DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

If you are looking for a book that unblinkingly, unemotionally, lays out exactly how, and how badly, we are screwing up this planet, you are looking for Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0.

If you are looking for a book that gives some idea of what could be done to at least soften the impact of the crash that is happening, you are looking for Lester Brown’s Plan B 3.0

But if you are looking for a book that talks about why Lester Brown’s proposals aren’t being adopted, you will have to look elsewhere.  You might start with Al Gore’s recent Assault on Reason, but the Inconvenient Truth guy, for all his smarts, is still part of the problem. I mean, really, Al,…”Occidental Petroleum”?…”Green Walmart”?

A lot of recent writers, from Al Franken to Michael Moore to Greg Palast, and the list goes on, seem to grasp pieces of the puzzle.  Some  blame capitalism, but history shows that the Communist Russians and Chinese were voracious destroyers of the environment as well.  For me, the little-known Buddhist writer David Loy has laid it out best in two of his recent books: A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, and Money, Sex, War, and Karma, Loy describes “the religion of the market” and how it has distorted the human psyche and the planetary ecosystem.  But, while I strongly recommend these books to you, they’re not the ones I’m here to talk about.  I want to focus on Lester Brown and Plan B 3.0.

I mean, it shows you how schizophrenic we are as a society when this book has a blurb by Bill Clinton, but Hillary’s platform calls for massive production of biofuels, which Brown excoriates, and targets an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050–which, according to Brown, is about thirty years too late.  Barak Obama, too, thinks we can wait until 2050, and John McCain?  Get serious!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The first half of Plan B lays out the problem, or problems.  Deteriorating oil and food security, rising temperatures and rising seas, emerging water shortages, natural systems under stress–all I’m doing here is reading you the chapter headings.  In a chapter titled “Early Signs of Decline,” he tells us that malnutrition is so pervasive in India that “60 percent of all newborns in India would be in intensive care had they been born in California.” and then goes from nutrition to the iminent exhaustion of the world’s mineral resources, finding that there are only a few decades worth of extractable lead, tin, copper, iron, and bauxite (aluminum) left in the ground, and covering the growing number of failing states–including Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons and is just a natural disaster away from chaos.  As recent events in Burma show us, the world is much more fragile than we would like it to be.

All of this adds up to a convincing argument that the consumer civilization that we try so hard to enjoy was a really bad idea.  So….is it too late to change it, or are we headed for Mad Maxville?

This, unfortunately, is where Brown falls down.  He has a great many good ideas, possibly enough that, if we could try all of them, enough of them would work to pull us back from over the brink, but there are also assertions that even an uneducated layman like me can clearly see amount to grasping at straws, even without the question of their political feasibility.  More on that in a moment.  But first, the straws.

Brown is big on universal primary education.  There are compelling arguments for this, such as that the more education a girl gets, the fewer children she is likely to have, and certainly universal literacy is a kind of evolutionary advance, but universal education is a sword that can cut two ways.

There are traditional ways of life that are ecologically balanced, and depend on children functioning as part of the family team.  Skills such as farming, animal care, construction, and many crafts are best taught to the young.  When children are taken from their parents and forced to sit in a classroom where their heads are filled with abstract facts, the transmission of these traditions is broken.  Families cease to function, and school graduates, given a carefully selected taste of life beyond their villages, leave for the burgeoning cities, where mostly they become part of the problem. If we are going to impart universal literacy, and I agree we should, we need to value traditional village survival skills and allow time for children to learn them.

Brown also banks heavily on “forest farming” and no-till agriculture to stabilize watersheds, recharge aquifers, and sequester carbon.  Again, we need models different from the ones usually practiced for these ideas to work in the real world.  Forest farming all too often results in monoculture one species of tree planted on thousands of acres, with herbicides used to prevent anything else from growing, just as no-till farming is heavily dependent on herbicides and patented seeds.  Herbicides, like all other petrochemical products, are just going to get more expensive and harder to find, while patented seeds are owned by multinational corporations who thus prevent farmers from engaging in the ancient practice of saving their own seeds, turning seed into another major expense for the grower and decreasing food security.

Brown suggests that the US build a vast network of electric-powered public transport, with the electricity generated by solar, wind, and geothermal plants.  The US is the only first-world country that does not have a good public transportation network.  What we have, instead, is a sprawling, automobile-oriented infrastructure that does not lend itself to centralized public transportation, and we have destroyed our country’s financial integrity by spending trillions fighting to control Iraq’s oil and building McMansions, so that the credit we would need for such an infrastructure investment is no longer available to us.  Heckuva job, Georgie.

Brown advocates a “World War II-type mobilization” to retool US industry to create the products needed to transition into a post-oil economy. Unfortunately, the US is not the manufacturing country it was in the 1940s, and a retooling of Chinese industry to create what is need instead of the distractions that now make up so much of the market would only worsen the US’s financial hemorrhage.

But in a way, these are quibbles.  The glaring point at which Brown misses the boat is in the very goal he sets:  stabilizing CO2 emissions below 400ppm, with the thought that that is the “tipping point” beyond which catastrophic, irreversible climate change will set in.  Well, even a book written as recently as last October, like this one, can be dated.  Since Plan B was published, Dr. James Hansen, the US’s premier climate scientist, has announced that, in his estimation, the tipping point was at 350 ppm, and we have already passed it.  Oops.

This does not invalidate Brown’s many excellent suggestions for technical fixes to the environment, but it underlines the failure of conventional politics to take him seriously.

Brown points out that everything that needs to be done could be done for a fraction of the US’s, and the world’s military budget, and would greatly lessen the need for military-style security.  Unfortunately, our country’s Presidential candidates seem to be competing with each other about how much they will increase military spending–which will only make things worse, and cause calls for more military spending, until our overseas bankers cut off our credit.

What Brown does not seem to understand is that the US is run by an elite who see nothing wrong with the fact that they are getting richer while we are getting poorer.  Most members of this elite are concerned about the environment, but they are not concerned enough to do something about the fact that it is they and their pathological acquisitiveness that is a big piece of the problem.  Since that seems to be the case, I must sadly conclude that we are in for a full-tilt crash and Mr. Brown’s caring and thoughtful book will be seen by historians of the future, if there are any, as a brilliant exercise in what might have been.

OK, Lester…what’s “Plan C”?

music: James McMurtry, “Dancing in the Ruins”

As a kid, two of the first adult books I read that made a deep impression on me were Neville Shute’s On the Beach and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, both of which portrayed the lives of everyday people in the aftermath of nuclear war. I found echoes of both in James Howard Kunstler’s new novel, World Made by Hand, which introduces us to the daily reality of life in upstate New York a decade or two after the trucks have stopped running and the electricity has gone off. There is a little post-nuclear flavor in Kunstler’s book, too. Part of his scenario involves terrorist nuclear detonations in Washington and Los Angeles, which delivered the coup de grace to the government and international economy that we take for granted now.

There are no newspapers in Kunstler’s world, no antibiotics, no rubber and not much plastic, but there are plenty of bullets left, and less inhibition about using them. The book starts on an almost idyllic note as it sets up a picture of clear-running, fish-filled streams, old railroad beds overrun with berries and strong, wild marijuana, and a slower-paced life reminiscent of the early 19th century, but we are brought back to earth with an unjust murder and a town left wondering how to deal with the powerful bullies who committed it.

The question is left simmering on a back burner as Kunstler introduces his other players: the dispirited townspeople, a wealthy, far-sighted landowner who has assumed a role not unlike that of a feudal lord, members of a Christian religious community who arrive in the area, fleeing the chaos prevalent in more urbanized areas to the south, and the lonely widow of the young man who was murdered, who seeks refuge in the home of Robert Earle, the story’s main character.

The “Christians” turn out to be more pragmatic and less sectarian than many who call themselves that today. They also have skills and deep pockets, and are willing to put both to use to help improve life in the little town of Union Grove, where most of the story takes place. After helping Stephen Bullock, the lordly landowner, recover a crew of traders who have been kidnapped on a trip down the Hudson, they gain the townspeoples’ trust enough to help them bring justice to the murder that began the book, and that is the point at which Kunstler brings our little tour of the future to a close.

Kunstler is best known for writing nonfiction about the circumstances of this novel. In The Long Emergency and the video The End of Suburbia he has laid out the facts, figures, and trajectories that lead to the world we inhabit when we read World Made By Hand, and it is this fact of fiction, as it were, this investment in believable human beings who inhabit the post-industrial, post-electrical America he posits, that brings the statistics and predictions to life. When we are told a story about what life after industrial collapse could mean for people like us, we have an easier time accepting the likelihood that the collapse of civilization as we know is going to happen to us and our friends, and this is just what Kunstler is trying to get across.

There were a few flags that went up for me in his portrayal. The denoument hangs on an act that seemingly can only be explained by some kind of supernatural occurence, a departure from the otherwise believable picture he paints. And somehow, there is no “alternative energy” technology in the book, either plain or fancy: nobody was smart enough to build a passive solar home, or a solar oven; nobody has any solar panels–but perhaps this is a symptom of Kunstler’s opinion that these artifacts are all too little, too late. And the occasional glimpses of what seem like magical powers by the Christian cultists? Perhaps Mr. Kunstler is going to tell us in a sequel. I would certainly read it, if civilization lasts long enough to get it in print.

music:  Terry Allen, “After the Fall“

While we’ve now become accustomed to the barrage of prescription drug commercials on prime-time TV, it’s jarring to learn that this advertising is legal only in the United States and New Zealand. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t just target Americans directly, but also spends roughly $25,000 per physician per year. With the aid of information from data mining companies, a pharmaceutical representative knows exactly how many prescriptions for what medication a doctor has written, allowing the industry to individually target them.

How Americans came to this fraught relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and its drugs — particularly antidepressants — is the subject of Charles Barber’s new book, Comfortably Numb. A veteran of mental health programs in homeless shelters and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Barber trains his eye to the confluence of science and culture that have led to the widespread prescribing of medications once reserved for the most serious cases.

While the field of neuroscience continues to churn out new data about the way our brains work, Barber is quick to remind us how much more is yet to be understood. Barber recently spoke with AlterNet about how less sexy treatments like social interventions and therapies can be just as effective in changing the brain.

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