Radical Community Agriculture

SUBHEAD: Reconnecting people to growing of their own food may prove to be a radical means of healing.

By Jared Spears on 22 July 2022 in Resilience -
(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-22/the-radical-roots-of-community-supported-agriculture/)


Image above: Photo promoting education in organic farming.  (https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/organic-farming-degrees-careers/).

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of those rare ideas which combine transformative potential with an elegant simplicity. The CSA model of funding and sustaining locally-rooted agriculture has grown exponentially around the globe over the past four decades. Since the first formal CSA at Robyn Van En’s Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, CSAs have become a household fixture across the US and elsewhere; the most recent estimate by the USDA (2012) counted approximately 13,000 CSA farms in the US alone.

The success of community-supported farming has coincided with rising demand for organic food since the late 1970s. But the model’s popularization has meant that, sometimes, CSAs can be misrepresented as ‘just another way’ for consumers to purchase fresh, seasonal food. Important elements embedded into the CSA model, such as that of shared risk among members, make the arrangement more than merely transactional. In fact, the origins of the CSA movement in America have radical roots, drawn from the prominent environmental movement and a subculture dissatisfied with the prevailing economic system.

A 1985 paper newly digitized from the Schumacher Center archive, “Community Supported Food Systems”, clarifies the deeper motivations which brought CSAs to the US in their present form. It is a timely reminder of the transformative potential the broader concept of Community Supported Industry still holds today – especially in light of our urgent need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions and foster resilience in our supply chains.

Given renewed interest in the concepts of local food security and food sovereignty as principles of climate action and economic justice, it is worth revisiting the transformative potential of the CSA model as grasped by those who first put the idea into action.

Importing the CSA model from Switzerland

The community-supported farming movement popularized in the 1980s had multiple antecedents around the globe. With examples of localized farming initiatives from Chile, to Japan, to rural Black communities in the Southern US, this movement may be best thought of as a spontaneous, distributed reaction to the conditions of globalized food markets. At the same time, growing concern around the health impacts of chemical pesticides, as well as the environmental costs of fossil fuel-based fertilizers, added impetus to the organization of organic farming at a more human scale.

That said, the formalized CSA model which subsequently spread across the US and beyond was pioneered in the Southern Berkshires, in the state of Massachusetts. And as the “Community Supported Food Systems” paper shows, its character was highly informed by models developed earlier in Switzerland. The ethos and organizing principles of these Swiss examples were documented and brought to Massachusetts by one Jan Vander Tuin.

Vander Tuin, a champion of pedal-powered transport and car-sharing, would later go on to make his mark advocating for appropriate technology in transportation. But before all that, he was a disillusioned farm laborer looking for alternatives. As Vander Tuin recalled in a 1992 article in RAIN Magazine, he went to Switzerland in the early ‘80s from the US having “felt burned economically… with an eye open for alternatives to market agriculture.” As he described the attraction of Switzerland at that time:

The early 1980’s were inspiring years for Swiss activists. The youth were rebellious, and citizens at large asked questions of the nation that epitomizes capitalism. I saw many evolving solutions to problems that I, coming from the States, had written off as unsolvable.”

After some time working first-hand on an organic farm outside Zürich, Vander Tuin was directed to a successful producer-consumer food co-op in Geneva, which had been inspired by the cooperative movement in Chile during the Allende administration. Vander Tuin called the project the most radical food co-op group he had ever encountered: it “addressed almost every problem I’d encountered in modern farming.” This project’s philosophy went beyond ecologically sustainable practices and pesticide-free produce, addressing the steep economic challenges faced by organic farming in an era of big, corporate agri-business. 

The basic notion that consumers personally cooperate with producers to fund farming in advance, he wrote “makes for more efficient use of land… and much less stress for farmers…” In short, Vander Tuin recognized that this model made organic farming for local consumption not just economical, but also more elegant and communitarian – in a word, more beautiful.

What drove Vander Tuin, as expressed in the paper, is “the feeling that existing food infrastructures are hopelessly entangled in the societal/cultural systems, especially the ‘free’ market.” Rather than wait for planners and experts, Vander Tuin noted how, in the Swiss examples, “concerned consumers and frustrated food workers” decided to provide responsibly-grown organic food for themselves. Shared values such as organic growing and energy-conscious distribution were identified from the outset. Everything down to how shares were calculated – based on the amount of produce the average non-vegetarian consumes per year – underscores the ambition for local self-reliance in food production.

The document also highlights a strong desire for economic fairness at every step in CSA practices. The costs of start-up investment and land would “ideally…be divided up equally (or by sliding scale).” 

 In the Swiss example, wages for farm labor were to be estimated at “the average wage of worker in region – not banker unfortunately” Vander Tuin added with a dose of humor. “The emphasis in all economic thinking,” it concludes, “was not to work the maximum profit principle but on the need/cost coverage principle. This meant more trust and more participation.”

Finding like minds in the Southern Berkshires

Vander Tuin documented these practices, eager to bring them back to the US for implementation. He caught wind of a group in the Southern Berkshires who had set up a sort of buying club for locally-grown produce, including a handful of local growers meeting the demand. The Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy (S.H.A.R.E.) was a community micro-loan program which grew out of the activities of the E.F. Schumacher Society (precursor to the Schumacher Center) in South Egremont. 

Vander Tuin became aware of the group, according to Schumacher Center co-founder Susan Witt, after reading a news article about their novel SHAREcropper initiative. Community-members would pool to list requests for locally grown produce in the SHARE newsletter, enabling them to identify farmers to grow the food locally. Those growers, in turn, secured demand for their crops in advance.

In other words, SHAREcroppers was managing, in an ad-hoc way, what Vander Tuin envisaged as a systematic alternative to corporate, mono-crop agriculture.

When Vander Tuin presented his proposal to members of S.H.A.R.E., they promptly sent him down to the road to meet one of their growers: Robyn Van En, who ran Indian Line Farm. Robyn not only held equally radical ambitions, but possessed the roll-up-her-sleeves attitude needed to make them a reality. With a community around them dedicated to the cause and willing to help see through the implementation, they could set to work.

Having moved to the Southern Berkshires several years earlier from California, Van En was pursuing her own alternative vision for growing at Indian Line. She brought deep ethical convictions about humanity’s relationship with nature to inform the early CSA movement. She later articulated the ‘Ideals of Community Supported Agriculture’ for a CSA manual in such terms:

Agriculture… is the mother of all our culture and the foundation of our well-being. Modern farming…driven by purely economic considerations, has driven the culture out and replaced it with business: agriculture has become agribusiness… Our ideals for agriculture come to expression in the biodynamic method of farming which seeks to create a self-sustaining and improving ecological system in which…everything has its place in the cycle of the seasons… The community involvement in the rhythms of the seasons and the celebrations connected with them will also enable us to find our proper spiritual connection to nature again.”

With a new agricultural ethic clear from the start, Van En also recognized early on a need for a new economic approach as well. As she later described: “I knew there had to be a better way…something cooperative, that allowed people to combine their abilities, expertise, and resources for the mutual benefit of all concerned.” 

 When S.H.A.R.E. members introduced her to Vander Tuin in 1985, they “only had to talk for a few minutes,” according to Van En, to know that what he’d brought back from Switzerland articulated just the sort of community framework she’d been looking for. As she later summarized:

The prices we pay for food may be cheaper than ever, but the hidden costs… are being paid [in other ways]. Unlike agribusiness, which has the motto: ‘The end (profits) justifies the means (exploitation)’, CSA’s motto is: ‘The means (community) assures the end (quality food).’”

Planting the seeds of the CSA movement

The group’s first venture in 1985 involved shares for apples and cider from the orchard adjacent to the present-day Schumacher Center. After the growing season, shareholders were invited to the autumn harvest in a spirit of celebration. (Vander Tuin reportedly even designed and built a pedal-powered cider press for the occasion). Producers and consumers were brought together in relationship with the land and its produce, creating space for community while proving the viability of the CSA model.

The following season, Indian Line Farm became the first fully-fledged CSA in the US. Credit for the success of the model in the Southern Berkshires goes to the many members of the community who supported Indian Line in various ways. 

But it was only the beginning for Van En: an educator by training, she would go on to become a tireless advocate of the CSA model and biodynamic farming and a vocal critic of industrialized agribusiness. The propagation of the CSA model across North America in the following decades owes much to Robyn’s conviction and endurance.

A final aspect of the CSA concept, originally outlined by Vander Tuin, remained only a theory until Indian Line Farm came on the market in 1998, one year after Van En’s untimely passing. At that time the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires and two area farmers formed a partnership with a local Nature Conservancy chapter to purchase the farm. Placing the land into the Community Land Trust in perpetuity was yet another innovation. 

Effectively decommodifying the land on which community food was grown while permitting the leaseholder to own the value of improvements, the move made good on an idea which, in Vander Tuin’s original proposal, appeared speculative: “community influenced land stewardship in the form of a ‘Community Land Trust’,” he wrote, seemed “applicable and desirable” compared to “normal ‘property’ arrangements.”

Today, the CSA model articulated by Van En and Vander Tuin remains a vital, community-based alternative to the host of health, environmental, and economic issues posed by industrial agribusiness. No wonder that the growth of CSAs has reportedly surged since 2020. Growing healthy, ecologically-sound food locally is, for a multitude of reasons, the most economical way for a community to provide for this most elemental of needs. 

Cutting out intermediaries and import dependency is a cornerstone of community food security and food sovereignty, as marginalized communities around the country and the world increasingly recognize. Combined with agro-ecological farming methods, relocalized agriculture holds great potential in our efforts to address climate change: reducing carbon emissions and helping to sequester carbon already in our atmosphere. And by layering on the innovative Community Land Trust model, affordable access to farmland can be secured for future generations of growers as well.

At the most human level, reconnecting people around the growing of their own food may prove to be among our most effective means of healing our widespread sense of disconnection from nature and community. It offers the promise for any community to rediscover how working in harmony with nature, rather than merely seeking to exploit it, can be as economical as it is beautiful.

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Korea in Conflict

SUBHEAD: "From Colonization to Militarization" a free lecture December 7th at 6-8pm at KCC.

By Kip Goodwin for Island Breath on 29 November 2017 - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/11/korea-in-conflict.html)


Image above: Representatives of North and South Korea meeting in Demilitarized Zone in 2015 peace talks. From (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34039187).

WHAT:
 "From Colonization to Militarization: Korea in Context: Past and Present".  A free lecture with powerpoint presented by KCC History Professor Mark Ombrello and Kauai journalist Jon Letman.   Followed by snacks, refreshments, and a lively discussion.

WHERE:
Kauai Community College
One-Stop Center (the first building on the right when you drive into the Puhi campus
3-1901 Kaumualii Highway
Lihue, Hawaii 96766
808-245-8225

WHEN:
 Thursday, 7 December 2017, 6pm - 8pm

SPONSOR:
Kauai Alliance for Peace and Justice, and KCC History and Philosophy Club
For more information, email ombrello@kauai.edu or call 808-245-8328

Dr. Ombrello will provide a brief overview of modern (20th century) history of colonialism in Korea from the overthrow of the kingdom by Japan in 1910 to World War ll.

Mr. Letman will speak on current affairs with focus on the highly militarized state of the two Koreas. At a time of heightened tension with the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, speakers will also examine Kauai's role in the militarization of South Korea and northeast Asia.

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Lay a hand on something

SUBHEAD: Because the Boss Man is right around the corner and coming on fast, and he sounds pissed.

By Brian Miller on 6 August 2017 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2017/08/06/lay-a-hand-on-something/)


Image above: A father and son review their work together. From (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3829996/Why-s-fun-dad-mum-Mothers-enjoy-parenting-hard-work-fathers.html).

The old black man told me, “Lay a hand on something when the Boss Man comes around.” I was spending my summer between seventh and eighth grade stripping and waxing floors at the church my family attended, and it was my first real job.

The boss who was supervising me, had come around a corner and found me idly staring into space.

What may have seemed like cynical advice to offer a 12-year-old boy was actually meant as a well-intended reminder that we should stay focused on our work.

Throughout my high school years, summers were spent working construction jobs in the Louisiana swelter. I can’t say I was a towering example of the ideal worker, but both early jobs helped me build the muscle memory of an ethic that prepared me to enter into and navigate through adulthood.

It is an ethic that seems sadly out of fashion these days. As a culture, we seem to have slid into a pattern of expecting less and less from our children, both physically and intellectually, and allowing them to remain children for longer and longer.

Likewise, if my observations from years in the bookstore business are any indicator, the dominant genre of books read by adults now is the category of Young Adult.

In my career and on the farm, I have worked with many young people embarking on their first job, and it is increasingly hard to find new workers (and I’ll extend that range up into their late 20s) who have ever done any type of work.

Most have zero muscle memory for what is required to be responsible and productive either in the workplace or as citizens.

That undeveloped set of skills carries over into what are supposed to be the “responsible years”: how does a person learn, without having experienced work, to make independent decisions, take orders, discern truth from fiction, stay focused and busy, develop the stamina to play a constructive part in a culture over many decades?

Disciplined work habits established early on affect all aspects of our culture, from school and the workplace to the arts and civic sphere.

That there is a drift backwards into adolescence that pervades our culture — whether it’s reading cartoonish literature designed for an underdeveloped mind or a political sphere that is dominated by…well, let’s not go there — is extremely alarming.

Now, all this fretting may be the special preserve of a man who just this week will reach his mid-fifties, but I do worry what this downward spiral means for our culture, for our species.

I continue to be haunted by a work I read recently, “Ends of the World,” a science history of deep time and the cycles of extinctions on our planet.

For me, the book serves to highlight both our insignificance and the childish hubris of our species that imperils our brief reign here.

While it may not allow us to avert a crisis, it just may be time to return to the practice of “laying a hand on something.” Because the Boss Man is right around the corner and coming on fast, and he sounds pissed.

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Surviving Shit-Town

SUBHEAD: For a horticulturist, and full-time worry-wart, who lived in a Alabama town he came to call S-Town.

By Richard Heinberg on 7 April 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-04-07/surviving-s-town/)


Image above: Graphics on John B. McLemore’s website hosting his podcast "S-Town" From (https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/1).

[Author's spoiler alert: If you haven’t yet listened to S-Town poodcast you might want to do so before reading the following essay, which discusses key facts revealed during the course of the story.]

I admit, it was strange to hear my name mentioned in John B. McLemore’s suicide note. John, the central character in what is currently the most popular podcast on iTunes (S-Town, narrated by This American Life producer Brian Reed and produced by the creative team behind Serial) was—as you already know if you’ve listened—a polymath antiquarian horologist, horticulturist, and full-time worry-wart, who lived in a tiny Alabama town he came to call Shit-Town. His story is riveting, complex, and touching.

Some commenters, while admiring the podcast, believe it’s too revealing of the intimate life of a person who is deceased and therefore incapable of giving or withholding permission. But it makes for compelling listening in any case.

My own conflicted thoughts about John McLemore’s story center on his obsession with global issues—climate change, resource depletion, debt, and the end of cheap energy.

After a quick search, I learned he was an occasional commenter on Post Carbon Institute websites. Also, in Chapter 4 of the podcast, he references a short video about the history of fossil fuels that is almost certainly our 2010 video, 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds.

John was, to put a name to it, a doomer.

I was not his sole or even primary source of news about the planet’s perilous prognosis; John also named authors James Howard Kunstler and Guy McPherson in his final manifesto.

Further, John’s suicide probably followed not just (or even mostly) from his immersion in dismal information, but also from long-term, self-inflicted mercury poisoning and decades of lonely sexual repression in a tiny, homophobic Southern town.

Still, as I’ve written on several occasions, the facts and analysis I’ve been dishing for the past couple of decades make for dreary reading.

I sometimes call it toxic knowledge: once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.

There’s only one justification for inoculating my readers with this awful news: the hope that it will act as a mental vaccine leading to behavioral change that both reduces the severity of the coming global crises and increases survival chances for the knowledge recipient.

Denying the information—or never having been exposed to it in the first place—offers no solace: the crises will come anyway.

In John’s case, hopes for enhanced survival prospects failed to bear fruit, though his story may perhaps inspire some podcast listeners to explore his sources of information and respond in a more pro-social fashion.

I can’t help but feel some of John’s sadness, anger, pain, and frustration. It surely resonates with my own. However, I have never for a moment wished I didn’t know what I know, and I don’t think John would have preferred “blissful” ignorance either.

If I have a regret, it is that John failed to find a community in which knowledge could lead to collective action. There was no Transition Shit-Town.

That was no doubt partly due to the oppressiveness of the local rural Alabama culture, but John bore some responsibility too—he could have moved somewhere more friendly and supportive.

As it was, he was left to stew alone in the most depressing of infusions: Guy McPherson’s “we’re-all-going-to-die-in-20-years” extremist interpretation of climate data.

Informed collective action is healing. That’s why my organization calls its most public website Resilience.org and not We’reScrewed.net.

I’m sorry for your pain, John. I hope at least a few listeners to S-Town learn something valuable from it.

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Why EROEI matters

SUBHEAD: The role of net energy in the survival of human civilization is absolutely crucial.

By Ugo Bardi on 7 March 2017 for Cassandra's Legacy -
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.in/2017/03/why-eroei-matters-role-of-net-energy-in.html)


Image above: This chart was shown by Charlie Hall in a recent presentation that he gave in Princeton. It seems logical that the more net energy is available for a civilization, the more that civilization can do: Say, build cathedrals, create art, explore space, and more. But what's needed, exactly, for a civilization to exist? Maybe very high values of the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) are not necessary. From original article [IB Note: An EROEI of 10:1 is required to support education, health care, art and and other features advanced features of civilization].

A lively debate is ongoing on what should be the minimum energy return for energy invested (EROEI) in order to sustain a civilization. Clearly, one always wants the best returns for one’s investments. And, of course, investing in something that provides a return smaller than the investment is a bad idea.

So, a civilization grows and prosper on the net energy it receives, that is the energy produced minus the energy required to sustain production. The question is whether the transition from fossil fuels to renewables could provide enough energy to keep civilization alive in a form not too different from the present one.

It is often said that the prosperity of our society is the result of the high EROEI of crude oil as it was in mid 20th century. Values as high as 100 are often cited, but these are probably widely off the mark.

The data reported in a 2014 study by Dave Murphy indicate that the average EROEI of crude oil worldwide could have been around 35 in the past, declining to around 20 at present. Dale et al. estimate (2011) that the average EROEI of crude oil could have been, at most, around 45 in the 1960s Data for the US production indicate an EROEI around 20 in the 1950s; down to about 10 today.

We see that the EROEI of oil is not easy to estimate but we can say at least two things:

1. Our civilization was built on an energy source with an EROEI around 30-40.
2. the EROEI of oil has been going down owing to the depletion of the most profitable wells.

Today, we may be producing crude oil at EROEIs between 10 and 20, and it keeps going down.

Let’s move to renewables. Here, the debate often becomes dominated by emotional or political factors that seem to bring people to try to disparage renewables as much as possible. Some evidently wrong assessments, for instance, claim EROEIs smaller than one for the most promising renewable technology, photovoltaics (PV).

In other cases, the game consists in enlarging the boundaries of the calculation, adding costs not directly related to the exploitation of the resource. That’s why we should compare what’s comparable; that is, use the same rules for evaluating the EROEI of fossil fuels and of renewable energy.

If we do that, we find that, for instance, photovoltaics has an EROEI around 10. Wind energy does better than that, with an average EROEI around 20. Not bad, but not as large as crude oil in the good old days.

Now, for the mother of all questions: on the basis of these data, can renewables replace the increasing energy expensive oil and sustain civilization? Here, we venture into a difficult field: what do we mean exactly as a “civilization”? What kind of civilization? Could it build cathedrals?

Would it include driving SUVs? How about plane trips to Hawaii?

Here, some people are very pessimistic and not just about SUVs and plane trips. On the basis of the fact that the EROEI of renewables is smaller than that of crude oil, considering also the expense of the infrastructure needed to adapt our society to the kind of energy produced by renewables, they conclude that “renewables cannot sustain a civilization that can sustain renewables.” (a little like Groucho Marx’s joke “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”).
Maybe, but I beg to differ.

Let me explain with an example. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the energy source that powers society has an EROEI equal to 2. You would think that this is an abysmally low value and that it couldn’t support anything more than a society of mountain shepherds, and probably not even that.

But think about what an EROEI of 2 implies: for each energy producing plant in operation there must be a second one of the same size that only produces the energy that will be used to replace both plants after that they have gone through their lifetime. And the energy produced by the first plant is net energy that goes to society for all the needed uses, including cathedrals if needed.

Now, consider a power source that has an EROEI= infinity; then you don’t need the second plant or, if you have it, you can make twice as many cathedrals. So, the difference between two and infinity in terms the investments necessary to maintain the energy producing system is only a factor of two.

It is like that: the EROEI is a strongly non-linear measurement. You can see that in the well-known diagram below (here in a simplified version, some people trace a vertical line in the graph indicating the “minimum EROEI needed for civilization”, which I think is unjustified)):


Image above: This chart was shows the relationship of the percentage of energy used in the production of more energy and the net energy then available for consumption for other purposes. [IB Note: Continued use of new oil gas and coal will wreck the ecosystem and that solar is the breaking point of 10:1 EROEI. Tar sands and biofuels are off the chart and cannot support civilization].

You see that oil, wind, coal, and solar are all in the same range. As long as the EROEI is higher than about 5-10, the energy return is reasonably good, at most you have to re-invest 10% of the production to keep the system going.

It is only when the EROEI becomes smaller than ca. 2 that things become awkward. So, it doesn’t seem to be so difficult to support a complex civilization with the technologies we have.

Maybe trips to Hawaii and SUVs wouldn’t be included in a PV-based society (note the low EROEI of biofuels) but about art, science, health care, and the like, well, what’s the problem?

Actually, there is a problem. It has to do with growth. Let me go back to the example I made before, that of a hypothetical energy technology that has an EROEI = 2.

If this energy return is calculated over a lifetime of 25 years, it means that the best that can be done in terms of growth is to double the number of plants over 25 years, a yearly growth rate of less than 3%.

And that in the hypothesis that all the energy produced by the plants would go to make more plants which, of course, makes no sense.

If we assume that, say, 10% of the energy produced is invested in new plants then, with EROEI=2, growth can be at most of the order of 0.3%. Even with an EROEI =10, we can’t reasonably expect renewables to push their own growth at rates higher than 1%-2%(*).

Things were different in the good old days, up to about 1970, when, with an EROEI around 40, crude oil production grew at a yearly rate of 7%. It seemed normal, at that time, but it was the result of very special conditions.

Our society is fixated on growth and people seem to be unable to conceive that it could be otherwise. But renewables, with the present values of the EROEI, can’t support a fast growing society. But is that a bad thing? I wouldn’t say so. We have grown enough with crude oil, actually way too much. Slowing down, and even going back a little, can only improve the situation.

(*) The present problem is not to keep the unsustainable growth rates that society is accustomed to. It is how to grow renewable energy fast enough to replace fossil fuels before depletion or climate change (or both) destroy us. This is a difficult but not impossible task.

The current fraction of energy produced by wind and solar combined is less than 2% of the final consumption (see p. 28 of the REN21 report), so we need a yearly growth of more than 10% to replace fossils by 2050.

 Right now, both solar and wind are growing at more than a 20% yearly rate, but this high rate is obtained using energy from fossil fuels. The calculations indicate that it is possible to keep these growth rates while gradually phasing out fossil fuels by 2050, as described here


• Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy.

Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it

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Student debt problem is "yuuuge"!

SUBHEAD: Long-term implications of loaning a trillion dollars to young people who have no assets.

By Shaun Bradley on 1 February 2017 for Anti Media -
(http://theantimedia.org/student-loans-problem-much-bigger/)


Image above: Students wearing graduation caps with their debt taped on top. From (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-02/america%E2%80%99s-student-debt-problem-much-bigger-anybody-realized).

The Department of Education recently released a memo admitting that repayment rates on student loans have been grossly exaggerated. Data from 99.8% of schools across the country has been manipulated to cover up growing problems with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans.

New calculations show that more than half of all borrowers from 1,000 different institutions have defaulted on or not paid back a single dollar of their loans over the last seven years.

This comes in stark contrast to previous claims and should call into question any statistics provided by government agencies. The American people haven’t fully grasped the long-term implications of loaning a trillion dollars to young people who have no credit or assets.

Increases in tuition seen over the past two decades have become a point of controversy and angst for those who don’t fully understand the contributing factors.

Between 1995 and 2015, the average cost of a public, four-year university skyrocketed by well over 200%. Although federal student aid programs are often championed as a necessity, they have been instrumental in making higher education unaffordable. The opportunity to pay for college by working a part-time job evaporated as soon as huge sums of money were handed out to anyone with a pulse.

Since students no longer pay their tuition upfront, colleges are able to raise prices in perpetuity, knowing the government will step in and make credit easier and easier to obtain. As an added bonus, outstanding student loans account for 45% of the government’s financial assets.

Subsidizing the lives of an entire generation has turned personal growth and advancement into a choice instead of a necessity.

After all, why take risks or work your way up from the bottom when with just a signature, the life you’ve always wanted could be laid at your feet? It’s not hard to figure out why so many people are tempted to take advantage of the instant gratification that comes from student loans, but like everything else in life, they have a price.

The same safety net that delays the anxiety of the future also ensures that monthly payments will be owed for decades to come. Procrastinating when faced with pivotal life decisions is an instinct that used to be overcome as a teenager, but today it is worn like a badge of honor well into adulthood.

The policies of intervention haven’t stopped at federal aid, and loan forgiveness is now being offered to those willing to work in the public sector or at a non-profit for ten years.

This perverse incentive only serves to drive those desperately in debt further towards government dependence. Productive jobs are created when the needs of others are met in the free market, not by joining the ranks of the state for self-preservation.

The idea that success comes exclusively through attending a university has created a stigma against some of the most valuable occupations.

The lack of real skill sets has lead to a shortage of welders, electricians, carpenters, and other trade workers. Instead of learning through experience with apprenticeships, many students have embraced four years of sleeping in, drinking heavily, and getting an increasingly useless degree.

While there are many fields that require specialized training, the surge in popularity of degrees like sociology, anthropology, and communications clearly illustrate a disconnect between the needs of the economy and the skills of the incoming workforce.

The normalization of this system has blinded individuals to their own potential. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and thinkers are those who have bypassed traditional education.

Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and hundreds of other innovators achieved greatness by breaking from predictable paths to knowledge.

Instead, passion and experience were the foundations that gave them the confidence needed to make groundbreaking strides. What it means to learn and be educated is changing rapidly as technology develops, and it will eventually force the State to adapt with it.

Albert Einstein was able to spot the innate flaws in the education system even back in 1936, but it’s doubtful he could have fathomed how far things would go:

“I want to oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which one has to use later directly in life. The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible…The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost.”

Those who do achieve their degrees often do so without developing important skills like critical thinking and individual discernment. The scariest part about this revelation is that almost 90% of outstanding private loans are co-signed by parents, making this an intergenerational problem.

As the instability of pension funds, social security, and economic conditions continue, any additional burdens passed onto the baby boomers could have far-reaching ramifications.

The vast distortions in information that this report exposes should motivate everyone to become an independent fact checker. The only way to reform this broken system is to shift the pursuit of knowledge towards the direction of each individual’s passion instead of creating more cogs for the machine.

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Canoe Plant BINGO & BBQ Event

SUBHEAD:Benefit for the Farm-To-School Lunch Program at Kawaikini Public Charter School.

By Linda Pascatore on 1 September 2016 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/09/canoe-plant-bingo-bbq-event.html)


Image above: Classroom with students and teacher at Kawakini School. From ().

WHAT:
Canoe Plant BINGO and Barbeque to benefit the Farm-to-School Lunch Program at  Kawaikini Public Charter School in Līhuʻe

WHERE:
At Hanai Market, at the old Kojima Store location in downtown Kapaa on Kuhio Highway.

WHEN:
Saturday, September 10th, from 5-8 PM

WHO:
Sponsored by Malama Kauai.  Those who cannot make the event but would still like to donate to the program can mail donations to:

Malama Kauai, ATTN: Kawaikini Lunch
PO Box 1414
Kilauea, HI 96754

Or donate online at www.malamakauai.org.

For more info contact:
Malama Kauai Youth & Food Programs VISTA
Sara Hopps, at sara@malamakauai.org or telephone 828-0685 x18.


Image above: Poster for Bingo event. Click to enlarge for printing. From Malama Kauai.

Bingo cards are only $1 Donation, and participants can win prizes such as gift certificates, jewelry, activity passes and more from local businesses including Kaua’i Beer Company, Hawaii Reef Guides, Olympic Cafe, Oasis, Studio Barre & Soul, Marriott Resort  and Aloha Aina Juice Cafe and much more. Locally sourced food will be prepared by Hanai’s culinary team, including Chef Adam Watten.

Since losing its school food vendor when Lanakila Kitchen closed in 2015, Kawaikini has had no consistent lunch program to provide its students.

This also means that students cannot use their reimbursements for free or reduced lunch through the National School Lunch Program, causing hardship for some families.

Last school year there was an interim lunch program, where the students were provided low-cost meals twice per week, which included donated produce from Malama Kauai, Moloaa Organicaa, and other farms.

Meals were prepared by Aunty Lorna Poe, who has three grandchildren at the school. Students are also provided fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks through the Village Harvest gleaning program.

“We are actively seeking a new food program vendor,” says Samuel Ka’auwai, Principal at Kawaikini NCPCS . “Because of the low reimbursement rate and smaller budget we have, it’s been difficult to find a vendor willing to provide meals three days a week when they know they won’t make a large profit.

We’re hopeful that the right person will come along or that we can raise more funding to incentivize someone to kokua (help).”
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Scientific education and stupidity

SUBHEAD: Cause and effect - scientific education may be a cause of political stupidity.

By John Michael Greer on 13 July 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/07/scientific-education-as-cause-of.html)


Image above: Niel Degrasse Tyson defends Scientology and Bush administration science record for the DailyBeast. From (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/31/neil-degrasse-tyson-defends-scientology-and-the-bush-administration-s-science-record.html).

While we’re discussing education, the theme of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid Report, it’s necessary to point out that there are downsides as well as upsides to take into account.

The savant so saturated in abstractions that he’s hopelessly inept at the business of everyday life has been a figure of fun in literature for many centuries now, not least because examples of the type are so easy to find in every age.

That said, certain kinds of education have more tightly focused downsides. It so happens, for example, that engineers have contributed rather more to crackpot literature than most other professions.

Hollow-earth theories, ancient-astronaut speculations, treatises arguing that the lost continent of Atlantis is located nearly anywhere on Earth except where Plato said it was—well, I could go on; engineers have written a really impressive share of the gaudier works in such fields.

In my misspent youth, I used to collect such books as a source of imaginative entertainment, and when the jacket claimed the author was some kind of engineer, I knew I was in for a treat.

I treated that as an interesting coincidence until I spent a couple of years working for a microfilming company in Seattle that was owned by a retired Boeing engineer.

He was also a devout fundamentalist Christian and a young-Earth creationist; he’d written quite a bit of creationist literature, though I never heard that any of it was published except as densely typed photocopied handouts—and all of it displayed a very specific logic: given that the Earth was created by God on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 in the morning, how can we explain the things we find on Earth today?

That is to say, he approached it as an engineering problem.

Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job, and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a solution.

What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem. That’s why, to turn to another example, you get entire books that start from the assumption that the book of Ezekiel was about a UFO sighting and proceed to work out, in impressive detail, exactly what the UFO must have looked like, how it was powered, and so on. “But how do we know it was a UFO sighting in the first place?” is the one question that never really gets addressed.

It’s occurred to me recently that another specific blindness seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard sciences.

 The downside to such an education, I’d like to suggest, is that it makes you stupid about politics.

Plenty of examples come to mind, and I’ll be addressing some of the others shortly, but the one I want to start with is classic in its simplicity, not to mention its simple-mindedness. This is the recent proposal by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I quote in full:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

That might be dismissed as just another example of the thought-curtailing properties of Twitter’s 140-character limit—if a potter makes pots, what does Twitter make?—except that Tyson didn’t say, “here’s the principle behind the constitution, details to follow.” That’s his proposed constitution in its entirety.

More precisely, that’s his sound bite masquerading as a constitution. An actual constitution, as anyone knows who has actually read one, doesn’t just engage in a bit of abstract handwaving about how decisions are to be made. It sets out in detail who makes the decisions, how the decision-makers are selected, what checks and balances are meant to keep the decision-makers from abusing their positions, and so on.

If Donald Trump, say, gave a speech saying, “We need a new scientific method that consists solely of finding the right answer,” he’d be mocked for not knowing the first thing about science. A similar response is appropriate here.

That said, Tyson’s proposal embodies another dimension of cluelessness about politics. Insisting that political decisions ought to be made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.

Consider the recent British referendum over whether to leave the European Union. That decision could not have been made on the basis of evidence, because all sides, as far as I know, agreed on the facts.

Those were that Britain had joined the European Economic Community (as it then was) in 1973, that its membership involved ceding certain elements of national sovereignty to EU bureaucracies, and that EU policies benefited certain people in Britain while disadvantaging others. None of those points were at issue.

The points that were at issue were values on the one hand, and interests on the other.

By values I mean judgments, by individuals and communities, about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s desirable and what isn’t, what can be tolerated and what can’t. These can’t be reduced to mere questions of evidence. A statement such as “the free movement of people across national borders is good and important” can’t be proved or disproved by any number of double-blind controlled studies.

It’s a value that some people hold and others don’t, as is the statement “the right of people to self-determination must be protected from the encroachments of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.” Those values are in conflict with each other, and it was in large part over such values that the Brexit election was fought out and decided.

By interests I mean the relative distribution of costs and benefits. Any political decision, about any but the most trivial subject, brings benefits and has costs, and far more often than not the people who get the benefits and the people who carry the costs are not the same. EU membership for Britain was a case in point.

By and large, the affluent got the majority of the benefits—they were the ones who could send their children to German universities and count on border-free travel to holidays in Spain—and the working poor carried the majority of the costs—they were the ones who had to compete for jobs against a rising tide of immigrants, while the number of available jobs declined due to EU policies that encouraged offshoring of industry to lower-wage countries.

What made the Brexit referendum fascinating, at least to me, was the way that so many of the pro-EU affluent tried to insist that the choice was purely about values, and that any talk about the interests of the working poor was driven purely by racism and xenophobia—that is to say, values.

As I’ve noted here in numerous posts, the affluent classes in the industrial world have spent the last four decades or so throwing the working poor under the bus and then rolling the wheels back and forth over them, while insisting at the top of their lungs that they’re doing nothing of the kind.

Wage earners, and the millions who would be happy to earn a wage if they could find work, know better. Here in America, for example, most people outside the echo chambers of the affluent remember perfectly well that forty years ago, a family with one working class income could afford a house, a car, and the other amenities of life, while today, a family with one working class income is probably living on the street.

Shouting down open discussion of interests by insisting that all political decisions have to do solely with values has been a common strategy on the part of the affluent; the outcome of the Brexit referendum is one of several signs that this strategy is near the end of its shelf life.

In the real world—the world where politics has to function—interests come first. Whether you or I are benefited or harmed, enriched or impoverished by some set of government policies is the bedrock of political reality.

Evidence plays a role: yes, this policy will benefit these people; no, these other people won’t share in those benefits—those are questions of fact, but settling them doesn’t settle the broader question. Values also play a role, but there are always competing values affecting any political decision worth the name; the pursuit of liberty conflicts with the pursuit of equality, justice and mercy pull in different directions, and so on.

To make a political decision, you sort through the evidence to find the facts that are most relevant to the issue—and “relevant,” please note, is a value judgement, not a simple matter of fact.

Using the relevant evidence as a framework, you weigh competing values against one another—this also involves a value judgment—and then you weigh competing interests against one another, and look for a compromise on which most of the contending parties can more or less agree.

If no such compromise can be found, in a democratic society, you put it to a vote and do what the majority says. That’s how politics is done; we might even call it the political method.

That’s not how science is done, though. The scientific method is a way of finding out which statements about nature are false and discarding them, under the not unreasonable assumption that you’ll be left with a set of statements about nature that are as close as possible to the truth. That process rules out compromise.

If you’re Lavoisier and you’re trying to figure out how combustion works, you don’t say, hey, here’s the oxygenation theory and there’s the phlogiston theory, let’s agree that half of combustion happens one way and the other half the other; you work out an experiment that will disprove one of them, and accept its verdict. What’s inadmissible in science, though, is the heart of competent politics.

In science, furthermore, interests are entirely irrelevant in theory. (In practice—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.) Decisions about values are transferred from the individual scientist to the scientific community via such practices as peer review, which make and enforce value judgments about what counts as good, relevant, and important research in each field.

The point of these habits is to give scientists as much room as possible to focus purely on the evidence, so that facts can be known as facts, without interference from values or interests. It’s precisely the habits of mind that exclude values and interests from questions of fact in scientific research that make modern science one of the great intellectual achievements of human history, on a par with the invention of logic by the ancient Greeks.

One of the great intellectual crises of the ancient world, in turn, was the discovery that logic was not the solution to every human problem. A similar crisis hangs over the modern world, as claims that science can solve all human problems prove increasingly hard to defend, and the shrill insistence by figures such as Tyson that it just ain’t so should be read as evidence for the imminence of real trouble.

Tyson himself has demonstrated clearly enough that a first-rate grasp of astronomy does not prevent the kind of elementary mistake that gets you an F in Political Science 101. He’s hardly alone in displaying the limits of a scientific education; Richard Dawkins is a thoroughly brilliant biologist, but whenever he opens his mouth about religion, he makes the kind of crass generalizations and jawdropping non sequiturs that college sophomores used to find embarrassingly crude.

None of this is helped by the habit, increasingly common in the scientific community, of demanding that questions having to do with values and interests should be decided, not on the evidence, but purely on the social prestige of science.

I’m thinking here of the furious open letter signed by a bunch of Nobel laureates, assailing Greenpeace for opposing the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice. It’s a complicated issue, as we’ll see in a moment, but you won’t find that reflected in the open letter. Its argument is simple: we’re scientists, you’re not, and therefore you should shut up and do as we say.

Let’s take this apart a step at a time. To begin with, the decision to allow or prohibit the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice is inherently political rather than scientific. Scientific research, as noted above, deals with facts as facts, without reference to values or interests.

“If you do X, then Y will happen”—that’s a scientific statement, and if it’s backed by adequate research and replicable testing, it’s useful as a way of framing decisions. The decisions, though, will inevitably be made on the basis of values and interests.

“Y is a good thing, therefore you should do X” is a value judgment; “Y will cost me and benefit you, therefore you’re going to have to give me something to get me to agree to X” is a statement of interest—and any political decision that claims to ignore values and interests is either incompetent or dishonest.

There are, as it happens, serious questions of value and interest surrounding the genetically engineered rice under discussion. It’s been modified so that it produces vitamin A, which other strains of rice don’t have, and thus will help prevent certain kinds of blindness—that’s one side of the conflict of values.

On the other side, most seed rice in the Third World is saved from the previous year’s crop, not purchased from seed suppliers, and the marketing of the GMO rice thus represents yet another means for a big multinational corporation to pump money out of the pockets of some of the poorest people on earth to enrich stockholders in the industrial world.

There are many other ways to get vitamin A to people in the Third World, but you won’t find those being discussed by Nobel laureates—nor, of course, are any of the open letter’s signatories leading a campaign to raise enough money to buy the patent for the GMO rice and donate it to the United Nations, let’s say, so poor Third World farmers can benefit from the rice without having to spend money they don’t have in order to pay for it.

These are the issues that have been raised by Greenpeace among others. To respond to that with a straightforward display of the logical fallacy called argumentum ad auctoritatem—“I’m an authority in the field, therefore whatever I say is true”—is bad reasoning, but far more significantly, it’s inept politics.

You can only get away with that trick a certain number of times, unless what you say actually does turn out to be true, and institutional science these days has had way too many misses to be able to lean so hard on its prestige.

I’ve noted in previous posts here the way that institutional science has blinded itself to the view from outside its walls, ignoring the growing impact of the vagaries of scientific opinion in fields such as human nutrition, the straightforward transformation of research into marketing in the medical and pharmaceutical industry, and the ever-widening chasm between the promises of safety and efficacy brandished by scientists and the increasingly unsafe and ineffective drugs, technologies, and policy decisions that burden the lives of ordinary people.

There are plenty of problems with that, but the most important of them is political. People make political decisions on the basis of their values and their perceived interests, within a frame provided by accepted facts.

When the people whose job it is to present and interpret the facts start to behave in ways that bring their own impartiality into question, the “accepted facts” stop being accepted—and when scientists make a habit of insisting that the values and interests of most people don’t matter when those conflict, let’s say, with the interests of big multinational corporations that employ lots of scientists, it’s only a matter of time before whatever scientists say is dismissed out of hand as simply an attempt to advance their interests at the expense of others.

That, I’m convinced, is one of the major forces behind the widening failure of climate change activism, and environmental activism in general, to find any foothold among the general public.

These days, when a scientist like Tyson gets up on a podium to make a statement, a very large percentage of the listeners don’t respond to his words by thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know that.” They respond by thinking, “I wonder who’s paying him to say that?”

That would be bad enough if it was completely unjustified, but in many fields of science—especially, as noted earlier, medicine and pharmacology—it’s become a necessary caveat, as failures to replicate mount up, blatant manipulation of research data comes to light, and more and more products that were touted as safe and effective by the best scientific authorities turn out to be anything but.

Factor that spreading crisis of legitimacy into the history of climate change activism and it’s not hard to see the intersection.

Fifteen years ago, the movement to stop anthropogenic climate change was a juggernaut; today it’s a dead letter, given lip service or ignored completely in national politics, and reduced to a theater of the abusrd by heavily publicized international agreements that commit no one to actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of the rhetoric of climate change activism fell into the same politically incompetent language already sketched out—“We’re scientists, you’re not, so shut up and do as you’re told”—and the mere fact that they were right, and that anthropogenic climate change is visibly spinning out of control around us right now, doesn’t change the fact that such language alienated far more people than it attracted, and thus helped guarantee the failure of the movement.

Of course there was a broader issue tangled up in this, and it’s the same one that’s dogging scientific pronouncements generally these days: the issue of interests. Specifically, who was expected to pay the costs of preventing anthropogenic climate change, and who was exempted from those costs?

That’s not a question that’s gotten anything like the kind of attention it deserves—not, at least, in the acceptable discourse of the political mainstream. We’ll be talking about it two weeks from now.

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Oceans 4 Peace Events

SUBHEAD: A mission to educate the public about the adverse effects of the 2016 RIMPAC.

By Juan Wilson on 11 June 2016 for Oceans4Peace -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/06/oceans-4-peace-events.html)


Image above: Still frame of ship bow plowing the ocean. From video "Sonic Sea" trailer below.

WHAT:
RIMPAC 2016 - The US Navy is sponsoring the armed navies of 24 countries to come to Hawaiian waters and practice naval war. They call these war exercises, RIMPAC, short for rim of the Pacific. These foreign navies will blast whale-killing active sonar, shoot missiles, shoot torpedoes, drop bombs, plant mines, sink ships, test new experimental weapons and otherwise harass, pollute and upset our ocean environment and the creatures who live in it. Oceans4Peace will sponsor teach-ins, a film series, contacts with decision makers and other public education events.

WHERE:
Around the Hawaiian Islands and the Pacific Missile Research Facility on Kauai.

WHEN:
June and July 2016

ACTION:
 Sign our petition to stop RIMPAC 2016
 "Oceans4Peace : Stop the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises"

To sign click here:
(https://www.change.org/p/oceans4peace-stop-the-rim-of-the-pacific-rimpac-exercises?recruiter=1616584&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive)

Oceans4Peace is sponsoring discussions, teach-ins, a film series and other public education events. See calendar below or go to(http://www.oceans4peace.org/page/page/8901763/2016-6.htm) or

RIMPAC IMPACT
Panel Discussion
Friday, June 17th 2016  6:00pm
Kapaa Library
Technology Effects on Whales - Kalasara Setaysha - Oceans4Peace
The Threats to Coral - Dr. Katherine Muzik - Marine Biologist NTBG
Expansion of US Militarism in the Pacific - Juan Wilson - Kauai Sierra Club

MOVIE SERIES
"Sonic Sea" A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Thursday, June 23rd 6:00pm  2016
Koloa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

"Sonic Sea" A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Friday, June 24th 7:00pm 2016
Kapaa Library
Discussion with  Kalasara Setaysha

“Sonic Sea” A film about noise in the ocean, especially Navy sonar.
Sunday, June 26th 6 :00pm 2016
Princeville Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

“Why We Fight”  A film about the US military.
Friday, July 1st 1016  6:30pn
Koloa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

"Oceans" Disney documentary film about the ocean.
Saturday, July 9th 1:00pm
Hanapepe Library
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

“Why We Fight”A film about the US military.
Sunday, July 10th 1:00pm
Kapaa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Rick Cooper

“Why We Fight”  A film about the US military.
Friday, July 15th, 6:30pnm
Hanapepe Library
Discussion Rick Cooper

“Oceans”  Disney documentary film about the ocean.
Sunday, July17th 206 1:00pm
Kapaa Neighborhood Center
Discussion with Gorden Labedz

Oceans4Peace is a Coalition of Kauai Conservation and Social Justice groups whose Mission was to educate the general public about the adverse effects of the 2016 RIMPAC, Rim of the Pacific, Naval war exercises.

The Coalition continues to monitor the US Navy for abuses to the ocean, its inhabitants and ecosystem. With Hawaii the center of the US Naval Fleet and Kauai the center of Naval war research, our Coalition continues to update its educational Process.

Presently, the on-going threat to our Ocean is the increase of the US Naval presence in the Pacific, "the Pacific Pivot," especially in the new Marine Sanctuary of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

The Navy has excluded all human activity there, except their own. They admit to using mid frequency and low frequency active Sonar in this so-called 'Protected Area'. This extreme sound blasting Sonar has been shown to cause harm to all ocean life, especially to marine mammals that rely on hearing for their existence.

The Navy, in partnership with the South Korean and Japanese governments, continues to build military bases only a few hundreds of miles from China, at Jeju Island in South Korea and Oura Bay, Okinawa, Japan. Both projects necessitate environmental destruction on a massive scale. We can ill afford this military buildup or the arms race with China it will provoke.

Our 'Oceans 4 Peace Coalition' is seeking the real answers, which enable us to report the truth. This page will keep you updated on US Navy impacts on our Ocean.


Video above: Still frame of ship bow plowing the ocean. From video "Sonic Sea" trailer below. From (https://youtu.be/T-jabL64UZE).

Oceans4Peace supporting organizations
Kohola Leo (Whale Voice)
Kauai Alliance for Peace and Social Justice
Surfrider Foundation
Kauai Sierra Club


Video above: "RIMPACT IMPACT" film shown by Juan Wilson at Oceans4Peace Panel Discussion 6/7/14. From (http://youtu.be/NLZx9fg7Gvg).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Oceans for Peace Pacific Pivot Panel 6/18/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Prepare for RIMPAC 2016 War in Hawaii 5/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to "take" millions of mammals 5/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: US court RIMPAC Impact decision 4/3/15
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 Impact Postmortem 10/22/1
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC 2014 in Full March 7/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: 21st Century Energy Wars 7/10/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War on the Ocean 7/3/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Voila - World War Three 7/1/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/28/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC IMPACT 6/8/14
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC Then and Now 5/16/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The Asian Pivot - An ugly dance 12/5/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/13/13
Ea O Ka Aina: End RimPac destruction of Pacific 11/1/13 
Ea O Ka Aina: Moana Nui Confereence 11/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again  9/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy license to kill 10/27/12 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sleepwalking through destruction 7/16/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Okinawa breathes easier 4/27/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Navy Next-War-Itis 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: America bullies Koreans 4/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Despoiling Jeju island coast begins 3/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Jeju Islanders protests Navy Base 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaii - Start of American Empire 2/26/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Korean Island of Peace 2/26/12   
Ea O Ka Aina: Military schmoozes Guam & Hawaii 3/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: In Search of Real Security - One 8/31/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Peace for the Blue Continent 8/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Shift in Pacific Power Balance 8/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RimPac to expand activities 6/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC War Games here in July 6/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Pacific Resistance to U.S. Military 5/24/10
Ea O Ka Aina: De-colonizing the Pacific 5/21/10
Ea O Ka Aina: RIMPAC to Return in 2010 5/2/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Living at the Tip of the Spear 4/15/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam Land Grab 11/30/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Guam as a modern Bikini Atoll 12/25/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GUAM - Another Strategic Island 11/8/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Diego Garcia - Another stolen island 11/6/09
Ea O Ka Aina: DARPA & Super-Cavitation on Kauai 3/24/09
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 - Navy fired up in Hawaii 7/2/08
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2008 uses destructive sonar 4/22/08
Island Breath: Navy Plans for the Pacific 9/3/07
Island Breath: Judge restricts sonar off California 08/07/07
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 sonar compromise 7/9/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2006 - Impact on Ocean 5/23/06
Island Breath: RIMPAC 2004 - Whale strandings on Kauai 9/2/04
Island Breath: PMRF Land Grab 3/15/04  

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Coddling of white male capitalists

SUBHEAD: Privileged white-supremacist patriarchal Americanized men extract wealth from all else.

By Robert Jensen on 5 March 2016 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-08/the-coddling-of-the-capitalist-white-supremacist-patriarchal-american-mind)


Image above: An 18th century "Portrait of a Gentleman" unsigned in the style of the Anglo American School. From (http://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2598B/lots/207).

[Author's note: This is an edited version of a talk given to Common Ground for Texans in Austin, TX, March 5, 2016.]

To avoid being conned, politically and intellectually, it’s important to examine how a debate is framed and what ideology is advanced by that framing. What is the scope of the question? How was the direction of the inquiry decided? Who set the boundaries of the conversation?

Let’s ask those questions in regard to the contemporary conversation in the United States about allegedly dangerous trends on college campuses concerning “political correctness,” “microaggressions,” and “trigger warnings.”

A spirited public discussion of these issues was touched off most recently by an article in The Atlantic magazine titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” I want to challenge the framing and ideology of that article, and of the dominant culture, by suggesting a better title would be “The Coddling of the Capitalist, White-Supremacist, Patriarchal American Mind.”

CAPITALIST
Educators are right to be concerned about non-rational or anti-intellectual factors that can shut down the conversation in a classroom; emotion and politics can impede open inquiry.

Let’s use that as a definition of political correctness — a narrowing of the scope of inquiry, especially to avoid certain controversial ideas out of a fear of offending someone, falling out of step with peers, or being disciplined by authorities.

There is one academic unit on most every campus where political correctness severely limits students and undermines the quality of intellectual work: The business school.

I have been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin for 24 years, and I ask students from the business school how often in their classes they are asked to challenge, or presented with a challenge of, capitalism.

The answer typically is “never.” Despite the many trenchant critiques of capitalism, the easily demonstrated failures of the system, and experiments with alternatives, it appears that the word “business” in “business school” actually means “business as it is narrowly defined in capitalism.” This limit, policed with an efficiency that Stalin would envy, is so routine that even in the sectors of a business school where one might assume challenges are welcome, such as courses on ethics or social responsibility, serious critiques are rarely presented.

Another troubling example of this ideological subordination to capitalism comes in most economics departments.

While there are challenges to capitalism allowed at some schools — those departments typically are described as “heterodox,” which implies that most economics departments are “orthodox,” a term most often used to describe adherence to religious doctrine — most economics curricula embrace neo-classical economics, which simply means the doctrines of contemporary capitalism.

Once again, the critiques, failures, and alternatives are ignored or sidelined.

Let’s pause to ponder the consequences of this narrow approach to the crucial question of how we produce, distribute, and consume goods and services.

One of the key problems facing the human species — I would say the central problem — is that a high-energy/high-technology world is undermining the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain large-scale human societies, and that a continued pursuit of “growth” on a finite planet will intensify the multiple, cascading ecological crises that are unfolding around us. In other words, modern mass-consumption capitalism is ecocidal.

Some economists recognize this and have for several decades been advocating “ecological economics,” an approach based on the notion that the laws of physics and chemistry (let’s call that “reality”) trump the theories of economists (let’s call that “the theories of economists”).

Ecological economics is reality-based.

One might think that all of economics, a field that likes to think of itself as a science, would embrace real scientific principles.

One might assume that ecological economics would be a synonym for “economics for rational economists.”

Instead, it is a small subfield that is routinely ignored within the discipline.

Why would this reality-denial strategy be dominant? Because of the coddling of the capitalist mind. Capitalists apparently are so emotionally fragile and intellectually limited, that any challenge to orthodoxy feels like aggression and threatens to trigger a breakdown.

Why do we coddle capitalists? Capitalists apparently have considerable influence, perhaps because the concentration of wealth in the system allows the wealthiest capitalists to have disproportionate influence in politics through campaign contributions and in education through philanthropy.

One of the renegades, Richard Norgaard, marks the non-rational quality of orthodox economics with the phrase “the Church of Economism,” describing the contemporary economy as “the world’s greatest faith-based organization” that “replaces belief in God’s control over human destiny with the belief that markets control our fate.”

Norgaard, a central figure in ecological economics, points out that some honest economists have acknowledged the religious nature of their discipline, including Frank Knight, one of the founders of the neo-liberal Chicago school of economics, who in a 1932 article wrote:

The point is that the “principles” by which a society or a group lives in tolerable harmony are essentially religious. The essential nature of a religious principle is that not merely is it immoral to oppose it, but to ask what it is, is morally identical with denial and attack.

There must be ultimates, and they must be religious, in economics as anywhere else, if one has anything to say touching conduct or social policy in a practical way. Man is a believing animal and to few, if any, is it given to criticize the foundations of belief “intelligently.

Certainly the large general [economics] courses should be prevented from raising any question about objectivity, but should assume the objectivity of the slogans they inculcate, as a sacred feature of the system.

Political correctness is real, and the most intellectually sanitized spaces on most campuses — the business school and economics department — encourage us to roll the dice of the future of the planet based on non-rational doctrines that are more theologically than empirically based. That is a cause for concern.

WHITE SUPREMACIST
From the class politics that define the modern university, let’s turn to race, where most of the debate has been focused the past year, and start with a definition of microaggressions:

the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership. In many cases, these hidden messages may invalidate the group identity or experiential reality of target persons, demean them on a personal or group level, communicate they are lesser human beings, suggest they do not belong with the majority group, threaten and intimidate, or relegate them to inferior status and treatment.

I am not part of any identifiable marginalized groups, but I’ve spoken with many students at UT and other universities in my 24 years of teaching, and I’ve read a lot about these issues, and all this evidence leads me to conclude that microaggressions are real and often have a negative effect on students, though there is considerable individual variation in non-white students’ reactions. So, what training and/or policies should a university implement to deal with this problem?

Before we get to that question, let’s ask where microaggressions come from. In matters of race, they are a product of white supremacy, the ideological system that for 500 years has shaped the domination of the world by Europe and its offshoots, such as the United States.

White supremacy is obviously a part of our history, but there is considerable debate about how relevant that ideological system is to contemporary life.

This debate goes on at the University of Texas at Austin, where for several decades students, faculty, and community members have called for the removal of statues of Confederate officials, which have been met by spirited defenses of those public monuments.

The statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was finally removed this past summer, but statues of Robert E. Lee (leader of the Confederate Army), Albert Sidney Johnston (a Confederate officer) and John Reagan (postmaster general for the Confederacy) still stand.

Public monuments to one of the most morally depraved political units in modern history remain on the UT campus to this day.

UT is, of course, in Texas, where many people celebrated the election to the presidency of sort-of native son George W. Bush, who once joked that his success proved that “C students: You too, can be president,” reflecting his less than stellar academic record, suggesting that his admission to Yale and Harvard universities for undergraduate and master’s degrees might have been based more on family connections than on merit.

Many of the same people who raise no objection to such legacy admissions will claim that UT is admitting black and brown students who are unqualified and that this policy is unfair and/or a threat to the integrity of higher education.

More nuanced defenses of this white-supremacist ideology (“it’s about heritage, not hate” in the case of the statues, or “we should live in a meritocracy” in the case of affirmative action) have in recent years given way to more overt racist rhetoric and images, no doubt sparked in large part by the election of a black president (who, because he is black, is deemed illegitimate by some) and an economic malaise (which is easier for some to blame on immigrants than on the people who capture a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth).

So, we have mainstream institutions that find it hard to remove symbols of white supremacy from prominent positions, let alone deal with the deeper ideological manifestations, let alone deal with the material realities of racialized disparities in wealth and power.

And we see a resurgence of conservative political forces that are comfortable with more overt expressions of white supremacy.

In that context, should we ask whether some non-white students are too sensitive about microaggressions? Sure, that’s a reasonable question, but it might help to think more about the context first.

Why does the contemporary United States, liberal and conservative, find it so hard to come to terms with white supremacy? A quick review of our history helps clarify that. We know that there would be no United States if not for the nearly complete extermination of indigenous people by Europeans, the first American holocaust, an extermination program justified by the ideology of white supremacy.

We know that the United States’ move into the industrial era was supported by cheap cotton, which provided the raw material for the textile mills of New England and a commodity for sale abroad to generate capital, and that the slave system that made that possible — another crime of holocaust proportions — was justified by the ideology of white supremacy.

American dominance of the world has intensified after WWII in part because of the use of military forces in the Third World, also producing holocaust levels of death and destruction, and such wars are easier to sell when the people being killed are not white (think about terms such as gook and raghead).

There would be no country called the United States, nor would it likely be the wealthiest country in the history of the world, without these racist and/or racialized crimes. It’s not hard to see why we don’t deal with the question honestly. How does a country come to terms with the reality that its prosperity is built on such extermination, exploitation, and empire?

So far, we have avoided that reckoning, and much of white America seems determined to continue that avoidance strategy.

Should we be coddling the white-supremacist mind?

PATRIARCHAL
The contemporary debate about campus politics also has intersected with concerns about gender, including the use of trigger warnings which alert students that a reading, video, or lecture may contain material that could cause emotional distress. The mental health of rape victims/survivors was one of the first concerns that gave rise to trigger warnings.

So, let’s talk about the reality of rape.
Rape is a vastly underreported crime; most women who are raped do not go to law enforcement agencies, and therefore crime statistics tell us little about the prevalence of rape.

But the feminist movement’s activism against men’s violence led to research based on women’s experiences rather than on crime reporting, and those studies have found varying rape rates.

On a global scale, 30% of women over the age of 15 have experienced “intimate partner violence,” defined as physical, sexual, or emotional violence, based on data from 81 countries. The rate in North America is 21%. For many years, anti-rape activists in the United States quoted the statistic that one in three girls is sexually abused and that 38% of the women reported sexual abuse before age 18.

A recent review of the data by well-respected researchers concluded that in the United States, at least one of every six women has been raped at some time in her life, a figure that is now widely accepted.

Much of this sexual violence is directed at young people; in the National Violence against Women Survey, slightly more than half of the 14.8% of women who reported being raped said it happened before age eighteen.

Those statistics address acts that meet the legal definition of rape, but women and girls face a much broader range of what we can call “sexual intrusions,” sexual acts that they do not request and do not want but experience regularly — sexually corrosive messages and calls, sexual taunting on the streets, sexual harassment in schools and workplaces, coercive sexual pressure in dating, sexual assault, and violence that is sexualized.

In public lectures on these issues, I list these categories and women’s heads nod, an affirmation of the routine nature of men’s intrusions into their daily lives.

To drive home the point, I sometimes tell audiences that I have just completed an extensive longitudinal study on the subject and found that the percentage of women in the United States who have experienced some form of sexual intrusion is exactly 100%.

Women understand the dark humor — no study is necessary to confirm something so routine.

If we describe rape as “sexually invasive dehumanization” to capture the distinctive nature of the crime, then let’s ask this painful question: How much of everyday life do women experience as sexually invasive dehumanization on some level? Even more challenging, why does this situation continue even when the feminist movement has made progress on other fronts?

The answer requires us to confront patriarchy, the system of institutionalized male dominance, in which men continue to use sex and violence to control women, a strategy not only widespread in everyday life but celebrated in the routine sexual objectification and exploitation of women in mass media and the sex industries of prostitution, pornography, and stripping.

How does a society come to terms with inequality woven so deeply into the fabric of everyday life? We can’t expect to advance a challenge to patriarchy by coddling the patriarchal mind.

CONCLUSION
I have spent his entire adult life working as either a journalist or a professor; I have both principled and practical reasons for caring about freedom of expression and academic freedom. I also have been on the receiving end of attempts to limit the scope of debate because of arguments I’ve made that have challenged the conventional wisdom of both conservatives and liberals.

My antiwar writing after 9/11 led to a phone/letter campaign to get me fired, and more recently my critiques of the ideology underlying the transgender movement have led to protests of public lectures I’ve given.

In my career, I have observed the routine way that serious challenges to concentrated wealth and power are marginalized in academic life. I also have witnessed exchanges in which accusations about class/race/gender oppression are hurled without supporting evidence and potentially productive exchanges are cut off by people who think that invoking jargon ends an argument.

A phrase such as “check your privilege” can be an important reminder that people from dominant groups should think about how unearned status can limit our understanding of power dynamics, but it also can turn into a cliché that shuts down conversation.

So, my remarks today are not intended to ignore the difficult struggles on campuses over questions of intellectual openness and honesty.

• When does merely offensive speech becomes oppressive?
• When should one person’s freedom of expression, no matter how offensive, be defended and when does a pattern of abusive expression clearly undermine the ability of others to participate fully in a classroom discussion?
• How do we encourage challenges to widely accepted theories and doctrines?
• How do we model civil, respectful intellectual debate when those debates are not merely academic but have serious effects on participants in the debate?
• When should we offer students some kind of shield from the corrosive aspects of contemporary culture and when is it important for all of us to face the worst of the culture?

My remarks are intended to suggest that any discussion of how to approach these issues should first contend with the systems and structures of power that create the hierarchy, inequality, and violence at the heart of these struggles.

After nearly three decades in academic life, I am more aware than ever of how difficult it is to resolve these questions and how easy it is for all of us to feel overly confident about our own conclusions.

Still, I am confident that crafting intellectually defensible policies requires us to never stray too far from the reality of those systems and structures of power.

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