Re: EARTH MEANDERS: Viva la Earth Revolution! A Sustainable Future by All Mea...

RE: Viva la Earth Revolution! A Sustainable Future by All Means Necessary by 
Dr. Glen Barry
http://www.environmentalsustainability.info/ 

Dear Glen,

I agree with everything you said here--a lucid analysis of our global plight, 
and of the drastic, revolutionary steps necessary if humanity is to have any 
future other than mass extinction and Gaiacide.

Everything, that is, except your allowance for the possibility of violence. 
This I oppose resolutely, not only on moral principle (ahimsa) but for 
pragmatic reasons as well. As Isaac Asimov put it quite simply, "Violence is the last 
refuge of the incompetent."

Glomart, our common enemy (short for Global Market Economy), is a 
hydra-headed monster, rooted in greed, ignorance, and denial. If you lop off one head, 
ten others sprout up, all armed to the teeth. But in order to vanquish such a 
monster--the very Cancer of the Earth--we first need to understand its true 
nature.

As Bob Marley says (quoting St. Paul), "I and I no come to fight flesh and 
blood/But spiritual wickedness in high and low places."

Glomart is *not* flesh and blood, even though it is driven by flesh and blood 
human beings like Bush, Cheney, the Haliburton and Monsanto boards of 
directors, etc. But Glomart itself is pure information--a complex (mal-)adaptive 
system based on the simple arithmetical logic of money alone--More is Always 
Better; therefore To Be is to Buy, What's Mine is not Yours, and The Bottom Line is 
the Bottom Line. And that's it--the whole Glomart system is based on these 
simple tautological premises. 

And therein lies the problem: an arithmetical logic of maximization and 
privatization is fundamentally incompatible with a finite and deeply interconnected 
world. Under Glomart logic, nothing has value until it has a price. Hence 
forests have no value until they become board feet; people have no value until 
they become cheap labor or--if they can afford an education--"human capital"; 
farmland no value until it is converted to monocultural cash crops; wetlands no 
value until drained to form parking lots and malls; nature no value until 
transformed into commodities. And since more is always better, whoever exploits 
Gaia most ruthlessly and efficiently wins the game, regardless of ecological and 
social costs (which are always externalized). Hence, today, as the intrinsic 
infinite-growth logic of Glomart bumps up against the finite limits of Gaia, 
we spiral downward into a hideous, violent, global feeding frenzy on what 
remains of Gaia's once-abundant resources.

So how can we best disable and neutralize this "spiritual wickedness in high 
and low places" of which the pernicious Bush regime is merely the most visible 
symptom, not the root cause?

Again, if I had a good answer, I would have already claimed my Nobel Prize. I 
don't. 

But here is my general suggestion: Since money is the lifeblood of Glomart, 
its sine qua non, we need to start with a clear understanding of money, so that 
we can effectively choke off the lifelines of Glomart (cash flow and debt) 
and redirect these resources to healing Gaia.

What, then, is money?  A transform of information about value. The way we 
spend or invest it reflects our true values and desires--what we REALLY want, 
despite our professed ideals.

And therein lies the problem: we are all addicts; we all want more and more 
fancy stuff, just like the CEOs of Monsanto and Haliburton, and we never feel 
safe until we have even more; an infinite regress which, if anything, becomes 
even more addictive, the more you have. Glomart takes full advantage of our 
innate greed and insecurity, of course, by nurturing our addictions 27/7 with 
ceaseless advertising, all of which reinforces the same basic message: More is 
Always Better, You Are What you Own. And we fall for it--again and again.

So the roots of Haliburton, Monsanto, and the Bush regime--the roots of 
Glomart--are in each of us, every time we pull out our wallets. 

So what can we do instead?

Here's one idea. I call it "The Quiet Revolution."  It would consist, very 
simply, of a publicity campaign--an ad campaign very much emulating the most 
insidious tactics of Madison Avenue or the Bush Election Machine--only this one 
would be (ideally) self-validating and self-replicating. In other words, I 
propose to fight Glomart with its own weapon--its appeal to our wallets. Here's 
how it might work:

Imagine an ad campaign built around three themes: Good Buy, Good Work, and 
Good Will.
The general slogan would be (something like) "What is best for Gaia is also 
best for You and Me"

The Good Buy ("Good Bye to Glomart") campaign would come first. That is, we 
create a collaborative fundraising campaign for all Gaia-friendly nonprofits 
(who always are looking for fundraising ideas!) that consists of the usual 
promotional paraphernalia--coffee mugs, buttons, bumper stickers, tee shirts, etc. 
all sporting a Gaia Image and Logo, along with a message like "Join the Quiet 
Revolution: Buy Organic" or "Join the Quiet Revolution: Recycle Everything! " 
or "Join the Quiet Revolution: Go Solar"--depending on the context (and on the 
particular cause promoted by the Gaia-friendly nonprofit with whom we are 
collaborating). Couple this with a snappy website, and a DVD demonstrating the 
economic logic of the Quiet Revolution: that every time we spend money on Gaian 
(i.e. local, organic, recycled, or renewable) commodities rather than Glomart 
commodities, we make it easier and more cost effective for everyone else to do 
likewise. The next step is to get merchants themselves to buy into promoting 
the Quiet Revolution, so that more local Gaia-friendly food markets, 
restaurants, etc. could compete more effectively with the big Glomart chains.

Follow this up with a Good Work campaign, encouraging college students and 
other jobseekers to "Join the Quiet Revolution" by choosing to work for more 
Gaia-friendly employers whenever possible. One would need to develop a good 
rating system for employment prospects, to facilitate such choices. But we would 
seek not only to channel prospective employees to more Gaian employers, but also 
to change the very concept of "employment" by *creating* work within 
community-run organic gardening cooperatives, etc.

While all this is going on, we could get faith communities on board by 
including a commitment to Good Will--above all, to total nonviolence, but also a 
commitment to promoting mediation, negotiation, active citizenship, and public 
education as a substitute for hostility or confrontation, whenever possible, in 
resolving environmental disputes. Good Will could also embrace concepts like 
the Mustardseed Project--a plan to encourage faith communities to create 
equal-contribution mutual funds for allowing their members to install solar panels, 
insulation, and other Gaia-friendly innovations in their homes, and to 
encourage them to create mutual support networks for organic gardening and local 
cooperatives.

All three themes of the Quiet Revolution--Good Buy, Good Work, and Good 
Will--would be aggressively promoted through media outlets, educational materials 
for the schools, speaker series, etc. and all the Gaia-friendly nonprofits and 
for-profit enterprises would find it in their best interest to jump on the 
Quiet Revolution bandwagon.

Yet for all that, it would still be a revolution--outwardly innocuous and 
cuddly, while inwardly subversive: each dollar spent on a Gaia-friendly 
alternative is a dollar denied to Glomart. Multiply that by the billions of consumer 
dollars that flow through the US economy alone, and you can see the potential 
economic impact if it caught on. Pretty soon the captains of Glomart would be 
falling all over themselves to join the Quiet Revolution as well--but we'd have 
their number, well publicized on our websites, working in close collaboration 
with all the nonprofits who make scrutinizing corporate environmental behavior 
their main business. Hence the Quiet Revolution could lead directly, where 
necessary, to strategic boycotts and Satyagraha campaigns against entrenched 
evil regimes like Bush & Co. (Imagine yet another bumper-sticker: "Join the Quiet 
Revolution: Withhold War Taxes")

It may or may not work, but it's the best idea I've had yet for catalyzing 
the spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth...And the best thing about 
it is, it is invitational and empowering, rather than finger-pointing and 
demoralizing. Winning people over to a Quiet Revolution would always involve three 
steps: (1) the Wake Up Call (Some dramatic illustration of how bad things 
really are on Earth and hence the urgency of change); (2) Profiles of Gaian 
Visionaries (What good people are doing, right now, to pave the way to a Gaian 
future) and (3) the Quiet Revolution (What you and I can do, starting this very 
moment, every time we take out our wallet, to become part of the solution).

Best wishes,

Tom