Degrowth is Punk as Fuck

SUBHEAD: We use "degrowth" because unlike post-growth or re-growth  Goldman Sachs won't be able to co-opt it.

By Vansintjan & Bliss on 9 December 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/12/09/degrowth-punk-fuck)


Image above: Banksy piece in its original place within Detroit’s Packard Plant. Photo by Billy Voo. From (http://beltmag.com/the-fight-over-graffiti-banksy-in-detroit/).

Very serious people often tell us that the word “degrowth” is too negative. People like happy, positive, nice things. Sure, the economy is systematically destroying life on earth. But nobody wants to degrow it.

Instead, these critics prefer words like “post-growth,” “a-growth,” "re-growth", even the mythical “green growth.” They want to create a circular economy, a green economy, a new economy, a prosperity economy, well-being economy, or a steady-state economy.

What do all these terms have in common?

They’re boring.

Here’s what degrowth naysayers don’t seem to get: degrowth is actually punk as fuck. We’re nonconforming, anti-establishment, DIY punks. And we’re not trying to sound nice. Take your positivity and shove it.

The term "sustainable development" shows what happens to concepts that aren't hardcore. It's been integrated into international agreements for over two decades, yet here we are, at the precipice of reaching dozens of tipping points that will send Earth's climate spinning into chaos.

The problem wasn't that not enough people got behind sustainable development, it was that everyone got behind it because it didn't challenge anything at all. In 2014, Goldman Sachs commissioned a report “Attaining Sustainable Development of Oil and Gas in North America” (emphasis ours).

That's why we use degrowth. Goldman Sachs won't be able to co-opt it. Unlike post-growth, re-growth, or a-growth, we think degrowth has something special: that "de-" is a little middle finger at the establishment.

Very serious people shoot back that degrowth, in using the word “growth,” just strengthens the language of the status quo. All it does, according to “framing” enthusiasts, is further reinforce the dominant pro-growth “frame” that supposedly makes degrowth seem scary and bad.

To this, degrowthers respond reasonably: we actually don’t give a flying fuck. We don’t want to be fake-nice about it. We want to name and shame our enemy.

Very serious people claim that degrowth, like some punk culture, is nihilistic, that it doesn’t inspire hope or change. We denounce growth but do not describe alternative values, they say.


Image above: Banksy  trompe-l’oeil painting on a security fence in the West Bank in 2005. Photo courtesy of Banksy. From (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/banksy-was-here).

Sure, degrowth is nihilistic, but in the Nietzschean sense: a healthy refusal of the present, one that is necessary to think differently. We reject growth to make space for different concepts and values: international solidarity, the commons, financial reform, basic income, conviviality, care, to name a few.

We've done our research, and we urge for practical policy proposals, long-term utopian visions, and disobedient direct actions—because the very serious politicians aren’t listening yet. If you've come to any of the last five degrowth conferences, you'll know how forward-looking and positive degrowthers can be.

Very serious people think that punks don’t get very far: no one listens to them, no one empathizes with them. Why not focus on the establishment, why not bribe them with words that are easier to swallow?

We beg to differ. Think of the Occupy movement. With little plan beyond stirring shit up, those punks redefined politics and forced politicians to finally pay attention to inequality. Think of the Windows employees who spent their time at the office coding open-source programs, using Microsoft money to pave the way for a new kind of cyberspace: one based on sharing and mutual aid.

It wasn't the soothing March on Washington For Jobs And Freedom that convinced President Kennedy to sign the civil rights act; it was the threat of disaffected black youths rioting in the streets in every major US city.

This fall, we stood with Standing Rock. The Lakota gathered against the DAPL not to be nice, but to register their dissent, to stand in the way of a system that has tried to crush them for centuries. Their dissent delivered a striking victory against the establishment.

We understand, but don’t agree with, those who voted Brexit and Trump as a big “fuck you” to the establishment. They are punks too, and we lament that the Left has been so preoccupied with being nice, professional, and reasonable, encouraging many of these promising punks to vote for a new breed of white supremacists and oligarchs.

We think the suburbanites tinkering in their backyard are punks as well—their DIY creations objections to the industrial economy. We are in solidarity with the foot-draggers, the wildcat strikers who don’t care about their company’s competitiveness. We agree with Paul Lafargue, who scoffed at “the right to work” and demanded “the right to be lazy!”

To us, nurses, teachers, small farmers, and childcare workers are punks too. Capitalist society considers these jobs basically worthless, but people do them anyway, because fuck you, that's what they do.


Image above:  Banksy graffiti art "Kill them with Non-Violence". It's perfect to explode them with flowers and love.  A version of this graffiti was used in the original article in CommonDreams. From (http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/banksy-graffiti-art-lennon-lincoln-gandhi-roosevelt-revolution/1/612185.html).

At home, many of us degrowthers are squatters. Some of us dumpster dive and graffiti over advertising. We cook big meals for each other. We throw big weddings and big funerals. We are weirdos who’ve never quite fit in in board rooms.

Last week, one of our own presented degrowth inside the pearly halls of the UK House of Commons.

Federico Demaria, one of the co-editors of the book Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era, shared the parliamentary stage with Kate Raworth, who coined the unobjectionable phrase Doughnut Economics, Tim Jackson, who wrote Prosperity without Growth, and two of the authors of the 1972 book Limits to Growth.

Unlike the other panelists, Federico was willing to be radical, willing to think differently. The audience loved it: he wasn't boring. Of course, some of his very serious co-panelists patronized him as a big-dreaming, radical youngster.

The serious people tell us that politicians will never support degrowth. They tell us to stop acting like teenagers, put on suits, and come up with innocuous words that the representatives of every country will applaud in the UN General Assembly.

We know that sort of work is necessary. Sometimes you will find us putting on those awkwardly fitting suits and creeping through the halls of power, our tattoos and piercings and bad haircuts not very well hidden.

But that’s not our audience. Our sympathies lie with the misfits, the outcasts, the mischief-makers, the queers. They are our kind of people. And that’s why people like us: at heart, whoever feels like a political outsider is a bit of a punk.

• Aaron Vansintjan is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is an editor of the website Uneven Earth and enjoys wild fermentations, decolonization, and long bicycle rides.

• Sam Bliss is a PhD student at the University of Vermont in the Economics for the Anthropocene research initiative. He loves reading, singing, and slow travel and strongly dislikes post-environmentalism.

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When reform becomes impossible

SUBHEAD: It's cheaper and more effective to let the system collapse than squander treasure attempting reforms.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 5 November 2015 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov15/collapse-cheap11-15.html)


Image above: Album cover from the original motion picture soundtrack from the movie "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by Timothy Leary. From (http://www.crossmap.com/blogs/timothy-leary-and-lifes-meaning-6876).

Collapse begins when real reform becomes impossible. Reforms that can't be stopped by the outright purchase of politicos are watered down in committee, and loopholes wide enough for jumbo-jets of cash to fly through are inserted.

The reform quickly becomes "reform"--a simulacrum that maintains the facade of fixing what's broken while maintaining the Status Quo. Another layer of costly bureaucracy is added, along with hundreds or thousands of pages of additional regulations, all of which add cost and friction without actually solving what was broken.

The added friction increases the system's operating costs at multiple levels. Practitioners must stop doing actual work to fill out forms that are filed and forgotten; lobbyists milk the system to eradicate any tiny reductions in the flow of swag; attorneys probe the new regulations for weaknesses with lawsuits, and the enforcing agencies add staff to issue fines.

None of this actually fixes what was broken; all these fake-reforms add costs and reduce whatever efficiencies kept the system afloat. Recent examples include the banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 meltdown and the ObamaCare Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Back in 2010 I prepared this chart of The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy: as bureaucracies expand, they inevitably become less accountable, less efficient, more bloated with legacy staffing and requirements that no longer make sense, etc.

As costs soar, the bureaucracy's budget is attacked, and the agency circles the wagons and focuses on lobbying politicos and the public to leave the budget untouched.

Since accountability has been dissipated, management becomes increasingly incompetent and larded with people who can't be fired so they were kicked upstairs. Staff morale plummets as the competent quit/transfer out in disgust, leaving the least productive and those clinging on in order to retire with generous government benefits.

In this state of terminal decline, the agency's original function is no longer performed adequately and the system implodes from the dead weight of its high costs, lack of accountability, gross incompetence, inability to adapt and staggering inefficiency.

I've covered this dynamic a number of times:

Our Legacy Systems: Dysfunctional, Unreformable (July 1, 2013)
The Way Forward (April 25, 2013)
When Escape from a Previously Successful Model Is Impossible (November 29, 2012)
Complexity: Bureaucratic (Death Spiral) and Self-Organizing (Sustainable) (February 17, 2011)

This generates a ratchet effect, where costs increase even as the bureaucracy's output declines. The ratchet effect can also be visualized as a rising wedge, in which costs and inefficiencies continue rising until any slight decrease in funding collapses the organization.

Dislocations Ahead: The Ratchet Effect, Stick-Slip and QE3 (February 14, 2011)
The Ratchet Effect: Fiefdom Bloat and Resistance to Declining Incomes (August 23, 2010)
The net result of the Ratchet Effect and the impossibility of reform is this: it's cheaper and more effective to let the system collapse than squander time and treasure attempting reforms that are bound to fail as vested interests will fight to the death to retain every shred of power and swag.

Since the constituent parts refuse to accept any real reforms, the entire system implodes. We can look at healthcare, higher education and the National Security State as trillion-dollar examples of systems that become increasingly costly even as their performance declines or falls off the cliff.

This is the lesson of history, as described in the seminal book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization.

Collapse does not need to be complete or sudden. Collapse tends to be a process, not an event.

Collapse begins when you can't find any doctors willing to accept Medicaid payments, when the potholes don't get filled even when voters approve millions of dollars in new taxes, and when kids aren't learning anything remotely useful or practical despite the school board raising tens of millions of dollars in additional property taxes.

Collapse begins when real reform becomes impossible.


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Beacon in th Sand

SUBHEAD: We must not pretend we'e something other than responsible agents, capable of destroying everthing around us.

By Tyler Sage on 24 September 2015 for The Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/a-beacon-in-the-sand/)


Image above: Cropped image of painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816 – 1868) titled "Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!)". Click to enlarge. From (https://americangallery.wordpress.com/category/leutze-emanuel-gottlieb/).

We might begin with the image of American history as a great tidal wave of progress. A wave launched with the appearance of the colonists; a wave rolling with greater and greater momentum westward across the continent. It brushed aside everything that resisted it. It used covered wagons and steamships, homesteads and railroads, guns and axes; it used laws and politics, noble speeches and the rhetoric of free enterprise; it used corporate charters and city charters and civic pride. It remade everything it touched.

This is a rather unreconstructed metaphor – we are, for example, bypassing the question of what this wave might look like to a Native American standing in its way – but it is at the same time a useful one. It captures something of the old notion of Manifest Destiny, and a bit of the American view of its own history as one of an inevitable, necessary advancement. It captures something of the feeling of propulsion that can seem at times to occupy the heart of the so-called American experiment. But it is also useful because of the questions it raises.

If our history is to be seen, metaphorically, as a wave of progress sweeping across the continent, what happens when that wave collides with the western wall of the Pacific Ocean? That is, what happens when the wave runs out of land?

At least two possibilities suggest themselves. It might be the case, first, that the wave of progress (we might call it ‘progress’) cannot be stopped. We can imagine it reaching the boundary of the Pacific and simply continuing to accelerate, if not geographically, then into other realms.

If we keep pushing on the image, we come to the image that the West Coast, and California in particular, often project: they are the furthest point of advancement, the tip of the still-moving spear, the prow of the boat. This seems to be the self-imagining of Silicon Valley, which would like to see itself as riding at the edge of an accelerating frontier, a force (or the force) for progress and goodness in the world.

It is also the imagining forwarded by the rhetoric of Hollywood, with its proclaimed position as the country’s ‘dream factory’, the place that points the way towards what the rest of us can only imagine ourselves being. Under these readings, our westward progress is still continuing. We advance, restlessly and unceasingly, towards some better place.

But there is another possibility. It might also be the case that the progress cannot go on forever. It may be that we should understand American civilisation as becoming increasingly enervated and deracinated as it spreads across the continent, thinner and less substantial, like a wave moving up a beach. Under this view, as it advances, our culture loses strength and decency.

Our downfall is inevitable, and you can see that if you look westwards; California is the land of fad and fantasy. There is little more out there than a construction of cultureless suburbs, plastic and unrefined, deadening.

This is the old view of the New York stage industry towards Hollywood; it’s the contemporary view sometimes exhibited by the East Coast establishment towards Silicon Valley: they are frivolous, substanceless dreamers with no grasp on either reality or propriety. All flash, no substance.

Under this imagining, American civilisation has become increasingly self-corrupted as it has pushed towards the Pacific; the West Coast is not a beacon but a symbol of dissolution. The motion is not towards intensified life, but towards senescence. In the indelible image of the poet James Wright, ‘At the bottom of the cliff / America is over and done with / America, / Plunged into the dark furrows / of the sea again.’

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We might continue with a fact: California is running out of water. This is not a metaphor. The details are fairly straightforward. Precipitation has been extremely low for four years. We might also note an example of the difficulty the state has had in approaching this problem: in January of 2014, Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency, and requested that citizens of the state reduce their water consumption.

He set a goal of a 20% reduction in water usage. In July of that year, the governor was back with another announcement: the first summer water usage statistics had appeared, and despite the declared state of emergency, people were actually using more water than they had the previous year. Since then, despite rationing to farmland and rapidly-intensifying restrictions by municipalities, things have not improved. T

here is only so much slack in the system. People use water; they need water. And people need to eat. California produces 71% of spinach consumed in America, and 69% of carrots, 90% of the broccoli, 97% of the plums, 95% of the garlic. And more. It is the breadbasket of American agriculture.

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We might offer an observation. It involves Starbucks, a west-coast company (it began in Seattle), and one that heralded the cultural boom of the boutique excellence of the everyday product with which we are now surrounded, from craft coffee and beer to farm-to-table food and excellent television shows. Last year, at Starbucks in California and across the country, coffee cups appeared bearing paper sleeves emblazoned with motivational sayings from Oprah Winfrey. T

he program, affiliated with the company Teavana (a subsidiary of Starbucks) was familiar in its outlines. It combined notions of corporate philanthropy – a portion of profits was donated to one of Oprah’s own charitable foundations – with self-help jargon; the underlying motive was, of course, to increase sales for Starbucks and fame and profit for Oprah. In terms of the dynamics we expect from our corporations, there was little unusual in this.

But if we pause for a moment, and step outside of our own familiarity, it’s possible to see how absolutely strange this is. We were drinking from cups of coffee bearing self-help slogans. What on earth for? What, if we step back from our position of familiarity, does this mean?

One obvious place to start is by examining the intention of this campaign: what was the effect it wanted to create? How exactly did it intend to increase sales? We might first note that these slogans made us, or tried to make us, feel better about ourselves. As Slavoj Zizek is fond of pointing out, programs like this one allow us to consume without guilt.

When we patronized Starbucks last year, those coffee sleeves assured us that we were no longer simply buying a product from a large, faceless corporate entity that did not much acknowledge our existence. Instead, we were buying a product that both gave to charity and reinforced our notion that, through the purchase, we were actually increasing the degree of our self-actualisation. The product was, in some sense, engaging with us on a level that was separate from its existence as a simple commodity.

But what, exactly, was the content of this engagement? One of the messages from Oprah on the cardboard sleeves read: ‘Be more splendid. Be more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.’ Splendid is descended from the Latin splendidus, meaning bright, or shining, or gorgeous. Extraordinary is also from a Latin word, meaning outside of the common order. So what Oprah and Starbucks were urging is that we be bright, shining, glorious stars of our own, outside the realm of the ordinary, that last world here presumably meaning ‘everybody else’. So far, so good.

This message, like the program itself, is so familiar to American culture as to serve as an entirely unremarkable background, or perhaps foundational element, of it. Each of us can shine. Each of us can be perfectly individuated from the mass.

The second half of Oprah’s exhortation showed us how: ‘Use every moment to fill yourself up.’ Here again we have the familiar element of ‘using every moment’. Life is precious; waste none of it. And how? By ‘filling yourself up.’ It’s this last phrase that contains the pure distillation of the message, as though each of the preceding ideas has suddenly and sharply come into focus.

There is, of course, the not-so-subtle pushing of the product through the reference of ‘filling’ (as in another cup of coffee.) Beyond this, however, resides the deeper image: we will become splendid and extraordinary by filling ourselves. We are to take every moment and use it to draw the world into us, to consume it; this moving of everything into our being will be the feat that actualises us.

This logic was pushed to its final conclusion by another slogan on a sleeve. ‘You are not here to shrink down to less, but to blossom into more of who you really are.’ That is to say, the exhortations of the first message are not exhortations to change ourselves. Rather, they are indications of our real, if hitherto unknown, potential. They are about our true purpose.

You are not here to change, you are here ‘to blossom into more of who you really are.’ You already contain the seeds of greatness. To be ‘more splendid’ and ‘more extraordinary’, you need to fill yourself up. But this will not alter you, or make you into someone else. It will, instead, release your true self. It will reveal your deepest actuality. Do not change, and do not let people tell you to change; instead, fill yourself up until your true inner perfection begins to emerge.

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We might consider the Peoples Church of Fresno. This is an entirely ordinary evangelical church, of the kind that can be found across the nation; however, for our purposes it is worth remembering that the history of American evangelism is intimately connected, for worse and for better, with the history of American westward expansion and American exceptionalism.

The eradication of the Native Americans had religious as well as social and economic roots – one has only to remember the famous Presbyterian minister Benjamin Palmer’s 1901 sermon, in which he argued that ‘when the Indians had, for countless centuries, neglected the soil, had no worship to offer the true God, with scarcely any serious occupation but murderous inter-tribal wars … the Indian [was] swept from the earth, and a great Christian nation, over seventy-five million strong, [rose] up.’

At the same time, however, much of the movement to abolish slavery in this country was religious, and evangelical, in nature: the seminaries in the (then frontier) Midwest were hotbeds for radical abolitionist thought, and John Brown was an evangelical Christian who started his career as a violent religious radical in Kansas. There has always been contradiction in our religious history; there have always been both anti-human and pro-human forces at work.

At the Peoples Church of Fresno last summer the lead pastor, Dale Oquist, taught a series of lessons on ‘Jesusology’. The title, like the title of Oprah’s project with Starbucks – ‘Steep Your Soul’ – was mostly a sales pitch, designed to stimulate intrigue while maintaining just enough referential force to indicate its content. So Jesusology was the study of the ‘life, significance, and ministry of Jesus.’ So far, so good.

This is exactly what we might expect to be happening at a church of this sort. The online summary of the first sermon in the series listed three main points, and two of the three were unremarkable: ‘Jesus was in the business of reshaping people’s views of who God is,’ and ‘We are to make straight the paths of our lives for Yahweh to come to us.’

These indicated that the sermon, like many evangelical sermons, was both a discussion of what the life and teachings of Jesus reveal about the true nature of God, and a discussion of the Biblical injunction to work on reducing the obstacles in our lives that prevent our communion with God.

But the third main point of the sermon is worth pausing over. It bore italics in the summary, and read: ‘God is not mad at us!‘ It was explained in the following way: ‘People tend to believe God causes or allows things to go wrong because of something they did wrong. Today we learned Jesus was in the business of reshaping peoples’ views of God.

We can know that God is not angry at us.‘ (Italics again in the original.) In a sense, this too is a common piece of Biblical teaching. The point is that our sins have been pre-forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus, and that (if we accept God into our hearts) the path of salvation is therefore open to us. We will not be punished if we repent of our sins.

But there is still something remarkable about that initial phrase: God is not mad at us! Thinking this over, it might occur to us to ask a question: Why, exactly, would we think that he is mad at us? Or, to put it differently: What was Pastor Oquist is seeing in his congregation that made him want to reassure them in this way?

The answer is given in the explanation that follows: ‘People tend to believe God causes or allows things to go wrong because of something they did wrong.’ So Pastor Oquist seemed to feel that we are afraid things are going wrong in the world because of something we did, and his natural inclination was to comfort us.

God is not angry at us; we should not live in fear, or sadness, or guilt. Our goal, as articulated in the other bullet points, is instead to open ourselves up to God so that we can know the truth about the world.

One begins to see the connection to the platitudes of Oprah Winfrey on the Starbucks cup. Both originate in assumptions about the unhappiness, or un-fulfillment, of their audience. Starbucks and Oprah assume that we feel un-actualised, so they try to reassure us that there is a path open to actualisation; Pastor Oquist believes we are afraid that God is mad at us, so he reassures us this isn’t the case. And beneath both of these vision lies the old notion of progress.

Progress westward, progress towards a greater place, towards a promised destiny. Progress towards a world in which, through filling ourselves up as individuals – through our personal splendour, through our personal relationship with God – we will somehow find our way through to a world that is better for everyone.

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There is a strange sleight of hand a work in all of this. It takes place in the assertion that through focusing on the ‘I’ we will improve the ‘we’. The path to community, that is, takes place through individualism.

 Consider a final example: the architecture, or built geography, of suburban California, and indeed, suburban America. It has often been claimed that there is a sort of anesthesia in this geography, composed as it is of interstates and strip malls, endless one and two-story responses to population growth, streets like inescapable mazes, identical houses strung one after another to the horizon.

There is a truth to these observations: from the outside these suburbs can come to look like a physical manifestation of what Adorno and Horkheimer loathed in what they the termed ‘the culture industry’. The repetition and flatness of affect can appear ideological, designed to perpetuate a culture in which, ‘conformity has replaced consciousness.’

But from the inside – that is, actually driving among these neighbourhoods and interacting with their owners – that ‘conformity’ takes on a new aspect. We see that the birds-eye view of the horror of the place must be somehow integrated with an understanding of the experience of its residents. To many of the people who live in these suburbs, they are not a repository of conformist horror, but a confirmation of achievement.

Each property is a small, inviolable personal kingdom. They are fenced. Kids splash in backyard pools. The lawns are manicured. The cars are cared for meticulously, and there are very few older models. As with the houses themselves, the point of the cars is not that everyone else may have exactly the same model, but that I too have one.

That is to say, from the inside, these suburbs are not representations of conformity, but of success. It is the success of I too. It is purchased with sweat, and perseverance, and hard-won dollars. All of my neighbours may have one, sure, but I too have a small castle of my own.

Looking closely, we can see the way in which this is a physical synthesis of the Oprah/Starbucks exhortation to splendidness and Pastor Oquist’s reassurance that God is not angry, you simply have to open yourself up to him. It is a geography, physical as well as social, that assures you of the possibility of achievement. It is a geography that reinforces the notion that even if there are awful things going on out there in the world, here you can have stability and comfort and be among the like-minded. Here, God is not angry.

All of this is possible; achieving it, deeply and truly, simply requires faith in the dream, along with a continued and constructive work on the self. For Oprah, this work is a filling up of the self; for Pastor Oquist, it is an acceptance of what was done for you, that is, an acceptance that it was on your behalf that Jesus died on the cross. In both cases, what is required is that belief in the validity of the self, the joy in the self, the acceptance of the self, the perfectibility of the self.

And the ultimate reassurance is that it is through this focus on the self that the ‘we’ lurking behind all of the encomiums will be created. We will have our malls and our movie theatres, our clothing stores and our cars. It is through the ‘I’ that the ‘we’ will be triumphant.

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We might return to the drama of the drought in California and the difficulty of taking measures to offset it. What becomes clear, if we look at the way people are living and what they are being told, is that to be asked to reduce, be it water or any other consumable, runs counter to nearly every mandate, belief, and historical self-understanding of our culture. California, and by extension America, is about having.

It is not about not having. It is about doing, not about not doing. If the choice is between some relatively abstract notion of preservation on the one hand, and washing the car on the other, we will choose washing the car.

We will choose to eat out-of-season vegetables to promote our health, and we will choose to take our regular showers to maintain our sense of hygiene. Why? Because when we are confronted with doubt, or difficulty, the accumulated weight of the system of beliefs in which we have operated for the entirety of our lives rests on the side of continuing to fill ourselves up.

It rests on the side of displacing our fears that we might bear responsibility. It rests on our belief in our own destiny, and our movement towards it; it rests on our belief that through the consuming ‘I’ we will reach the promised ‘we’. These bad things are not happening because of anything we’ve done; God is not mad at me, he cannot be punishing us.

In these ways, the need to use less water is nearly impossible to negotiate, because it is a worldly annoyance running up against transcendent imperatives. It is competing with self-actualisation. And self-actualisation, we are told over and over again, is the entire goal of our lives. It is through self-actualisation that we will, in Donald Trump’s phrase, ‘Make America Great Again.’

We are meant, we have been told more times than we can count, to have our own small place in the sun; we have worked for that place, we have been promised it, and we’re sure as hell not giving it back.

It is here, I think, that the great sad force of the metaphor of American culture as a wave becomes finally and fully apparent. A wave is not a movement of water, it is a movement of force through water.

And the force that moves through us is the very notion of progress itself. When it runs up against the reality of California, the reality of the drought, we see that it is boundless and unstoppable, and at the same time enervated, dissipating. It is a force at once ever-expanding and ever-thinning, an endless taking-in, an endless self-fulfilment, and the continual emptying-out of these things.

It is the notion of California, land of the blossoming star, land of the internet billionaire, land where we can each have our personal kingdom; it is the notion of the new electronic frontier sweeping out away from us and across the world, promising a California for every human on earth, regardless of how devoid of meaning that promised land is.

It is this force, this idea of progress, with which we need to contend. When we see Oprah’s slogans on our coffee cups, we should howl with laughter at the idea that we will be made better by coffee. When we hear of Pastor Oquist’s sermons we should ache with sadness at his need to so reassure his congregation. We should long to tear down the sterility and separation of the suburbs, their imprisoning message of false achievement.

We should agitate and organise and foment. We should proclaim that the natural world has an inherent value that is greater than the value of our personal or financial success; that transcendence comes not from a filling-up of ourselves but from a re-awakening of our connections to each other and to the non-human world; and that we must not pretend that we are something other than responsible agents, fully capable of destroying ever single thing around us.

But we should do none of this in service of the idea of progress. We should do it because if we don’t we are not living, experiencing, cognisant beings. We are simply inanimate objects through which destructive force is transmitted.

• Tyler Sage lives and teaches in California. His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Common, Bright Lights Film Journal, The L.A. Review of Books, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. You can find him at tksage.com.

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Kouchi, Kawakami & Tokioka squirm

SUBHEAD: Tell Senator Kouchi to play it straight. DO NOT shift GMO labeling burden to stores!

By Phoebe Eng on 9 March 2013 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/03/kouchi-kwakami-tokioka-squirm.html)


Image above: Architectural rendering of Whole Foods store in Kailua, Hawaii.  From (http://jeffbrink.com/image-of-the-month/whole-foods-%E2%80%93-kailua-hawaii/).

Several Kauai voters recently received Rep. Tokioka's response to our letters of support of HB 174 (GMO labeling bill). See (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/03/ron-kouchi-gmo-labeling.html).

Rep. Tokioka states that while he supported the bill (with reservations) he, Rep. Derek Kawakami, and Sen. Ron Kouchi are working instead on what he calls a "Whole Foods" approach. Rep Tokioka, Rep. Kawakami and Sen Kouchi prefer to allow grocery stores and other food outlets to adopt their own labeling programs. However, as lawyers point out, this is already allowable.

Rep. Tokioka also says it is impossible to determine or verify whether all products contains GMO's. However, also according to lawyers, GMO labeling would be just like any other labeling requirement - there would be spot inspections and enforcement against those who break the law. (for Rep. Tokioka's full response to those who wrote letters of support for HB 174, see bottom of this email).

Fortunately for all of us who support GMO labeling, Whole Foods just coincidentally announced Friday that it WILL NOW REQUIRE the labeling of GMO's sold in its stores! Here's a quote from Whole Foods co-CEO:

"We are putting a stake in the ground on GMO labeling to support the consumer's right to know," said Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. "The prevalence of GMOs in the U.S. paired with nonexistent mandatory labeling makes it very difficult to select non-GMO products. We are increasing our support of organic, and we are working with our supplier partners to grow our non-GMO supply chain to ensure we can continue to provide these choices in the future."

So Please, if you have 5 minutes today...

PLEASE cut and paste the article below to Reps. Tokioka, Kawakami, Morikawa...and most importantly Sen. Kouchi.

Please let them know that the GMO companies need to be responsible for the labeling of GMO foods, not shopkeepers and grocery outlets. Avoiding responsibility and shifting the cost burden onto others, and hiding important information from consumers is not the pono way of doing business or serving consumers and families in our state.

Sen. Ron Kouchi
phone: 808-586-6030
fax: 808-586-6031
senkouchi@Capitol.hawaii.gov

Rep. Jimmy Tokioka
phone:  808 586 6270
reptokioka@capitol.hawaii.gov

Rep. Derek Kawakami
phone: 808 586 8435
repkawakami@capitol.hawaii.gov

Rep. Dee Morikawa
phone: 808 586 6280
repmorikawa@capitol.hawaii.gov

Malama pono

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Whole Foods plans to label GMOs by 2018

Whole Foods Market (Nasdaq: WFM) announced at Natural Products Expo West that, by 2018, all products in its U.S. and Canadian stores must be labeled to indicate whether they contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It is the first national grocery chain to set a deadline for full GMO transparency.

"We are putting a stake in the ground on GMO labeling to support the consumer's right to know," said Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. "The prevalence of GMOs in the U.S. paired with nonexistent mandatory labeling makes it very difficult to select non-GMO products. We are increasing our support of organic, and we are working with our supplier partners to grow our non-GMO supply chain to ensure we can continue to provide these choices in the future."

Whole Foods Market now has 3,300 Non-GMO Project verified products, more than any North American retailer. In 2009, it began putting its 365 Everyday Value™ line through Non-GMO Project™ verification and encouraged its grocery suppliers to do the same. It is expanding this effort to work with all suppliers as they transition to ingredients from non-GMO sources, or clearly label products containing GMOs by the five-year deadline. The company will announce its progress along the way.

"We're responding to our customers who have consistently asked us for GMO labeling and we are doing so by focusing on where we have control: in our own stores," said Robb.

GMOs are now part of an ongoing national conversation, thanks to efforts of various advocacy groups and to U.S. states considering their own labeling laws. Robb added, "While we are encouraged by the many mandatory labeling initiatives, we are committed to moving forward with our own GMO transparency plan now."

"We have always believed quality and transparency are inseparable and that providing detailed information about our products is part of satisfying and delighting the millions of people who place their trust in Whole Foods Market each day," said A.C. Gallo, president of Whole Foods Market. "This bold task will encourage manufacturers to ask deeper questions about ingredients and it will help us provide greater transparency about what we sell, so our customers can be empowered to make informed decisions."

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Rep. Tokioka's acknowledgement to letter writers on HB 174

Aloha,

Thank you for contacting me regarding HB 174; relating to the labeling of GMO and non-GMO products. In recent weeks, our office has been the recipient of numerous phone calls and emails regarding this Bill. I have been and will continue to support this Bill as I feel the goal of HB 174 is beneficial for all.

On Tuesday in the House Chambers, HB 174 had its third reading, was subsequently voted on then passed by the House of Representatives. It is now making its way to the Senate Chamber for their consideration. During the vote, I voted YES, however with reservations.

 The only reason for my voting with reservations is NOT because I do not support the Bill, but because as HB 174 currently reads, there is no mechanism in place or system that would be implemented which would guarantee that all "non-GMO" products are truly non-GMO. Moreover, it would be impossible for the State of Hawai‘i, Departments of Health or Agriculture, to inspect ALL goods that are imported into Hawai‘i and determine whether or not the product is GM or non-GM.

To address this issue, one possible solution that Senator Kouchi, Representative Kawakami and I have been working on would be for individual stores/chains to adopt or implement programs of their own modeled after a program currently in place at Whole Foods Market (WFM).

What WFM has done is they offer separate sections for non-GMO products. These products as well as the shelves they occupy are clearly labeled "GMO-FREE". The products have also been certified as "GMO-FREE" by the Non GMO Project. The Non GMO Project is a non-profit organization that is independent from WFM whose sole function is to verify that non-GMO products are in fact non-GMO.

What I like about the WFM model is that there is little to no Governmental involvement. Senator Kouchi, Representative Kawakami and I have met with many of the grocery stores, including Times/Big Save, Foodland and Safeway to name a few, to encourage them to follow the WFM model. Thus far the dialogue has been productive and their responses have been positive.

Many of the individuals who have contacted me feel that Hawai‘i could be a leader in the GMO labeling movement, which I am in agreement – to a degree. Realistically however, the Federal Government, through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and/or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), would have the greatest impact on achieving a comprehensive nation-wide labeling and monitoring program to identify GM products apart from GMO-Free products.

To that end, we will be introducing a resolution asking our Federal Delegation to pass a law that would adopt uniformed standards for labeling throughout the entire nation.

For the current status of HB 174 you may click here or copy and paste the following link into your web browser's address bar (http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/measure_indiv.aspx?billtype=HB&billnumber=174).

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact our office at (808) 586-6270 or via email. Thank you again for your sharing your thoughts and concerns, your input is greatly appreciated and I will be sure to keep it in mind as we move forward.

Aloha and Mahalo,

Rep. Tokioka


See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Ron Kouchi & GMO labeling 3/8/13



.

GMO Chump Change

SUBHEAD: For a measly $12,050 NTBG and the KFBRP are pimping for a DuPont/Pioneer in today's paper.

By Joan Conrow on 5 February 2013 for Restoring Mayberry -
(http://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/2013/02/coppicing-and-pollarding.html)


Image above: Gilbert Peter Kea, Garden Island Resource Conservation & Development president, and Lisa 'Cali' Campton, project coordinator, accept a $7050 grant from Laurie Yoshida, the DuPont Pioneer Communications Manager.  From (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/biotech-company-gives-grant-to-expand-program-to-help-critically/article_8809727a-6f65-11e2-b02a-001a4bcf887a.html).

 It was bad enough when the keiki at Eleele School were turned into biotech stooges. But it was really tragic to see two conservation groups — National Tropical Botanical Garden and the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project — pimping for a chemical company in today's paper.

For a measly $12,050 between them they let themselves be used to make Dupont-Pioneer look good. Ironically, the NTBG program that “benefitted” from the chem company's largess is called the Kokua Aina Youth Initiative. Hey kids, let's help the land with money derived from poisoning it and destroying biodiversity.

I know funding can be hard for nonprofits to come by, but when you take cash from the chemical companies, you're not only legitimizing their operations, you're allowing them to co-opt your good work and good name for their craven purposes. As for Laurie Yoshida, the new DuPont communications manager, well, I suppose there isn't much difference between flacking for Linda Lingle and a company that produces poisons and tweaked seed.

Of course, the chem companies have a lot of extra cash to throw around since they don't pay general excise tax on the estimated $250 million worth of seeds they sell each year. Though Senate Bill 365 was introduced to change that, it hasn't even been scheduled for a hearing.

Meanwhile, some 1,200 people showed up yesterday to testify on HB 174, which would require all foods produced with genetically engineered materials to disclose that fact on the label with bold-faced type. Hawaii Public Radio reports that House Ag Committee Chair Jessica Wooley plans to move the bill forward to the Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee. Tellingly, the Star-Advertiser didn't even cover the hearing, and instead printed an Associated Press report that was a rewrite of the HPR story, without Rep. Wooley's recommendation.

HPR used a great quote from Life of the Land's Henry Curtis:

When did we make a conscious decision in this society to have the companies that developed chemical warfare be in charge of our food supply?

Though chem company reps and their lobbyist, Hawaii Crop Improvement Assn., tried to plant the fear that labeling will increase food costs, here's the real reason why they don't want GMO products labeled: they know that if given a choice, people will not choose GMOs.

Heck, animals don't want it. A friend whose family grows seed corn in the Midwest told me that farmers have observed that deer won't touch the GMO corn fields. “And deer eat anything,” she said. Other farmers reported that their chickens and livestock will refuse GMO feed when given a choice. So what do the “dumb” animals know that we “smart” humans haven't figured out?

Meanwhile, in an attempt to ensure that they are allowed to operate with impunity in Hawaii, the chemical companies got lawmakers to introduce SB590. Though it's phrased to make it sound like it's protecting farmers and ranchers, when you see language like this, you know it's really all about biotech:

“No court, official, public servant, or public employee shall declare any farming operation a nuisance for any reason if the farming operation has been conducted in a manner consistent with generally accepted agricultural and management practices. No law shall be enacted that abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ generally accepted agricultural technology, livestock production, and ranching practices."

Though the bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing, Councilman Jay Furfaro moved to head it off at the pass by submitting testimony objecting to that provision. As he quite rightly notes:

"This statement preempts individual Counties to have little or no recourse to protect our constituents from action done by any and all agricultural businesses or individuals should the health and safety of our communities be compromised."

Which is exactly why the high-polluting industrial ag wants this bill. Jay goes on to write:

I am cautious knowing that much of the “generally accepted agricultural and management practices” involved with the larger biotechnical companies are continuing to evolve and the safety of its practices are called into question.

Go Jay!

What's even sicker is the bill's stated mandate of:

...promoting and fostering an atmosphere of acceptance of all the various forms of agricultural practices and operations that are generally accepted as legitimate and appropriate within our nation.

Pretty pathetic. But then, the nonprofits are already doing that when they pose for newspaper pictures happily taking chump change from the chem companies..