of the Stout Mill complex.



Interest in the novel money was not limited to the local area. The Chase Manhattan Bank of New York wrote to the City Treasurer to inform him that they had placed a full issue of myrtlewood script on permanent display in their coin collection. They complimented the city on the quality of the coinage.



Although city officials planned to destroy the wooden money after it had served its purpose, so many citizens kept their pieces that it was decided to leave the coins in circulation. Neither issuance had carried a final redemption date. In other words, there is no date beyond which the city will honor the coins and exchange them for "real cash".



Until recent years, the myrtlewood discs would occasionally be cashed in at local banks and then redeemed by the city. The coins were placed on sale at face value from an informal cardboard box container kept in the city hall safe. It is no longer possible to secure a coin in this manner.



The saga of the First National Bank of North Bend had a happy ending. Approximately two years after the closure, a new bank took over and paid all depositors one-half of their funds. Later the bank stood good for the remainder, plus interest as allowed by the government. No one lost money, just the use of it for a two-year period.



So, the "money-grown-on-trees" venture turned out to be a profitable one for the city of North Bend. Its happy ending includes the addition to the world of numismatics of a highly prized and valuable set of wooden tokens that are really much more than just tokens. Remember "Myrtlewood Money is Good Money".



How many complete 10-piece sets are in existence today is a controversial subject among collectors. The answer is probably somewhere between four and six. The rarest and most difficult coin to obtain is the first issue $10 piece. And don't bother to ask about the value! No collector is willing to sell, and no one is willing to quote a price.



SPECIAL NOTE: As part of North Bend's celebration of Oregon's Centennial, in 1959, the Chamber of Commerce promoted souvenir tokens with a $.50 redeemable face value. The discs were sold to the public with the Chamber receiving the profit. Although easily confused due to the myrtlewood used, printed design and sponsor distinguish the 1959 issues. Only the 1933 coins are still redeemable and recognized currency within the city.

From Myrtlewood Money

Gulf oil spill: a hole in the world

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism.














‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters


Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.
"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.
And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing better" to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up".
"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would "make it right". Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would "leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before", that he was "making sure" it "comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis".
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
BP's mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man".
Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry" – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable" that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: "If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year."
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. "Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: "We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because "nature has a way of helping the situation". But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP's top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean's winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that "70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all".
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company's trademark "what could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was "You can't be here then". But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld".


Make the bleeding stop


Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It's another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined." Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while "unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual". And just in case we still didn't get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don't even mention what a hurricane would do to BP's toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.

From the Guardian by Naomi Klein