When I started this blog I stated that it was to be about world issues and not personal matters. Well, with this posting that's about to change somewhat. Yet, there's still not going to be any teen-girl drama. ;-)

I had intended to write a blog post last summer, after the G20 fiasco in Toronto. I was apalled at the heavy-handed conduct of the police and government authorities then and the lact of remorse, contrition or even serious introspection since. I was also quite disappointed in the acceptance of these actions by a large contingent of the population, reflecting a profound political disengagement and apathy that warrants a reminder of "First they came..." However, I just couldn't find the words to express my outrage any better than many others who were echoing my sentiments.

The issues of the G8/G20 meetings being protested were sidelined by the policing issues, many details of which I won't delve into here as they are well documented elsewhere. That is not to say the latter were not important; indeed, they are (especially, given the billion dollar price tag!) and there needs to be a serious inquiry into how this was allowed to happen as it did and why there has been so little done to assure it will not happen again. Unfortunately, the mainstream media dwells not on what is most important but rather (to them) what is most urgent, that is to say, they instead cover what's sensational. Sadly, there is very little investigative journalism anymore.

For instance, the Harperialist agenda of the G8 meeting in Muskoka prominently featured the funding for maternal health initiatives in the developing world. Significant media attention was (justifiably) drawn to the fact that such funding did not include some family planning initatives that were at odds with Conservative ideology. However, little attention was given to the larger smoke-and-mirrors issue that this funding announcement was nothing new; it was just the reaffirmation of previous commitments to fund United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) initiatives. Yet, what was left unsaid (or at least under-reported) in the mainstream media is that many of the other previous MDG commitments were left unfulfilled by the G8 countries.

At the time of the G20, Toronto was in the midst of the pre-election mayoralty race and an already unbelievable amount of attention was being paid to a comic fringe candidate running on a Palinesque populist platform. In the fall, Toronto elected right-wing buffoon Rob Ford as mayor and he set about immediately to undo much of what good had been done by his predecessors. Not long thereafter, Canada re-elected the Harperialist federal government, only this time with a majority after years of wheedling an electorate that is largely disengaged, apathetic and disgusted with political maneuvering. We can expect the government to contiune, now unhindered: kowtowing to the economic interests of industrial-age resource-based industries; attacking social programmes while ensuring tax breaks for the wealthy; avoiding, indeed deriding, scientific and fact-based policy development, especially anything to do with climate change; imposing more oppressive surveillance, policing and tough-on-crime sentencing, likely including a step-up of the widely repudiated War on Drugs; and enforcing even more draconian intellectual property laws than the United States. Coming in the fall of 2011, I fully expect Ontario will elect a Conservative government, having grown tired of the lackluster performance of the Liberals, whereupon more attacks will be visited upon social programmes and green iniatives will be curtailed, particularly in the energy sector. Oh, and south of the border the Republicans have assumed a majority in both the House and the Senate.

In the year prior, I had been seriously dismayed by the collapse of the climate change talks in Copenahagen, after which the green movement seemed to give up pursuing geo-political solutions, while climate denialism continued to flourish. Obama, who had been elected on the audacity of his platform of Hope was fighting an economic collapse and a rear-guard action against Republicans during a mid-term election, did little to address any of these larger issues. So at about the time of the G20, I was undergoing some personal stress, a sort of existential crisis. I had become extraordinarily anxious about many of the global issues (about which I've previously blogged) that we confront as a civilization, indeed as a species, as the sustainability of our way of living becomes more untenable on a finite planet. I was begininng to succumb to a feeling of deep depression and despair.

I think I've posted about how I had become disillusioned with my software development career, how I'd abandoned some of my early environmental ideals to pursue the manufacture of bits, which arguably did little except improve the efficiency of capitalist interests. (Of course, having to deal with entrepreneurial psychopaths didn't help!) I feel a sense of personal guilt for having been part of the Hippie generation that first embraced and celebrated environmentalism, then turned our back on it as we grew up, took up careers and settled down to raise families in the suburbs. It has only been over the past few years I've re-awakened to many of these issues and I'm now dealing with the psychological fallout.

I can't say it was the events or aftermath of the G20 per se, or my disillusionment about them, but it was about that time that I realized that I needed an awakening of a more profound kind. For the past year, I've been pursuing an inward journey of personal development along a more spiritual path. Oh, I'm still an avowed (agnostic) atheist, although I'm much less militant about it, now. At the suggestion of my therapist, I've been reading about Advaita Vedanta (a non-dual form of Hinduism compatible with atheism) and Buddhism (which originally derived from many of the same concepts), although I'm still wrestling with how to reconcile their metaphysics with what I know and believe about the reality in which we live. This also led me to read more about science, especially cosmology, psychology and some philosophy. I've also taken up reading literature  -- and not just my favourite existential authors (Camus, Dostoyevski, etc.)! -- which is quite a departure from my strictly non-fiction diet. I think it's working.

All in all, I'm fairly happy with life and have a more positive outlook than last year at this time. I'm back to work on a voluntary basis with a not-for-profit organization that is a clearinghouse for information on social justice and environmental issues. In the short-term, I'll be leveraging my IT skills to upgrade their infrastructure and I hope to develop a new website or, at least, enhance what is already there. Afterwards, I hope to do more in the area of writing and editing of articles to be published online. Apart from joining a career networking meetup group recently, this is the first concrete step, after some considerable time not working, I've made towards rebuilding my career. I had thought of abandoning the IT field altogether but I'm reconsidering that now and think that I'll keep it as an option going forward, at least in terms of seeking out transitional opportunities.

The journey continues...

The ecological damage done to our planet owing to unfettered consumerism will be compounded by population growth. Despite optimistic projections for the global population to plateau at about nine billion people by 2050, the per capita rate of consumption is expected to continue to grow exponentially as impoverished third world people strive to attain a Western standard of living. Worse still, at over six billion people today we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet (even ignoring potentially catastrophic impacts upon food and water security owing to anthropogenic global warming).

This is clearly unsustainable and insane. We need to find a better way to factor ecology into our economy.

Until quite recent times, despite their shared etymologies, the fields of economics and ecology have each developed largely independent of the other. The now-familiar term 'ecology' which has not yet been in use for 150 years, shares a common root with its older cousin 'economy', first coined in c.1530. Both words derive from the ancient Greek oikos meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation”; the former term, literally means “household management” and was used in the 17^th century with respect to the wealth and resources of nations, whereas the term 'ecology' simply means the study of the nature of a place or, more broadly, the environment at large.

Although the environmental movement is an fairly recent historical phenomenon, ecologists have long recognized how economic activities impacted upon ecosystems. In contrast, most economists remained focused on their own discipline and anything that was not a cost or benefit to a party directly involved in a transaction of interest was considered an 'externality'. Their economic models were based on abstract ideas largely unfettered by the realities of nature and, excepting a few useful 'resources', excluded such external factors from consideration so that the universe of economics was unbounded and heedless of natural limits to growth – no such parameters need clutter the models. That some of these 'externalities' might be be harmful to the environment was not a concern to them, at least not until quite recently.

An abstract approach to economics happily served the avarice of its most ardent stakeholders who were singularly interested in pursuit of larger slices of an expanding economic pie. An insatiable consumer demand fuels an incessant and accelerating churn of ever increasing production and consumption. Never mind that this mode of so-called progress entails a commensurate depletion and degradation of the natural environment of this small (and seemingly shrinking) planet.

This Western Idea of Progress, ineluctably linked to the pursuit of limitless economic growth, first emerged during the Enlightenment and has since been chased with alacrity by classical liberals advocating for free markets. In his Development as Freedom Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen cogently illustrates how Adam Smith's concern for the social values and the public good have been largely eviscerated from popular discourse while the essential laissez faire elements of his theories have been removed from the pre-capitalism context of mercantilism to serve as fundamental truths for modern corporate capitalism.

Over the 100 years following the inception of 'capitalism', a term first used by Karl Marx in 1877, the corporation rose to dominance and created unprecedented wealth. In charting its career, documentary filmmaker Mark Achbar's award-winning The Corporation [video], based on the book by Joel Bakan subtitled “The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”, takes the corporation's “status as a legal 'person' to the logical conclusion by putting it on the psychiatrist's couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” Unsurprisingly, the 'personality' discovered was wholly infused with pure self-interest.

Progress in our post-industrial society has been marked by an obsessive focus on maximizing wealth and consumption, often conspicuously with the excessive acquisition of stuff. What has become the sine qua non of measurement of such progress in most societies is the so-called standard of living, which focuses on economic conditions, with just a nod to some other factors (such as education and health care) that affect the quality of life. A basic measure of income, gross domestic product (GDP), is how the standard of living is commonly rated but more colloquially it is often represented in terms of consumption, for instance: how many cars, televisions, dishwashers, etc. are there within the average household? Progress has also often been closely measured by some consumer trend, such as the number of some particular kind of appliance per household over a period of time.

The presumption underlying the conventional measurement of our standard of living, of course, is that more stuff means a better quality of life. Sure, our modern society has provided us with longer lifespans, better overall health, tools to ease our toil, devices to facilitate our communications, vehicles to quicken our transportation, etc., but at what cost? Aesthetic or intangible qualities of life and worldly matters beyond the economic sphere, those nuisance 'externalities', have conventionally been given considerably less weight. Are we any happier now than our ancestors were in their time? The country of Bhutan offers a rare exception to this obsession with wealth in its measurement of a gross national happiness (GNH) index. Oh, there have been attempts to create more representative meaningful measurements of progress, such as the genuine progress index (GPI), which “adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, and subtracts factors such as the costs of crime and pollution.” Although, as Noam Chomsky observed in his March 21, 2010 address to the Left Forum [video], whilst the GDP has increased steadily since 1950, the GPI has stagnated, remaining relatively flat since the 1960s. Yet, consumption continues unabated; will we ever have enough stuff? When is enough enough?

Adam Curtis' brilliant film The Century of Self [video] documents the rise of consumer capitalism. It shows how public relations pioneer Edward Bernays applied his uncle Sigmund Freud's new psychoanalytical theories towards manipulating public opinion. As might be expected, he was soon enlisted by corporations to use behavioural science for innovative advertising and marketing campaigns designed to create demand for products and services where none had existed before. People's desires were molded; they were easily convinced that they should get more stuff – stuff they really didn't need but were told they must have. Everyone else wanted it, needed it, so they just had to keep up with the Joneses.

In her ground-breaking book No Logo, Naomi Klein explores how consumerism represents a recent shift in our culture where the brand is now glorified over the product or services it represents. Carefully crafted corporate marketing campaigns and omnipresent advertising inculcate an insatiable desire for the brand itself and, by extension, its associated products and services. Now, it's not so much the stuff that's important as what it represents: the idea, the brand; the product is just a by-product of cool. Still, in this society, more and more stuff must be consumed to maintain one's place at the leading-edge of cool. Klein has since written much about the rise of globalism.

In a shrinking interconnected world of global media and cultural exports, people in developing countries are acutely aware of the Western way of life and all its wealth as portrayed on their television and cinema screens, which undoubtedly inculcates a demand for these same things. Globalism, fueled by rapid communications, transportation and cheap fuel, has allowed for the export of these Western ideals along with the products and, now, the developing world is playing catch-up.

In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth just 1.5%:

Source: globalissues.com

Yet, if we have already overshot the Earth's sustainable carrying capacity by 40%, how long can we expect to survive when the global South catches up to the North? Even if global population growth is stemmed and eventually declines (steadily if collapse can be averted but likely much more precipitously otherwise), we will need to shift away from rampant consumerism to a no-growth economy, a steady state based on renewable resources. It would be insane to persist in the pursuit of socioeconomic systems that deny natural limits to growth.

[1] Paul Ehrlich is quoted in Julia Whitty's excellent article The Last Taboo in Mother Jones magazine.

We are now at a peak moment in history, perhaps at the apex along the arc of progress (as this vulgar term is understood colloquially) of our industrial civilization, from which we will surely experience a perilous decline, what James Howard Kunstler calls The Long Emergency, perhaps even an outright collapse.

In the past 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, we have seen extraordinary advances in the technologies that undergird almost every aspect of our modern way of life. Perhaps the most obvious measures of progress are seen in the fields of transportation and communications – my grandparents saw horse-drawn carriages eclipsed by the automobile and lived to see a live video transmission of Mankind's first footsteps on the moon – yet other advances, ranging from the way we grow and produce our food to the manufacturing of goods that never seem enough, have just as significantly affected (but not necessarily improved) our standard of living. And all this progress has been enabled by the petrochemical industry. Oil, natural gas and other petroleum products fuel the engines of industry and the raw material inputs into the manufacturing of many goods, particularly plastics, fertilizers and even food. They fuel the engines of our personal vehicles and the global transportation system of trucks, airplanes and ships that transport goods, much of it food, around the world. No longer are we simply dependent upon on the limited resources of our locality; we have an entire global economy that avails us of the world's resources and it is all quite literally fueled by oil. For now, at least. But that is about to change. This peak is a tipping point.

Accompanying this unprecedented rate of progress has been a senseless disregard for the depletion of non-renewable resources and degradation of our natural environment, which impose natural limits to growth. Our environment gives us the context for our lives and our civilization depends upon its resources but there has been an irrational denial of this reality. The true costs of these resource inputs and the collateral damage have not been factored into our economics; they are considered externalities. Our whole modern economy is based on the ludicrous idea of unrestrained and limitless growth.

Beyond the impending problem of depleted fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources (such as minerals) is the unsustainable extraction of otherwise renewable resources, where the rate of consumption exceeds the rate of renewal, poses a serious risk to our society – not to mention the ecological damage inflicted upon the environment. People in many parts of the world are already suffering from the effects of related environmental damage, including shortages of fresh water and the loss of arable land (impacting food security), wildlife species and habitat, forests, rivers and streams, oceans, marine life and habitat, biodiversity, etc.

Added to these sustainability issues is the matter of what Paul Ehrlich called The Population Bomb, the fact that global population is growing exponentially. The Malthusian consequences hotly debated decades ago have since been largely denied, owing to optimism that fecundity rates can be significantly reduced through efforts to improve conditions in the so-called developing world by alleviating extreme poverty and achieving more equitable social justice. While there was once considerable merit in this argument, especially considering the lower growth rate achieved in many developed nations, it fails to recognize that we have probably already exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet. Time may have run out for the graceful self-regulation of our species and conditions could become very ugly on a shrinking planet.

Worse yet, the population issue is compounded by an exponential rise in consumerism, with an attendant rise in demand for the depletion of ever more resources and the degradation of even more of our environment. A morality play is unfolding as the developing world aspires to achieve the Western lifestyle we have so heavily promoted; yet, tragically, despite our sense of social justice, they shall not be able to attain what we cannot even keep for ourselves.

Finally, adding to an emerging sense of urgency is the issue of climate change, which has recently received considerable press, although the court of public opinion seems to be as-yet undecided. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused global warming, there is little appetite to change the status quo in order to preclude the worst of the foreshadowed impacts. Even if climate change cannot be definitively attributed to anthropogenic causes there remains significant risk of the potential impacts, such as the flooding of lowland areas by rising oceans due to melting icecaps and glaciers; droughts and famines arising from monoculture crop failure; species extinctions due to habitat loss; etc. Yet, if carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels really do contribute significantly to global warming then we have an even more compelling reason to urgently shift our ruinous oil-based economy towards something more forgiving.

Adaptation to these deteriorating conditions may not be easily accommodated; the ensuing regional social pressures may erupt into civil unrest, mass migrations and wars over limited resources. Those societies most directly and severely impacted first will, of course, most likely be in the historically disadvantaged South. Globalism will be dead; in the North, the first and most significant impacts will most likely be economic with rapidly increasing security risks arising from the obstinate loss of empire, which may portend a reversal of the social liberal agenda that has unfolded since the time of the Enlightenment as the corporate-state plutocracy clamors to hold onto its wealth and power. As societies collapse, comfort will likely be sought in the false hopes of despots and prophets.

Even if the worst of such apocalyptic scenarios are not to be fully realized, we must recognize that we cannot continue along the same path, denying our interconnectedness with the natural world. Technology will not save us. Renewable energy only takes us so far; there is no viable alternative for many uses of fossil fuel. Our survival – either as a society or a species, choose one – demands that, rather than trying to prop up our present way of life, we must find a more sustainable way to live. We need to find a new standard of living.

About a year ago, I came out on Facebook with a personal profile attributed to my real identity. Yet, I continued to maintain a 'more subversive' pseudonymous profile but after realizing that I was using it less and less as I grew more comfortable with my new online voice, I eventually consolidated these personae and disclosed my true identity to my online friends. (As my alter ego alias may still some useful purpose when I'm concerned with shielding my identity, I won't disclose it here.)

I have over the past couple of years become increasingly concerned with issues of ecological sustainability. My long-standing concerns were re-ignited with a heightened sense of urgency by the recent fervour over climate change. I've been an avid reader of history and upon reading Clive Ponting's Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World I came to realize that the threatened impacts of impending climate change bring into sharper forcus a nexus of many related environmental issues and their underlying causes. In short, our modern lifestyles in this industrial society have wreaked havoc upon the environment proportional to the extent that we consume products. Compounding this issue is global population growth and matters of global social justice, which will result in dramatically increased deterioration of our environment. Our planet imposes natural limits to growth and, if not already exceeded, we are on a trajectory to over-shoot its carrying capacity.

For most of the past 25 years I have been an investor in The Hunger Project, a strategic not-for-profit organization committed to ending chronic world hunger and extreme poverty by empowering women and men to end their own hunger. Whilst I remain a strong advocate for their work, I've since come to believe that it is at the risk of becoming moot unless we can address some of the larger issues that confront us, some of which — at the risk of sounding alarmist — might, as some believe, be potentially civilization-ending if not simply risking the extinction of the human species. Yet, I remain a strong advocate for social justice; I believe that we cannot create a sustainable future without being inclusive and fair in considering the wants and needs of all people. Even apart from worse-case collapse scenarios associated with climate change or carrying capacity over-shoot, there will be an increasing risk of civil unrest, mass migrations and wars arising from population pressures, depletion of resources and an overwhelming sense of injustice related to growing gaps in wealth and opportunity, both regionally and world-wide. In this age of globalization, our interconnected world is much smaller than it used to be and will offer no refuge to isolationists who may want to ignore the plight of the increasingly resentful disadvantaged.

For the South, the earliest significant impacts of climate change, for instance, will likely be direct affects, such as droughts, crop failures, etc., while in the North we are more likely to be indirectly impacted by related global and regional security threats. The so-called War on Terror that has captivated much international attention over the past decade may just be a taste of what will come, with concommitant further erosion of civil liberties as corporate-nation states hunker down to protect their vital interests.

These topics and related matters are some of the subjects I intend to write about. I will undoubtedly write about other concerns and interests, too, in the areas of social justice, civil liberty, politics, popular culture, philosophy, privacy, security, information technology, free/libre open source software, (so-called) intellectual property, etc. Yet, I promise it won't be all doom and gloom. While I won't be blogging like a teenage girl about my personal life, I don't intend to ignore what is good in the world. Nor will this blog always be so serious (I often feel compelled to express my sardonic sense of humour, not that you can tell from this post! ;-p) and I'll also post photos as I re-kindle a long-neglected interest in photography.

I'm looking forward to this; it should be fun! :-)

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