The Hames Report

Middle East Protests & Oil Addiction

Gasoline prices have been rising this winter in the US even though we are well outside the summer driving season with its traditionally highest price level. Among the reasons for today's higher gasoline and crude oil prices is the high demand for heating oil during this extra cold winter, as heating oil in some northern parts of the world is a life-and-death commodity. This can put some pressure on gasoline supplies as refineries might attempt to maximize heating oil output, although refining requires producing a constant balance of light, medium and heavy products, at fairly high utilization of capacity.

Crude oil prices have been moving toward the $100 per barrel mark. The actual price for crude and petroleum products is much higher in some nations due to subsidies (direct and hidden), keeping prices artificially low. But the official price of oil seems on the way to break the $147 / bbl record from July 2008.

Whether the emerging economic powerhouses China and India are the main reason for higher oil prices is academic, when the whole world is affected by developments in price and supply anywhere. The stability of countries such as Egypt and other Arab states has been proven illusory. When the right geopolitical event in the Persian Gulf (perhaps connected to the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni trends now in play) interrupts oil supplies by as much as 10% or more of global demand, the effect on the oil market may well be as if Hubbert's peak oil bell curve became a cliff that we have already jumped off.

A revolution in Saudi Arabia has been my favorite example for years, in terms of illustrating what can spark a return to the 1970s' skyrocketing oil prices, panic buying and hoarding. As grocery shelves will be emptied in a few days when a major oil supply crunch hits, as the late Matt Simmons reminded us, what difference does it make how many billions of barrels of crude are really off Brazil's coast?

Now, when people didn't expect it but should have, we see that Arab peoples have indeed been chafing under dictatorship for decades. Arabs, as in most places, have been biding their time for liberation. Whether certain regions can soon attain it is another matter, when many have far outstripped their besieged ecosystems' carrying capacities. In Middle Eastern countries the water and soil situations are generally poor and getting worse. Food shortage and food riots can flow from ecological deterioration, especially as new weather patterns (or non-patterns) have been increasingly disruptive for agriculture.

This is one argument for activists in Arab lands to remember there is no liberation or equality on a dead planet. Although the Egyptian uprising or revolution is hundreds of miles removed from the Persian Gulf, where 18% of the world's total trade in crude its shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, a common spirit of rebellion has spread in the region. It can take a sharp anti-American or anti-corporate turn and thus affect oil exports to the U.S.

In Saudi Arabia where the monarchy is extremely repressive, demonstrators have dared come out of the woodwork after Tunisians sent their dictator packing. International emphasis on military security in the region has been on huge ships and the Persian Gulf itself, but numerous facilities on land in Arab countries and nearby nations are vulnerable to attack and closure. Also, the Suez Canal sees one million barrels of oil pass through each day from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

The number of separate but linked oil facilities, extent of damage, or days of closure do not have to conform to some arithmetic model for there to be a massive reaction in the world oil market. The perception of supply shortage, with real instances affecting deliveries, is what drives oil prices on the world market, much as the stock market sometimes has a herd mentality. So far we are talking about what most observers would consider a temporary oil supply disruption resulting in a price spike. However, if the disruption and spike are strong enough, severe effects can shut down much of the global economy and simultaneously stop much local activity.

Petrocollapse - the exacerbated and lasting failure of the world oil market to meet demand, and the paralysis and collapse of most of the economy's infrastructure relying on petroleum - does not need to follow a formula or specific pattern of oil industry breakdown or a certain depletion schedule of oil reserves. We will only be sure when petrocollapse hits. Because peak oil has been attained, we can say that the petrocollapse process has begun and just needs a catalyst to tip the whole economy and trigger famine on a scale as large as some future climate disaster.

I don't believe the "Transition Town" or less-known "Stair-case slow collapse/catabolic" viewpoints take into account adequately the extreme vulnerability of and to the oil market. The Transition Town and Stair-case adherents' views, hopes, dreams and assumptions may actually refer to social change from civilization collapse, when they may think they are referring to the post-peak oil downslope, or vice versa. But this may make no difference as events may accelerate, and collapse and die-off throw theory and wishes out the window.

In my oil analysis career at Lundberg Survey, we accurately predicted the Second Oil Shock based on our finding that in March 1979 there would be a 9% shortfall of gasoline for U.S. demand. It was a time of billions fewer humans and rising oil production (extraction). The world also seemed poised to follow through with stringent conservation and development of alternative fuels. After Jimmy Carter's failure to catch fire with those strategies, energy efficiency actually reversed direction with the SUV phenomenon. But any slight per capita gains, had they been consistently in the right direction for conservation, are offset anyway by growth, while efficiencies paradoxically end up adding to more consumption.

Since 1979, aggregate energy demand has not been tamed in the least, and growth of the global oil infrastructure has dangerously proliferated. Peak oil extraction happened worldwide around 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, although "peak" is not a single year due to the advent of nonconventional crudes and biofuels over time. Peak oil is the main reason we are living in very different "oil times" since 1979: growth of crude supply has turned a corner, starting downward. Compared to past years, even conventional crude (light, sweet, easily extracted) - besides unconventional and expensive, extra-polluting oil replacements - is far more expensive to exploit, with lower net energy obtained for newer fields.

Petrocollapse will not be limited to the U.S., as we shall see when dominoes fall. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The popular faith in renewable and other alternative fuels to "save us" from dwindling oil reserves or from a loss of Middle Eastern or OPEC oil ought to be shattered prior to the rude and crude awakening from a significant supply crunch. The alternatives are not ready on a large scale, and generally only provide electricity rather than liquid fuels or petrochemicals or other materials. We will only wake up en masse when chaos starts to rapidly unfold - as if it hasn't already.

One is constantly cautioned to never conclude on a sour note. So I will point to the silver lining of collapse as a liberator far more fundamental than regime change. This is because basic relationships in society will be radically altered by extreme lifestyle change brought about by the loss of petroleum and by having to painfully face the recent separation from natural cycles that modern technological societies have achieved.

The U.S. is still thought to be the richest country in the world, but increasingly this fact requires the caveat of a greater and greater gap between the rich and poor. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world. In contrast, Tunisia is far better off, ranked the 62nd most unequal country. Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal. And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country! And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years.

The New York Times published on 31 January that in Egypt "long-simmering resentments have burst into open class warfare." As poor as the Arab peoples are who are rioting and replacing regimes, and as important as this is for Arabs and all people under oppression, it is even more urgent for US citizens to focus on questioning their own circumstances vis-a-vis petroleum dependence.

Fossil fuels do not make us safer or healthier. Besides getting soft from sitting in our cars, before the TV and under the influence of many pharmaceutical drugs made from fossil fuels, US citizens seem to still want to believe all is more or less well. As to energy, many still believe "they will think of something." But some of us would rather "Imagine" and create now a radically more liberating and equitable world and way of living, as John Lennon did with his song of that name.

This article was written by Jan Lundberg and was first published in Alternet on 1st January 2011. It is reprinted here with Jan's permission. Jan is founder of Culture Change and was an oil industry analyst at Lundberg Survey before joining the grassroots environmental movement in 1988.

Climate Cranks: Time to Fight Back

I didn't realize it at the time, but my daughter was born at a momentous turning point in history. She arrived on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in April 2005. All the nurses kept remarking on how alert this baby was, so her mother and I decided to name her Chiara, which means "clear and bright" in Italian.

I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government's chief science adviser. The interview changed my life. King, who had done as much as anyone except Al Gore to awaken the world to the dangers of climate change, helped me understand that the climate problem had undergone a profound, largely unexpected paradigm shift that carried the gravest of implications for little Chiara and all the world's children. No longer was climate change a preventable future threat; it was now a punishing current reality, one that was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better.

My interview with King led me to write HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth  which has just been published. My hope was to find a way for my daughter and her peers around the world to cope with all that lies in store for them. After four years of investigation that took me across the United States and around the world, I'm heartened to report that there are many practical steps we all can take—as individuals, as communities, as countries—to protect our societies and our young people from the changes in our climate that are unavoidable over the coming decades.

Still, I am saddened and angry that we find ourselves in this position in the first place. After all, humanity's failure to take action in time against global warming was a conscious decision, a result of countless official debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Much of the blame for this unfortunate outcome belongs to people I have come to refer to as climate cranks—the corporate lobbyists and right-wing ideologues who for twenty years have done all in their power to keep this country, especially the government, from seriously addressing the problem.

In my journalism I have frequently pointed out the nefarious role the climate cranks have played in our national politics, but I confess I have often wondered how much good this did. I revere the profession of journalism and have long believed that it is best kept separate from activism; each of these callings has its own role to play in the endless struggle to make a better world. But I am not only a journalist. I am also a father. And as a father who during all of my now 5-year-old daughter's life has been watching governments, especially my own, do next to nothing about the climate catastrophe hurtling toward us, I have come to feel obligated to reach beyond the tools of journalism, vital as they are. Like my colleagues Bill McKibben and Mike Tidwell, two journalists and fathers who have also come to embrace climate activism, I now feel compelled to take more direct action. If Chiara and her peers around the world are to have a decent chance of inheriting a livable planet, the status quo cannot stand. We need transformative change, above all in Washington, and we need it quickly.

Which is why I will go to Washington the week of February 15 to confront the climate cranks—in Congress, in the media and in the corporate sector—and try to stop them from further sabotaging our response to the climate crisis. My partners in this effort will include the group Kids vs Global Warming, whose iMatter march aims to put a million kids in the streets on Mother's Day to demand that our leaders address climate change as if our children's future matters; Grist, America's leading environmental news website; The Nation; and other organizations still to be determined.

On the ground in Washington I will be joined by local young people—activist members of Generation Hot. Our plan is to confront the climate cranks face to face, on camera, and call them to account for the dangers they have set in motion. We will highlight the ludicrousness of their antiscientific views, which alone should discredit them from further influence over US climate policies. And we will show how our nation could still change course—for example, if the federal government were to use its vast purchasing power to kick-start a green energy revolution that would create jobs and prosperity across the land. We welcome your help and constructive suggestions for how to achieve these goals and invite you to join us.

But now let me turn to the question of why such direct action has become necessary. From the time global warming emerged on the public agenda in the late 1980s, it was regarded as a grave but distant future threat and, crucially, one that could be neutralized if humanity acted quickly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I shared these assumptions until my October 2005 interview with David King shattered them. The science adviser told me that in fact global warming had already triggered outright climate change, and had done so a hundred years sooner than even the most concerned scientists had expected. One early manifestation, according to three British scientists writing in Nature, was the record heat wave that brutalized Europe in the summer of 2003. King cited government statistics indicating that the heat had killed 31,000 people, making it "the deadliest disaster in modern European history." Yet this turned out to be an underestimate. An epidemiological study conducted in 2008 for the European Union—reported here for the first time—concluded that the 2003 heat wave had caused at least 71,449 excess deaths, a toll considerably higher than the United States suffered during the Vietnam War.

As a new father, most alarming to me was King's next point: this newly triggered climate change is bound to intensify for the rest of my daughter's life. The inertia of the climate system—that is, the laws of physics and chemistry—guarantee that average global temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how fervently humanity might embrace solar energy, electric vehicles and other options for reducing emissions. And as temperatures rise, this global warming will unleash still more climate change: deeper droughts, stronger storms, wilder wildfires and so on, as well as faster sea level rise.

"No, no, it's not too late," King hurried to reply when I asked if this paradigm shift means all is lost. But the early arrival of climate change does transform the nature of the problem, as paradigm shifts tend to do. To wit, humanity now faces a double imperative. The traditional goal of climate policy—to reduce global warming—has now become more urgent than ever, for if global temperature rise isn't halted soon, it could gain too much momentum ever to reverse. Yet at the same time, humanity has no choice but "to adapt to the impacts that are in the pipeline" over the coming decades, said King. In short, we have to live through global warming even as we try to reverse it.

All of this makes my daughter an involuntary member of what I call Generation Hot. In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot, roughly 2 billion young people in total. I choose that date because it was the day humanity was put on notice that human activities were unwittingly raising temperatures on this planet. The warning was in NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony to the Senate, boosted by the decision of the New York Times to publish the story on the front page, thus making "global warming" a common phrase in newsrooms, government offices and households the world over. But Hansen's and countless subsequent warnings have gone unheeded, largely because of stiff resistance from the carbon lobby, to borrow author Jeremy Leggett's term—the energy and auto companies that profit from carbon dioxide emissions, the politicians and propagandists these companies sponsor and the right-wing ideologues who share their antigovernment sympathies.

My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot are fated to pay the price for this foot-dragging. One of the most unpleasant facts about climate change is that, once triggered, it cannot be turned off anytime soon. Even if humanity somehow stopped emitting carbon dioxide overnight, King told me, "temperatures will keep rising and all the impacts will keep changing for about twenty-five years." Since it is likely to take us at least a quarter-century to leave fossil fuels behind, the reality is that we're locked in to at least fifty more years of rising temperatures and the harsher climate impacts they bring. Thus the young people of Generation Hot are condemned to spend the rest of their lives coping with a climate that will be hotter and more volatile than ever before in our civilization's history.

You want specifics? By the time she is my age, Chiara may well not have enough water to drink here in California, because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack will have melted. Children in today's Washington, DC, are likely to witness in the course of their lifetimes sea level rise combine with stronger storm surges to regularly ring the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials with moats and submerge half of the National Mall. By 2050 the record heat that made the summer of 2010 so wicked will become the new normal in New York City and much of the East Coast. Overseas, the impacts will be punishing as well, especially for the poor. In Bangladesh, sea level rise is already making the soil and water in southern coastal regions too salty to produce decent yields of rice, the staple crop for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, the inexorability of sea level rise ensures that many such low-lying areas worldwide will have to be evacuated, unleashing vast streams of climate change refugees. Military experts warn that this will pose not only humanitarian challenges but recurring threats to peace if the refugees attempt to cross national borders.

Precisely how much blame the carbon lobby and climate cranks deserve for the fate of Generation Hot cannot yet be scientifically determined. In theory, it's possible that global warming would have prematurely given rise to outright climate change even if the United States and other countries had scaled back their emissions beginning in the late 1980s. After all, it is the historic accumulation of greenhouse gases, not the annual emissions, that drives global warming. Scientists are still debating exactly when global warming sparked climate change, as well as the related question of how much responsibility global warming bears for any particular climate impact. (In their Nature study of the 2003 heat wave, for example, the three British scientists estimated that global warming was responsible for about 75 percent of the excessive heat Europe experienced that summer.)

But these are scientific nuances. As a practical matter, there is no denying that the large amount of greenhouse gases emitted since June 23, 1988—about 40 percent of humanity's total emissions since the Industrial Revolution—made global warming worse. That, in turn, increased the likelihood of unleashing climate change. Viewed in this context, the obstructionism of the carbon lobby and climate cranks played a decisive role.

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the climate cranks blocked our government from taking serious action against emissions. By doing so, they also stalled international action (since other countries were understandably reluctant to reduce their emissions when the world's biggest polluter was unwilling to do so). Thus limits on global warming were avoided at the very time they would have mattered most. "Had some individual countries, especially the US, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have [avoided dangerous climate change]," Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton who ranks among the world's most eminent climate scientists, told me. "But we didn't, and now the impacts are here."

"This was a crime," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Germany's former chief government adviser on climate told me. But the wrong people are being punished. My daughter and the rest of Generation Hot have been given a life sentence for a crime they didn't commit. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are reaping record profits, enjoying prominent media coverage (and not only on Fox) and even gaining control of the House of Representatives, where they plan to launch an inquisition against climate scientists who don't share their loony ideas.

It is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Don't rely on our media to rise to the occasion. The protocol of mainstream news coverage leads Washington journalists to refer to these people as climate skeptics. They're not skeptics. They're cranks. True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.

One crank recently took me to task for supposedly having no respect for science. In my reply, I assured him I respected science as much as anyone who lives in the modern world, where we take for granted air travel, Wi-Fi Internet, modern medicine and a host of other blessings. Then I asked, "If you respect science so much, how do you explain the fact that virtually every major scientific body on earth disagrees with you about climate science? Are they all in on the conspiracy?" He never replied, but of course that is the logical implication of his camp's insistence that they do too have science on their side. The scientists who say otherwise are all part of a conspiracy to—well, take your pick: to keep the research dollars flowing, to expand government control of the economy, to dismantle modern society and return us to hunter-gatherer primitivism. As I said, these are the ravings of cranks.

You can hear much the same from Congressional Republicans, starting with Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the vice chair of the House Science Committee, who will be leading the charge to debunk mainstream climate science. "I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything human beings do," Sensenbrenner has opined, repeating a talking point favored by many climate cranks but definitively refuted by many peer-reviewed scientific studies. For his part, the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is so scientifically illiterate that he apparently thinks the environmental complaint about carbon dioxide is that it's a carcinogen. Uh, no, Mr. Speaker, that's actually the rap against those cigarettes you like smoking (and whose manufacturers you've defended all these years).

Newly emboldened by the midterm elections, the Republicans are gearing up to put environmentalists and climate scientists on the defensive and block progress against global warming for the rest of Obama's presidency. It's time to turn the tables on them. The first step is to connect the cranks to the terrible consequences they have set in motion, and thereby discredit them from further influence over the nation's climate policies.

How? Our initiative, Confront the Climate Cranks, will do just that: confront the cranks on camera and accompanied by some of the children they have put in danger. We will video all of our confrontations and then quickly make them available to the public—by posting them on YouTube and sharing them with mainstream and alternative media and the social networks of our partner organizations. (In the run-up to these confrontations, we will invite the participation of the members or readers of The Nation, Grist, Kids vs Global Warming and the other partnering organizations, polling them on which cranks to target, what questions to ask and so on. Thus we hope to build momentum before arriving in Washington, as well as generate continuing attention and activism after the confrontations.)

By no means is our initiative alone sufficient to turn the tide in the climate fight, but we believe it can make a valuable contribution, especially if others lend a hand. By naming and shaming the climate cranks, we hope to shift the political terrain of the climate fight. By highlighting the specific climate impacts that have already begun and will intensify in the coming years, we aim to shift the debate away from abstract ideology toward the actual consequences the cranks have wrought for Generation Hot. And by conveying our message through children and parents, we can reach the ordinary Americans whose support is essential to overcoming the power of money and insider status in Washington. We hope you'll join us.

This blog was written by Mark Hertsgaard, the environment correspondent for The Nation. Mark is the author of six books, including "Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future." This article is adapted from Mark's latest book HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, published in January by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You can get involved in Mark's work by visiting the Generation Hot Facebook page)

 

Congress of the New Middle Ages

The last year or two have witnessed no shortage of silver-bullet rhetoric to deal with the world’s most pressing challenges. A global economic “G-2” of the U.S. and China was proposed to sort out the imbalances between savings and deficit countries; the United Nations General Assembly devoted several days in September to the “Millennium Development Goals” that address hunger, poverty, and other socio-economic ills; grand summits were held in Copenhagen and Cancun to craft a global climate treaty; and experts spoke of a “Grand Bargain” to freeze Iran’s nuclear program.

It should come as no surprise that all of these attempts to solve global problems with the stroke of a pen have proven stillborn. A new “Concert of Powers” à la 19^th-century Europe, another “San Francisco moment” recreating the 1945 founding of the United Nations, or even a “new Bretton Woods” financial summit is not going to deliver geopolitical stability and worldwide prosperity.

Such antiquated thinking is a complacent vestige of a Western-led world. Even more fundamentally, it is a legacy of a Westphalian, state-centric world. That too has ended. We have entered a new Middle Ages: an era that most resembles the pre-Westphalian era of nearly 1,000 years ago. That was the period of history when the East was as powerful (if not more so) than the West, cities mattered more than nations, powerful dynasties and trading companies were engines of growth and innovation, private mercenaries fought in all wars, religious crusades shaped inter-cultural relations, and new trade routes over land and sea forged the world’s first (nearly) global economy.

What did diplomacy look like in the Middle Ages? First, it was characterized by complex multi-level relations: the Pope and his emissaries, Germanic duchies and vassal territories, Italian city-states like Milan and Venice, and great universities from Oxford to Bologna. Second, it was informal. For most of history, the chief criteria for diplomatic inclusion have been status and prestige, not legal sovereignty- which only came into being in the 17^th century. The formalized, bureaucratized foreign ministry as we know it today is a legacy of French nobleman Cardinal de Richelieu, who as an adviser in the court of King Louis XIII established a Ministry of External Affairs in 1626 and dispatched the most extensive professional diplomatic corps in Europe. As patriotism ascended, freelance diplomacy was curtailed.

But diplomacy, as the professional joke goes, is the second oldest profession. It long pre-dates the state, and will continue to thrive even as new ways of organizing people, territory, resources and ideologies emerge. Because diplomacy takes place amongst anyone who is someone, it is our best window into the changing structure and patterns of relations among the world’s leading authorities.

The best place to view what model of diplomacy lies before us in the New Middle Ages is the Swiss enclave of Davos, where each January the planet’s most influential heads of state, CEOs, mayors, religious leaders, NGO heads, university presidents, celebrities and artists flock for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), an event that over the past four decades has established itself as what “60 Minutes” last year dubbed “the most important meeting on Earth.” What CBS’s flagship program discovered was that this gathering of “capitalists, globalists, and futurists” seems to work precisely because it is neither formal nor official.

Davos has nothing to do with sovereignty and everything to do with authority: it’s peer-to-peer among anybody who’s somebody. Where else do hundreds of Fortune 500 CEOs, American cabinet secretaries, the mayor of London, prime minister of Catalonia, chairman of China’s Export-Import Bank, investor-statesmen like George Soros, rock-star activists like Bono, and billionaire hybrid executive philanthropists like Bill Gates speak directly and honestly, and form new ventures on the spot?

Compared to the modern inter-state diplomatic system, Davos represents anti-diplomacy—and yet it actually reflects the true parameters of global diplomacy today better than the United Nations. The reason is that in our ever more complex diplomatic eco-system, relations among governments represent only one slice of the total picture. Beyond the traditional “public-public” relations of embassies and multilateraism, there are also the “public-private” partnerships sprouting across sectors and issues. Qatar’s natural gas fortunes hinge on its arrangement with Exxon, India’s ability to attract foreign investment is contingent on support from the business magnates who make up the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and the alliance of the Gates Foundation, pharmaceutical company Merck, and the government of Botswana saved the country’s population from being wiped out by AIDS, to name just a few of the now literally countless such arrangements flourishing today. The third and often neglected dimension of the new diplomacy is “private-private” interactions which circumvent the state altogether. Think of the Environmental Defense Fund dealing directly with Wal-Mart to cut the company’s overall emissions by 20 million metric tons and install solar panels at 30 new locations. The diplomats at Cancun could only dream of such concrete measures.

All three of these combinations of negotiating partners thrive at Davos and in all WEF activities, which range from mini-Davos-style regional conferences to year-round multi-stakeholder initiatives in public health, climate change, anti-corruption and other areas. The WEF does what no U.N. agency would ever do: allow “coalitions of the willing” to organically “grow and go” - incubating them but also quickly spinning them off into self-sustaining entities; but importantly also letting projects die that fail to attain sufficient support from participants. In this sense the WEF is both a space for convening but also a driver of new agendas.

The WEF has long been a practitioner of today’s newest behavioral economic fad: “nudging”. The WEF’s founder, Swiss-German academic turned businessman Klaus Schwab, first declared a “Spirit of Davos” in 1983, claiming that the WEF annual meeting had become “one of those increasingly rare international events where formality can be dispensed with, where personal contacts can be made, where new ideas can be tried out in complete freedom, where people are aware of the responsibilities involved in belonging to an international community, where we have time to look at really important issues rather than everyday pressures.” It is, of course, an explicit homage to the mid-1920s “spirit of Locarno,” which urged the normalization of relations with Germany and its admission to the League of Nations. Like Locarno, Davos is not an institution but a place where agreements can be made in the hope of influencing subsequent decisions and events. The WEF has been ahead of the curve in promoting some of the signature issues of our time—from broadening the understanding of the ingredients of economic competitiveness through its signature reports than began in the 1970s to promoting good corporate citizenship years before anti-globalization protesters stormed Montreal and Seattle - yet rarely does it get any credit.

The credit always goes to the growing ranks of “Davos Man,” and often-misquoted term coined by Samuel Huntington in 1996 to denote an increasingly rootless global elite caste. But not everyone viewed the emergence of “Davos Man” as a bad thing. Contrary to the WEF’s reputation as a host for secret, if glamorous, deal-making, the Economist praised “Davos Man” as the necessary antidote to traditional diplomats who seal themselves behind veils of protocol, instead immersing themselves in the latest innovations, technologies and trends, speaking English as their lingua franca, and reinforcing thinking and debate through engaging with the media. Today the WEF has more followers on Twitter than any international organization, and uses Davos to convene “Global Town Halls” with live online participation to debate global priorities.

Surely Davos does not correct the “democracy deficit” afflicting the world’s power structures, but what it does better than any other is correct the “diplomacy deficit,” giving anyone it invites the right to represent themselves without interference or manipulation. NGOs speaking for the world’s oppressed, social entrepreneurs, and all manner of others seeking attention and funding get unobstructed access to the world’s richest companies, governments and philanthropists. Davos is where money and megaphones come together.

The WEF is an interesting proxy for America’s standing in the world as well. At Davos, American leadership isn’t embodied in feeble cabinet members mouthing pre-fab remarks, but through its modern-day Medicis. The Medici family of medieval Florence led the West into the Renaissance by commissioning artists like Michaelangelo, inventors like Leonardo da Vinci, and backing secular rationalists like Machiavelli. Far from being ignorant, aloof, and depraved, America is home to most of the postmodern Medicis, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett to George Soros. Mr. Gates tackles global scourges through science, Mr. Buffett backs public works through investment, and Mr. Soros attacks autocrats with technology. What the old and new Medicis have in common is a disregard for antiquated notions of public versus private power and a focus on a new hybrid model that unites the best of both spheres. America’s global footprint is far greater than its declining share of global GDP and its increasingly unpopular president. Davos is where it needs to go in greater numbers to regain global respectability.

Davos is reflexively dismissed as “waste of time” by those either not invited or not interested in making contributions to the world beyond their own bottom line. But with the G-20 far less than the sum of its parts and the U.S.-China “G-2” more a nightmare scenario than solution, Davos represents a fluid yet far more resilient division of labor for the world. Nobody can stop the entropy that is diffusing power in the world. Instead, we need more Davos-like congresses to harness all the new power centers, from presidents to entrepreneurs to activists. Indeed, what matters most of all is not what happens at Davos but who copies it. Its demonstration effect is visible already in events ranging from the Clinton Global Initiative to the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority “Davos in the Desert” conveniently set for the week prior to Davos.

Global governance is not a thing, not a collection of formal institutions, not even a set of treaties. It is a process involving a far wider range of actors than have ever been party to global negotiations before. The sooner we look for new meta-scripts for regulating transnational activities and harnessing global resources to tackle local problems the better. Davos continues to be a good place to start.

This article was written by Parag Khanna. Parag is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance" published this month by Random House.

 

 

Clueless: The Future of Stupidity

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe

                                                Albert Einstein

We humans, by our very nature, are easily misinformed, misled by gossip, taken in by grand lies, seduced by rumours and conspiracy theories, and often downright stupid.

A cursory glance at the average story headlining the daily newspapers reveals the degree to which stupidity and gullibility are routine. Indeed I suspect we constantly underestimate the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Its very difficult to avoid them. They are to be found everywhere – in academia, industry, government, politics and big business. 

Lets be clear. I am not talking about ignorance or a lack of education. On the contrary, many uneducated people are incredibly intelligent while countless stupid people have had a particularly decent education. I am using the term stupid quite explicitly to identify those among us who consistently display their capacity to ignore reason, who habitually disregard the obvious, who doggedly believe they are right and who remain convinced of their own infallibility, come what may.

Most of us believe we are smart. The problem is stupid people think they are smart but are not. They are deluded. In other words they are unaware they are stupid. However this is potentially hazardous for the rest of us, especially given the strong likelihood of stupid people being in positions of influence or power. Complicating the matter is the fact that even intelligent individuals can be stupid on occasions.

To deride stupid people, to single them out in order to laugh at their naivety would, in itself, be foolish. For stupidity seems to be a conditional norm. As a species we are clueless a lot of the time. If that were not so serious it would be amusing. But stupidity is a reality we need to face up to, particularly in an age characterised by the collapse of certainty and by the failure of systems we rarely challenge yet whose genesis arose from flawed assumptions and questionable intentions. Many of these are grand lies; misfortunate social memes that have ingrained themselves across generations and cultures to shape a shared civilizational weltenschaung.

In purely technological terms we are a remarkable species – or so we constantly flatter ourselves. In a more general cognitive context our capacity to solve complicated issues probably justifies the conclusion that we are a highly developed sentient intelligence but that is only a half-truth.

Over the past few centuries fundamental design issues and associated down-stream problems have recurred generation after generation and in every culture. Wisdom has been in short supply. Our undoubted technical and engineering capabilities have leapt ahead of any comparable expertise in social design. Furthermore our much-vaunted technological brilliance is set on destructive purposes rather than being used as a tool for good. All things considered we look pretty stupid.

I doubt very much that we can continue for too long in our conventional clumsy ways. But what should we do in a political and cultural landscape in which alarmist rumours, lies and superstitions are peddled as sacrosanct beliefs and where such fictions have more currency than fact-based truths?

Blaming individuals is not the point. Nor will condemning certain groups or communities for being ignorant, greedy or malevolent get us very far. Criticising an education system that still focuses on subject disciplines while failing to teach social interaction, altruism, learnable intelligence, critical thinking, eco-literacy and systems dynamics, is simply too easy. On the other hand we do need to tackle our collective stupidity. And if messaging has such a significant impact on how we interpret facts then there are few alternatives other than countering the more preposterous lies with a narrative that simply tells the truth.

Lets start with the biggest lie of all. The truth is there is no God. At least not in the sense of an omnipotent, omniscient man in the sky – compassionate or unforgiving depending upon one’s source of indoctrination. During the Enlightenment it became obvious that the God-myth was an elaborate hoax. It has endured, and flourished for a while, nurtured by those whose best interests were served by defending such infantile propaganda.

But it is now time to grow up and to acknowledge the myth for what it is. Like Zeus or Thor or Quetzalcoatl the God of monotheistic traditions is pure fiction; fabricated at a time of relative scientific ignorance to account for phenomena that could not be explained any other way.

On one level the God-myth reflects imagination, inventiveness and beauty. Reactions to the myth from the faithful can be pure and sincere. Nevertheless, pause for a moment to reflect on how bizarre our situation has become at the behest of this myth. As the potency of the lie became clear to rulers and those in authority it was used calculatingly and comprehensively to wield social control over the rest of us until, today, its impact has become insidious and irrational. For example, nobody in the US can seek public office unless they are prepared to pretend such a God exists. Much of what passes for good public policy in any number of cultures is forced to conform to religious taboos more suited to a medieval theocracy. Meanwhile crimes against humanity, whether it be the stoning to death of Iranian women or the atrocities committed by US-led forces in Iraq, are condoned on the basis of some kind of religious-inspired logic within a forlorn illusion that “God is on our side”.

In this day and age, when scientific and spiritual knowledge combined has reached a stage of sophistication that enables us to design, create and sustain life, but where much of the suffering we inflict upon each other can still be attributed to religious hatred, war and delusion, the God-myth has become indefensible. It is stupidity and self-deceit at its most scary. To refute this lie is a moral necessity.

Other lies, almost as grand, flow from this. Serfdom is a case in point. The ancient claim of monarchs and popes to be God’s representatives on Earth intrinsically entrenched their power in an era where the God-myth was intense and could not be defied without the risk of eternal damnation.

Yet it amazes me that millions of people around the world are still in thrall to rulers and autocrats who blatantly and in full view of the media accrue wealth at the expense of those who pay allegiance to them. The mystery, pomp and ceremony surrounding “majesty” is simply incomprehensible when set against the fact that each day over 4 billion people have insufficient access to clean drinking water. Inequities and injustices would diminish considerably if we were able to institute more egalitarian, less corrupt, regimes.

Another grand lie that distracts us from the invention of better futures is the assumed role of business in today’s society. It is often asserted that the role of business is simply to make profits for shareholders and that no other role should be countenanced. That is the kernel of stupidity. For profits depend upon continuous economic growth which, we have now discovered, is impossible. It flies in the face of physics. We have reached the limits imposed by nature – and nature is reacting in ways that are alarming.

In pre-industrial cultures production and consumption were mostly localised. Value was self-evident in that the quality of life was to be maintained. Meanwhile mastery of one’s craft was nurtured by a system of guilds. This system, based on trust and equity, was to generate value of one kind or another for the entire community.

The advent of the modern, limited liability company, changed these dynamics, creating a legal behemoth that enjoys freedoms and benefits denied us mere mortals. Initially the invention of the corporation spawned a level of growth and development previously considered impossible. It opened up new markets and expanded the range of goods and services that could be purchased. But over time the corporation’s obsession with money and profits eroded trust, amplified greed, and set humanity on a course from which we are now finding it is almost impossible to recover.

This lie needs to be overturned. Contemporary business can no longer merely serve the financial interests of a minority especially if, in order to do that, it has to ride roughshod over the environment or the rights or ordinary citizens. Business has to become an amplifier of value, but in ways that are more equitable than in the past, that recognise the inherent value of non-commoditised resources, and that accept responsibility for future generations.

I should point out that this is not some kind of utopian dream but a practical solution to some of the problems facing us today; problems that will not fade into memory without a conscious effort to destroy the lies underpinning them.

There are myriad interrelated myths to which we adhere in spite of all evidence pointing to their fantastical and deceitful nature. Contemporary stupidity covers the full range of policy issues - from the absurd to the irrational. Whether it is the bullying use of warfare that changes nothing in the long run, the denial from large corporations that small-scale local farming is the key to solving world hunger, the proliferation of guns in a country where deaths from the use of legal arms is on the increase, farcical arguments around whether or not global warming is caused by humans, or the unsustainable nature of a global monetary system based upon debt, it is the tissue of underlying lies and erroneous assumptions that are of most concern and that play into the hands of stupid people.

While dogma and inconsistencies abound, stupidity will flourish. But we can rise above it by accepting culpability for our stupidity, letting go of our ego-driven need to be right all the time, and coming to terms with the underlying flaws in our life-critical systems.

Human intentions, together with our knowledge base for leading, governing, making, contributing, managing, consuming, exchanging and relating (to each other and to the environment) all need a drastic overhaul and brought into a situation where the truth, rather than fiction, is the primary design tool for societal evolution.

Whether we opt to approach that from a scientific viewpoint or a spiritual ethos the issue is the same. We must find ways to transcend our collective stupidity, especially by rejecting obsolete fears and superstitions that may otherwise continue to trap us in a quicksand of escalating crises from which we will find no way out.

The alternative is to remain clueless – and perish.

 

Eradicating Ecocide

Until we have a law to prosecute those who destroy the planet, corporations will never be called to account for their crimes

Sophie Scholl, a Munich University student, was executed for revealing the truth about the activities of the Nazi authorities. This week 20 brave Ratcliffe whistleblowers have been sentenced at Nottingham crown court for plotting to draw attention to the truth of the activities of another German entity. This time, replace the tyranny of the Nazis with the tyranny of the energy giant E.ON.

Scholl and 20 others stood up and took direct non-violent action. Their crime was the dissemination of leaflets highlighting and decrying the tyranny of the Nazi dictatorship. It was a decision to undertake something unlawful – an act that they believed was a necessity – to halt a greater but unnamed crime, a crime that cost many lives. That crime did not, at the time, have a name. But it soon did: genocide.

The Ratcliffe 20 did the same in April 2009. They too were prepared to stand up and take action. Their crime was planning to shut down Ratcliffe-on-Sour, a coal-powered station that is one of Britain's largest greenhouse gas emitters. The state was failing to prevent a greater injury from taking place; the loss of life. This time it is not only human life, but all life.

Like Scholl and her fellow activists, the Ratcliffe 20 were motivated to take non-violent direct action. They, along with 124 others, decided to undertake something unlawful: conspiring to close down the offending emitter. It was an act that they believed was a necessity; to halt a greater but unnamed crime, a crime that is already costing many lives.

Their defence was that they were acting to prevent a greater crime, of death and serious injury caused by climate change. We do not currently have a legal crime in place that fits this description but there is one fast looming on the horizon and that crime is ecocide.

Currently there is no law to prosecute those who are destroying the planet. Instead, climate campaigners do not have the support of the judiciary in preventing the corporate ecocide that is daily occurring under our very noses. Ecocide is permitted (as genocide was in Nazi Germany) by the government and, by dint of the global reach of modern-day transnational business, every government in the world. Corporate ecocide has now reached a point where we stand on the brink of collapse of our ecosystems, triggering the death of many millions in the face of human-aggravated cataclysmic tragedies.

Over the passage of time, tyranny revisits. Tyranny is the cruel, unacceptable, or arbitrary use of power that is oblivious to consequence. While the use of coal stations may not be deemed an intentional cruelty, it is certainly an unacceptable use of corporate power. Our governments collude by encouraging excess emissions, contrary to their UN commitment to stabilise "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

Sixty years ago the tyranny was Nazism. Today it is pursuit of profit without moral compass or responsibility. Despite the planned Ratcliffe protests, it is one that the majority of humanity accepts regardless of the known consequences. We look the other way from the daily reports of destruction of our world by those who are in a position of superior responsibility; the master controllers of our fates are those who determine how we live our lives. It is the heads of the top corporations who gamble with the fate of our planet; those who produce and supply our energy are the most culpable of all.

The failure rests with our governments who are unwilling to intervene to make the destruction of our world a crime. Our police are disempowered and our justice system is unable to protect our greater interests when faced with the superior silent right of corporations to cause injury to persons and planet. Those who stand up and speak out are thereby treated as criminals.

Prior to the Ratcliffe trial, the judge ruled: "the defendants must have the opportunity of putting that contention (that the emissions from the power station do pose an immediate threat) before the jury, no doubt backed by expert evidence." Expert evidence was heard, from James Hansen, the former head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute, on the immediacy of the threat to life caused by escalation of emissions, to MPs who confirmed government inertia. All of which the jury failed to accept. What will it take for that dense sea fog to dissipate and for the truth to be revealed?

Unlike the Ratcliffe 20, Scholl and her co-conspirators were denied the right to defend themselves in their trial. They too were convicted for resorting to unlawful acts, which they believed to be necessary to expose the truth. At the very end of her trial, she spoke out. It is just matter of time, she said, before the true destroyers are put in the dock. The very same can be said today.

This article was written by Polly Higgins and published in The Guardian on Monday 5^th January 2011. Polly Higgins is a barrister, international environmental lawyer and the author of Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet, published by Shepherd-Walwyn. Further information on Polly’s work is available from Polly’s websites: http://www.facebook.com/ecocide and http://www.thisisecocide.com

 

Terrifying Revelations

"Try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."
                                                                        Julian Assange, 2007

Do you believe that it is in Americans' interest to allow a small group of US leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America (from Indochina to Iran to Iraq) do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "un-American" subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit US Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.

These two issues became officially linked for the first time when former US Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal explicitly stated that the murder of civilians increases rather than decreases the numbers of those committed to killing Americans, and actually implemented policies, since reversed by General Petraeus, to reduce US murder of civilians. McChrystal said that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies." By so doing he made it clear that killing civilians is not only a moral and war crimes issue but, in today's interdependent world, also threatens US national security.

As important as is the issue of free speech, it is the question of whether the US Executive is in fact protecting the American people through its mass murder abroad that really lies at the heart of the Wikileaks controversy. Executive Branch officials justify persecuting and threatening to murder Assange on the grounds that he has damaged US "national security." If McChrystal is right, however, it is the past decade of US Executive mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, now revealed beyond any doubt by Wikileaks, that is the real threat to US national security.

The chilling fact is this: whether you believe that September 11th 2001 was due to incomprehensible fanaticism or genuine grievances, it seems likely that US leaders’ murder of countless Muslims since 2001 will cause the next 9/11 should, God forbid, it occur. The recent suicide-bomber in Sweden who came perilously close to succeeding taped a message saying "so will your children, daughters, brothers, and sisters die, like our brothers, sisters, and children die." Similar sentiments were voiced by the Times Square bomber and it is likely that those responsible for future American deaths will also be motivated by revenge for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims for whose deaths US leaders are responsible since 2001.

This is not, of course, to justify such attacks. Any attacks on civilians, whether by the Taliban or General Petraeus, are totally unjustified and crimes of war. But if the issue is how best to enhance US national security, it is critical to rationally discuss the most prudent and sensible means of preventing further attacks, which in this case is to stop creating huge numbers of people who want to kill Americans. If General McChrystal is correct, every American should tremble at the long-term danger to America caused by the last decade of US war-making in the Muslim world. If only 1/100th of 1 per cent of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are moved to want to attack America because of America's post-9/11 killing of Muslim civilians, for example, the US Executive will have created a pool of 160,000 Muslims devoted to murdering Americans.

Nothing is more emblematic of the service Assange is doing Americans than the July 25the New York Times headline announcing its publication of the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs: "View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal Of War In Afghanistan."

The New York Times thus not only acknowledged that Wikileaks had supplied Americans with vital information about the war that its own government was denying them, but that this information had not been provided by the US mass media. If it had been doing its job, after all, America’s “newspaper of record” not Wikileaks would have long ago revealed that the Afghan war was "bleaker than official portrayal of the war." The Guardian newspaper's headline on the same day drove the point home: "Massive Leak Of Secret Files Exposes Truth Of Occupation," – i.e. the truth as opposed to US Executive lies.

These Afghan War Logs, like the Iraqi war logs after them, and much material in Wikileaks' recent release of diplomatic cables, reveal above all that US Executive war-making is marked by massive deception of the American people - particularly lying about (i) the enormous civilian casualties the US is causing and (ii) its claim to be pursuing a "counter-insurgency strategy" designed to install a democratic Afghan government. The Times and Guardian stories describe how these official US documents reveal constant US Executive Branch lying to the American people.

US MURDER OF CIVILIANS: "A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," (The Guardian) "Incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghan civilians were killed - not just in airstrikes but in ones and twos - in shootings on the roads or in the villages, in misunderstandings or in a cross-fire, or in chaotic moments when Afghan drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints". (New York Times) "The NATO coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial… The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path." (The Guardian)

REGULAR COVERUPS OF US CIVILIAN MURDER: "The dead, the reports repeatedly indicate, were not suicide bombers or insurgents, and many of the cases were not reported to the public at the time." (New York Times) "War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of an incident in which they killed 19 civilians… There would be no punishment." (The Guardian) "The logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000 lb bombs on a compound where they believed a `high-value individual' was hiding, after `ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area'. A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died." (The Guardian)

US AND A CORRUPT AFGHAN GOVERNMENT ARE ALIENATING AFGHAN CIVILIANS AND LOSING THE WAR: "The documents illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001... The reports paint a disheartening picture of the Afghan police (who) are often described as distrusted, even loathed, by Afghan civilians. The reports recount episodes of police brutality, corruption petty and large, extortion and kidnapping... The toll of the war, reflected in mounting civilian casualties, left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and alienated... The expanding (US) special operations have stoked particular resentment among Afghans - for their lack of coordination with local forces, the civilian casualties they frequently inflicted and the lack of the accountability." (New York Times)

When the Iraqi war logs were published 3 months later, they revealed even more shocking information, particularly that US soldiers had handed over Iraqi civilians to Iraqi police, knowing they would be hideously tortured employing electric drills, acid and other devices before being savagely murdered. Ellen Knickmeyer, the Washington Post Bureau chief in Baghdad in 2006, wrote that these revelations meant that US officials had been lying daily to the US media, and American people, by saying they were not aware of this mass murder. U. S. leaders also lied constantly in claiming they were not tracking civilian casualties, when in fact they were. Since international law made US leaders responsible for providing law and order in occupied Iraq, these Wiklileaks cables thus also revealed that US leaders bear a major responsibility for these war crimes, among the worst since the end of WWII.

Both the Wikileaks Iraqi and Afghan War Logs, in short, have revealed that the entire US Executive is a "vast lying machine", as journalist David Halberstam described the US military in his affidavit for the CBS vs. Westmoreland trial. It must be understood that “truth” vs. “lies” is not even an operational category within the Executive Branch or military. The purpose of communicating with the public is not to provide them with truthful information but rather to advance “the mission”. People who communicate with the public obtain their jobs and are promoted on the basis of their ability to mislead, deceive, “spin” and lie. There is no recorded case where Executive Branch officials have been rewarded for telling the truth to the American people, and many where they have been punished or lost their jobs for doing so. And nothing so epitomizes the degradation of democracy in America that the fact the public expects Executive Branch officials to lie to them, and that mass media journalists even betray their profession by defending Executive secrecy and excoriating those who reveal their lies like Julian Assange.

It is thus impossible to overstate the importance of the Wikileaks documentation of these lies to the American people. When a journalist reports a US government misdeed, government officials automatically deny it and many Americans are unsure whom to believe. But Wikileaks has revealed official government documents that prove US leaders’ lying and commission of crimes of war. The fact that the US has covered up its mass murder of civilians, and that this is contributing to its losing the war, is thus no longer open to serious question. The callous and careerist politicians and journalists who daily ignore US mass murder, while calling for Assange's arrest or execution, shame themselves, their children, and their profession by their indifference to non-American human suffering and obsequious toadying to illegitimate Executive power.

And the Wikileaks documents reveal something even more important: the entirely bogus nature of US claims that Assange has damaged US "national security", e.g. by revealing information that could help the “enemy.” It is obvious that the "enemy" knows whether those murdered by the US are civilians. The US Executive clearly claims it is only killing “insurgents” to keep its murder of civilians a secret from the American people, fearing it would face protests that could tie its hands if it became known. The Wikileaks documents, though they date from 2009 and before, also shed important light on what is occurring today under General David Petraeus.

It is important to remember, after all, that the Wikileaks controversy is not primarily about the past or abstract legal issues, but what is happening to actual human beings today. As you read these words countless Afghan and Pakistani villagers are huddling in their homes, terrorized by US war-making, as General Petraeus's brutal offensive into southern Afghanistan, met by an increase in the Taliban's resort to roadside bombs and assassination, has caused the Red Cross to issue an unusual alarm saying that conditions are at their worst for Afghan civilians in 30 years, i.e. as bad as during the Russian invasion. A Canadian press report indicates that Kandahar's main hospital is overflowing with civilian casualties, and that "on some days, the floor is red with blood".

Petraeus has tripled air strikes, brought in 9,000 US assassins who are conducting round-the-clock murder, and introduced an unprecedented number of night-time raids recalling Nazi movies from the 1940s - as screaming US soldiers break into people's homes, terrorize women and children, and kill, wound, torture or imprison men indefinitely without a trial or any chance to prove their innocence. Even the US-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai is so appalled that he has begged the US to curtail its airstrikes and night raids, saying, “the raiding homes at night. Terrible. Terrible. A serious cause of the Afghan people's disenchantment with NATO and with the Afghan government… How can you measure the consequences of it in terms of the loss of life of children and women because you have captured Talib A. And who is this Talib A? Is he so important to have 10 more people killed, civilians? Who determines that?”

Petraeus has firmly refused to end what this Afghan leader describes as the General’s responsibility for civilian murder, making a further mockery of his claim to be bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan. Particularly significant are the many first-person reports in the Wikileaks Afghan War Logs of US murder of innocent civilians at US checkpoints - which flesh out McChrystal's March 2010 admission that "we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

For this raises a basic question about Petraeus's vast escalation of US airstrikes. If US forces have murdered countless innocent civilians at checkpoints, where they can at least see those they are killing face-to-face, how many more innocent civilians is Petraeus killing from the air, in bombing raids where those below can barely be seen?

And these Wikileaks documents also shed important light on how Petraeus's massive escalation into both southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he has dramatically escalated both US drone and ground assassination, is weakening rather than strengthening long-term US national security. Just as the Taliban is far stronger today after the US has wasted $300 billion and thousands of American lives over the last 10 years, Petraeus's tactics are strengthening not weakening America's enemies over the long run. If he murders enough people in southern Afghanistan, the General may be able to claim some short-term successes there. But there is no serious question that his tactics are sowing a long-term whirlwind which not only threatens the stability of the Afghan and Pakistani governments, but pose a long-term threat to Americans at home.

A UN map just published by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that the Taliban, using classic guerrilla tactics, has moved into northern and western Afghanistan as Petraeus has moved south, giving them control of more territory than ever. “Internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year's fighting season, countering the Obama administration's optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago”, the Journal reported.

The New York Times has reported how various insurgent groups in Pakistan have responded to Petraeus's tactics by coordinating and cooperating for the first time, vastly increasing the threat they pose to the Pakistani state. It is also obvious that Petraeus cannot possible]y kill more "insurgents" than he is creating if he continues to provoke the 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan Pakistan border to want to fight America. The population of North and South Vietnam combined during the Vietnam war was only 31 million, after all, and provided a manpower pool large enough to outlast 500,000 Americans.

In the end, however, the most profound questions for Americans raised by the Wikileaks documents go far beyond the Muslim world. If we can free our minds of a lifetime of official propaganda identifying the US Executive with the American people, the evidence is overwhelming that in foreign and military policy the US Executive Branch is an undemocratic institution that does not represent its own citizens. It operates largely independent of Congress, the Judiciary or a mass media which has largely become an arm of Executive power, broadcasting its lies far more often than it exposes them.

A few months before President Obama's December 2009 decision to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, for example, only 24 per cent of Americans wanted to send more and 43 per cent wanted to decrease the number. Their wishes were ignored, as are the opinions of Americans today who, by a margin of 63 to 32, oppose US war-making in Afghanistan. And, Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” revealed, even the President is largely a figurehead when it comes to Executive war-making.

Woodward documents how the military thwarted Obama’s clear desire to begin a major pullout from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. Last month, Obama was humiliated by being forced to endorse a hypothetical 2014 pullout date.

Most Americans would agree with the statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." But the governed can only give their consent if they are informed as to what they are agreeing to. This is obvious in our daily life. I cannot be said to have "consented" to buy your laptop if you deceived me by not telling me it was broken. One of our most basic legal principles is that a contract is null and void if it was obtained under false pretences. By revealing massive US Executive deceit Wikileaks has thus revealed that it does not legitimately represent the American people.

These Wikileaks documents thus raise the most fundamental question citizens can ask themselves: to what extent to citizens of a democracy owe their allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain the consent of their citizens through massive duplicity? And to what extent can they trust either their judgement or their decency?

Americans may find themselves increasingly pondering such questions in coming years, as economic decline and future terrorist attacks cause US elites to bring home the authoritarian mindset that has caused so much damage abroad. It seems certain that American democracy will face greater challenges than at any time since the country's founding.

But that is a long-term question. The key question now is whether Americans can hear the sound of suffering their leaders are causing abroad, as at this very moment innocent men, women and children are being murdered and maimed in what the Red Cross describes as the greatest civilian carnage since the Russians invaded 30 years ago. Julian Assange should be applauded not persecuted for hearing the sound of their suffering. Do we?

This post first appeared in Alternet. It was written by Fred Branfman and is reprinted here with the author’s kind permission. Fred exposed the US Executive's Secret Air War in Laos, which illegally and savagely murdered tens of thousands of innocent Laotian peasants. He has written frequently on Executive war-making for Alternet in recent years. See www.trulyalive.org for more information on Fred’s activities.

How Leadership Development Fails

Initial thoughts

Each year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on the development of leaders - by companies wanting a competitive edge, government departments concerned to improve their professional competence, institutions looking for greater public impact or a more congenial work environment and individuals seeking self-improvement.

Most of these investments are channeled into workshops, training courses and programs of differing kinds. And most of it goes to waste. Although there are often short-term gains reported by a few individuals these are exceptions. Leadership development programs are rarely effective in the long-term. Much goes on as before. Transformational change remains in hiding.

Of course it can be unwise to make such sweeping statements. There are any number of innovative off-the-grid experiences available to executives, in particular, that have been shown to yield extraordinary and continuing benefits. The intensive strategic learning journeys offered by The Constellation are but one such example. Generally speaking, however, we do not discover more sophisticated leaders or higher levels of consciousness emerging from conventional leadership programs. Unfortunately the facade of success appears to be easily sustained in today’s marketplace, in spite of the fact that programs intended to develop and nurture leaders most often serve only to underline the dearth of leadership that currently exists.

There are good reasons for this which I only began to explore during the writing of The Five Literacies of Global Leadership.

Current approaches to leadership development remind me of the health and well-being industry, its veracity as well as its marketing hype. I am sure you know the way this industry works.

If you are wealthy the first step is to choose the most superbly equipped, state of the art health resort, if possible in some exotic location. Many of these facilities offer comprehensive packages comprising nutritional therapy and customised diets, spa and sauna rooms, colonic irrigation, therapeutic massages and detoxification treatments, physical exercise regimes, yoga and meditation classes. Often exuding an air of exclusiveness, these facilities offer tranquillity and a rare chance to reflect on one’s life journey in harmony with nature. Think squawking parakeets, sunny skies, the sigh of a gentle breeze through palm trees, the distant sound of surf...

For many others who long to participate in these health resort experiences but are less affluent it is simply the equivalent of a holiday. A few frequent flyer points away from life's hectic treadmill. A pause. Do they provoke long term change? No, not usually. But they still have benefit. The problem is the misconception of what is on offer. The marketing message seduces, exactly like the messages surrounding corporate change, into taking the easy path - the pill for weight loss or, for that matter, the pill for anything, versus doing the inner and outer work that is actually required for real change to embed.

Health resorts are luxurious and also very expensive but then so are most corporate change and leadership development programs. Of course you can expect highly personalised attention from expert staff as well as your own private villa for seclusion should you so choose. Sports stars and movie celebrities check-in to these places. You are bound to emerge a fitter, healthier, happier, more effective human being. Or so you reason...

As it turns out this is an illusion. Statistics show that over 86 per cent of people who routinely attend a health resort, wellness centre or spa, fail to maintain their new fitness and dietary regimen even when the immediate impact such life changes produce have been noticeably beneficial. This is why people constantly return. In fact the health and well-being market actually depends on their return customers.

Although I cannot quote precise statistics the same happens to be the case with almost all leadership development schemes – even the best and most internationally lauded of brands. Just think about it. These intensive courses and high-level retreats are typically designed “for” a clientele, rather than “with” them, by human resource specialists (and occasionally instructional designers) who then turn over custody of the participants development to a cadre of facilitators, academics and consultants, particularly those who have acquired something of a guru status in their special field.

There can be no doubt that training and development professionals are too often engaged to drip-feed superfluous or questionable information, minimising any potential discomfort and creating an impression for participants they are in some kind of positive and sustainable transition. Focused primarily on upgrading technical knowledge and often urging behavioural or attitudinal readjustments, these external service providers are not in the least bit concerned with volition or conflicting “states of being” within the group. Nor do they concern themselves with trying to secure any kind of enduring collegiality. Why? Because they are not paid to do that. If they were rewarded on such results, the programs they designed would most likely take on an entirely different form and ethos, more appropriate to a transformational paradigm than the prevailing instructional mode, which merely gives them licence to perform in front of an admiring audience.

The cynic in me is also suspicious that one of the most important selection criterion for any successful external trainer or facilitator is the ability to inject novelty without causing unnecessary offence or too much distress – unless, of course, that has been overtly orchestrated. Some of the most highly paid facilitators, including a number of associates with whom I regularly work, state emphatically that, for the most part, they are paid to smooth conversational processes and make participants feel good about the outcome, even if this bubble bursts the morning after. In other words facilitators are often the insurance policy that guarantees a good time is had by all. Tick the box. Job well done.

Is it any real surprise then that participants come away frustrated by the suite of new-fangled theories and incoherent models they are expected to deploy but that remain functionally and symbolically disconnected from their day-to-day problems?

The expression of freshness, of discovery and exhilaration, of modified behaviours and new personal commitments that seemed so novel and engaging at the time, eventually fade into vague memories. Unless further invitations transpire offering additional, more “advanced” courses. Which then serve to recycle the whole experience once again. Ah well, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme!

It is true to say that most programs of this nature are simply unsustainable away from the conditions of their genesis. In other words they are designed to fail. The promise of sustainable change is one that simply cannot be kept. Yet pills continued to be swallowed by the bucket load and unwise investments, amounting to millions of dollars in training, materials, travel and accommodation, not to mention opportunity costs, roll on mainly because those responsible for resource allocation have been brainwashed into believing that leadership development is critical to the business.

It is critical. We know that. But not in any shape or form. And certainly not in the form of a pill or vaccination promising immediate and sustainable change. The results are in and the implications are absolutely clear. If effective transformational leadership is the goal (and far more consideration must be given as to whether this really is the superordinate aim) a number of critical design factors must be taken into account.

After all is said and done, the need for development (whether individually or collectively motivated) arises for a reason. There has to be an underlying imperative, a logic, implying something is currently missing and/or something can be gained, from undertaking a program focused on development. We have to believe in the potential for surfacing something better, brighter, grander or more effective that will evolve from investing in the development of leaders and the nurturing of new forms of leadership.

Well there is. Actually there are three overarching logics (or longings) that commonly drive the urge to grow successive generations of leaders and to articulate a new knowledge base for leadership:

1. The judgement to perceive reality from a higher altitude or the perspectives offered by a new stages of consciousness. Higher states of enlightenment unveil hidden dimensions and possibilities for becoming a force for good in our world
2. The wisdom to appreciate the complexity inherent in human systems, relationships and beliefs. This capability can be used to comprehend complex dynamics and to provide a more sophisticated resolution of the dilemmas facing us
3. The willingness to step into different epistemologies, and cultural mindsets, and to do so with grace. Such volition opens up compassion and empathy for diversity and inclusion, without which any leadership flounders or descends into baseness.

To enable these three logics to manifest within the context of leadership development, five additional factors must be taken into account:

1. Learning Mode

Leadership development needs to be prised out of the instructional mode (of telling) into the sphere of personal and collective transformation (of enquiry and questioning).

That simple shift requires development initiatives to be co-designed by the community of participants or stakeholders, including those for whom development or behavioural change is intended, so that relevance is assured at all times and everyone has a say in how their “evolving selves” can best be used in every moment.

A word of caution is in order. The term “co-design” is very much in vogue today. It has become common currency even within the instructional mode of development. Only in that context it refers to specific knowledge to be imparted (as in theories, models, exemplars and tools) as well as the manner of such instruction (that is presentations, round tables, facilitated dialogues or working groups). This usually implies that a "design" is agreed by the commissioning agency (most commonly members of an organisation's human resource community) in conjunction with designated service suppliers. This is not what I mean by the term co-design.

Within the transformational paradigm authentic co-design is an engaging and continuing process, it requires a contribution from, and the presence of, all stakeholders in the initiative - especially those being targeted for development. As a consequence design input focuses on the symbolism, composition and staging of experiences that have the direct effect of excavating ancient wisdom or of eliciting yet-to-be-embodied knowledge, as opposed to conveying explicit data which is, after all, the objective of design input within the instructional paradigm.

2. Attention density

Typically the potential value arising from development workshops and programs remains unrealised, mostly because of routine pressures or a cultural DNA that protects the status quo, but also because of conflicting philosophies. By means of development programs leaders connect with new possibilities (for themselves and for the organisation) but may find it difficult integrating these into beneficial enterprise-wide changes because of existing conditions that actively discourage the migration of new knowledge into new praxis.

This can also be deeply troubling at a personal level. When this happens people either stay, suppressing what they have learnt in compliance with tradition, are marginalised as they struggle to resolve the tensions, or give up trying and leave.

True leadership development aims to change these outcomes by finding ways for new knowledge to integrate and transcend into new work. This is a cyclical, iterative and recursive dance between transformative thinking and communicative action. I often refer to this transitional or migratory state as an “awakening” process rather than a “developmental” process per se. Leaders are given opportunities (or are jolted into epiphanies) that awaken within them an electric, palpable authenticity and potency, both individually and collectively.

This can usually only be achieved by (i) continually recreating, sharing, integrating and transcending the conditions, conversations and experiences evident when a sense of anticipation, renewed purpose, or excitement for change originally surfaced and (ii) by having leaders nurture and value intimate working relationships with mentors who can constantly remind them of the transformational experience and intended higher purpose.

3. Framing

There are enormous social and psychological impediments to deployment of the kinds of consciousness expansion we seek from leaders today. Most leadership programs ambushed by the instructional mode of development are seriously impacted and distorted by the nature of the inquiry itself. In short, the question or impulse (or sometimes just the nominated expert at the front of the room offering their pet view) shapes the response, rather than allowing the data to frame relevance. It is for this reason that on-the-job learning in a transformational mode is preferable to almost any other form of developmental experience.

True learning coupled with the evolution of new forms of consciousness invariably arises from an inner sense of knowing and translating that into action. It occurs when experts, gurus, facilitators and trainers are taken out of the equation and people are left to wallow in a messy and confronting space defined only by intentionality and imagination and guided by questions and provocations from those who are “tuned in” to group dynamics and are not constrained by adherence to a single model, truth or impulse.

4. Setting

Pertinent theory and the analysis of case studies can be immensely useful - if there is an opportunity for immediate translation, application and practice. Nowadays however it is quite easy for anyone to surf the net and download as many case studies and theories as one could stuff in a wine cellar. Generally speaking classroom teaching in the conventional sense adds almost no value to leadership development in ways that are unequivocal.

Furthermore, where such theories and lectures take people off-the-job into an artificial learning environment for an experience that might be memorable but is not replicable when it matters, they invariably fail. Naturally this will be fiercely contested by the business schools who trade in such models.

If programs and courses are delivered in this manner one needs to ask what is retained when participants return to work? How much of the learning endures? To what extent will that knowledge continue to add value when the daily routine exerts its gravitational pull? How much of it will still be relevant in five years time? Or ten years time?

Above all how can the unique experiences conveyed within instructional development programs be amplified in ways that add value for the thousands of other people who were not privileged to attend the program? Generally speaking they can not. In order to generate sufficient returns on investments in leadership, higher-order benefits need to spread across the enterprise - in terms of a more innovative culture, cross-business cooperation and the collective comprehension of environmental patterns and trends. This can only manifest in “on-the-job” praxis which is the pragmatic element within the transformational mode of change.

5. Language

The vocabulary of leadership is critical. Within the transformational paradigm development must include terms such as being, empathy, diversity, beliefs, choice, wisdom, responsibility, an expanded sense of self, freedom, intent, purpose, integral, limits and volition. For this is the language of intentional transformation.

As a lexicon in its own right, this language evokes altogether different responses and emotions than the technical terminology so beloved of management consultants and behavioural psychologists, the result of which, so often, is to keep leaders firmly anchored in current disciplines and beliefs.

Final thoughts

The development of leaders and leadership is especially pertinent in today’s global environment as huge shifts in our most life-critical systems edge us towards an age of ethical capitalism, an era of far-reaching change and fundamental political, economic and social upheaval leading, one might hope, to societal renewal. In order to benefit commercially and continue creating value through such volatile times, it will be necessary for companies and governments to pursue innovative business and operating models as well as adopting mindsets open to entirely new ways of being, thinking and doing.

I have been blessed with the extraordinary good fortune to be involved with some of the most progressive leadership programs of their kind available anywhere: inspiring, challenging and knowledge expanding. Until very recently leadership development was premised on a model that depended on acquiring knowledge from external experts or consultants, usually in an artificial environment far removed from the day-to-day bustle of organisational routines, and where case studies and lines of reasoning assume a continuation of the prevailing business paradigm. This is an instructional mode of conditioning. It is repressive and manufactures consent but is increasingly useless in a leadership context.

If we are to challenge that hypothesis, opening our thinking to more exploratory ways of understanding, the development paradigm needs to shift. We will need to take the very best of what has been achieved, integrate and transcend new knowledge and ways of knowing, and embed this within a continually evolving expansion of leadership praxis. That will entail leaving theory behind and treating leadership as a process of continual learning rather than as a punctuation of events residing outside of our control.

 I am grateful to my colleague in The Constellation, Dr Christine McDougall, for her valuable assistance in developing some of the ideas contained within this piece.

 

A Convenient Lie (with apologies to Al Gore)

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." Dresden James

Over the passage of time I have come to anticipate the end of each year with a serenity born of familiarity as much as for the solitude and change of pace it invariably brings.

As people all over the world return home for the holidays, hibernate or simply seek sanctuary in simple joys arising from reconnection and renewal, the frenzied clockwork of contemporary existence seems to slow down to such an extent that it allows scrutiny in some considerable detail - like counting the seconds. In that briefest of moments all exterior realities are suspended, albeit temporarily, and transcendent qualities perceived or possibly felt.

Perhaps this illusion of slow motion, of stillness, is the only real gift at this time of the year – a rare chance to pause, review in awe the debris we have left in our wake, reflect on the path we are intent on tracing and ponder our most probable destination should the path remain true.

Since a very early age it has been my practice to mark the end of each calendrical chapter by writing a short account of the past twelve months, attempting to make sense of events while mulling over key twists and turns in a journey I share with others as well as consider some ways I may be changing as a result of others' interactions with me.

Normally I sense only evolution. This year has been different. It has invited palpable psychological change. I am increasingly perturbed by foolishness. Stupidity goads me into anger far more easily these days. Greed and laziness too. And I am suitably offended when encountering self-righteousness in any guise. Perhaps all of this is partly a consequence of age. At 65 there is less time for subtlety or toleration of political correctness. Every word must cut through pretension; every deed must be meaningful. It was always in my genes but this year I have matured into a trouble maker par excellence!

Long ago I acquiesced to the label of futurist – an ironically short-sighted consent, for as successive years pass I feel less confident about what tomorrow holds and far less able to voice my apprehension without resorting either to vehement provocation or brooding silence – a state many find even more disconcerting given my innate penchant for debate and my delight in vocabulary.

It is also true that on some days I feel like an impudent adolescent, accused and imprisoned with prejudice in a padded cell from which there is little likelihood of escape, other than by appealing to those who chose to incarcerate me in this manner. On such occasions my blood boils and I am moved to scorn, delivered with an icy precision, capable of inflicting deep wounds. Yet each month I meet and fall in with hordes of like-minded souls who agree with my analysis of the global milieu and who feel a similar torment and stress. Yet few speak out - possibly for fear of being classified as an hysterical malcontent. No matter. I cannot help myself.

Even so the curse of knowledge is deleting positive memories of the future as fast as the water evaporates from puddles in summer. With each moment that passes I feel less able to comprehend the impulse of a species tacitly, tragically, intent on pursuing its own destruction, knowing that most people just get on with their lives, much as before, having little or no consciousness that would lead them to such a desolate conclusion. Each day it becomes harder to tolerate a situation where the most destructive of “inconvenient truths” are ignored, relegated to trivial pursuits, or ridiculed by an increasingly terrified gang of wealthy monarchs, politicians, autocrats, media barons, industrialists and senior executives who have, quite simply, lost the plot of what it means to lead.

Of course it is all too easy (and utterly wrong) to view everything through a lens clouded by despair and scarcity. On those rare occasions when pessimism crowds me in I am fortunate enough to be stirred by those around me who see only abundance, generosity of spirit and cooperation. They are my inspiration and my salvation.

This year has been crammed with significance on so many levels. The local impacts of global heating continued to gather pace. Meanwhile the previous failure of the United Nations’ climate negotiations in Copenhagen, which led to an even more spectacular collapse in Cancun, were air-brushed into “success” by armies of spin doctors. China’s yuan has become the most trusted global currency, helping to reinforce the continuing shift of moral and economic authority to Asia and the global South.

Web 2.0 journalist Julian Assange blew the whistle on an entire library of government chronicles, copping the petulant wrath of politicians and generals who dislike their sordid little secrets being aired in public. In Burma, comparable enemies of democracy graciously released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest while in Thailand the year ended peacefully after the stirrings of a class revolution failed to muster the required momentum – at least for the time being…

As usual my personal life flaunted variegated shades throughout the year. Isaan New Life took off. The Constellation was born in a state of grace and love. A host of new ventures started at a pace that promises to be both exhilarating and exhausting. In 2010 I traversed the world several times, created a furor in the Thai Royal household by publishing a letter highlighting racism and injustice, resigned from Dhurakij Pundit University but accepted the Chair of Australia21, started work on my next book, Dancing with the Future, encountered enriching new friendships on all five continents and accompanied Suna to Japan and Europe where we witnessed the cherry blossom season in Kyoto, tried our hand at salmon fishing in Scotland, foraged for mushrooms in Stroud and enjoyed crusing the canals in Amsterdam. However the most incredible news was that I am to become a father once again. Our baby is due in June.

Inevitably I am drawn to speculating on what kind of a world our child will inhabit. Those who know me well understand that the more recent compulsion for my work springs from the dread of knowing I helped create a world that, in some respects, is hardly worth inheriting. In my quietest moments this is a huge burden. At least I want my children and grandchildren to know that I strived to instigate renewal; to help create a world that is intentionally different to the one manifesting today.

What might that effort look like and to what end? To many observers even the proposition of massive societal change might look, feel and smell like unwarranted insurgence and seditious in the extreme. But only, I suspect, because we have been conditioned to interpret radical ideas through the win-lose lens of scarcity and competition. Thus we instinctively respond to any inherent novelty in this regard as a threat to our quality of life or our standard of living - especially in the West. Or even as an unwarranted imposition on our hard-won freedoms and acquisitive tendencies.

Actually the imperative for whole societal change is more accurately described as intentional evolution, where such intentionality arises from a more sophisticated collective awareness of reality to that which currently prevails. Let me be clear: the imperative for whole-system change is not some kind of left-wing conspiracy aimed at shifting power from one group to another. Such a goal would be entirely inconsistent with our actual needs. On the contrary, intentional evolution transcends more primitive instincts by shifting attention to our mutual predicament, our shared humanity, rather than on individual fears of deficiency, deprivation or difference. In effect it builds on an integral knowledge base, harnessing the impetus to collaborate in the design of a society we would all gladly bestow on our children, and their children.

The most salient, indeed sacred, aim of evolutionary leadership in this context must be to seek paths that reach into the future by going beyond limits imposed by the “civilizational worldview” that pervades our existence and within which the human species is most certainly trapped.

It may help to define what I mean by the civilizational paradigm: that is the framework of unchallenged principles, beliefs and values that has given rise to our world-system – its institutions, structures and protocols. This belief system is not new. On the contrary it stretches back hundreds of years to a time in history when tribes and communities were just beginning to form.

In fact the civilizational worldview is not only enduring but immensely resilient. Over centuries it has been modified and shaped by differing cultural streams (most obviously Occidental, Indic and Sinic mindsets as well as more finely-grained hybrids of these) without seriously testing its underlying philosophy. Intriguingly the only cultural mindsets I have yet discovered that appear not to subscribe to the civilizational worldview are the various Aboriginal and pre-literate belief systems that honour a different social order and intent.

Outside of these pre-literate mindsets then, the civilizational ethos encompasses all political ideologies and class structures and is consequently one to which we all learned to submit, whether consciously or not. Its core is embodied in the following attributes:

1. A hierarchical social order controlled by a privileged minority (an elite leadership for want of a better term) that remains largely unaccountable for its decisions and where serfdom (and even slavery) is used extensively to exercise power
2. The pursuit of wealth through unlimited economic growth and expansion and the protection of this wealth (as well as the determination of how it is used) through a strictly measured allocation of resources sustained by an interwoven apparatus of political, legal and military elements
3. An economic system, driven by notions of scarcity and competition, that vests title to the wealth produced by society in the elite
4. The concentration of power and wealth in urban centres as well as widespread despoliation and plundering of the rural environment and wilderness
5. A grand mythology and mythic narrative portraying society as originating from and continuing to be influenced by suprahuman powers with sectors of the elite as the official conduit of that influence
6. A written language and accompanying symbolism that is absorbed and monopolised by the elite and its functionaries particularly in the reification of the civilizational illusion
7. Education, labour and corrective systems designed to serve the aims of the elite while manufacturing and maintaining compliance with the designated social order
8. A military establishment and industrial war machine utilised not only for external defence and aggression but also for internal control and repression.

I apologise for listing these attributes in a language evocative of repression, power and class struggle, but it really is the most apposite way to explain the essence of the civilizational ethos. And although as individuals we might find such an association confronting in the extreme, our collective memory and impulse resonates quite spontaneously with this paradigm precisely because most of us have known no other. Whether Chinese, European, Aztec, Zulu or Sikh, it has been the original, solitary, overarching worldview with which we have all complied. So far...

However we have made two fundamental errors in our abiding allegiance to it. Firstly, we have come to view progress within this single worldview as the zenith of human potential, one to which all people and societies should aspire. It is not. Secondly, we have assumed that the civilizational paradigm can solve all of the problems facing us today. Clearly it can not.

Now comes the appalling catch. Those readers who are paying attention will have realised that in order to transcend the civilizational worldview - to move beyond civilization to a world-system that is genuinely sustainable, less manipulative yet deeply liberating - we need to persuade the wealthy (that is you and me) in addition to our nominated elite (including monarchs, high wealth individuals, heads of state, corporate leaders, public intellectuals, and senior bureaucrats) to give up that which has brought such unprecedented affluence and power. As far as I can see the only way to pierce the bubble is by shedding our desire to accumulate more and more material wealth at any cost. But in order to achieve that our overwhelming narrative about who we are and what is important must morph from one that exalts competition and scarcity in every crack and crevice of public life to one that venerates cooperation and abundance without boundaries. Indeed abundance is the space in which evolutionary leadership must now manifest if our species is to advance beyond base materiality, futile conflict and rampant consumerism.

If you think such a situation is sheer fantasy, then take a look at what I am predicting will happen within the next quarter of a century; simply because it has to. As I look back on my life with such gratitude, and forward into the future with such hope, my deepest conviction is that we will witness a substantial shift in five conditions that serve to hold the civilizational worldview in place:

1. Official diplomacy will be set aside so that the truth can be told openly, sincerely and without fear
2. The wealthiest among us will cooperate to eliminate poverty and injustice
3. Militarism and the industrial war machine that spawns terror and sustains conflict will start to unravel or be dismantled
4. Communities will migrate to a steady-state (low growth) economy that jettisons reckless development and consumption in favour of replenishing the Earth’s natural resources
5. The power currently vested in nation states will decline as human ingenuity opens up less exploitative and engaging forms of governance.

This is not an altogether idealistic wish list. Nor is it quite so mad as it looks. Indeed, as I have indicated consistently over the past decade or so, there are already signs that such a genesis is in train. Small, apparently insignificant tremors and recallibrations are evidence that more massive shifts are on the way. The commons movement is gaining an inexorable momentum, calling into question established notions of ownership and granting rights to the underprivileged. Open source and peer-to-peer mechanisms are unshackling ordinary men and women from under the yoke of large corporations. Networked communities are beginning to challenge allegiance to the nation state. Meanwhile people everywhere are beginning to tire of a dominant narrative and systems that isolate and alienate, that create fear and suspicion, and that propagate injustice and inequality.

Digital communications tools and social media are enabling alternative voices to be heard, free from the censorship and half-truths beloved of the establishment and state-controlled media. The recent hullabaloo surrounding Wikileaks, for example, is an indication that a majority of citizens are increasingly disdainful of officialdom, believing truth and integrity to be far more indispensable than complicit agreement with the elite's belief in their right to preserve clandestine reports and activities. In fact the leaked documents are shocking not because they reveal profound state secrets (lets face it there is more tittle-tattle than profundity here) but because they illustrate (a) that the government-military alliance is in effect a vast terrorist machine perpetrating mass murder in our name; (b) an alarming dearth of true leadership in the propaganda many elected representatives are prepared to invent simply to bolster their illusion of power; and (c) the fact that democracy itself has gone feral given that we now owe our allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain our consent through massive duplicity.

Another case in point derives from the Cancun climate accord which seems to me to be indefensible in the way it fails to deal with climate justice. The text of the accord replaces binding mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with voluntary assurances that are utterly inadequate, at least if we are not to exceed a rise in global temperature of 2 degrees Celsius. Filled with bureaucratic ambiguities the accord allows numerous loopholes for polluters, opportunities for expanding traditional carbon markets and other mechanisms that reduce the obligation of developed countries to lead.

Ultimately international negotiations will need to bite the bullet or risk irrelevancy. Sadly, a convenient lie has become all that powerful nations are willing to offer, while they ignore scientists' exhortations to act radically now. Unbelievably Bolivia was the only nation in Cancun to refuse to sign the accord. Bolivia’s logic is clear: they are perturbed that yet another US-European managed, neo-colonial process, will result in the justification and continuation of a failed “development” model and the emergence of additional market-based mechanisms that aim not to solve the problem of global heating but rather to profit from it.

Who knows, perhaps they also grasp the fact that we are facing not just a serious environmental crisis but a global ecological collapse in the broadest sense. Whatever the motivation, this act of principle by one of the poorest nations on the planet appears to be reigniting the determination of others in a similar position not to comply with the traditional power elite.

Indeed support for Bolivia’s stand is forthcoming from diverse networks across Asia and the global South. Comprising men and women, rural communities and farmers, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, formal and informal workers, climate migrants, youth and urban poor (communities who are among the marginalized and most vulnerable due to climate change) the members of these networks comprehend that their lives and their futures are at stake.

All of which indicate a tentative breakdown in the key elements required to preserve the current worldview and a positive sign that we can evolve to a fresh worldview (beyond civilization) more just and benign than that some of us have enjoyed and are now chossing to reject. Ironically I view a breakdown in the established order as an essential pre-requisite for the future survival of our species. Call that revolution if you like, although I am no revolutionary. I am confident, however, that we can evolve in ways that are wise, socially liberating, and do not require us to go back to the dark ages.

But there is a tension within me for I, too, have been indoctrinated within the bubble of the civilizational paradigm. So although I believe the excessive habits of the rich (especially our astonishing levels of production and consumption) are totally unsustainable, I cannot bring myself to accept the oft-heard conspiracy theory suggesting deliberate, organised, attempts by the world’s elite to cling to power through any means. I need to believe in the good intentions of people, whether serfs or leaders, and in our capacity as a species for adaptation and, yes, transcendance.

On the other hand one huge question lingers in my mind. It relates to the speed at which we are prepared to change. Whether we like it or not, whether we "get" it or not, those factors defining the civilizational worldview which I articulated above are obsolete, utterly out of kilter with our needs and the limits imposed by physics. We have reached a point in the human story where, in order to survive and thrive, leaders must create the conditions for their own decline - in terms of wealth and power. This is metamorphosis and to suggest this will require a degree of altruism, audacity and wisdom that is unbearably rare is a huge understatement.

Whether the members of a system we have deliberately installed over many centuries are sufficiently enlightened to even comprehend this, or possess the collective capability to design what is in effect a new society, remains to be seen. It requires letting go of old knowledge and ways of knowing, unprecedented application of imagination and innovation, and an unwavering commitment to collaboration.

The clock is ticking. Uncertainties are plentiful. And, of course, many people see no need to change the habits of a lifetime. “Let future generations deal with the problem” is their catch-cry. I cannot live with that thought. Success will most likely depend on the patience of the world’s poor, the ability of young people everywhere to invest in the creation of a world-system far beyond today’s materialistic models, and a willingness from people of all creeds and persuasions to set aside pettiness, fear and superstition in order to combat economic, energy and environmental issues in ways that will provide us with the breathing space needed to design the next great worldview.

I am grateful to Keith Chandler and his study into mindsets and value systems for helping me to articulate the set of eight attributes depicting the civilizational worldview in this blog.

 

Time to Call Our Bluff

An invitation to withdraw our consent from current economic leadership and do what needs to be done

The news is filled with stories of nations on the edge of economic collapse, going with a begging bowl to the financial markets, European Union and International Monetary Foundation for billions of dollars of “rescue package”. Should the markets or institutions be gracious enough to lend them the money (which must be repaid with significant interest), the countries must introduce a package of “austerity measures” to get their economy “back on track”. To please the High Lords of the global economy, funding is cut to public services, people are made unemployed, subsidies for the environment and international development are slashed – all in the name of “getting our economy back on track”.

But what are we actually talking about here? Do we need to go along lemming-like with the commands of the current economic priesthood? Or could we start questioning the consensus reality, testing its integrity and authenticity, seeing if the emperor really has any clothes?

Although it may seem and feel like an unthinkable course, it is my belief that if we did choose to withdraw our consent and asked ourselves what we really needed, the world would not fall apart around us, our lifestyles would not plummet to the depths of a depression. The good people of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and others “in need” would know exactly what they needed to do to ensure that their societies functioned well, people who needed care were cared for, the natural environment on which we depend was looked after properly, and that what we really needed to provide in terms of goods and services was provided in a way that nurtured people and planet. We have abdicated our responsibility for the running of our household (economy from the Greek oikos, a house and nomos, a law) to people educated in abstract mathematical models that have become increasingly detached from the realities of people’s lives. It is time to reclaim that responsibility and break the consensus trance.

Imagine…

Imagine what would happen if instead of going along blindly with the demands of our outdated agreements and concepts of how we should run our households, communities and countries, our leaders were simply to refuse. The people and governments of Ireland, Portugal, Spain and others simply said “No. We don’t want your money and we don’t want your conditions.” Before we go any further, just feel for yourself what that would feel like... When I imagine that, I feel tension first, but then an enormous relaxation and sense of groundedness in my body.

So here we are. We stand in our own power. We have a current situation that by the old paradigm looks like our economy and country are going down the plughole. But what if we were to refuse to judge the beauty of our society, culture and people any more by those criteria? What if we were to look at the real value of the contributions people make in their daily activities, the value that our creativity, dedication and innovation adds to people’s well-being and our planet’s vitality? What if we were to decide to stop doing stuff that clearly is not aligned with the best of who we are and to start doing things that are truly meaningful and gainful for the demands of our times?

Would this mean the end of our civilisation? Would this mean world war? Would this mean armageddon? Of course not! It would simply mean that we simply do what needs to be done, regardless of the economic rules that most of our current leadership say we should follow (simply because they see no other option). In fact, it is my belief that it is precisely the continued enforcement of our outdated beliefs about economics and society that will plunge us into greater darkness and despair.  We just need to accept that times have changed, the solutions and models we created to solve problems of the past don’t work any more, we need to let them go, look again at who we are, and start to re-organise.

One step at a time...

So, I hear voices crying, where is the big plan? If we don’t have a big plan of how to organise everything differently, how can we let go of the old? Well, maybe we don’t need a big plan. Maybe we just need to continually connect to reality as it is in the present moment, take decisions that seem workable for the current reality, address new tensions one at a time as they arise, and dynamically steer our way into the future.

In fact, if you study the science of non-linear transitions (and we happen to be in one right now), there is no other way to do it. From the old paradigm that we are still immersed in, even as we sense its demise in every cell of our being, we simply cannot see the future that will emerge out of this transition. The best we can do is stay as close to present reality as possible, keep sensing into the general direction we want to go, listen deeply to what resonates and what creates tension, act to the best of our ability, prototype and learn, while letting go of any attachment to pre-conceived outcomes.

These unstable yet hugely fertile times require a very different approach to organisation and leadership. Do we know how to do this? Yes, small organisations and civil society initiatives have been experimenting with this for years. As is the nature of these kind of transitions, we now need to look to the fringes, where people have broken free of the old consensus reality, find the things that are working, experiment with them ourselves and keep learning – step by small step.

It is much simpler that we think. Our highly intellectual civilisation has created complex models around the basic realities of exchanging value, rooted in ways of seeing the world that believe in a reality of strident individualism, a world made up of lots of separate parts and an over-glorification of the mind and the measurable, at the expense of the heart and the immeasureable. Yet biologists and physicists increasingly describe a reality of interconnectedness, collaboration and mutual care.

Let us let go of all the models and theories that we hold of how people should be organised, look closely at ourselves and those around us, ask ourselves what really needs to be done, and start, one step at a time, to re-organise ourselves in a way that honours the best of what it is to be human, that assumes a fundamental interconnectedness with the rest of life around us and that releases that mysterious spirit inside us we call Life. Can we do it? Of course, it is simply who we are.

This blog was written by Peter Merry who is founder and Chair of the Center for Human Emergence in the Netherlands (www.humanemergence.nl) and Director of the new Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence. He is a founding partner of Engage!, a fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology and a member of the faculty of Wisdom University Europe.

Science Friction

Today we welcome to the program, Dr Nick Mitchell, founding director of the Integral Science Academy, Nobel Prize winner and Australia’s Chief Scientist to hear about his life, ideas and concerns. Welcome to the program Nick. Your team has just made a breakthrough in solving one of our major environmental problems. You’ve been partying I hear?

You bet. Even scientists let their hair down occasionally you know. I mean, in a six-way race against Europe’s affluent Monsanto empire, a Chinese conglomerate funded by that zany billionaire guy who recently acquired Glaxo Smith-Kline, and three boutique global alliances, it was our team that cracked the jackpot! Yes, of course we celebrated.

It’s meant a lot of hard work and plenty of travel for you and your associates.

Yes indeed. Professor Lin Lynn, one of our most eminent hydrologists and the former chair of the Cooperative Research Centre in Water Futures at Tehran University, and I have spent most of our time during the past three years coordinating the work of our various team leaders - Hiromi in Tokyo, Bob here in Canberra, Vivek in Mumbai, June and Tammy in Boston. I still hate travelling, as Lin would have told you, so I work from Canberra whenever possible, using the resources of the Decision Theater at ANU where I also have a Chair. The air hammocks on Singapore Airworld are quite comfortable I suppose but, unlike Lin, I’ve never been able to sleep in an upright position. I also avoid taking any melatonin you see, so when the lid closes I get this awful sense of claustrophobia. Anyway it’s been a race against time. Our funds were fast drying up. But now we’re on the verge of announcing a solution to one of the world’s most formidable ecological problems.

Nick, before you tell us about that perhaps I should explain to our listeners that we’re talking about salinity. Your desalination process has been successfully tested on some of the world’s most hypersaline areas with unprecedented success.

Yes. Actually the desalination process is only part of the solution. The real breakthrough arose when we married our nano-membrane desalinator (the technology) with “keyline” design principles (the philosophy) and applied this to specific tracts of land identified with the help of detailed intelligence from NRI in Canberra. It was the combination of these things that allowed us to achieve quite extraordinary results.

The success will mean massive profits for your sponsors, Nippon Chemicals & Chemnet and incalculable kudos for you and your team. 

That’s correct. Also Vivek’s Research Institute in India and CSIRO here in Australia are likely to reap a bonanza in funding through their strategic partnership with Hoechst. In fact it’s probably the difference between surviving or not for Vivek. So he is over the moon, as you can imagine. Our sponsors are looking at a return on their original investment of something approaching 800% over the next decade.

For a while there it looked as though salinity was the one environmental problem we would not be able to solve. By 2025, dry land salinity had claimed almost 18 per cent of our cultivated land. Salt in Adelaide’s drinking water, where my parents still live, had reached the World Health Organization’s maximum safety levels. It was shocking.  

There have been many costly attempts to remedy salinity of course. Possibly the biggest disappointment was the massive and costly Wonthaggi plant that started up in 2012 which was supposed to have had an initial capacity of 410 megalitres a day. Successive governments, as you know, have ploughed more and more money into promising initiatives. I guess they’ve all helped to some extent. Who knows what proportion of our land would be lost without these efforts? But you are correct in that none of them have really cracked the problem in the long-term - until now.

Why do you think that was Nick? What is it in our thinking that focuses on short-term expediency rather than the long-term future?  

Oh, hold on. You’re putting words into my mouth. And I can’t accept the proposition that we ignore the long view. Today’s science is a fast moving body of knowledge and we are always finding new ways of combining different aspects of science to create more viable solutions to problems. You’ve only to look at history. It doesn’t matter how tough the problem, science always finds a way of dealing with it. It is this scientific capability that is so beneficial to society.

Can you give our listeners some concrete examples?

Sure. Remember 2008 when we decided to de-stock much of the interior of sheep and cattle on advice from CSIRO researchers? That worked very well in the region and it certainly allowed the recovery of some arid-zone ecosystems and increased organic matter in soils.  

As I recall Nick, the social impact on the families who had farmed these lands for generations was calamitous.

Well it’s true we really hadn’t given that side of things much thought. But we’re scientists, not sociologists. We can’t be held accountable for non-scientific problems. And solve scientific problems we do. Take the “daughterless” project for example. In 2010, the introduction of the latest research from leading gene technologists in the UK enabled Aussie farmers to use various anti-fertility techniques, including an immunosterilisation technique known as “daughterless”, to control pests ranging from mice to cane toads.  You must remember that? It created quite a hullabaloo in the press. It was very successful.

I do remember that Nick.  But I also seem to recall that, although the situation improved for a while, there were some problems associated with these techniques spreading to domestic animals.

Well, yes that was a surprise for us. All of the experimental research indicated that the cross-species transference would be within tolerable limits and would not have a widespread impact on total populations. We are learning that the application of controlled research on a wide scale can have unforeseen impacts. But we always find a solution – just as we did through the development and application of hormone implants in the females of reproductive age. This also helped overcome normal sterility. So I think you’ll agree that the benefits in this case have far outweighed the costs, and produced a valuable new industry for Australia. The sale of implants and implant expertise has reinvigorated several country towns and created a budding new Australian export industry. And there are many other new experiments continuing to show similar promise for the sustainability of the Australian rural sector.

Why don’t we hear much about these experiments? Surely the community has a right to engage in serious debate about such issues, just as scientists have an obligation to explain to us the options we have as a society – especially when it comes to new technologies? How can we the public trust the experts if we aren’t included in the conversation?

It is a challenge for science – to hold back research and implementation when we know there are benefits because we need to engage the community first. I guess scientists are more interested in the science and solving problems than in trying to market our work to the community. There is so much to be done.  Spending precious time persuading government and commercial sponsors to put money up for research is bad enough. They certainly won’t entertain the funding of pure research nowadays. There always has to be a commercial outcome to raise any interest at all. So I guess we’ve learned to keep our business out of the public eye until we’re certain it works. 

Surely you run a great risk in not including non-scientists in the process?

There are calculated risks in everything we do. I don’t see how including non-scientists can really achieve much other than slowing the process down. Science is difficult for some people to understand. Scientific research is complex work. That is why we have experts. What good does it do to try to explain this to ordinary people? Aren’t we better to find the solutions and then present them to people? Overall I believe the community is interested in our results and the benefits from scientific research. All of our technological developments, scientific breakthroughs, health and aging...  All of these are due to the work of our scientists. I’ll agree that we need to communicate better. But it is a perennial dilemma I’m afraid, and one that our commercial backers are not really prepared to fund. Its solutions they demand - not public relations. Look, scientists have tried hundreds of things that you won’t necessarily have heard about. Take feral pests for instance. Wild cats, rabbits, cane toads…  Now there’s a problem. We’ve trying everything we know to combat that one. Your airwaves would be clogged if we talked about every approach that we’ve ever tried!

But in spite of all these efforts, the cane toad problem today is far worse than it’s ever been!  

Indeed. It is proving to be a diabolical problem. But there are promising research indications that the borscevits strain of blood sucking insects imported from Antigua might combat the growing plague.  There are a number of other promising approaches each looking at specific aspects such as diet, predators and habitat. It is a difficult issue but I’m optimistic that we will find an answer sooner or later. You must remember that we’ve achieved an enormous amount during the past 25 years. I’m thinking of organic fertilisers, satellite resource intelligence, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy... The public recognises the value of robust science, and when provided with good evidence will support it. They will even change their minds about some things.  Remember the public outcry in the first decade of the new millennium over genetically modified foods! Most fresh produce and processed foods are genetically modified now. The initial public outcry was just because people were misinformed – they didn’t have all the facts. Greenies on a mission, I always said! We have to be realistic. People can rely on science to provide huge benefits for society. For example, we’ve enriched oilseed with omega-3 fatty acids to ward off cardiovascular disease and created drought-resistant cereals. It’s all environmentally benign agriculture naturally. What’s more Australia is now recognised as one of the most efficient producers of GM foods in the world. Where would we be without those exports!  

I’ve always understood that the shift away from intensive farming techniques in 2005, coupled with the complete ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock, was really just following the lead set by the EU in 2004?

That is partly true. This policy actually came about as a result of pressure from the EU. They asked the WTO to examine the legality of Australia’s strict quarantine regulations, claiming the process was nothing more than disguised protectionism. That was a difficult one for the Minister as she had to squeeze free trade and Australia’s “clean and green” image into the same quarantine bottle!  Then there was the BSE outbreak in the EU, you’ll recall.  All was well for a time, although it was a bit of a balancing act. But there were good scientific reasons for the use of antibiotics, as was proven by the particularly nasty outbreak of Salmonella poisoning that led to the collapse of the Australian pork industry. Now everyone is eating GM soybean that looks and tastes like pork. So it has found public acceptance now – thanks to another scientific discovery that created another Australian industry and saved a whole community.

Now that everything in our lives is so commercial (even scientific research and technology is motivated by short-term profit) how does your Institute find funding to work on those projects that may be less commercial, but socially desirable? How do you fund the work you are doing in Africa, for example.

As I said before, there is no such thing as pure scientific research these days.  There are simply no resources available for things like that, unless you can find a private benefactor of course. The people who get the grants are those that large corporations will back. So we are forced to focus on the more commercial outcomes of our work. This becomes a barrier when commercial profit is finite. Our African project is a good example. We’ve been using a combination of gene cloning and biomimicry techniques to try and find solutions to some of Africa’s most scary health problems. This is leading-edge stuff. Historically there has been no money available for this kind of thing because those people most in need, African peasants, can’t afford to pay for the solution. When profit is the only motive it is inevitable that society as a whole suffers.  And they demand profits – they don’t sense a responsibility to provide health care for Africans. These days the only way to work on these problems is when political will bows to the pragmatic entrepreneur – in this case the Gates-Buffet Foundation, which has a record of assisting the world’s poor.

And yet, isn’t it ironic that if account were taken of our rampant use of polluting fossil fuels, industrialized countries would have totted up an environmental debt of around one thousand billion dollars to the highly indebted poor nations, such as those in Africa.

Yes indeed, it doesn’t make sense does it? But on a more positive note, those countries have also benefited from the science. Increasingly, globalization has brought new industry, new crops and new water technologies to poorer countries. So they are benefiting too. And the salinity project will eventually have spin-offs for the drought stricken countries of the third world. Now that we have a commercial solution and are in production, the technology will become more widely available. I understand negotiations are currently underway to begin production of the nanomembrane in several developing countries.

Nick, now that the salinity project is coming to a conclusion, at least from a research point of view, can you tell us what is next in the pipeline?

I feel an obligation to help reverse the decision that was made way back in 2015 when a meeting of some of the world’s leading scientists in Luxembourg voted to abandon the so-called “precautionary principle” that has guided scientific endeavor for the past couple of centuries. 

Why did they take this risk?  

At the time most scientists, and politicians for that matter, felt a need to focus all available resources and energy on a massive effort to overcome the planet’s worst environmental and health problems. We needed solutions and we needed them fast. Remember global warming and pollution had become a real threat by then. In Australia we’d already lost the battle to save the Great Barrier Reef and salinity was considered a lost cause. So there was nothing to lose and everything to gain.  

Was there any single factor informing that decision?

It depends upon your point of view. It’s true that from around 2030 the various forms of human cloning and stem cell farming being practiced precipitated a few problems we hadn’t foreseen. One of these was a new family of mutant viruses. As usual, the alarmist media hype backed the scientific community into a corner and I think it was the reaction of some prominent scientists to that issue which resulted in the Luxembourg decision. A few skeptics warned of dire consequences. But scientists have always had immense confidence in robust science. We know that science can solve most of the world’s problems - sooner or later. And at the time I think we genuinely thought that these few instances arose from a small number of research projects that turned out not to be as sound as we had thought. If the science is sound, then the risk is small. Unfortunately though, it seems that many of the solutions adopted, especially by some small commercially minded labs in the Eastern European Union and the US, weren’t adequately tested before being brought into use. The commercial pressure to get to market, together with the releasing of controls…  Well, as you can see I think it was a bad decision. As a result a few chronic ailments have emerged that we don’t fully understand. And there are some outbreaks of old diseases, like hepatitis C, for example, that have come back to haunt us in new guises. But there are numerous research projects focusing on these issues and I am confident that we will crack them very shortly.

Doesn’t that mean that abandoning the “precautionary principle” was rather reckless?

I don’t know that it was reckless. I think at the time that we thought it was an acceptable risk. The need for the solutions was so great - remember we were faced with very big environmental and health problems. And initial research findings were so promising. You’re right that there were instances where we were proven wrong. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.  

I’m not sure that Janine Field, the Fox News journalist who contracted a new form of hepatitis, despite being inoculated before an assignment in Afghanistan, would agree with you – or the thousands of people who took the same Merck vaccine in good faith.

Yes this was an unfortunate instance, but I don’t think you can blame science for this one. I understand that Ms Field has sued Merck & Co, who made the vaccine and that they recalled batches of ineffective hepatitis in pre-filled syringes in March. You’ll recall that the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, claims Merck "negligently manufactured, distributed and sold the recalled vaccine which provided absolutely no protection against the disease"..  So let’s be quite clear, this is obviously the result of poor manufacturing and quality control, not poor science.  That said, I do believe that the commercial pressure on science now to get to market quickly, and the removal of controls over production and distribution of scientific products, allows for less than desirable practices. I would like to see some control over those things, to put the brakes on just a little so that situations like this don’t happen.

And on the environmental front we are still left with impending ecological disaster if we don’t act quickly?

Yes. Things do go in cycles don’t they? 

So what’s the answer?

The attack on scientific expertise is insidious as it is an attack on excellence and rational thinking per se. We must remember that science is impartial and objective. It is the only logical basis we have for decision-making. So attacking science gets us nowhere. I guess I would advocate a more rational approach and a return to the past in terms of the “precautionary principle”. Now is the time to be providing the time and the frameworks for sound scientific research, reinforcing the need for robust thinking, and sufficient testing. We need to ensure good science, not undermine all science.

But do we have the luxury of time to be so cautious?

Possibly not. But I really know of no better way.

Dr Nick Mitchell, thanks so much for your time today. And as for your exotic viruses project, I’m sure our listeners empathize with your efforts to help the world’s poor in ways that contribute to their quality of life. Good luck.  

Next week on this program we will be talking to NASA scientist James Goode about his work on the self-repairing chemical lasers currently deployed in the Earth’s atmosphere to protect us from the terrorist activities of rogue states. This is Harry Drummond signing off for today. Take care and stay happy…