Awakening resistance & developing solutions requires awakening awareness. Art: copyleft 2017 Sandy Sanders
My critique of almost everything in 2020 that gets on a screen or piece of paper regarding environmental issues is that: 1) there are no complete big picture views that makes it possible to understand the true nature of current conditions; 2) the details of our problems are incomplete, do not include a brief overview of all problem areas & technologies and end up being biased toward some political or profit objective axe to grind; and 3) possible worst of all, there are almost no policy platform solutions advocated or argued to present a scenario which becomes worthy of prosecuting.
I am a long time observer and fan of science and a social activist/artist in earnest since 2000. I grew up idolizing Bucky Fuller in the 60's and took to his prescient view of universal global solar as inevitable by my 30's (1981). Whoa... was i wrong, as the Reagan/Thatcher devolution drove us right into a Neo-Gilded Age of insane proportions. Since Reagan, I have watched in horror as capitalism has occupied democratic republics and every activity of social production via communications media capitalist brainwashing to preemptively halt all self-ruling democratic egalitarian socialism. This is obvious today to all those who backed Sanders and now feel cheated.
I believe we need big picture holistic views of modern capitalist civilization that cite all the problems and then list possible solutions, scenario-ing a sustainable future. Below is a list of issues and solutions I believe are commonly left out of contemporary environmental presentations including the "Planet of the Humans" film and pretty much everything i have ever seen or heard, except from Green parties or Socialists that seemingly never get any airtime.
Below are my content proposals for a more holistic view of our 21st Century environmental crisis, including proposed solutions.
1) BACKGROUND: Since the enclosure movement in England in the 1300's, capitalism has evolved technologically to occupy, colonize and deconstruct all democratic republics worldwide into solely serving 1% profit objectives. The 1.5 billion Earth population of 1900 was the last date of a sustainable human footprint. The mantra of capitalist growth for profit is manifested by increased consumer and worker populations. All capitalist activity since 1900 has at it's root population growth to feed profit. The World Wars and violent recession cycles of capitalism are attempts to reproduce ever more profit on an over-resourced, over-populated planet. This capitalist conflict/war-to-profit modality includes taking over governments and media to avoid the public's solution to these crisis cycles: socialism and the end of capitalist hegemony. Because of capitalist political intervention, the 99% have no democracy to decide our own policy remedies. Those elected serve the profit objectives of the 1%. We are left with unregulated, unmitigated policies serving capitalism rather than serving the social needs of humanity. My opinion is that capitalism has inverted from a growth seeking entity to a parasitic consumer of human assets, demanding obedience, without which it would collapse. This is the underlying condition which has prevented all sustainable social and environmental policies to come to the table of public discussion, much less to fruition. Will we ever be able to adaptively create a sustainable planet from the current unregulated destruction under the current dysfunctional republics cloaking capitalism?
2) Because of the capitalist "civilization" conditions above, we exist in a misinformation environment controlled through limited access to the truth (the best available information assiduously sought after) from 95% of broadcast, publication and internet media owned by the 1%. The 5% that does reach out for the truth is useful and the only vehicle for the 99% to compile the facts necessary for informed discussion and to develope solutions and provide informed consent.
3) What I believe to be a coherent list of most overlooked and under-reported environmental problems and solutions is as follows:
- Nuclear energy is a species terminal technology with 250,000 year radioactivity that is virtually impossible to store safely (this knowledge is a fact within the scientific community since the 1960's no matter what we hear from MSM), so this solution is out.
- Carbon energy sources are terminally polluting and resource exhausting, centrally controlled by capitalists with massive propaganda, subsidies and the State acting as enforcer on their behalf. So this solution is out.
- Solar, wind & wave energy sources are free. The solutions to harvesting these sources for energy must be non-polluting and cost effective. Paul Hawken's "Natural Capitalism" advocates first designing downstream end products first, then working upstream to engineer the environmental conforming steps to achieve the total desired results. This is the opposite of typical capitalist product development. They are not solutions, they are linear produced products sold to us to make profit. My vision of solar is universal residential and business building rooftops distributing energy at site of creation with neighbor sharing. Any grid must definitely not be SMART (with remote control 5G RF, AI, robots, drones, 1% surveillance and god knows what else) but merely low tech backup for emergency situations. Where is the discussion of ARTIFICIAL LEAF technology that efficiently produces hydrogen for storage and after hours use directly from sunlight? To extrapolate we could have tanks in our basements next to the water heater and tanks in vehicles using clean hydrogen to produce electricity. Hello? Wind and Wave technologies need to be designed so animals and humans are unaffected by propellers and noise. [These are all doable if we put our tax revenues into solving these problems. Instead we spend 70+% of our US Income Tax Revenues every year prosecuting US world empire destabilizing foreign countries and regions with Defense/State/Spy spending. Add in 40 years of 1% de-taxation and incremental austerity and we see the republic and it's 99% economically drowned in the bathtub.]
- Require Cradle-to-Cradle manufacturing in every sector.
- Car-Free Cities, block by block community vehicle sharing and the insurance infrastructure to make it so. Free Public Transportation will triple volume and lower cost per unit to an insanely useful degree. Society already subsidizes Public Transportation up to 80% so this is a no-brainer. Triple the national train tracks and trains, and have separate shipping and passenger tracks with subsidized passenger tickets. This will increase ridership and lower pollution and traffic. With passenger vehicles shared and limited in numbers, all could be electric powered by solar hydrogen, identified above. "Natural Capitalism" also described a process to build passenger vehicles with only 10% of the physical resources now used. Bicycles and trike cargo bikes should be everywhere. Restrict air flight to maximum lifetime miles until non-polluting.
- Require skylights in every building via Building Codes and tax incentives. All architects and contractor contracts must include profit incentives for sustainable low-energy-requiring-environments with the greatest incentive going to the highest efficiency while maintaining highest quality environments for humans, including plants and nature inside buildings. [What we see with linear capitalist product evolution is greater profit and speed but proprotionately reduced quality and longevity. Successfully sustainable energy environments must be higher quality for humans, to the point of transparency.]
- A Carbon Tax driving down CO2 and toxic environmental impacts of all kinds by profit or punish of industry with revenues diverted to low income people so they are not negatively impacted.
- Universal Dark Skies. Public lighting shoots 75% of light where it's not intended. The Dark Skies movement advocates directing light only where needed. Humans get stars to see at night as a quality of life benefit!
- Make all workplaces vote on becoming democratically run worker collectives. If workplaces choose to remain authoritarian so be it, but worker collectives will organize their work and products to be beneficial to themselves and their communities eliminating toxicity, harm and stupid useless products. [See the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain for hugely successful example.]
- Convert capitalist republics into Direct Democracies where the people vote their own policies and budgets based upon providing for the social needs of humanity, not private profit. Under this scenario the 99% would oversee technical professional employees replacing politicians to obey directives on policy & budget implementation or be fired. Until we can design a ground up Direct Democracy. (Visit my Direct Democracy ground-up project here for more information:
[www dot sandys dot art/peoples_policy+budget_directives_ballot_2018 dot html]
- We need to discuss limiting families to a 2 child maximum via income incentive, which could through attrition slowly lower global poulation over 3 generations to 3 billion? This would relieve the capitalist population/profit growth pressure and replace it with a slower, higher quality egalitarian life for all humans, plant, animal, land & sky. [Just imagine halving the population to find all of the readymade housing, material and tools to reuse with greatly less need to manufacture!]
[Note: I have written Bill McKibben with a list like this above asking why 350.org does not advocate specific policy solutions that they know through research and study will work to remedy climate change. His reply? To paraphrase, 'we can't do that, the politicians need to do it'. To me this is totally unacceptable, inexcusable and in fact to be a very questionable form of magical thinking.]
The Green and Socialist Parties across the world have published excellent lists of policies like these but they get zero airplay on MSM. Among many ideas, Public Banking, Taxing the Rich, Free Public Education through College, Government limits on housing ownership and prices, basic services socialized, removes our society from being a 1% capitalist CA$1N0 thwarting humanities evolution to a sustainable Spaceship Earth providing for the social needs of humanity.
We need more films, reporting, documention, and discussion of the above possibilities to get the 99% onboard for collectively created (everybody in!) Ecotopia.
Sandy Sanders
2020 Eugene, Oregon