“The greatest philosophers have found answers to life’s problems,
not just in theory, but in practice.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Never doubt that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world.
In fact, it is all that ever has.”
– Margaret Meade
Thomas Jefferson understood that democracy is rooted, not only in a truly free press and freedom of speech, and in face to face town hall democracy, but equally critically, in tens of thousands of yeoman farmers, each with a small plot of land. Our land, and our food system, have now been taken over by giant corporations, by billionaires, and increasingly, by China. We now either reclaim the land, or we will lose our demcracy, and along with it, our freedom, our rights, and also our sovereignty and security. These are the central facts we must realize now. Land is the key: to our freedom, to our democracy, to our rights, to our food security and our health, and to the healing of our planet.
*
Relocalization, community-building and regenerative agriculture are the keys to weathering the growing storm that we are facing now, as a confluence of crises come to a head. We can feed humanity and heal the planet with regenerative agriculture. We either make relocalization, community self-reliance and regenerative agriculture our foundation, or we have no foundation. That is most important to understand. That requires land reform, and land redistribution, and now. Not in 10 or 20 years, but now. If you want to understand the key elements in any sane or workable plan for mitigation and adaptation, this is it. Understand this, or wait for the tsunami to hit.
In the longer term, but nevertheless very soon, if we want either a stable society, a just society, or a free and democratic society, we will have to ban fractional reserve banking and usury, along with fiat currency. This unholy trinity impels and requires infinite growth on a finite planet, which makes it utterly unsustainable; and it also produces accelerating hyper-concentration of wealth and power, which undermines justice and equality, and which will furthermore be the death knell to freedom and democracy, if we let it. But I am not talking here about longer term actions that we must take, but instead, what we must do immediately, if we are to survive the onslaught we have created for ourselves, in terms of the confluence of the growing financial/economic, food and environmental crises.
In the immediate term, we must reclaim and renew democracy and freedom, and make a bold move to relocalization, combined with intelligent mutual aid and cooperation, and most critically, with regenerative agriculture, as our primary strategy, to avoid global cataclysm. All of that will require a very large investment in making the transition to a truly green, sustainable, just and regenerative society. That will require that we tax the richest 1% and the large profitable corporations, tax pollution (collected by municipalities, not global elites), and put a tax on great concentrations of wealth. We need to redesign our infrastructure, and with all speed, or we will race off the cliff we are fast approaching. These actions will be necessary to fund that shift. They are by now immediately required and unavoidable. But what is even more fundamental and more urgent is the low-tech solutions offered by small-scale regenerative agriculture. And that requires land reform, and a redistribution of land. That is priority one, as I will explain and make clear.
Many people will say, these changes you propose may make sense, and may even be critically and urgently needed, but they are impossible. But I say to them, we have done the impossible many times before. Defeating the fascists in WWII seemed impossible, but we did it. Surviving the last ice age was very nearly impossible, and must have seemed impossible to our ancestors, but we did it. We do well in a pinch. It is when we are challenged the most, that we rise to our greatness. And we will rise to the challenge once again.
We simply have no choice. We either rise to the occasion, or we admit that we are cowards, and morally bankrupt at that. There is no time left for fatalism. We either rise to the occasion now, and take the necessary actions now, or we admit that our humanity is forfeit, and we have become the hollow men.
We rise now. There is no other way.
We can no longer wait on governments, corporations and business elites to take the necessary actions. In fact, they are the major roadblocks to change. We must take the necessary steps ourselves. We start small, and build exponentially – and that, fortunately, is what is already happening now.
As Geoff Lawton puts it, “Nail it. Then scale it.”
Exactly.
As Alice Walker said,
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
*
Covid in perspective
In 2020, the peak year, to date, of the covid crisis, just under two million people died from covid world-wide, by official figures. Every preventable death is tragic, but we also need to put things into perspective. Every year, 1.3 million people die globally from auto accidents, seven million people die from air pollution, 25 million die from hunger, and 25 million die from obesity and unhealthful diets. If we truly want to reduce preventable deaths, and we are willing to invoke authoritarian measures – which I would argue are never justified, and always cause more harm than good in the end – we would save many more lives, a total of 10-20 million a year, by banning private automobiles, fast food and junk food. If we were truly serious about health and reducing preventable deaths, we would immediately invoke a 90% wealth tax on the richest 0.1%, and take $18 trillion from the $ 20 trillion that sits in the offshore bank accounts of the super-rich, and with it, use $1 trillion to end world hunger and poverty world-wide, and use the other $17 trillion to usher in a great transition to a truly sustainable and regenerative society. If we continue doing what we are doing now, we will not have only have two million people dying a year from covid: we will have a 90-98% die-off of humanity, and the death of 6-7 billion people – within this century, and possibly in less than 30 years. Covid is serious enough. The environmental crisis dwarfs it in scale. And so far, we have no seriousness about it at all. Nor do we have the slightest seriousness about ending world poverty or world hunger – despite the fact that five billion people now live in poverty, and 20,000 children die every day of hunger. Land reform and regenerative agriculture are the primary solutions to both the environmental crisis, and to global poverty and hunger. It is time we got serious, and now.
*
The big picture
There are now more than five billion people in the world living in poverty, and hundreds of millions more living precarious existences on the edge of poverty. We have the power to heal and regenerate our world, and quickly, in a matter of a few years, as well as the power to end poverty and to feed the world; but, we must be aware, we are going to be facing global crop failure due to global warming in less than 20 years if we fail to act. Clearly, there is zero time for hesitation, avoidance, denial or delay. That is the context, and that is our timeline.
Dmitry Orlov, Richard Heinberg and James Howard Kunstler are generally excellent in terms of analyzing what peak oil and the energy cliff we are now passing, combined with economic/financial and ecological crises, when interwoven, as they are, entails for our very near future. Note that we passed peak oil globally between 2005-2008. Plummeting oil industry profits confirm the other industry figures clearly and undeniably – Big Oil is now insolvent. Oil shocks are coming fast, and the decline will not be smooth, as previously believed, but very sharp and steep.
However, most people analyzing peak oil and fossil fuel dependency implications do not realize that, as Vandana Shiva says, small-scale, locally-based, regenerative agriculture can produce ten times more food per acre, or square, meter than the collapsing system of petrochemical industrial agriculture – not less food, but ten times more food.
Thus, the global famine and global die-off of human populations that have been predicted are only inevitable if we fail to take the right steps immediately, which are: abandon petrochemical industrial agriculture, slash our fossil fuel use, decentralize and relocalize economies, and especially food production, and shift to community-based regenerative agriculture en mass.
The bad news is, many nations, communities and regions will likely remain in denial, and will suffer terribly for it. The good news is that millions of communities are already making this shift, and the relocalization and regenerative agriculture movements are growing exponentially.
What does it all mean? It means some communities, regions and nations will fare relatively well, while others are hit by a perfect storm, of unprecedented magnitude, that was to a great extent perfectly avoidable. This is what Tainter, the great historian, calls the runaway train scenario – where we stubbornly refuse to make a change – combined with the suicidal behaviour of elites who erroneously believe their wealth will protect them, and therefore prop up the existing system rather than supporting or leading positive change.
The other misunderstanding is that we will all be slavish peasant farmers in the near future. But Dmitry Orlov is right here, when he says that if you want endless gadgets and a society that produces a growing number of billionaires, then you have to work 40 hours plus per week; but if you want a community that simply meets its basic needs, we can work just 15-20 hours a week.
The benefits post-collapse will be sizable. It is the transition that will be painful. And of course, we should do everything we can to mitigate the destruction and the suffering, lest we lose our very humanity and our sanity in the bargain.
Relocalization, community self-reliance in food, water and energy, along with mutual aid and cooperation, regenerative agriculture, and a redistribution of land, will be critical – and are critical, not in the future, but right now. This is in stark contrast to the publicly-announced plans of the Davos set of global billionaire elites, however. Their plan is 180 degrees in the wrong direction, as well as being frankly fascist. We need to be perfectly clear about this. The one thing above all that we can no longer afford, is comforting delusions.
*
Global economic apartheid must end now – or we are doomed
It is not widely recognized, and in fact, there is nearly universal denial about it, but we now live under a global system of economic apartheid. There are of course major elements of race, gender and xenophobia, along with negative forms of nationalism (there are also positive forms of nationalism, of course) mixed into this global regime; but it is class division which primarily holds it in place. And there is a separation between humans and nature which is also foundational to this deeply destructive and mutually degrading wealth-extraction machine. Either we end the system of apartheid, and restore a more integrated and equitable balance within human society, and between humans and the rest of nature, of which we are an inseparable part, or our future will be a nightmare beyond our imaginings.
From Thomas Hobbes to Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates, the elite always want to convince us that they are indispensable, that they are our protectors, benefactors, and saviours. We are taught not to trust ourselves or one another, but to look to the state and the elite for our safety, our protection, our guidance and our well-being. But there is another view. People like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., taught us to trust ourselves, to trust that freedom works better than elitism or authoritarianism, and to be wary of great powers. Furthermore, we have seen from the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom that the management of the commons is better done, and with better results, by local communities, than by distant elites. The answer to our social and ecological crises is not more elite rule, more authoritarianism, more colonialism, imperialism and technocracy, and more centralization and hyper-concentration of power and wealth, but a rebirth of freedom and democracy. The positive changes will come from below, as they always have, and not from above. And that means, among other things, that land, and the redistribution of land, is the key.
Malcolm X was right: revolution is about land – it is about the landed and the landless. (He was wrong about violence being necessary, but he was right about land being central. And he later renounced violence, it should be noted as well. Violent revolution now would result, not only in a bloodbath, but in a long and bloody stalemate. We have no time to waste on a long and protracted stalemate, therefore we have no time for violent digressions.) It is increasingly undeniable that what we now need and cannot avoid, is a new wave of non-violent, grassroots democratic revolutions to sweep the planet, and to sweep away the decaying and collapsing, socially and ecologically destructive system of predatory and vampiric, global crypto-fascist corporate oligarchy. That revolution hinges upon land.
Climate change is real, accelerating, and will spell global crop failure and mass famine in less than 20 years if we do not greatly and immediately intensify our efforts to halt and reverse it. The majority of people globally now know the issue is real, urgent and severe. What most people do not know is this:
If we stopped all burning of fossil fuels tomorrow, 100% globally, climate change would continue – because of soil degradation and desertification. That means the we must immediately abandon petrochemical industrial agriculture and factory farming, which together are degrading the world’s soils, leading to desertification, and massively fuelling climate change. Industrial agriculture is the primary cause of soil degradation, desertification and climate change. The 75 year old experiment in petrochemical industrial agriculture has been a catastrophic failure – in terms of human health, in terms of social impact, in terms of global destabilization, and in terms of environmental destruction and climate change. That is by now an undeniable fact. That means we need to shift, not only off of fossil fuels, but even more importantly and more urgently, we must shift to regenerative, organic, holistic agriculture. And we cannot afford to take another 50 years, or even 20, or 10, to accept the fact, and make the transition.
Regenerative agriculture is priority one for halting climate change, since it is the most effective and fastest way known to sequester and remove carbon from the atmosphere, in addition to being the number one way to cut greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Of course we need to plant trees and new forests, stop deforestation and factory farming, and get off of our fossil fossil fuel addiction; but regenerative agriculture is also a priority, and an even more urgent one. That also means land, and land reform, are the central issues of our time, as I will presently explain.
Small scale, local, community based, regenerative organic agriculture, permaculture, and holistic management and systems design – built from the bottom up, based in freedom and radical democracy – are the primary tools that will heal our world, because, among other reasons, this is the most effective and fastest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere – and together, they form a global movement that is growing fast, and at an exponential rate. There are now over 100,000 ecovillages in more than 167 countries, and there are millions of small scale regenerative organic farms. These are the working models that we need to build upon, and scale up globally, with all speed.
(See Vandana Shiva, Murray Bookchin, Peter Kropotkin, Rianne Eisler, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, Allan Savory, Geoff Lawton, Gar Alperovitz, Helena Norberg-Hodge, and the Global Ecovillage Network, for vision, strategy, tools, methods and systems design – and for proven, working models and inspiring examples.)
Petrochemical industrial agriculture and our addiction to fossil fuels have been a Faustian bargain. It is a deal with the devil. It has been nothing less than a catastrophe, and it is destroying us. It is time for a new deal: a Green New Deal, based in democracy and freedom, not technocracy; and based in land reform and regenerative agriculture, as its foundation.
There is definitely hope. We have the power now, to either renew the world, or to destroy it. And the next 20 years will be the critical, deciding moment for humanity. We have no time to lose, and no time left for avoidance, denial, apathy, complacency, half measures, or the succumbing to numbness, cynicism or despair. Moral courage, sheer survival, common sense and basic sanity, all require that we act now, with boldness and speed.
We have a choice now as human beings: either to continue with a system and a culture of global apartheid, based in domination, exploitation, extraction, extreme and growing inequality, degradation and destruction – a system which is racing towards ecological holocaust, fascism and collapse; or to abolish and transcend that system, to re-integrate and reconnect, to find a new balance, and to become the guardians and healers of nature, ourselves, and one another, and of our world. That shift hinges upon two things above all: attitude, vision, or our view of the world; and land.
*
The greatest of dangers
The greatest dangers facing humanity in the 21st century are five: nuclear, chemical or biological warfare; the rapidly growing environmental crisis, which threatens food system collapse and global famine within 20 years; corporate fascism, which is already well advanced; economic collapse, due to money printing addiction; and the peak oil energy crisis, which has the power to grind our fossil fuel dependent industrial civilization to a halt in short order. All of these immediate grave dangers require: 1. a rebirth of democracy and freedom, 2. a global shift to decentralization, and 3. a redistribution, not only of wealth and power, but most critically, of land. We can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic all we like, but if we do not swiftly and boldly take all three of these steps, it is systems collapse ahead, and it is coming soon.
People should be concerned about geopolitics, economics and ecology, and about the extremely fragile state of our energy and food distribution systems, among other pressing concerns; but while truly existential threats loom near on the horizon, the majority have lost their minds over the latest variant of the flu.
We are succeeding valiantly in one thing, at least: training in unthinking, irrational obedience to authority – we are succeeding marvelously in that. But if that trend continues, our species is finished.
A little more critical thought, and a little less blind obedience, are the only things that can save us now.
*
The real solutions
Half of the world’s people live in the countryside. Three quarters of the people living in poverty live in the countryside. Two-thirds of the income of the rural poor comes from small-scale farms and peasant agriculture. Meanwhile, peasant farmers and the rural poor produce two-thirds of the world’s food. Something is deeply wrong with this picture, and it is getting worse, not better. And we have not even mentioned the issue of indigenous land rights, which have profound implications, and which it is our moral obligation to address, and speedily, honestly, ethically and forthrightly, without hesitation, obfuscation, evasion or delay.
The richest few, the new landed aristocracy of billionaires, are taking over. Bill Gates alone has bought up over a quarter million acres, and the billionaire/corporate land-grab is accelerating. This is the enclosure of the commons, and the theft of the commons, on a new, global scale. This is the issue which will determine the fate of humanity and the Earth. Land is the key issue, above all: who has access to it, who does not, how it is used, and how is it shared – or not shared, but horded by the richest few. This is the pivotal issue of our time, and it is the fight of our lives.
The billionaires who meet annually at Davos, at the World Economic Forum, have made their plan clear. They want to drive the people off the land, and into “smart cities”, where total surveillance and authoritarianism are proclaimed as “the new normal”. But this is the opposite of what justice, freedom, democracy, human well-being, and ecological regeneration require.
Global inequality continues to soar to historically unprecedented levels, while the concentration of wealth, power, and control of land, becomes ever greater. The the ruling 1% – the billionaire class and their loyal minions – are devouring humanity and the Earth, and are vying to gather all wealth, land ownership, and power in their hands.
While roughly three and a half billion people live in rural poverty or are struggling to survive, another billion and a half people, at very conservative estimates, are part of the rapidly growing sea of the urban poor, or are economically struggling. Land reform and agrarian reform is thus essential and urgently needed, if we care about justice, health, poverty reduction, or humanity, in the least.
What will help the five billion rural and urban poor or struggling the most, is a combination of four things: land and freedom, above all, along with organic, non-hybridized heritage seeds, and micro-capital – micro-credit, or small loans of under $5,000.
We need a new wave of land reform and agrarian reform now, and urgently. That will end poverty, greatly reduce inequality, end hunger and greatly improve human health (far more than experimental genetic engineering drugs labelled as vaccines), and greatly increase world peace and stability. We need to bring the people back to the land in large numbers, in millions of small communities, and we need to boldly redistribute the land to make that possible en mass. Furthermore, as Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Allan Savory and Geoff Lawton have shown: through organic, holistic, decentralized, small-holding, locally-based regenerative agriculture, mass scale land reform and land redistribution, putting people as well as animals back on the land, is the only thing now that will heal the Earth – and feed humanity.
Not GMOs, not petrochemical industrial agriculture, not factory farms or lab grown meat – it is permaculture, regenerative, holistic, organic, small-scale agriculture, and putting people and animals back on the land, which are the key ingredients needed, to both heal our world, and feed the people.
*
Everything in nature is an ebb and flow, a balanced flow between gathering and dispersion. Every empire, however, seeks to concentrate power and wealth in a few hands: they seek to gather, and to withold from dispersion. But you cannot have day without night, arising without falling, or gathering without dispersion.
This attempt to concentrate and hold onto all power and wealth, which all empires try to do – to gather without dispersion – upsets the natural balance of life, until the extreme is reached, and we have, as the Taoists have pointed out, the “inversion of opposites”, and the dispersion must then come, and the empire collapses – either suddenly, through revolution, or slowly, through decay.
In either case, the empire falls due to over-concentration of power and wealth, if not due to ecological collapse. And in either case, the balance was lost, through hubris, power-lust and greed, which are the driving forces of all empires.
The extremes of imbalance and inequality, both social and ecological, are reaching their maximum limits. Collapse is imminent – that means, of course, in historical time, which could be decades until collapse, or less, but quite possibly, very soon. This newest of empires, the global corporate empire, will fall. Whether it is through ecological collapse, or through social collapse and revolution, the fall is inevitable now, because no system based on extreme imbalance can last in nature, or in history.
Wealth and power have been vastly over-concentrated, and the hyper-concentration of wealth and power continues to accelerate. The dispersion, or redistribution, of wealth and power, and a more equal, or at least more equitable, sharing of wealth and power, both socially and ecologically, is not only imperative, and essential for justice, human health, and human well-being, along with ecological sustainability and regeneration – by now, it is a necessity, if we are not going to have systems failure, and the collapse of modern civilization.
*
Land is, and has always been, the primary basis of wealth, and of power. Justice, sustainability, stability, peace and regeneration, and the healing of our world, require that land be shared more widely and more equitably now. It is going to happen one way or another, as it must. Let’s get on with it.
Tax the rich? That is a good idea. Invoke a wealth tax on the richest 1%? Also a good idea. In fact, these two steps are critical and absolutely necessary if we are to solve humanity’s two greatest challenges: to eliminate poverty, and to fund the transition to a truly green, sustainable, regenerative, thriving and stable society. But it is the redistribution of power that is most critical. That means two further steps are essential, at a minimum: democracy and freedom must be reborn; and the land must be shared more widely, more equitably, and more fairly.
As the ancient Greeks knew, hubris precedes a fall; and gluttony, including gorging oneself on power and wealth, always comes at a price. The party’s over. It is time to pay the bar tab. The orgy of extraction and hording of wealth and power by the super-rich cannot, and will not last. The reversal – the dispersion – has begun.
*
A few of the most important facts about our 21st century world are these – and they are proven and well understood, at least by the few who have either dug deep enough in research, or have stepped back enough to reflect, to gain a clear perspective; however, the level of denial is deep and pervasive, including among environmentalists, labour, NGOs, most academics, social justice activists, business and political elites, and the general public.
- The single best way to reduce and eliminate poverty is to give the people the primary source of wealth and empowerment – which is, and has always been, land. With over five billion people living in poverty and many more living precariously, this alone makes land reform an urgent moral imperative. And if we value peace over violence, chaos or civil war, it is also a pragmatic imperative.
- The single most powerful way to slow, then halt, then reverse climate change and global warming, is to heal and regenerate the soil – particularly on the grasslands and dry lands which cover two thirds of the Earth’s landmass – since only healthy soils can sequester enough carbon now to avert a cataclysm. And the only way to accomplish that effectively and at the rapid pace we need, is with small scale, local, community-based, holistic, regenerative organic agriculture and permaculture. That requires large numbers of both people and animals working with the land and living on the land, in carefully designed regenerative agriculture systems. That makes land reform a survival imperative for humanity. It is that, or it is runaway global warming, followed rapidly by global crop failure, famine, civilization collapse, and extinction.
- Urbanization is not inevitable, just as globalization and corporate rule are not inevitable. Over the past 100 years we went from 12% urbanization of human population globally, to over 50% – and over 80% in the “developed” world. But big cities require long supply chains. Long supply chains mean food and other necessities and consumer items travel thousands of miles, requiring vast amounts of energy, almost all of it fossil fuels, and emitting vast amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases. Long supply chains are therefore utterly unsustainable. (They are also increasingly fragile and unreliable.) That means large cities are utterly unsustainable. Getting serious about climate change or the environmental crisis more broadly requires that we get serious about buying local, and slashing shipping miles by 90% or more. (It is the next logical steps which elude the vast majority of people, including most environmentalists, academics, NGOs and elites.) That means we must produce most of what we need at the local level. That means economic decentralization is a survival imperative. *And economic decentralization necessitates demographic and population decentralization.* That means that relocalization, re-ruralization, demographic and population decentralization, and an enormous shift toward small-scale, sustainable and regenerative communities, is a survival imperative. Again, that means land reform is, quite simply, a survival imperative.
These are the unassailable facts. We ignore them at our peril.
Fortunately, the necessary awakening has begun, and is accelerating rapidly.
*
We now need an alliance between the environmental movement – or at least, the majority part of it which is not crypto-fascist – and indigenous movements the world over, along with peasants movements, the more alert elements among the labour movement, ethical business leaders and entrepreneurs, the organic, permaculture and regenerative agriculture movements, small scale farmers, and yes, an alliance that includes both the grassroots right and the left: anyone and everyone who values freedom and democracy and the regeneration of the Earth, as the three principle pillars of any decent or even viable society, and who prefers this to the increasingly authoritarian rule by corporate oligarchs, and to the collective suicide, fascism and ecocide which it entails and is driving us towards. This unity amidst diversity is building and growing now. An awakening, and a new renaissance, is emerging now and being born. And it hinges upon a shift in consciousness; it hinges upon our unity – across, and despite, and within our rich diversity; and it hinges upon land.
Know your enemy. The enemy of the people and the Earth is the wealth-extracting, killing machine, which is the corporate industrial empire. We have been grinded on the wine press much too long. Rebel. We either abandon and transcend the global apartheid system of neoliberal and neofeudal corporate rule, or we will not only be serfs and slaves – we will have no future at all.
As I argued in my recent book, it is indeed, now, a matter of The People vs The Elite. The 99%, or the greater majority of us, at least, must unite to defeat and dethrone this latest, and last of empires, and to restore and renew both freedom and democracy, and equally critically, to heal and regenerate our world. And once again, I would argue, that hinges upon land.
A new renaissance has already begun. And sharing the land more equitably will be at the very centre of it.
Vive Zapata!
Tierra y libertad! Land and freedom!
It is time.
Let this mark the beginning of a new global movement: for land and freedom for all, and for the healing of our world.
*
We now have fire tornadoes in Australia. Fire tornadoes. The wildfires have been so severe and so intense, that the massive updrafts of rising hot air creates tornadoes in the midst of the wildfire, creating fire tornadoes. If that’s not apocalyptic-sounding, I don’t know what is. How many alarm bells do we need? Are we all collectively deaf?
The entire Southern US will be uninhabitable due to severe heat, while the mid-west has dust storms and severe drought, forcing people to abandon it en mass; the western and northern US states will burn with uncontrollable wildfires, making them uninhabitable, and the Eastern seaboard will be unlivable due to the frequency and severity of storms and hurricanes, that make Sandy and Katrina look mild by comparison. That is just one nation. And that is the future if we do not immediately increase our seriousness, and our effectiveness, in battling climate change.
Activism is high and rising, but a deadly complacency still grips our politicians, business “leaders”, and the majority of the people on Earth. And complacency, in this case, means we are playing Russian roulette. Do we really want to play that game?
Action is urgently needed – and not just from governments and business, but from all of us.
Building soil and healing the soil is the key, along with transitioning rapidly off of fossil fuels, and halting deforestation and factory farming. Ban the sale of flush toilets, which effectively flush our topsoil down the drain, give every family an odourless composting toilet, and, give every family at least one acre of land for gardening (roughly 1,000 square meters) – as family garden plots and building lots, or in community gardens, or collectively shared in land trusts, in ecovillages of 15-150 people, or in rural or rural organic co-op farms, and with these simple steps, we will more than double the effectiveness of our efforts to combat climate change. The solutions are in truth quite simple – but we human beings have a very self-defeating habit of over-complicating everything. And you can bet that almost every instance of human beings over-complicating things is profit driven. Simplicity will save the world, not grandiose over-complexity. Remember Tainter. Civilizations fall, in large, by becoming overly complex, to the point of accidental suicide. And we are headstrong, and racing full bore along that same track, yet again.
Nature thrives based on mutual reciprocity, interdependence, diversity, and simplicity. Modern civilization is steeped in models of behaviour and attitudes of short-term, narrow self-interest, illusions of separateness, homogeneity and monocrops – of our minds, culture, and farming practices, and in vast over-complication. Guess which party must change. It’s us. Nature bats last.
*
The Earth has 36 billion acres of total landmass. Grasslands and deserts make up roughly two thirds of that total land area, or roughly 20 billion acres. These are the lands that must be healed with greatest speed, through regenerative agriculture and permaculture. Of that 20+ billion acres, I am urging that we give at least two billion acres back to the people, to radically intensify our efforts to halt climate change and heal our world. That should be seen, not as a radical proposal, nor an impossible one, but a modest proposal, considering our very survival is at stake, and one we simply must implement, and immediately, if we are to survive.
The one requirement for families to receive and retain the usufructory rights to their allotment of land (the only kind of land rights that should exist, and the only ones that truly exist in practice) is they regenerate and improve the fertility, health and diversity of the land and the soil, or else pay someone or some group to do it, or entrust the land to a person or group, to ensure the land and soil are healed. The results would be – will be – a rapid greening, cleaning, and healing of the Earth, along with a sharp drop in poverty and hunger, and a radical increase in our effectiveness in dealing with species loss, desertification, and climate change.
20% of the Earth’s land is snow-covered, 20% is mountains, 20% is good land for farming – though this is shrinking and being degraded rapidly; 10% is desert or lands without soil – and this is rising fast; and 30% is marginal or degraded land. It is the marginal, degraded farmlands and grasslands (and vacant urban wasted land) which we must focus on first, and heal and regenerate as our top priority. This is something only regenerative agriculture, combined with serious and bold land reform, can accomplish.
We need to preserve and regenerate wetlands, and protect and preserve old growth forests and mature forests. It is the marginal and degraded lands that we need to farm with regenerative agriculture, in order to most rapidly heal our world.
If, and only if, we very quickly abandon petrochemical industrial agriculture, and make a giant leap into regenerative, holistic, organic agriculture and permaculture, while slashing carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, can we avert catastrophic, runaway global warming. We need to do both, and now, immediately. That requires land reform, if we are at all serious, and a redistribution of land – not from the poorest half of humanity to the richest 1%, as is happening now, but the other way around.
Remember that all great changes have started small. The American Revolution was launched by just a handful of people. At Valley Forge there were just 77 men. And yet, the revolution succeeded. We have many more than a handful who are actively regenerating the soil, right now, and millions more who are dedicated to actively protecting and healing the Earth. Surely we can accomplish this task of reclaiming a fairer share of the land, so that the healing of our world can begin in earnest. We can, and we must, and so we will.
*
Regenerative, holistic, organic agriculture and permaculture, which necessitates putting large numbers of people and animals back on the land to repair and heal the soil, can sequester and remove 100 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Nothing else that we can do can match the ability of healthy, healed soils, to draw down carbon out of the atmosphere. Carbon reductions are not enough. Reducing our carbon footprint is not enough. Carbon sequestration, the removal of carbon from the atmosphere, is now equally critical, if not even more urgent. And only healthy soil can do that.
We are at 420ppm of carbon in the atmosphere now, in June of 2021, and rising. We need to bring that down to 350ppm as rapidly as possible, and within ten years, or else the carbon and methane released from melting permafrost will trigger a positive feedback loop, causing out of control global warming, resulting in global crop failure, and the extinction of humanity and many other species. This is our time to shine, or to wither and die, with a collective whimper. Let us hope that we are not that foolish as to allow the latter option to be our fate.
The race is on. Get gardening.
Stop driving. Go organic. And plant.
Plant like your life depends upon it. It does.
*
“I’ve always been impressed that we’re here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.”
– JRR Tolkien
40% of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by industrial agriculture – and that is without fully considering the degradation and destruction of soils by industrial agriculture, which are turning two thirds of the Earth’s land into desert, and in the process, blocking and precluding our ability to heal the soils, in order to sequester the carbon, which is absolutely essential and urgently needed if we are to halt climate change. In addition to killing the planet’s ecosystems, industrial agriculture is poisoning humanity and wiping out the farmers. Giant corporate industrial farms are taking over. The big four agribusiness giants receive a billion dollars a day in subsidies globally, so that they can accelerate the mass extinction that is underway, accelerate climate change, desertification, species loss, and the global bankruptcy of small scale farmers, and accelerate our race to human extinction. The game is rigged, and the money machine, is a killing machine. We need to understand this, or we are finished as a species. But we also need to realize that the greater power is in the hands of the people.
What we are battling is simply the newest, and if we are wise, the last empire: the empire of corporate billionaire power lust and greed. The people, not technology or the ruling power elite, are the answer.
Small farms, based in biodiversity, have been proven to be ten times more productive than large, monocrop industrial agriculture farms – and small farms are shown by the Food and Agriculture Organization to be currently providing 80% of the world’s food. Why then are we massively subsidizing giant petrochemical industrial agriculture? A single word explains it. Profit. Actually, a better word is control. Power. Food has been weaponized, starting in the Vietnam War. Control the world’s food, and you can rule the world. The industrial agriculture system is designed for corporate elites’ profit, and more importantly, for billionaire elites’ power and control, not to feed humanity. It is the small scale farmers and gardeners who feed humanity, and who will heal the Earth. This is absolutely critical for us to understand now.
250,000 farmers in India recently went on strike, in the biggest strike in human history, to protest the neoliberal deregulation, corporate globalization, and petrochemical industrial agriculture policies that are literally killing the farmers, while poisoning humanity and destroying the planet. This is the power of the people, and we have only seen the beginning.
What ended the Great Depression in the 1930s? It was massive public works projects which gave jobs to millions of people and rebooted the economy. That is, it was millions of hands that saved us from a dire economic situation. What stopped the fascists would were literally trying to take over the world in the 1930s? (And remember, the big chemical and pharmaceutical giants all have their roots in Nazi Germany.) Again, it was millions of hands joined together to defend freedom and democracy, and to defeat the (first wave) of fascists. What ended the Dust Bowl of the 1930s? Once again, it was millions of hands, working with the land, to heal the land, that rescued us from that great calamity. And so too, today, it will not be the billionaires, the giant corporations, the political elite, the bureaucrats or technocrats, nor Big Tech or high technology which will save us from global warming, species loss, poverty, global hunger or mass extinction. It will be the people, once again. Once again, it will be millions of hands that save us. We truly are the answer we have been waiting for.
If, and only if, we abandon the failed experiments in petrochemical industrial agriculture and fossil fuel addiction, and we put enough hands, people, and animals, back on the land, with the right knowledge of regenerative agriculture, which anyone can quickly learn to understand, then we can heal our lands and soils and ecosystems, and halt and reverse climate change, in as little as five years. If we fail to do that, then we are all dead.
We need a Green New Deal alright, as I outlined in my first published book in 2014, Enlightened Democracy, before the term “Green New Deal” was coined. But the Green New Deal must not be based in technocracy and crypto-fascist, neofeudal, global corporate rule, which of course is the agenda of the Davos billionaire elite. It must be based in freedom, democracy, constitutional rule, justice, and, equally critically, in regenerative agriculture, and a fairer redistribution, not just of wealth, but of power, and of land.
The environmental crisis, the global health crisis, and the global food crisis, are all rooted in a viscious class war. Vandana Shiva is right: it is a matter now of Oneness vs The 1%, or as I titled my last book, it is now, above all, The People vs The Elite. And land – its use or misuse, and its distribution – is at the very heart of all of these deeply interconnected crises. We either share the land more equitably, and heal the soil and the planet by that means, and that means only, or we will be driven rapidly into a darkly Orwellian world of neo-feudalism and global corporate rule that results in the death of the human species.
Our choices are clear. It is revolution or death.
Land and freedom now!
J. Todd Ring,
May 28, 2021
Post-Script:
Imagine a world that is clean, green, sustainable, regenerative, resilient, equitable, fair, inclusive, stable and abundant – and that is furthermore fire-resistant, flood-proof and drought-proof, with food security for all. That is now proven to be attainable. Regenerative, holistic, organic agriculture and permaculture is a major part of how we do it. Democracy, freedom, unity in diversity, cooperation, and land reform, are some of the other vital, key components.
Order these three books today from your local independent bookstore, I would urge:
Oneness vs The 1%, by Vandana Shiva
Biodiversity, Agroecology, Regenerative Organic Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions For World Hunger, Poverty and Climate Change, by Vandana Shiva and Andre Leu
And my own recent book,
The People vs The Elite: A Manifesto For Democratic Revolution, Or, Survival In The 21st Century & Beyond
Further resources:
If you watch only one thing this year, or for the rest of your life, make it this. Vandana Shiva perfectly summarizes the big picture in under 30 minutes.
Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction
https://youtu.be/GwxOxQ1AOEg via @YouTube
If you watch two things in the rest of your life, make this the second:
Dr. Vandana Shiva on India’s🇮🇳 Farmers’ Protests: Indian Farmers Are a Victim of Food Imperialism
https://youtu.be/rgaHIoceQ88 via @YouTube
Must-watch:
(3 minute eloquent video summary)
Vandana Shiva: “We are nothing without living soil”
https://youtu.be/3EAVbQNBpq4 via @YouTube
Vandana Shiva On the Real Cause of World Hunger:
https://youtu.be/jEqS6rnoyYc via @YouTube
Also a must-watch:
TEDxMasala – Dr Vandana Shiva – Solutions to the food and ecological crisis
https://youtu.be/ER5ZZk5atlE via @YouTube
And watch this. The shift to organic food and community-managed organic agriculture is accelerating. Our health, our planet’s health and our future depend on us all supporting that shift, and growing and eating organic.
Poison on our Plate | Ramanjaneyulu GV | TEDxHyderabad
https://youtu.be/64RLBgD-Cck via @YouTube
Also:
The most important environmental film yet – and the most empowering and inspiring.
Kiss The Ground https://youtu.be/39akrHEIDBM via @YouTube
Dmitry Orlov on collapse:
And note my comments near the top of this essay: famine is inevitable only if we fail to take the right steps now. Otherwise Orlov is perfectly lucid, and right.
David C. Korten on The Great Turning:
And here is something small and concrete that we can do immediately: plant a garden – either on your own land or back yard, or in a community garden.
Here is leading permaculture teacher and designer Geoff Lawton on how to make an instant garden. Well not quite instant – it will take you 45 minutes. Yes, it matters, and it matters greatly. Every journey begins with a single step. This is one of the most important.
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
Gender, Hierarchy, Civilization & Collapse: A Few Thoughts
Posted in Uncategorized with tags analysis, anthropology, collapse, ecology, empire, gender, hierarchy, history, inequality, philosophy, politics, social commentary, social theory, sociology on May 19, 2020 by jtoddringWhat did Sumeria ever do for us? Invented writing, our concepts of time, irrigation, cities, created the first literature…little stuff like that.
Sumeria predates ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Biblical times, though it was a completely forgotten civilization until very recently. The civilization spanned roughly 3,500 years, between 5,500 BCE & 1,750 BCE.
Remember, modern Western civilization is a mere 400 years old. Just a baby, by comparison.
The Sumerian civilization, mythology and writings inspired the book of Genesis and Homer, for example, and provided one of the primary the seedbeds for Western civilization, such as it is. Unfortunately they also invented or co-invented war, empire, conquest, ecological degradation, class division, hierarchy, plunder and inequality. Crappy stuff we’re still living with today.
They did uphold gender equality, however. Mind you, this seems to indicate Eisler was wrong and Bookchin was right: hierarchy spreads as a corrosive social model that comes to infect everything, but it does not necessarily begin with gender.
“Even so, the culture had been struggling to retain its autonomy ever since the Amorites had gained power in Babylon. A shift in cultural influence, evidenced in many respects but, notably, in the male-female ratio of the Mesopotamian pantheon, came with the rise to power of the Semitic Amorites in Babylon and, especially, during the reign of Hammurabi (r. 1792-1750 BCE) who completely reversed the Sumerian theological model in elevating a supreme male god, Marduk, over all others. Temples dedicated to goddesses were replaced by those for gods and, even though the goddesses’ temples were not destroyed, they were marginalized.
At this same time, women’s rights – which were traditionally on par with men’s – declined as did the great Sumerian cities. Overuse of the land and urban expansion, coupled with ongoing conflicts, are cited as the primary reasons for the fall of the cities. The correlation between the decline in the status of female deities and women’s rights has never been adequately explained – it is unknown which came first – but it is a telling detail in the decline of a culture which had always held women in high regard. By the time the Elamites invaded c. 1750 BCE, the Sumerian culture was already deteriorating and the [invading] Elamites simply finished the process.”
– Joshua J. Mark, Ancient History Encyclopedia
Hierarchy, inequality of class, empire, war, conquest, pillage and plunder, and ecological destruction: all of these things existed in Sumer alongside gender equality, it seems, and gender equality both in terms of cultural values, religion and mythology, and in practice. Therefore, we have to conclude that gender imbalance is a severe social, spiritual, and moral problem, but the evidence seems to indicate that it is not the root of all evils that it is sometimes presented to be.
That being said, when gender imbalance begins, society rapidly spirals into ever deeper problems, because the fundamental balance between agency and communion is destroyed; until the society finally collapses, or rediscovers a balance.
Sumeria was well on the way to collapse, regardless of external threats, exactly as with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Internal imbalance always brings internal decline, and finally, either an eventual renaissance and rebirth, or the collapse of the civilization.
“Sumerian was well established as the written language by the late 4th century BCE and Sumerian culture, religion, architecture, and other significant aspects of civilization were as well. The literature of the Sumerians would influence later writers, notably the scribes who wrote the Bible, as their tales of The Myth of Adapa, The Eridu Genesis, and The Atrahasis would inform the later biblical accounts of the Garden of Eden, Fall of Man, and the Great Flood. Enheduanna’s works would become the models for later liturgy, Mesopotamian animal fables would be popularized by Aesop, and The Epic of Gilgamesh would inspire works such as the Iliad and Odyssey.
The concept of the gods living in the city’s temple, as well as the shape and size of the Sumerian ziggurat, is thought to have influenced the Egyptian development of the pyramid and their beliefs about their own gods. The Sumerian concept of time, as well as their writing system, was also adopted by other civilizations. The Sumerian cylinder seal – an individual’s sign of personal identification – remained in use in Mesopotamia until c. 612 BCE and the fall of the Assyrian Empire. There was literally no area of civilization the Sumerians did not make some contribution to but, for all their strengths, their culture began to decline long before it fell.”
– Joshua J. Mark
Their civilization began to decline long before it fell and actually collapsed. Then as now. History is repeating.
We must regain the balance, in multiple ways, or we too are headed for collapse.
“When I observe the ruts in a road, I am compelled to think, how much deeper the ruts in the mind.”
– Henry David Thoreau
But as Thoreau said, it is never too late to give up our bad habits, or our old ideas. Remember: “There is more day yet to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
JTR,
May 19, 2020
Post-Script:
On a comic note, for comedic relief, note this. Trump must have been advising the Sumerians on wall construction. Something was clearly amiss. The futility is amusing, in any case. Decline and collapse was due to internal factors, not external threats. But it surely is a Homer Simpson moment to build a wall, and not even get the basic concept right!
“The Sumerian civilization collapsed c. 1750 BCE with the invasion of the region by the Elamites. Shulgi of Ur had erected a great wall in 2083 BCE to protect his people from just such an invasion but, as it was not anchored at either end, it could easily be walked around – which is precisely what the invaders did.”
Wow. Is that how historians will look at us in 4,000 years, presuming humans are alive on Earth by then? Ending our civilization with one big, “Doh!”
Oh, Marg….
Critical Reading:
Rianne Eisler, The Chalice and The Blade
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
Ronald Wright, A Short History Of Progress
Wade Davis, The Wayfinders
David Suzuki, Elders’ Wisdom
Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self
Allan Wallace, Choosing Reality
Noam Chomsky, Year 501
Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and On Civil Disobedience
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Share this:
Leave a comment »