Author says challenging simple concepts can save planet
May 29, 2009Author and democracy activist Frances Moore Lappé says we already know how to solve the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and world hunger.
But she says our own pre-conceived ideas about how things should work - our mental map of the world - is actually preventing us from taking action.
In a speech at Ottawa's Carleton University as part of the 78th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Lappé called for a wholesale revamping of the way we view government, the economy and democracy. If we manage to do it, she says, we can save ourselves from our own demise.
Lappé, made famous in the 1970s by her bestselling vegetarian cookbook Diet for a Small Planet, is an activist, author and co-founder with her daughter Anna Lappé of The Small Planet Institute. She says many people today are frightened by the potential for disaster, ecological and otherwise, and fearful that nothing can be done to prevent it. Lappé says we can do something - if we challenge five assumptions about the way the world works.
The first is that going green means "powering down," or reducing our consumption of energy. Lappé says all we have to do is stop getting energy from fossil fuels and start getting it from renewable sources like the sun.
"Every day the sun supplies us with 15,000 times the amount of energy we're now using in fossil fuels," she says. If everyone had a solar panel or windmill on their roof, we wouldn't be dependent on oil companies - and as individuals we'd feel more in control of our own destiny.
The second idea to dispense with, she says, is that going green means an end to economic growth. What we have to do, she says, is change our idea of what growth is. Right now, she says, the Walton family - owners of Wal-Mart - controls as much wealth as the bottom 40 per cent of the U.S. population. Is it growth if the wealthy families just get wealthier?
There's plenty of room for growth, she says, if we learn to do things more efficiently. For example, she says various estimates show that between 25 and 50 per cent of all food produced in the United States is wasted. And that every year, Americans throw out some 300 pounds of packaging material.
The third idea she wants to challenge is the notion that humans are by nature greedy, self-centred and materialistic. Under certain conditions, she said, we can be monsters. But there wouldn't be 6.8 billion of us on the planet today if we didn't also have positive qualities such as empathy, cooperation and fairness. As a society, she said we should simply try to make sure our rules try to bring out the best, not the worst in us.
The fourth idea she disputes is that we dislike rules. She says humans crave structure, particularly rules that make sense to us as individuals and which foster a sense of inclusion. We will accept the right rules, she says, citing as an example a German law that enables individual citizens to sell power they produce at home, through renewable sources such windmills or solar panels for example, to utilities at a guaranteed price. People there have embraced the idea, she says.
The final concept she wants to challenge is the idea that our problems are so pressing there's no time for democracy, and only an authoritarian regime can save us. She believes the only hope for the planet is to trust in people and set rules that bring out the best in us.
"The mother of all issues is who makes the decisions," she says, adding that if decisions are taken by people with the most money, we all suffer.
Lappé says she's not against a market economy - just the idea that there's only one way to run the economy.
She also wants to challenge the idea, she says, that change is impossible. Recent history has shown that seemingly insoluble problems have in fact been solved.
"It's not possible to know what's possible."
Source: Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Jan 14, 2009 |
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How do you enforce this? The corollary statement that goes unsaid by greens is:
"To do this we will need authoritiarian governments to enforce rationing and artifical shortages."
No one seems willing to complete the thought here and confront the anti-human, anti-liberty ideology of greens.
The ideology of greens is strongly socialist because of the need for a strong centralized authority to remove the freedom of production and consumption from the people. The more they push this, the greater the chance the people will violently reject them.
It is the ultimate in freedom and patriotism for any country or person to seek to become as self-sufficient in their energy sources as possible, even if it initially costs more. Our current power structure and delivery systems are highly vulnerable to price fixing/fluxuations, foreign control and even terrorist acts. A few years back an unintentional cascading power outage that started in Ohio (USA) blacked out huge sections of the US and even into Canada. This should have been a wake-up call to our vulnerability. What terrorist could easily blow up 1 million or 300 million solar panels as compared disrupting electricity to thousands of homes and business by striking a single point along millions of miles of power lines? How much will one of those events cost us in gross productivity?
Like with all technology, the first units are expensive and suffer from issues. Each generation usually gets better, cheaper, faster and more efficient. Not moving toward alternative energy sources is like IBM in the 1980%u2019s avoiding building on its original PC design because they made more off of selling mainframes. Others moved into fill the gap and built on their idea. No one forces you to buy a computer, but many of us see the value in owning one. There is not one answer, or a final, no-patch or upgrade free solution to these questions. Nor will it be easy.
Ultimately I am just sick of hearing the lame excuses that gas and oil prices are going up because they didn%u2019t think that the winter would be so cold or the summer so hot. There are too many variables in the energy market not to try to find shelter from the storms.
Wind farms are having a horrific affect on birds. This then has an impact on insects. This then has and impact on crops and on and on it goes. You can solve one problem, but you create others that you will need to deal with.
It all comes down to education. We need to re-educate both ourselves and our children.
Oh, and as for climate change can someone tell me why Mars and Pluto are heating up? Has our pollution somehow migrated throughout the solar system?
Rod:)
When you demand that human population be diminished and that people be come poorer, hungrier and have fewer rights, you have left the academic argument and have become a revolutionary. Not even Hitler's new world order delusions demanded such intolerable force be used against human beings.
BTW, this really isn't an ideological argument, there is no left vs right when it comes to nature and the needs of human beings to successfully evolve on this planet.
A deeper argument can be made that the green movement is fundamentally incompatible with liberal western societies, as it requires a central authoriy to force rationing and laws restricting economic activity. When you realize the kind of social control required to realize the green agenda, you will recoil in horror.
Nature will limit our activities naturally, prehaps even catastrophically, but we must accept this and preserve our liberty. We will eventually find equilibrium, nature will adjust, and man will adjust. We don't need people electing themselves into positions to do this for us.
No amount of propaganda or eco-quackery will convince us to surrender our liberty to a tyranny of green socialists with a will to rule for "mother earth".
Incidentally, resource-rich third-world countries have already had more than their share of draconian measures, from the indians who met the conquistadors and onwards. "Blood diamonds" and oil are more current examples. The consumption in the west is not an isolated system.
Actually I do hold a lot of optimism for the future. Humans are dyanamic and clever and when left alone by their governments they come up with all sorts of solutions.
We are at a major crossroads in our civilization, and there's a lot of unprecedented events taking place that we don't have historical references for
There's never been so many humans on earth, and the pressures of population will be the major crisis of the 21st century. We have to patiently WAIT for development to stabilize growth, not call for genocidal depopulation or authoritarian suppression of human life.
Industrial nations have already stabilized their growth, but the third world has not. Undeveloped populations will become developed in the next 100 years, and they too will stabilize. There is a plateau we will hit in the 21st century, and I think we need to plan for that.
The population doom prophets of the 20th century were completely discredited by 2000 and should remind us how to treat charlatans like Al Gore and anyone else who spreads hysteria based on fallacy.
More interesting are the social features of green extremism; it strongly resembles Marxism and demands a command and control economy with permanant "revolutionary" authority to protect us from an environmetal crisis that cannot be allowed to end. Objective science will by necessity be suppressed under such a system, and any study that suggests crisis and emergency rule are unjustified will be suppressed and censored. A green government would be one of the ugliest governments possible, equal to and perhaps beyond that of Stalin, Mao, or the fictional INGSOC of Orwell.
The supression of industry and liberty is exactly the wrong solution if you really need is innovation to solve your problems. The major reason why the population doom prophets of the 1970's and 80's failed was because they could not understand how *free* humans innovate, and the development of new techniques of farming and distribution makes their bell-clanging seem ridiculous today. We live in abundance because we maximize our productivity according to the rules of human nature, and the long experiments in human society support the idea that liberty is the best motivator, not the whips and gulags.
Don't be fooled by the greens, it's the same old argument about command and control vs liberty, and every academic who promotes the tired, old, murderous ways of marxism dressed up in new green clothes needs to be known for what they are.
Yes, let's replace our pre-conceived ideas with her pre-conceived ideas!
What's wrong with this picture? Well, maybe that her pre-conceived ideas are no better than any other person's?