Rag Radio : Singer/Songwriter, Author, and Actor Bobby Bridger

Bobby Bridger performs live on Rag Radio, Friday, November 18, 2011, at the KOOP studios in Austin. Photos by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Singer/Songwriter, Author, Actor, and Artist Bobby Bridger
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Also listen to Author and Sustainabilty Advocate Ellen LaConte on Rag Radio, Below.

Bobby Bridger, who was our guest on Rag Radio Friday, November 18, 2011, has recorded with Monument, RCA, and Golden Egg Records. He is the composer of the anthem of the Kerrville Folk Festival -- "Heal in the Wisdom" -- which was Number 3 in a group of 100 Austin songs placed in a time capsule at City Hall.

His newest book is Where the Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West, which "explores the impact of Native American culture on the American psyche..." and on "the development of modern popular entertainment."

He is also the author of A Ballad of the West, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, and a biography, Bridger, which famed singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson said "reads like an epic poem... as he crosses paths with the icons of modern American music, art, literature, family, and culture," while "sculpting his own unique artistic expression via the winds of fate, desire, synchronicity, and a large dose of providence."

(Eliza Gilkyson will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, December 16, 2011 from 2-3 p.m. CST on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the Internet.)

Bobby Bridger has traveled the globe performing his historical epic trilogy, A Ballad of the West, as a one-man show. London-based Qube Pictures released a boxed set DVD collection of A Ballad of the West and a 90-minute documentary, Quest of an Epic Balladeer, based on Bridger’s life and work. He has appeared twice on PBS’s Austin City Limits, on PBS’s American Experience, on C-SPAN/Booknotes, CNN, Good Morning America, A&E, NPR, and the Australian Broadcasting Company.

In 1988 Bridger was invited to Oxford University to perform "Heal in the Wisdom" for closing ceremonies of the First Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival where featured presenters included Nobel Prize winners the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and astronomer Carl Sagan.

Bridger also is a trained artist and art educator who has painted since age 12; his best known works were inspired by Australian aboriginal "dot" or "dreamtime" paintings.

From left, Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer with singer/songwriter and author Bobby Bridger at the KOOP studios in Austin, November 18, 2011. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Also listen to Author and Sustainability Advocate Ellen LaConte
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Ellen LaConte, who was our guest on November 11, 2011, refers to herself as an “independent scholar, organic gardener, gregarious recluse, and freelance writer living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina.”

A contributor to The Rag Blog, LaConte is the author of a controversial, widely-endorsed “meta-synthesis” book, Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it. A summary of her philosophy: “The global economy has gone viral. It is ravaging Earth’s immune system, triggering a Critical Mass of mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social, cultural, and political crises that are compromising the ability of Earth’s human and natural communities to provide for, protect, and heal themselves.”


Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas.
Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

• Dec. 2, 2011: Author, Economist & NY Times Columnist Robert H. Frank.
• Dec. 9, 2011: Nonviolent Activist Val Liveoak, of Peacebuilding en las Americas.
  
• Dec. 16, 2011: Texas Music Hall of Fame Singer/Songwriter & Activist Eliza Gilkyson.

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Ellen LaConte : When Too Big to Fail is Too Big Not To

"Blick auf den Planeten Erde" by Heikenwaelder Hugo, Austria / Wikimedia Commons.
When too big to fail
is too big not to

Where bailout theory comes a cropper, no matter who’s doing or who’s receiving the bailout, is when it ignores the inevitability of finiteness on a finite planet.

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2011

Author and sustainability advocate Ellen LaConte will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, November 11, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin. Stream it live here.

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters here and around the world and most of the now iconic 99% of humans have something in common with the forces and powers they’re protesting.

Like the powers that be on Wall Street, in Washington, and in the rest of the nation’s and the world’s capitols and financial centers, they believe in the global economy’s ability to deliver them the goods -- the resources, jobs, wages, and services they deserve and depend on -- if only the people managing it were more fair.

As I write this the occupy moment in the U.S. is weakening and, its having neither chosen a single demand or coherent cluster of them nor posed any coherent solution to present inequities and trespasses, seems likely not to become a coherent movement. This leaves OWS in much the same position as the political and economic forces against which it is arrayed: incoherent.

Inarguably, the global economy could be managed in a way that would come closer to creating the flat world, level playing field, and economic equity envisioned by analysts like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. But even if it were, we would still be dealing with an economy that’s approaching a terminal condition capable of bringing to an end life as we know it. It’s this terminal condition we need to be protesting, or better still, trying mightily to mitigate or avoid.

Global economic theory tends to rely on one particularly counterintuitive notion: that huge transnational corporations, organizations, and economic systems are not vulnerable to the defects inherent in all forms of gigantism and overreach. Rather they are and should be treated as if they were "too big to fail" -- or at least too big to be allowed to.

Why?

Letting them go under would, exactly as we’ve seen, put at risk the national and regional economies, investors, stockholders, suppliers, and other businesses and organizations, and even sovereign nations, they would weaken or take down with them. Some other economy, corporation, organization, country, or consortium of them will -- even must -- as a matter of course, bail out vulnerable mega-companies and institutions and nations. They must not be allowed to fail.

And so stock markets, investors, and even individuals who are not vested in the financial sector or directly in the global economy but who do depend on its ability to keep funding the systems they rely on for their lives and livelihoods keep counting on the powers and the world’s leaders to make sure the system doesn't fail. And they assume, or at least try very hard to believe, they can actually do that.

Bailout Theory, as it is called, is fatally flawed, however, when it comes to a globalized, fossil-fueled, industrial, and hyper-capitalized economy. The kind of economy we are all now living “under.” The very economy that both fat cats and fist-shakers stake their futures on.

Again, why?

"Because Mother Nature does not do bailouts," says former Vice President and climate change spokesperson Al Gore. Just as there's no other Earth to turn to if we live for too long beyond this one's means, there's no larger economy to turn to if the global economy operates much longer beyond its means. And there are no unaffected national or regional economies that are sufficiently big, rich, or independent to bail the global economy out.

As we’ve seen in Europe, the global economy’s wealthiest, most powerful and aggressive subsidiary economies are heavily invested and implicated in each other’s bad paper, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and other forms of debt. Witness Germany’s virtual ownership of Greece and Britain, and European banks teetering on the edge of insolvency due to bad loans made to the overdrawn PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) and in development, infrastructure, energy, military and expansion projects that are so big that no subsidiary economy can afford to undertake them alone.

The global economy’s poorest subsidiary economies already hang on by a thread that the richest, finding themselves ever less rich, may choose or have no choice but to cut. National economies are propping up each other’s credit and financial institutions in such a way that each of them is vulnerable to the failure of any of the others.

In spring 2008, in an earlier draft of my book Life Rules, I predicted that only one opportunistic condition would be required to bring down this jerry-rigged, multinational system of props: protracted widespread drought, cumulative weather-related disasters coupled with bankrupt emergency management systems, failed grain crops, another major resource war, recognition of and panic around peak oil, a rapid or prolonged sequence of serious seismic events, or meltdown of the U.S. or European Union economies, for example. Here we are.

But surely economic collapse isn’t inevitable, is it? After all, we pulled out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That was a worldwide phenomenon too and the decades following the crash brought the most prosperity to the most people in human history.

The mid-20th century miracles of industrial productivity, the phenomenally productive (not to say completely harmless) agricultural Green Revolution, computer, electronic and digital technologies, and (so-called) free-market economic policies accomplished a number of wildly ambitious goals.

They enriched and added to the list of self-designated First World (or at least prosperous, powerful, developed, industrialized) economies and so-called Second World (developing, industrializing) economies. They hauled many so-called Third World economies -- by the First World’s reckoning, the poor, less powerful, undeveloped, not-yet industrialized economies -- into the modern era.

In the process they created a conceptual divide that gave putative First World nations a dangerous sense of superiority and entitlement and global aspirations that carried stock markets around the world to such heights that at century’s end one investment analyst predicted the DOW Jones Industrial Average, which had yet to exceed 14,000 points, could hit 36,000.

Couldn’t upgraded versions of the same sorts of activities and policies that bailed us out then (Keynesian policies, for example, that we still like to believe will work now) actually bail us out now too?

No.

Why not? Several once-in-an-Earthtime conditions permitted the boom that followed that early 20th century bust. Among them were:

• a war-driven, full-employment, manufacturing economy based on the production and deployment of conventional (that is, non-nuclear, non-biological) weaponry;
• cheap, abundant fossil fuels and natural resources, like minerals, metals, land and water;
• free, reliable ecosystem services;
• relatively predictable, mostly good weather;
• the gold standard limitation on economic and environmental overreach;
• widespread faith in “endless capital” and effective big government.

None of these can save us now. Perpetual warfare bankrupts and corrupts rather than bankrolling nations and threatens unprecedented death and destruction. Earth’s cornucopia of resources and fossil fuels is approaching empty and will not be refilled. Ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, soil maintenance, flood control, pH balance, and water purification have been seriously taxed by global economic activity over the past half century.

The climate has already become noticeably unstable and increasingly unfriendly and CO2 in the atmosphere (not to mention other greenhouse gases) is almost 50 parts per million higher than life as we’ve known it can tolerate. The removal of any tie between the amount and value of monies in circulation and a finite material like gold has allowed -- caused -- the increasing funniness and decreasing actual value of money and created a false sense of limitlessness.

And the capacity of governments to manage at the global or even national level the complex symptoms that characterize our present critical mass of environmental, economic, social, and political crises appears to be nil.

“Thus it is that we can say,” writes American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in a paper titled “Globalization or the Age of Transition,” “that the capitalist world-economy has now entered its terminal crisis, a crisis that may last up to 50 years. . . As the world-economy enters into a new period of [attempted] expansion it will exacerbate the very conditions which have led it to this terminal crisis.”

“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global,” wrote anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies as long ago as 1988. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” He no longer includes the hedge “if and when it comes again” in his prediction.

In short, the booming, credit-driven economy that those once-in-an-Earthtime conditions permitted is the biggest economy there is and ever has been. There’s no bigger human economy for it to turn to for help. It’s too big not to fail.

If this is true, then future moment-cum-movements may wish, will likely need, to focus on post-global economics rather than tweaking of the present system which is both moribund and a danger to living things, including most humans.

[A freelance journalist, contemporary issues writer, and memoirist, Ellen LaConte is author most recently of a controversial, widely-endorsed meta-synthesis, Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it. Information about Ellen and her work can be found at www.ellenlaconte.com. Read more articles by Ellen LaConte on The Rag Blog.]

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Ellen LaConte : Finding Democracy in Unexpected Places

Single-celled amoeba called dictyostelium gather together and turn themselves collectively into a new creature: slime mold. Image from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
Finding democracy in unexpected
-- and radically green -- places

What if nature -- life as we know it -- rather than our own history, provides 'the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking'?

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / October 13, 2011

[This post is adapted from Ellen LaConte’s article in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of the international journal, Green Horizon.]

"Our capacity for democracy grows from our connection with nature. As we lose that connection, isolation, fear, and the need to control grow -- and democracy inevitably deteriorates. It’s easy to forget that a deep connection with nature provides the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking.” -- Peter Senge in Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society i

In my book Life Rules (the implication being that we don't), I make the case that the prognosis for global or even national-level solutions for the syndrome of economic, environmental, and political/social crises we presently face is poor.

I take the recent debt-ceiling fiasco as further proof of the pudding. Variously inept, corrupt, craven, bought and paid for, ideologically intransigent, and ignorant of or unwilling to face and make the electorate face hard realities, our leaders are evidently incapable of comprehending or coping with the complexity of the issues before them.

They fail to see, or at least fail to say that they see, the connections between and among these crises. They exhibit an almost pathological inability or refusal to recognize the seriousness of consequences of the convergence of these crises: economic and ecological breakdown and worldwide chaos.

Tackling these crises -- or at least seeming to -- only one at a time is equivalent to treating AIDS-related cancers without treating the recurrent pneumonia and wasting disease that are also symptomatic of AIDS.

Leaders of both major parties have chosen posturing and pandering as alternatives to governing and Greens haven’t yet the numbers, leverage, or heft to challenge them. For the major media, posturing and pandering are meat, potatoes, trifle, and a raison d’etre. For the American people they’re disastrous. Waiting for politicians and politics as we’ve known them to cure themselves of this life-threatening condition could prove fatal.

Taking to the streets as larger and larger numbers of Americans are, for a variety of causes ranging from climate change to oligarchy removal, is a start. It signals that a critical mass of Americans are dissatisfied.

But nonviolent protests may meet with dismissal at worst and minor concessions at best. Because, whatever else may be said of the present political “process” and the behaviors of the Powers in Washington, it’s not democracy. Genuinely democratic praxis is nowhere to be found inside the beltway. Representative Eric Cantor’s description of the Wall Street justice-and-democracy-starved occupiers as a “mob” is indicative of the present batch of powers’ perspective on the people they are supposed to represent.

As a set of behaviors and relationships that can help people talk through and across their differences, integrate their interests and skills, work for the common good, and organize otherwise fractious and factional humans in common cause, democracy is missing in action in America. It has been co-opted by globalized capitalism much as the human body is co-opted by HIV.

I think, however, that it’s not that democracy has failed us but our way of thinking about it that has. We might say of democracy what Gandhi said when asked what he thought of civilization: “It would be a very good idea.”


What democracy's not

So far we’ve gotten the idea wrong. We are accustomed to thinking of democracy as a noun. “A democracy” is a physical place, a nation with borders defined on a map such that if we are born within those borders we are somehow born into democracy too.

Democracy is a kind of protective covering “under” which we live, such that it will take care of us and keep us from harm. We treat it as if it were a possession. “Having it,” we are superior to those who don’t. We think of it as a right. Aside from being born within a particular nation’s borders and under the protection of that nation’s government, police, and military, we don’t have to do anything to get democracy.

In fact, we have very little to do with it. It’s just ours, by right. Nonetheless, we go to great lengths to “keep it,” including going to war for it or over it. And we’ve gotten into our minds and political discourse the notion that we ought to try to “give it” to others, as if it were a thing we could give like food or money or weapons.

But what if “democracy” is not a noun? What if, as Frances Moore Lappé and I have proposed in our books Democracy’s Edge and Life Rules, it’s more like a verb. What if it’s not something we have but something we do, together; how we organize ourselves and relate to and behave with each other?

And what if, as MIT management innovator Peter Senge suggests, we’ve been looking for democracy in the wrong places. What if nature -- life as we know it -- rather than our own history, provides “the inspiration for genuine democratic thinking”? And what if, as Hopi elders proposed some hundreds of years ago, what life tells us is that we really are the ones we’re waiting for.

African buffalo herds stand up and point themselves in the same direction. Image from redbubble.

Democracy all the way up...

It has long been assumed that most animal societies are organized as we are with powers and cowerers, doers and done to, top dogs and underdogs, alpha males and dominance everywhere you look. That view is changing.

Larissa Conradt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex, UK, writes that,

In social species many decisions need to be made jointly with other group members because the group will split apart unless a consensus is reached. Consider, for example, a group of primates deciding which direction to travel after a rest period, a flock of birds deciding when to leave a foraging patch, or a swarm of bees choosing a new nest site. Unless all members decide on the same action, some will be left behind and will forfeit the advantages of group living. ii

And if too many are left behind the group will fall apart leaving the members in a state of chaos and confusion and at a survival disadvantage. Accordingly, “group decision-making is a commonplace occurrence in the lives of social animals.” iii

In studies of red deer conducted with her colleague Tim Roper, Conradt found that when it comes to making decisions about moving on from a resting place, feeding ground or watering hole, it’s not the sexually dominant alpha male or even a group of sexually-dominant males that make the decision when to go or even necessarily where.

Life has taught red deer the hard way that even the most experienced, strong, clever alpha might decide to move the herd based on nothing more than a sudden urge or misinterpreted sign of danger, even though many members of the herd are still thirsty, tired or hungry.

Barring clear and present danger, members of red deer herds, gorilla bands, African buffalo herds and other close-knit animal societies vote their readiness to move by standing up and pointing themselves in the direction they want to go. When a significant majority have stood and/or pointed themselves in the chosen direction, the group moves on together in the direction they’ve chosen together. In a statement that until recently the scientific community would have considered unorthodox or heretical, Roper and Conradt concluded that “democratic behavior is not unique to humans.” iv

Anna Dornhaus of the University of Arizona and Nigel R. Franks at the University of Bristol in the UK have found that some varieties of bees and ants engage in information pooling and consensus decision making. “Democracy is not something that humanity invented,” Dornhaus concludes.

Radio personality and author Thom Hartmann has written of this new understanding of animal behavior:

Without exception the natural state of group-living animals is to cooperate, not dominate. Democracy, it turns out, is hardwired into the DNA of species from ants to zebras. And it includes all of the hominids from the great apes to Homo sapiens. v

...and all the way down

Examples of democratic activity can be found at levels as far down Life’s food chain as microbes. “In recent years,” Werner Krieglstein wrote in Green Horizon Magazine,

scientists have documented a remarkable sequence of behavior that might well be suited to serve as a metaphor if not as a lived example for how we human beings can and should behave in times of need... Scientists observed this single cell organism cooperating in a quite extraordinary fashion when the food supply was running short.

Facing a life threatening famine, hordes of single-celled amoeba called dictyostelium gather from every direction and every part of famine territory and turn themselves collectively into a new creature: slime mold. “They group together, forming a community, to achieve goals they could not achieve by themselves.”vi

Microbiologist Mahlon Hoagland explains how this works: Recognizing pending catastrophe,

a single amoeba, apparently self-appointed, begins to emit a chemical signal. Near-by neighbors, irresistibly drawn to the signal "ooze" over and attach themselves to the signaler. Each new member of the cluster amplifies the signal by releasing its own signal. More amoeba arrive.

It’s sort of like a grassroots flash mob at this point.

Then a startling transformation occurs: The aggregate shapes itself into a slug and begins to migrate to a new location, leaving a trail of slime behind it. As the slug moves the cells differentiate into three distinct types,

each type taking up a task vital to the group’s survival.vii

They form a creature that looks like a tiny futuristic floor lamp with a base, a post, and a round, covered bulb. The base roots the slime mold in its new food-rich environment. The post raises the bulb high so that its equivalent of light will cover as large an area as possible.

And what’s the equivalent of light in this amoebic democracy analogy? Spores, like tiny eggs. Dispersed like photons in their new space when the bulb “turns on” and emits them, they become new single-celled amoebae. “And then the cycle begins anew.” Individuals do their own thing until collective -- democratic -- action is required again to deal with another shared crisis.


Dog, meet dog

Dog-eat-dog is, after all, an anomaly. It is not the state of nature. Something closer to democracy is. Red in tooth and claw is a human projection based on incomplete and inaccurate science and biased observation.

Carnivores for the most part turn on each other -- the weakened, wasting, wounded, or recently deceased -- only when there’s not enough else to eat. And that happens for the most part only when we or natural forces dramatically reduce their territory and/or sources of food. In other words when our activities and presence or natural cycles or cataclysms have caused Critical Mass.

Think urban feral dogs and cats, gorillas when the mist has gone away with the forests, wolves when wildfire or volcanic eruption clears the landscape of herds and small prey. But even in desperate times, most other-than-human species continue to cooperate more like those amoeba than like rabid packs of dogs. Why? Democracy is key to species survival.

We are about to learn that. If the protests in the American Street bear down hard on the Wall Street occupiers intent that Americans work together to “create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone” rather than assuming any elected official or group of them will do these things for us, then we might gather to ourselves the courage and conviction necessary for a Second American revolution, this time not just to topple oligarchs but to declare independence from the Global Economic Order that they support so that it will continue to support them.

References

i Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2005), p. 173.
ii From the website of the Center for the Study of Evolution at the University of Sussex, www.biols.susx.ac.uk/members/lconradt
iii Ibid.
iv Tim Roper and L. Conradt, “Group Decision-Making in Animals,” Nature, 421 (January 2003): 155.
v Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do? (Harmony Books, 2004), 141.
vi Werner Krieglstein, “How to Feel and Act Like an Amoeba,” Green Horizon Magazine, Spring 2008.
vii Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson, The Way Life Works, (Three Rivers Press, 1995), 152-153

[Ellen LaConte’s book Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon, 2010, orderable from all book sellers) from which parts of this post have been drawn has a diverse and deep list of supporters ranging from Richard Heinberg, Robert Jensen, and William Catton to John Cobb, Joanna Macy, and Derrick Jensen. She will be guiding workshops at the “Brave New Planet: Imagining Ecological Societies ” conference in Claremont CA, Oct. 27-29. Bill McKibben keynotes. McKibben, Cobb, and plenary speaker David Orr will participate in open discussions throughout the conference. You can link to podcasts of LaConte’s radio interviews at www.ellenlaconte.com. Read more articles by Ellen LaConte on The Rag Blog.]

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Ellen LaConte : A Really Scary Story for Stephen King

Time to be scared straight?
Dear Stephen King:
An open letter to one American who really
could scare the rest of us into action

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2011

I've been participating in an email discussion group that's tackling urgent issues like population, climate change, and peak oil. There's one particularly curmudgeonly member who persistently protests the doom and gloom vision members of the group generally share. Recently he suggested that we might as well just get Stephen King to write our posts because fear-mongering is his business and he'd take the doom and gloom up a notch. Which inspired me to write the following open letter to Stephen King.


Dear Stephen King,

Most of your books are too scary for me. They give me nightmares. Call me over-sensitive. But when my son was a teenager and I still lived in Maine (Stockton Springs, not far from you) he devoured your books. So I bought a batch of raffle tickets from the local library, partly to support a good cause but more than a little because a signed hardcover copy of your latest book (I think it was The Stand) was the drawing prize. When I won and gave him the book, for about a week he thought I was the best mom ever.

Well, he’s almost 35 now and along with a lot of other young Americans, he’s wondering what our generation was thinking all these years we didn’t notice we were spending down his only meaningful inheritances: a habitable planet, the company of congenial species and functioning ecosystems, and enough natural resources to get a living on in an economy that doesn’t devour its young.

Even though I edited a national small-farm magazine, wrote scads of articles about organic gardening, homesteaded, heated and cooked with wood, grew most of our veggies, raised some of our meat, put food by, composted, and recycled through the years of his childhood, I was still complicit in and beneficiary of the systems that thoughtful young people like my son now believe have robbed them blind and put their very lives at risk of being nasty, brutish, and short.

And despite my best intentions, I was complicit. We all are who have been fortunate enough to live the American Dream.

In my book, Life Rules (as in, “we don’t”) I write that “we’re stealing our present pleasures from tomorrow’s children.” It’s easier than taking candy from a baby. Like William Catton wrote in Overshoot back in 1982 -- which apparently didn’t shake enough folks up because we’re still overshooting the planet’s capacity to support us, living as far beyond Earth’s means as many of us are living beyond our own -- “Posterity doesn’t vote and doesn’t exert much influence in the market-place. So the living go on stealing from their descendants."

The problem is that most Americans don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re trying to grab hold of a better future for themselves and their kids and grandkids. They don’t realize that all that grabbing has dramatically reduced what they and their grandkids are going to be able to get. They haven’t caught on to the finite planet thing, the idea that on a finite planet, every resource except sunshine and other forms of radiation from outer space is either a one-shot deal -- like fossil fuels, water, minerals and metals -- or a timed-release one -- like forests, fisheries, topsoil -- that we haven’t been giving Life enough time to re-release.

They don’t get it that we can’t keep treating species like pop-up critters in a state fair shooting gallery and ecosystems like toilets and all-you-can-eat buffets. They’ve got it in their heads that some-magic-how, our population can keep growing and so can “the” economy, as if we had a whole bunch more Earth’s we could import stuff from when we run low (like we have now of cheap-easy oil, water, food, minerals, metals, and money) or move to when this one’s used up or its weather is havocked.

Now I know, Mr. King, that you’re familiar with the predicament we’re in, which is scarier even than the hot-housed version of some of our present quandaries you offered up in Under the Dome, which is saying a lot.

And I suspect you’re not any more thrilled than I am or millions of other Americans are with the bickering and dithering of our present crop of leaders who, if they’ve seen the handwriting on the wall -- the pending end of Life as we know it if we keep trying to do business as usual -- are as clueless about its meaning for them and for us as Babylon’s King Belshazzar was in the book of Daniel when that dead hand, like something right out of one of your stories, wrote mene, mene, tekel u-Pharsin on his palace wall.

And given that you’ve never quit the kindly, off-the-beaten-track, small-town, good-neighbors environs you were born in for the bright lights of a big city, I suspect you also know that where surviving creeping chaos, a critical mass of crises, and pending systemic collapse are concerned, small is not only beautiful but sustainable. And local is a lot more manageable -- even when it comes to identifying and punishing the bad guys -- than global or even national, whether we’re talking economies or governments.

And it seems to me that, given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it, and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.

So, here’s my contribution to your plot outline:

It’s 2011. The global economy, like any successful meme, has gone viral. It’s doing the same thing to the planet’s human and natural communities that HIV does to the human body. Really. Check this out. Point for point, the economy’s a dead ringer for the virus (pardon the pun).

• HIV is a tiny package of genetic information, an RNA code without any body attached to it. The global economy is a big package of socio-economic information, a set of ideas about a particular kind of economic system (without any body attached to it).


• HIV is held together by a protein wrapper like the sugar coating on a pill that makes it taste better. The wrapper acts like a camouflage, making it “taste better,” or at least not taste bad, to the bodies it hopes to infect so that they don’t reject it on first pass. The sugar coating that makes the viral economy taste good and camouflages its intent is a capitalist ideology of perpetual growth and progress and universal prosperity -- an easy sell to communities and nations lacking in material well-being


• Though it has some of the characteristics of living things, HIV is not a living thing. It’s a parasite, a taker. It lives off its hosts’ resources. In the process it weakens and sometimes kills them. Without workers, consumers, and believers, without Earth’s raw materials, other-than-human species and ecological services, the economy couldn’t feed itself, expand or grow. It’s a parasite -- a taker -- too.


• As a group, disease-causing agents like viruses are called “pathogens.” The directors, managers, promoters and primary beneficiaries of the global economy are traditionally called “the Powers That Be,” or simply “the Powers.”


• The secret of a virus’s success is mobility. Viruses need reliable methods of transportation to move them from host to host. Many viruses are airborne. HIV is liquid-borne. It gets around in bodily fluids like semen, blood, and breast milk, and through contact between mucous-lined -- moist -- tissues. Ditto the global economy. It spreads from community to community, nation to nation, by means of liquid assets and fluid exchanges of money, credit, loans, “floats,” entitlements, tax breaks and incentive, and through money-lined contacts between its participants, particularly the Powers.


• HIV targets and takes over -- it dominates -- the immune system, a system distributed throughout the body that protects, defends, heals, and restores health to the body. By means of this domination of the immune system it dominates the whole body. The viral global economy targets and takes over -- it dominates the Earth’s equivalent of an immune system -- the natural and human communities that in the past have been able to protect, defend, heal, and restore health to themselves, their ecosystems, and the biosphere, the whole body of Life on Earth.


• HIV invades immune system cells, disables their protective and healing capabilities, and reprograms them to make millions of copies of itself. After it has used up a cell’s resources, its copies disperse to other parts of the body and other hosts, destroying captured cells and whole organ systems in the process. The global economy persuades, buys, cajoles, coerces, or forces its way into human and natural communities. It undermines their ability to provide for and protect themselves, and reprograms them to support its growth and expansion. When it has depleted local resources, it moves on, leaving communities and nations in ruins.


• HIV makes the body vulnerable to all manner of infection and disease. The global economy makes every place on Earth vulnerable to the environmental, economic, social, and political symptoms that result from contracting Earth’s equivalent of AIDS.


• Left untreated, the human immunodeficiency virus morphs into AIDS and dies when the host does. Left untreated, the viral economy becomes too big not to fail. It consumes all it can of its host -- Life on Earth as we know it -- and dies when it's host does.

In your page-turner, you could turn the viral economy into a virus that attacks the human brain, affecting people according to their adrenalin levels, making some more aggressive and self-interested and others merely more attracted to comfort, convenience, and consumption.

Of course the virus would mutate as it evolved and spread, turning off parts of the brain given to reason and clear perception of reality. You get my drift. As the virus got stronger, humans would become less intelligent and more susceptible to it.

You’d have no end of crises, villains, causes of death, and scenes of mayhem to work with. Bankrupt state and local economies, millions living in the streets of un-TARP-covered cities, killer storms and broke emergency management agencies, the unemployed and homeless wandering zombie-like in the streets, kudzu and ivy growing over Main Street, species going belly up everywhere you look, suicides, murders, thievery, empty store shelves, cars, and trains and planes stalled for lack of fuel, no more plastic anything, people dropping like flies for lack of food and medicine, money worth the paper it’s printed on, governments closed down, their staffs, lobbyists and legislators walking home (like that guy in Cold Mountain who walked home after the Civil War before there were cars and planes), brownouts and power grid failures, invasive species, mutated bacteria and pandemic MRSAs, mass migrations...

The end of Life as we know it has got to be the scariest story you’ve attempted, despite the fact that it’s coming true. And while we non-fiction hacks try desperately, book after book, post after post, and page after page to persuade the not-yet-converted that Americans need to get together and work together to take our future back before there’s nothing left worth taking back, you could pull it off in a thousand pages or less before the 2012 elections.

And you could even give it an uncharacteristic happy ending, where a critical mass of little American cities like Bangor, Maine, and neighborhoods in big cities like Seattle figure out how to ward off and survive the infection. Their leaders and people could become sort of like antibodies -- that was Paul Hawken’s idea in Blessed Unrest -- dedicated to healing, protecting, and providing for themselves and their natural support systems. And they could discover the joys of resourcefulness, resilience, reciprocity, recycling -- and survival against the odds.

But, then, that wouldn’t be a very Stephen King ending, would it? You’ll come up with something better. And scarier. Feel free to take this plot line and run with it.

All best,

Ellen LaConte

[Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, gregarious recluse, and freelance writer living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic. Her most recent book, the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010), is available on order from bookstores and online booksellers. You can learn more about the book, read her recent posts, or sign up for her bimonthly online newsletter, Starting Point, at www.ellenlaconte.com. Read more by Ellen LaConte on The Rag Blog.]

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Ellen LaConte : Garden As If Your Life Depended on It

Digging in for the future. Image from Civil Eats.
Because it will:
Garden as if your life depended on it

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

Spring has sprung -- at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it -- and the grass has ‘riz.

And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills, and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food -- all of which are also becoming more expensive -- or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops 20 percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread -- and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it -- will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity, and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.


What’s for supper down the road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

• the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,
• prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,
• some foods to become very expensive compared to what we’re used to
• and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually, and mentally healing activity -- or all four.

Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

The rig is up. Image from The Market Oracle.

Why’s gardening so important now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake, and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the U.S. around 1971. Lest you’ve missed the raging, that’s the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We’ve shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter.

There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling, are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous, and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules -- “The ABC’s of Peak Oil” -- which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn’t leave much. (See Beth Terry’s website, for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that’s hard to get because it’s located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones.

Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies, depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system’s going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that’s escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or thereabouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

Poppies for biofuel? Photo by Yannis Kontos / Polaris.


2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat, and soy for human and animal consumption -- i.e., food -- to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and... Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive.

Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, “The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year.” Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore’s deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food.

Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that’s seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed -- read “First” -- world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland -- if its farmers didn’t go organic a while back -- is comprised of dead soils.

Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition.

Half the Earth’s original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries.

China’s soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket’s soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn’t coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

Peak dirt. Image from treehugger.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting of one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease, or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop.

At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world's wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia.

The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed “Ugh.”

4) Climate instability. Bad -- uncongenial -- weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we've passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what's being farmed for.

The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters,which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns, and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we've been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it.

When a whole nation's or region's staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry, and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn't the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (Go here for that.) No pundits, talking-heads, or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won't be coming back.

The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we're going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it.

Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other's food as seriously as we've taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won't have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what's our recourse?

Urban garden in lower Manhattan. Image from Civil Eats.

Gardening like everybody's business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We've become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about to have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we'll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally.

Gardening -- and small-scale farming -- while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion, will be less about doing business than about everyone's having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

In a subsequent column I'll review five variations on the theme of gardening to counterbalance the five reasons I think we need to.

• Back-yard, back-porch, back-40 gardening
• Community gardens
• Community Supported Agriculture
• Urban gardening
• Taking the 'Burbs.

[Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, freelance writer, speaker, and editor, living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic and Advisory Board member at the EarthWalk Alliance. She was assistant to the late homesteader and bestselling Living the Good Life author, Helen Nearing. Her most recent book is the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once & how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010) can be examined at www.liferules-thebook.info. LaConte publishes a quarterly online newsletter, Starting Point, and can be reached at www.ellenlaconte.com.]

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