Permanent Social Recession

SUBHEAD: Social recession is a permanently recessionary economy such as that of Japan - and now, Europe and the U.S.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 28 August 2013 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug13/social-recession8-13.html)


Image above: Cartoon son asks "Can I move back in with you until I find a job?" Dad answers, "That's funny. I just asked your grandparents the same question." From (http://timiacono.com/index.php/2011/06/30/is-it-a-great-recession-or-a-little-depression/).

Social recession is my term for the social and cultural consequences of a permanently recessionary economy such as that of Japan - and now, Europe and the U.S.

Forget Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of expansion ("growth") or recession--what really matters is the social recession, which continues to deepen in America. The term social recession has two distinct meanings: around 2000, the term was used to describe the erosion of social cohesion via the decline of institutions such as marriage and the rise of social problems such as teen pregnancy.

Many commentators pinned the responsibility for this erosion of social constraints and bonds on rampant individualism and overstimulated consumerism, while others pointed to urbanization, the commodification of child care, women entering the workforce en masse and similar trends. Poverty was explicitly rejected as a causal factor, hence the term "social recession."

This notion of social recession was aptly described by Robert E. lane, author of the 2001 book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies:

There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life... . For people lacking in social support of this kind, unemployment has more serious effects, illnesses are more deadly, disappointment with one's children is harder to bear, bouts of depression last longer, and frustration and failed expectations of all kinds are more traumatic.

(For more on the subject, please go to The Social Recession (The American Prospect.)

I use the term social recession to describe a very different phenomenon, the social and cultural consequences of permanently recessionary economies such as Japan, and now Europe and the U.S. I have defined and used social recession in this way since 2010: The Non-Financial Cost of Stagnation: "Social Recession" and Japan's "Lost Generations" (August 9, 2010)

Here are the conditions that characterize social recession:

1. High expectations of endless rising prosperity have been instilled in generations of citizens as a birthright.
   
2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.
   
3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the shrinking middle class.
   
4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state (welfare) or parents to the middle class.
   
5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.
   
6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social recession as a reality.
   
7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social recession issues.
   
8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations by the generations ensnared by the social recession: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as autos.
   
9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment, i.e. the "end of work".
   
10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

I have described the "end to (paying) work" here many times:

End of Work, End of Affluence (December 5, 2008)
End of Work, End of Affluence I: Cascading Job Losses (December 8, 2008)
End of Work, End of Affluence III: The Rise of Informal Businesses (December 10, 2008)
Endgame 3: The End of (Paying) Work (January 21, 2009)
Demographics and the End of the Savior State (May 17, 2010)

What happens to the social fabric of an advanced-economy nation after a decade or more of economic stagnation? For an answer, we can turn to Japan. The second-largest economy in the world has stagnated in just this fashion for almost twenty years, and the consequences for the "lost generations" which have come of age in the "lost decades" have been dire. In many ways, the social conventions of Japan are fraying or unraveling under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

While the world sees Japan as the home of consumer technology juggernauts such as Sony and Toshiba and high-tech "bullet trains" (shinkansen), beneath the bright lights of Tokyo and the evident wealth generated by decades of hard work and the massive global export machine of "Japan, Inc," lies a different reality: increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity for the nation's youth.

The gap between extremes of income at the top and bottom of society-- measured by the Gini coefficient -- has been growing in Japan for years; to the surprise of many outsiders, once-egalitarian Japan is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The media in Japan have popularized the phrase "kakusa shakai," literally meaning "gap society." As the elite slice of society prospers and younger workers are increasingly marginalized, the media has focused on the shrinking middle class. For example, a bestselling book offers tips on how to get by on an annual income of less than three million yen ($30,770). Two million yen ($20,500) has become the de-facto poverty line for millions of Japanese, especially outside high-cost Tokyo.

More than one-third of the workforce is part-time as companies have shed the famed Japanese lifetime employment system, nudged along by government legislation which abolished restrictions on flexible hiring a few years ago. Temp agencies have expanded to fill the need for contract jobs, as permanent job opportunities have dwindled.

Many fear that as the generation of salaried Baby Boomers dies out, the country's economic slide might accelerate. Japan's share of the global economy has fallen below 10 percent from a peak of 18 percent in 1994. Were this decline to continue, income disparities would widen and threaten to pull this once-stable society apart.

  The Recession That Never Ended: 2008 -2013 (and Counting) (August 26, 2013)

 Young Japanese, their expectations permanently downsized, are increasingly opting out of the rigid social systems on which Japan, Inc. was built.

The term "Freeter" is a hybrid word that originated in the late 1980s, just as the Japanese property and stock market bubbles reached their zenith. It combines the English "free" and the German "arbeiter," or worker, and describes a lifestyle which is radically different from the buttoned-down rigidity of the permanent-employment economy: freedom to move between jobs.

This absence of loyalty to a company is totally alien to previous generations of driven Japanese "salarymen" who were expected to uncomplainingly turn in 70-hour work weeks at the same company for decades, all in exchange for lifetime employment.

Many young people have come to mistrust big corporations, having seen their fathers or uncles eased out of "lifetime" jobs in the relentless downsizing of the past twenty years. From the point of view of the younger generations, the loyalty their parents unstintingly offered to companies was wasted.

They have also come to see diminishing value in the grueling study and tortuous examinations required to compete for the elite jobs in academia, industry and government; with opportunities fading, long years of study are perceived as pointless.

In contrast, the "freeter" lifestyle is one of hopping between short-term jobs and devoting energy and time to foreign travel, hobbies or other interests.

As long ago as 2001, The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimates that 50 percent of high school graduates and 30 percent of college graduates now quit their jobs within three years of leaving school.

The downside is permanently downsized income and prospects. Many of the four million "freeters" survive on part-time work and either live at home or in a tiny flat with no bath. A typical "freeter" wage is 1,000 yen ($10.25) an hour.

Japan's slump has lasted so long, a "New Lost Generation" is coming of age, joining Japan's first "Lost Generation" which graduated into the bleak job market of the 1990s.

These trends have led to an ironic moniker for the Freeter lifestyle: Dame-Ren (No Good People). The Dame-Ren get by on odd jobs, low-cost living and drastically diminished expectations.

The decline of permanent employment has led to the unraveling of social mores and conventions. Many young men now reject the macho work ethic and related values of their fathers. These "herbivores" reject the traditonal Samurai ideal of masculinity.

Derisively called "herbivores" or "Grass-eaters," these young men are uncompetitive and uncommitted to work, evidence of their deep disillusionment with Japan's troubled economy.

A bestselling book titled The Herbivorous Ladylike Men Who Are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity, claims that about two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters. "People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing," says Ms Ushikubo. "So the men who came after them have changed."

This has spawned a disconnect between genders so pervasive that Japan is experiencing a "social recession" in marriage, births, and even sex, all of which are declining.

With a wealth and income divide widening along generational lines, many young Japanese are attaching themselves to their parents, the generation that accumulated home and savings during the boom years of the 1970's and 1980's. Surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of freeters live at home.

Freeters "who have no children, no dreams, hope or job skills could become a major burden on society, as they contribute to the decline in the birthrate and in social insurance contributions," Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor wrote in a magazine essay titled, Parasite Singles Feed on Family System.

This trend of never leaving home has sparked an almost tragicomical countertrend of Japanese parents who actively seek mates to marry off their "parasite single" offspring as the only way to get them out of the house.

An even more extreme social disorder is Hikikomori, or "acute social withdrawal," a condition in which the young live-at-home person will virtually wall themselves off from the world by never leaving their room.

What we're seeing in Japan is the confluence of three dynamics: definancialization, the demise of growth-positive demographics and the devolution of the consumerist model of endless "demand" and "growth."

Japan is the leading-edge of the crumbling model of advanced neoliberal capitalism: that consumerist excess creates wealth, prosperity and happiness.

What consumerist excess actually creates is alienation, social atomization, narcissism, and a profound contradiction at the heart of the consumerist-dependent model of "growth": the narcissism that powers consumerist lust and identity is at odds with the demands of the workplace that generates the income needed to consume.

Japan and the Exhaustion of Consumerism
The Hidden Cost of the "New Economy": New-Type Depression
The Future of America Is Japan: Stagnation
The Future of America Is Japan: Runaway Deficits, Runaway Debts

The younger generation of workers raised in a consumerist "paradise" are facing an economic stagnation that reduces opportunities to earn the high income needed to fulfill the consumerist demands for status symbols. Given the hopelessness of earning enough to afford the consumerist lifestyle, they have abandoned traditional status symbols such as luxury autos and taken up fashion and media as expressions of consumerism.

But the narcissism bred by consumerism has nurtured a kind of emotional isolation and immaturity, what might be called permanent adolescence, which leaves many young people without the tools needed to handle criticism, collaboration and the pressures of the workplace.

Narcissism is the result of the consumerist society's relentless focus on the essential project of consumerism, which is "the only self that is real is the self that is purchased and projected."

Narcissism, Consumerism and the End of Growth (October 19, 2012)

In my analysis, this is the direct consequence of the supremacy of a consumerism that is dependent on financialization: an economy dependent on debt-fueled consumption to power its "endless growth" is one that will necessarily implode from its internal contradictions: debt and leverage eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the collateral and the national income, and the narcissism of consumerism leads to social recession, a crippling state of "suspended animation" adolescence and great personal frustration and unhappiness.

The ultimate contradiction in this debt-consumption version of capitalism is this: how can an economy have "endless expansion and growth" when pay and opportunities for secure, high-paying jobs are both relentlessly declining? It cannot. Financialization, consumerist narcissism and the end of growth are inextricably linked.

This leads to a dispiriting no exit: It's as if there is a split in the road and no third way: some young people make it onto the traditional corporate or government career path, and everyone else is left in part-time suspended animation with few options for adult expression or development.

We need a third way that offers people work, resilience and authentic meaning. In my view, that cannot come from the Central State or the global corporate workplace: it can only come from a relocalized economy in revitalized communities.

For more on this topic:
Generational Wealth and Upward Mobility (October 24, 2012)
Priced Out of the Middle Class (June 28, 2012)
Do We Have What It Takes To Get From Here To There? Part 1: Japan (November 8, 2012)
Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption (May 9, 2013)
Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out (May 17, 2013)
Will Crushing Student Loans and Worthless College Degrees Politicize the Millennial Generation? (May 31, 2013)


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Terms of Surrender

SUBHEAD: Man's conquest of Nature through Progress has proved to be a temporary self delusion.

By John Michael Greer on 28 August 2013 for the archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/terms-of-surrender.html)


Image above: Detail of photo of Japanese surrender. Gen. MacArthur (at microphone) watches as  Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu signs the unconditional surrender document aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the morning of September 2, 1945. From (http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/07_Special-Documents/Historical-Documents/1945_Surrender-of-Japan.html).

Today’s debates over hydrofracturing (“fracking”) oil-bearing shales, the theme of last week’s post "Well and truly Fracked", have dimensions that go well beyond the world of ritual theater discussed there. To begin with, of course, a great deal of money is being made off the current fracking boom by assorted Wall Street office fauna, and their efforts to keep the gravy train rolling for their benefit doubtless have quite a bit to do with the remarkable disregard for mere geological reality to be found in so much pro-fracking propaganda these days.

That sort of strained relationship with fact is a sufficiently standard feature of speculative bubbles that it ought to be high up there on the checklist of any connoisseur of financial lunacy. Those of my readers who recall the details of the late housing bubble will doubtless think of the enthusiasm shown then for what were called NINJA loans—that is, loans given to borrowers who had no income and no jobs or assets, but who would one and all, so bankers insisted with straight faces, pay back those loans religiously out of the money they were sure to make flipping properties.

The same logic doubtless governs the equally earnest insistence that the ferocious depletion rates that afflict fracked wells simply don’t matter, that kerogen shales like the Green River formation that have resisted every previous attempt to get oil out of them have suddenly transformed themselves into nice extractable oil shales for our benefit, and that the results of wells drilled in the best possible “sweet spots” in each formation must inevitably be repeated by every available wellsite in the region.

Here, as with the countless other examples that might be put on display by some Dickensian Spirit of Speculative Bubbles Past, the understandable desire to make a fast buck off other people’s cluelessness might seem to offer an adequate explanation for the bumper crop of fatuous twaddle that’s being pushed by the pundits and splashed around so freely by the media these days.

Still, I’ve come to think that there’s more going on here than the passion for emptying the pockets of chumps that sets the cold sick heart of Wall Street throbbing, and indeed that there’s even more at work than our culture’s touching habit, discussed over the last two weeks, of reenacting the traditional morality plays of the civil religion of progress in order to console the faithful in difficult times.

Plunge into the heart of the fracking storm, rather, and you’ll find yourself face to face with a foredoomed attempt to maintain one of the core beliefs of the civil religion of progress in the teeth of all the evidence. The stakes here go far beyond making a bunch of financiers their umpteenth million, or providing believers in the myth of progress with a familiar ritual drama to bolster their faith; they cut straight to the heart of that faith, and thus to some of the most fundamental presuppositions that are guiding today’s industrial societies along their road to history’s scrapheap.

Since the days of Sir Francis Bacon, whose writings served as the first draft of the modern mythology of progress, one of the central themes of that mythology has been the conquest of Nature by humanity—or rather, in the more revealing language of an earlier day, by Man. You aren’t Man, in case you were wondering, and neither am I; neither is Sir Francis Bacon, for that matter, nor is anyone else who’s ever lived or will ever live.

This person called Man, rather, is a mythical hero who gives the civil religion of progress its central figure. Just as devout Christians participate vicariously in the life of Christ through the celebration of the sacraments and the seasons of the liturgical year, believers in progress are supposed to participate vicariously in Man’s heroic journey from the caves to the stars by purchasing hot new products, and oohing and aahing appreciatively whenever the latest shiny technological trinket is unveiled by Man’s lab-coated priesthood.

Man’s destiny is to conquer Nature. That’s his one and only job, according to the myth, and when Man’s not doing that, he’s not doing anything worthwhile at all. Read any of the standard histories of Man written by true believers in the civil religion of progress, and you’ll see that societies and eras that devoted their energies to art, music, religion, literature, or anything else you care to name other than extending Man’s dominion over Nature are dismissed as irrelevant to Man’s history, when they’re not critiqued outright for falling down on the job.

You may be thinking by this point, dear reader, that a belief system that likes to portray humanity as a tyrant and conqueror rightfully entitled to view the entire cosmos as its own private lebensraum may not be particularly sensible, or for that matter particularly sane. You may well be right, too, but I’d like to focus on a somewhat more restricted point: according to this way of looking at things, Nature is not supposed to put up more than a pro forma struggle or a passive resistance.

Above all, once any part of Nature is conquered, it’s supposed to stay conquered—and of course that’s where the trouble creeps in, because a great many of the things we habitually lump together as Nature are refusing to go along with the script.

Examples come to mind by the dozens, but one of the most significant and frightening just now is the collapse of the most important health revolution of modern times, the conquest (that word again) of bacterial disease by antibiotics. I’m not sure how many of my readers realize what an immense change in human life followed Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery that a substance excreted by bread mold killed most bacteria without harming human cells.

A century ago, dysentery and bacterial pneumonia were leading causes of death in most industrial countries, killing far more people than heart disease or cancer, and the odds of living from birth to age five had an uncomfortable resemblance to a throw of the dice even in wealthy countries.

Penicillin and the antibiotics that followed it changed that decisively, enabling doctors to stop bacterial diseases in their tracks. It’s because of antibiotics that I’m here to write this blog; the scarlet fever that had me flat on my back for weeks when I was seven years old would almost certainly have killed me if antibiotics hadn’t been available.

Outside the public health and infectious disease fields, most people remain serenely convinced that the relative freedom from bacterial disease that’s characterized the recent past in the industrial world is destined to remain fixed in place for the rest of time. Within those fields, by contrast, that comfortable conviction finds few takers.

Penicillin, the antibiotic that saved my life in 1969, won’t even slow down most microbes now. Diseases that used to yield readily to an injection or two now have to be treated with complex cocktails of increasingly toxic antibiotics, and every year more pathogens turn up that are resistant to some, most, or all available antibiotics.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, at least for those who want to play the blame game. It’s been common since the 1950s for physicians to prescribe antibiotics for conditions antibiotic therapy can’t treat—for example, the common cold. It’s been equally common since the 1950s for livestock farms to give their animals daily doses of antibiotics, since (for complex biochemical reasons) this causes the animals to gain weight more quickly, and thus be worth more money at slaughtering time.

Both these bad habits helped give bacteria the widest possible range of opportunities to develop resistance. Still, these and other contributing factors simply help feed the main issue, which is that bacterial evolution didn’t come to a sudden stop when Fleming started paying attention to bread mold.

I’ve commented several times in this blog that understanding evolution is crucial for making sense of the predicament of the industrial world, and the approaching end of the antibiotic era offers a solid example of the reasons why. Evolution through natural selection is the process by which living things adapt themselves to environmental changes; it works through individual organisms, but its effects are not limited to the individual scale. In the case of the spread of antibiotic resistance among microbes, there are at least three patterns at work.

First, microbes are being selected for their resistance to individual antibiotics.

Second, as new antibiotics are brought out to replace old ones, microbes are being selected for their ability to develop resistance to one antibiotic after another as quickly as possible.

Finally, the pressure exerted on the entire microbial biosphere by the pervasive presence of antibiotics in the modern environment is giving a huge selective advantage to species that have the ability to exchange genes for resistance with other species.

The results are being documented in increasingly worried articles in public health journals. A large and growing number of pathogenic microbes these days are already resistant to the antibiotics that used to treat them; new antibiotics brought onto the market start running into problems with resistant bacteria in a fraction of the time that was once necessary for resistance to emerge; and the transfer of antibiotic resistance from one species to another is becoming an increasingly troubling problem.

The possibility of a return to pre-1928 conditions, when a simple bacterial infection could readily turn into a death sentence and most families buried at least one child before the age of five, is seeing serious discussion in the professional literature.

As already mentioned, though, such worries are falling on deaf ears outside the public health and infectious-disease fields. There’s a mordant irony in the reason why, though I suspect it’s not often relished outside of the peak oil scene and a few other places where the same logic appears.

Faced with the prospect of the end of the antibiotic era and the return of bacterial illnesses as major threats to public health, most politicians, like the people they’re supposed to serve, respond with an overfamiliar sentence: “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of something.”

The increasingly frantic efforts of researchers to find new antibiotics and stay ahead of the remorselessly rising tide of microbial resistance get no more attention than the equally frantic efforts, say, of drilling companies to find petroleum deposits to make up for the increasingly rapid depletion of existing oil fields.

In both cases, and in any number of others, the myth of progress is the most important barrier in the way of a meaningful response to our predicament. According to the myth, we can’t go backwards to any condition encountered in the past; what Man conquers is supposed to stay conquered, so he can continue his ever-victorious journey from the caves to the stars.

It’s unthinkable, in terms of the myth, that the supposed conquest of some part of nature—say, bacterial disease—might represent nothing more than a temporary advantage that the pressures of natural selection will soon erase.

Thus when this latter turns out to be the case, those believers in the religion of progress who aren’t forced to confront such awkward realities in their work or their daily lives simply repeat the sacred words “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of something,” to invoke the blessing of the great god Progress on His only begotten son, Man, and then proceed to act as though nothing could possibly go wrong.

The difficulty, of course, is that an embarrassingly large portion of the territory supposedly conquered by Man over the last three centuries is showing an awkward propensity to ignore Man’s overlordship and do what it wants instead. The much-ballyhooed Green Revolution of the mid-20th century is another case in point. The barrage of fertilizers and poisons the proponents of that movement turned on agriculture won a temporary advantage over the hard subsistence limits of earlier eras, but it was only temporary. T

he reckless use of artificial fertilizers turned out to have drastic downsides, while the poisons drove insects and weeds into exactly the same frenzy of intensive natural selection that antibiotics brought to the microbial world. Insects and weeds don’t reproduce as quickly or swap genetic material with the same orgiastic abandon as microbes, but the equivalent changes are happening at a slightly slower pace; one of the dirty secrets of conventional agriculture is that herbicide resistance among weeds and pesticide resistance among insects and other agricultural pests are spreading rapidly, erasing the short-term gains of the Green Revolution while leaving the long-term costs in lost topsoil and poisoned water tables to be paid by generations to come.

Farmers faced by resistant weeds and pests, like physicians faced by resistant microbes, are turning to increasingly desperate measures to get the same results that their equivalents got with much less trouble. That’s exactly the situation that’s driving the current fracking boom and bubble, too. Back in the glory days of petroleum exploration and discovery, drillers could punch a well a few hundred feet into the ground and hit oil; now it takes hugely expensive deepwater drilling, tar sands extraction, or hydrofracturing of shale and other “tight oil” deposits to keep the liquid fuel flowing, and the costs keep rising year after year.

The implication that has to be faced is that the age of petroleum, and everything that unfolded from it, was exactly the same sort of temporary condition as the age of antibiotics and the Green Revolution. Believers in the religion of progress like to think that Man conquered distance and made the world smaller by inventing internal combustion engines, aircraft, and an assortment of other ways to burn plenty of petroleum products.

What actually happened, though, was that drilling rigs and a few other technologies gave our species a temporary boost of cheap liquid fuel to play with, and we proceeded to waste most of it on the assumption that Nature’s energy resources had been conquered and could be expected to fork over another cheap abundant energy source as soon as we wanted one.

That follows logically from the myth, but it doesn’t follow in reality. Instead, the temporary advantage our species gained by exploiting all that cheap, easily accessible petroleum is being brought to an end by factors even more implacable than the constant pressure of natural selection on niche boundaries: the simple facts that a finite planet by definition only contains a finite amount of any given resource, and that deposits of every resource are distributed according to the power law—the rule, consistently true across an impressive range of fields, that larger deposits are much less common than smaller ones.

Those factors are not going away; the fact that Wall Street office fauna are shoveling smoke about, ahem, “limitless amounts of oil and natural gas” from fracked wells, may make them their umpteenth million and keep the clueless neatly sedated for a few more years, but it’s not going to do a thing to change the hard facts of the predicament that’s closing around us all.

Seen in this light, the mythology of Man’s conquest of Nature bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a certain other campaign of conquest launched to the sound of blaring brass bands and overconfident pronouncements in the not too distant past. Like German civilians tuning in to news broadcasts from Berlin in the heady summer of 1941, people in the world’s industrial nations have taken in any number of proclamations about Man’s latest glorious victories in the war against Nature.

The conquest of disease, the conquest of hunger, the conquest of air and space and distance itself—is there any scientific or technological success, however temporary, that hasn’t been praised in those fatuous terms?—each had its fifteen minutes of fame as Man’s heroic legions of science and progress pursued their allegedly invincible Drang nach Sternen.

Some time ago, though, the content of the propaganda broadcasts began to change, though their tone did not. Nuclear fusion seems to have played much the same role in Man’s conquest of Nature that Moscow played in that other campaign, the goal that seemed almost in reach time and again, but never quite fell into the hands so greedily outstretched for it.

Other campaigns meant to push the frontiers of Man’s dominion further out into Nature’s unconquered territory have had equally mixed luck, and even the immense effort that put an American flag on the Moon turned out to have no more influence on the course of events than the rather less challenging campaign by an SS mountain battalion that put a different flag on the summit of the highest mountain in the Caucasus range.

It’s what followed that relative stalemate, though, that’s of importance here. Beginning in 1943, the German civilians tuning in to those radio broadcasts from Berlin had to deal with an increasing burden of cognitive dissonance, as the heroic battles and triumphant victories breathlessly announced by Goebbels’ acolytes stopped moving eastwards on the map and started shifting back toward the west.

The forces that had been sweeping everything before them in the suburbs of Moscow were now doing the same thing in the vicinity of Smolensk, with no explanation of the change. Nor was there any clearer explanation to be had as Germany’s glorious victories shifted steadily westwards, past Minsk and Warsaw and Breslau, until nervous listeners in the Berlin suburbs, just before the broadcasts stopped for good, could hear the sound of artillery rattling their own windows.

The question that all would-be conquerors need to ask themselves, in other words, is what will happen if their planned campaign of conquest fails. None of the 17th-century thinkers who played a role in launching humanity on its assault on Nature seems to have posed that question, even in private, much less tried to think through the answers.

I’d encourage my readers to have this in mind when the latest reports of glorious victories place these latter more and more often in territory that was supposedly conquered in earlier campaigns. I’d also encourage them, to push the metaphor a step further, to think about what terms of surrender might be demanded of us when Man’s grand attempt to conquer Nature ends in defeat—something we’ll discuss further next week.

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Revisiting the Adam & Eve myth

SUBHEAD: Tracing ecological destruction in the collapse of some of the most significant civilizations.

By Stuart Bramhall on 23 August 2013 in the Most Revolutionary Act -
(http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2013/08/23/collapse-revisiting-the-adam-and-eve-myth/)


Image above: Illustration for movie version of "A Short History of Civilization". From (http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2012/06/surviving-progress-the-review/).

Book review of "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright

The theme of "A Short History of Progress" is social collapse. In it, Canadian historical archeologist Ronald Wright summarizes humankind’s biological and cultural evolution, as well as tracing the role of ecological destruction in the collapse of the some of the most significant civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Easter Island and the Mayan civilization). Exhaustively researched, the book advances the theory that many of colossal blunders made by modern leaders are very old mistakes made by earlier civilizations.

Wright starts with the mystery of the agricultural revolution that occurred around 10,000 BC, when homo sapiens ceased to rely on hunting and berry-picking and began growing their own food. Twelve thousand years ago, the global population was still small enough that there was more than ample wild food to feed them. Yet for some reason, a half dozen human settlements in widely separated regions simultaneously domesticated plants and animals. Why?

The Importance of Stable Climate
Citing extensive geological and archeological evidence, Wright suggests plant and animal domestication may have been triggered by unprecedented climate stability. Prior to 10,000 BC, the earth’s climate was wildly unstable, with ice ages developing and abating over periods as short as a decade or so.

These sudden periodic changes in climate forced our hunter gatherer ancestors to continually migrate in search of food. The climate stabilization that occurred following the last ice age (around 10,000 BC) enabled them to settle in larger groups, save seeds to cultivate crops that took months to harvest, and engage in trade for other basic necessities.

Wright goes on to describe a number of diverse civilizations that arose and collapsed between 4,000 and 1,000 BC – and their unfortunate tendency towards mindless habitat destruction and runaway population growth, consumption, and technological development. In each case, an identical social transformation takes place as resources become increasingly scarce.

As prehistoric peoples find it harder and harder to feed themselves, inevitably a privileged elite emerges to confiscate communal lands and enslave their inhabitants. They then install a despotic tyrant who hastens ecological collapse by wasting scare resources on a spree of militarization and temple or pyramid building. This process is almost always accompanied by wholesale murder, torture, and unproductive wars.

Wright relates this typical pattern of ecological destruction and collapse to a series of “progress traps,” in which specific human inventions turn out to have extremely negative unintended consequences. Instead of fixing the underlying problem they’re meant to solve, the inventions create an even worse environmental mess. It’s a pattern so common in prehistory that it’s become enshrined in the Adam and Eve and similar creation myths. All describe how the quest for knowledge ended humankind’s access to freely available and abundant food and forced them to produce their own.

Our Ancestors Wipe Out the Neanderthals and Mammoths
According to Wright, the first of these “progress traps” was the invention of weapons (for hunting) by early homo sapiens. Wright blames this early invention of weapons for the first (archeologically) recorded instance of genocide – namely the wiping out of homo Neanderthalis (Neanderthal man) by Cro-Magnon man between 40,000 and 30,000 BC.

This was followed by other important mass extinctions as homo sapiens spread out across the globe between 30,000 and 15,000 BC. The most recent archeological evidence suggests the mammoth, camel and horse became extinct in North America during this period because of perfected hunting techniques that allowed homo sapiens to carry out mass slaughters (involving as many as 1,000 mammoths or 100,000 horses simultaneously).

Some archeologists attribute the end of hunting as a predominate food source (in numerous regions simultaneously) and the rise of plant-based diets to the decline in game animals stemming from this indiscriminate slaughter. The birth of agriculture, in turn leads to widespread deforestation and soil erosion in all the ancient civilizations, accompanied by soil salinization from over-irrigation. According to Wright, the entire cycle takes around a thousand years, which happens to be the average lifespan of most historic civilizations.

Turning Iraq Into a Desert
The first civilization to collapse in this way was Sumer (in southern Iraq), which flourished between 3,000 and 2,000 BC. The Sumerians invented irrigation, the city, the corporation (in the form of priestly bureaucracies), writing (for trade purposes), hereditary kings and slavery. By 2,500 BC, soil salinization (from irrigation) had caused a massive drop-off in crop yields. Instead of implementing environmental reforms, the ruling elite tried to intensify production by confiscating communal lands, introducing slavery and human sacrifice and engaging in chronic warfare.

From Sumer the cradle of civilization moved north to Mesopotamia (Babylon), in the region of northern Iraq and Syria, and humankind created one of the first man made deserts out of a region lush in date palms and other native vegetation.

Around 1,000 BC, similar civilizations also appeared in India, China, Mexico, Peru and parts of Europe. The Greeks (around 600 BC) were the first with any conscious awareness that they were destroying their own habitat. Plato writes a vivid description of the dangers of erosion and runoff from deforestation. The Athenian leader Solon tried to halt increasing ecological devastation by outlawing debt serfdom, food exports, and farming on steep slopes. Pisistratus offered grants to farmers to plant olive trees for soil reclamation.

Wright makes a good case for similar environmental destruction, rather than barbarian invasion, causing Rome to collapse. By the time of Augustus, Italian land had become so degraded that Rome was forced to import most of their food from North Africa, Gaul, and other colonies.

The Role of the New World
The most interesting section of the book concerns the role the New World played in rescuing the environmentally decimated European civilization. According to Wright, it was mainly New World gold and silver that capitalized the industrial revolution. However he also stresses the importance of the New World foods that were added to the European diet at a point where the population had outstripped their food supply.

Maize (sweet corn) and potatoes are twice as productive (in terms of calories per acre) as wheat and barley, the traditional European staples. He also makes the point – ominously – that, despite all our apparent technological progress, humankind hasn’t introduced one new food since the Stone Age. In fact, homo sapiens hasn’t evolved culturally or intellectually since our ancestors failed to confront resource scarcity in a way conducive to their survival.

If anything, given mass extinctions, potentially catastrophic climate change, and a growing scarcity of energy, water and fertile soil, we seem to be repeating the old maladaptive pattern. As examples, Wright cites the idiotic war on terrorism, which has ironic parallels with the chronic warfare the Sumerians launched 4,000 years ago. He also cites the rise of the New Right and the folly of trying to address resource scarcity by consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.


Video above: Trailer for "Surviving Progress", a movie based on "A Short History of Progress".  From (http://youtu.be/3DuampumYoc). 

[IB Publisher's note: This trailer ends with some techno-optimist claptrap about creating software to take over biological evolution - God forbid.]




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Roadmap to redesigning civilization

SUBHEAD: Archeological evidence indicates civilization preceded the agriculture contradicing the idea agricultural made civilization possible.

By Stuart Jeane Bramhall on 26 August 2013 in Dissident Voice -

(http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/08/a-roadmap-to-redesigning-civilization/)

Image above: Permaculture in action. Photo credit: hardworkinghippy via photopin cc. From (http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2013/08/26/a-roadmap-to-redesigning-civilization/).

Toby Hemenway, host of the video Redesigning Civilization — with Permaculture, defines permaculture as a branch of ecological design that employs natural ecosystems as a model. Although most permaculture design relates to food production, its principles can be applied to the management of all human needs, including water, shelter, waste, energy, finance, culture/spirituality and even sports and security.

Permaculture-based food production focuses on returning to a “horticultural” method of food production with “food forests” and other self-maintained food systems, as opposed to our current mechanized, open field method of food production. Permaculture relies on ecologically designed gardens, rather than open fields, and mixed crops, rather than monoculture. It also employs the continuous plant succession typical of natural ecosystems, rather than starting with a clear cut every year.

For me, the most interesting part of the film is Hemenway’s discussion of archeological evidence that civilization preceded the Agricultural Revolution (around 10,000 BC). This contradicts the prevailing belief that the agricultural made civilization possible by creating a food surplus. It’s been argued for more than a century that the creation of a food surplus through open field agriculture freed up non-farmers to specialize in higher pursuits, such as art, science, music, religion, and literature.

According to Hemenway, more recent archeological evidence suggests that civilization came first. This includes Venus figurines which have been discovered from 40,000 years ago, religious symbols from 30,000 years ago, evidence of horticulture (plant tending) 30,000 years ago and evidence of irrigation 20,000 years ago. He also talks about an archeological site in Gokikli Tepi Turkey from 14,000 years ago that reveals that our ancestors were attending large spiritual gatherings of hundreds of people.

Feeding large numbers of people simultaneously poses a clear technological challenge. Hemenway suggests that these large gatherings may have been the impetus for large scale open field cultivation. “Agriculture” (from “ager” meaning field) made it possible to produce large amounts of grain which, unlike other foods, can be stored for long periods.

Hemenway goes on to discuss some of the immediate drawbacks of grain-based agriculture (based again on archeological evidence): 

1. Overpopulation, famine, and warfare – agriculture immediately caused a population boom, as grains are the one of the easiest foods to convert to calories. They increase female fertility, as well as allowing for early weaning (breast feeding inhibits ovulation). This population boom made settlements more susceptible both to conquest from neighboring tribes and famine due to failed harvests.
   
2. Shorter life span and poorer health – following the introduction of agriculture, people tended to be shorter, suffer from more degenerative disease, and have shorter life spans (by about 20-30%). They also became subject to deadly viral epidemics (such as small pox) transmitted from domesticated animals.
   
3. Less leisure time – following the introduction of agriculture, people had to work 60+ hour weeks just to survive. This was in part due to the need to support a priesthood, nobility, and military to protect the grain surplus. A hunter gatherer can generally collect sufficient food in four hours to last him a week.
   
4. Agriculture created a fear of nature (of insects, weeds, wilderness, wild animals, and wild people) and a mindset in which people came to see themselves as separate, rather than part of nature.

Hemenway goes on to outline the basic permaculture design principles, with specific examples of their application to all aspects of sustainable living:

• Catching, storing, and reusing energy and materials, essentially eliminating the concept of waste.
• Becoming pattern literate – learning to observe ecosystems to see how a small change can have a big effect.
• Focusing on community and regional self-reliance rather than individual self-sufficiency.

Drawing on real-life examples, the film finishes with recommendations of what viewers can do to facilitate the transition to a “permaculture” lifestyle in their own communities.

Enjoy.

Video above: Toby Hemenway presents "Redesigning Civilization - with Permaculture", One hour, thirteen minutes. From (http://youtu.be/H6b7zJ-hx_c)

• Dr. Stuart Bramhall is an American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. Her works include a young adult novel The Battle for Tomorrow about a 16 year old girl who participates in the blockade and occupation of the US Capitol and a memoir, The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee. Email her at: stuartbramhall@yahoo.co.nz. Read other articles by Stuart Jeanne.

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The Golden Plain

SUBHEAD: Mana was once a vital wetlands supporting the lives of fish bird and plants - It can be again.

By Juan Wilson on 27 August 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-golden-plain.html)


Image above: Vernal ponds on the westside. In this case Puolo Point, near Hanapepe. Photo by Juan Wilson.

An imaginary true story
Imagine you are in Kekaha, Kauai, during a full moon near the Winter Solstice early in the 20th century; or more precisely at sunset on December 19th in 1907. As the sun is setting you are at the western end of Kekaha in a grove of palm trees at the sandy southern edge of a wetland. It is a place the Hawaiians call Pokii.

The bright day is cooling as above you the glow of as the sky turns from orange to a deep purple.  You look down again you see a small outrigger canoe slipping across the shallow water. It will soon take you north.

Your guide uses his paddle to pole you into the marshy water as the canoe rocks. It has rained a lot above the Mana plain in the last week and the water has made its way to down to the marsh. After a short while you are gliding through the water in an area fringed with sedge grasses. On either side, beyond the marsh, flooded fields of rice reflect what is left of the twilight.

To your left a thick forest of kiawe borders the marshland. You can barely hear the winter swell crashing on the shore break beyond the trees. A Pueo owl hovers over a clearing in the trees as it hunts for dinner.

On the right are the quarter-mile high cliffs of Mana and above them the grassland on the mantle above. The grassy mantle is divided by forested narrow valleys that cut the land into what look like loaves of bread set side by side. You can see farther when open water widens into the lower part of the 500 or so acres of Kawaiele Pond.

From the valleys along the base of the cliffs a forest of lehua and ohia trees spills. The valleys carry the fast moving rainwater from far above down to the Mana Plain. There along the base of the cliffs the marsh edge is fringed in pili and makaloa grasses.

As the dusk becomes darkness your guide points ahead. The moon is shining brightly on the smooth water. Suddenly there is a flash as a school of young fish leaps through the water and into the air chased by something unseen.

There is a great variety of fish, birds and plants that depend on this expansive wetland for their birth and sustenance. How many we will never know.

The rice paddies are behind you now. You are lucky to have this guide through Kawaiele Pond as it has branches that sprawl in different directions. One way leads to an outlet to the ocean and the village of Waiele in Kaawaloa ahupuaa.  There are stone walls lining fishponds near the shore of the village. Here fish enter to spawn in the Mana wetlands. The keike thrive in the warm brackish waters until it's their time.

In the distance there is a flatboat with two of men in it. One holds an oil lamp over the water while another gathers something from the water with a net. Shorebirds used these marshes to breed and hunt the fish too.

You pass through another branch of the pond leading to Limaloa Pond and Hohili beyond. You turn to look behind at the moon. The sky is cloudless. The moon is so bright that at first you do not see the rainbow surrounding it. As your eyes adjust the colors around the moon seem to pulse.

The guide has reached the northern end of Limaloa Pond and he nudges the bow of the canoe into a reedy area that seems solid enough. Above and ahead of you a line of clouds moves slowly with the trades strung down Mana Ridge from the swamp and forests of Kokee. It streches across the channel to Niihau bringing fresh water with it. After a short portage over a sandy area the two of you slip the canoe into the marsh of Nohili Pond in Nonomahiki ahupuaa. The guide navigates the canoe through the grassy area and into open water.

This is not as big as Kawaiele or Limaloa Pond but it has an impressive feature ahead to your left - it glows white in the moonlight with a scattering of dark tree stands on its back - its known to many as Barking Sands. At the peak the sand dunes of Nohili Point are about 100 feat high - the tallest in Hawaii. The beach they sit on is the longest in Hawaii as well, stretching over ten miles uninterrupted from Kekaha to Polihale.

You are tempted to end your trip at south end of Barking Sands. It is certainly about the most spectacular place to survey Mana and the ocean, but you have another goal farther ahead. The northern marshes of Nohili Pond are just ahead. As you drift onto shore you hear the scrape of sand on the canoe's hull. 

Once you land you could stay with your guide and go over the next portage and soon reach Kolo Pond close to the cliffs. It is a special place, but your plan is to head toward the old road that skirts the back of the dunes and reach Queen's Pond that lies along the shore of Kolo Ahupuaa. It is not a long walk.

You walk along the old dirt road and in s short while you cross into Kahelunui ahupuaa. The giant sand dunes north of Barking Sands continue there march up the beach with you. Kahelunui is narrow so its not long before you enter into Kolo ahupuaa; not where the pond is back at the cliff, but near the ocean dunes.

The old road passes through a group of giant monkeypod trees  Their ancient boughs make semicircular arcs from the massive trunks almost reaching the ground. The trees are the marker to head towards the ocean and Queen's Pond. You hike up the sandy path through kiawe trees that provide the only shade available in the day.  The moon is casting its shadows of the treetops in the white sand. You are careful to avoid the thorns of their fallen branches.

The dunes here are high and block the sound of the ocean. However you do hear laughter from the top of the 50 foot dune. The path ramps up to a clearing and you see sparks fly into the sky. You have found your friend's campfire in the dunes protected from the ocean wind. After a brief greeting you're off down the face of the dune heading toward to the ocean and the pond.

Queen's Pond is fully formed next to the ocean, and glistening in the moonlight. Tonight the pond is fat. It lies parallel to the ocean over 700 long by 150 wide. It is probably over your head in the middle.

Being a tidal ocean pond it forms in the sand only under the right conditions. It can disappear in a matter of hours or stay on for weeks. You never quite know if it will be there the next time you come. No one is out here but you and your friends.

You strip off your dusty clothes and touch a toe in the pond. The pond has been in place for couple of sunny weeks so it is warm. You wade in on the sandy bottom. There is a greenish blue flash beneath you. Your feet must have disturbed some bioluminescent algae growing in the pond.

Surprised, you laugh. A friend dives in head first and waves of aqua color light radiate out in front of her. You can see tiny fish dart away as you decide to dive in too - eyes open you see more rainbows.


Image above: Looking north towards Queens Pond and Polihale in distance, from the border of Kolo Ahupuaa, Photo by Juan Wilson.

The reality of it all
In 2010 I was asked to map the traditional land areas of the islands of Hawaii. They consist of the moku (roughly bioregions) and ahupuaa (roughly watersheds) of each island.

The indigenous Hawaiians developed a land management system utilizing the moku and ahupuaa to achieve long lasting agricultural and aquaculture practices. Although it was not perfect, it supported people's needs while protecting the environment for a longer time than modern practice has proven to do.

The Hawaiian success, as with most cultures, resulted in higher populations. Pigs escaped domestication and tore up the mountains. Birds became extinct because of the color of their feathers. Limits of acreage in the valleys meant greater difficulty expanding food production. These factors and more meant leaning too hard on the resources of the land.

As Hawaiian population reached into the hundreds of thousands, stricter regulation and control (kapu or taboo) of people increased. These disciplines were needed to maintain a precarious equilibrium with the environment. Even with these difficulties the pre-contact Hawaiians did better protecting the land than those from afar who settled here. By the time of Captain Cook's landing on Kauai, in 1779, growing population was something that Hawaiians already were dealing with. But not for long.

After taking just about every whale in the Atlantic the whalers moved to the Pacific with the attendant missionaries. They brought new diseases that decimated the Hawaiian people. As much damage as they did to Hawaii was only topped by plantations and the military.

Plantations:
The industrialized agriculture (primarily sugarcane and pineapple) that began in the 19th century that was practiced by Americans and Europeans required terraforming the islands to divert water our of the valleys and swamps and to where large fields could be assembled for irrigation of monocultures. The Hawaiians who depended on the natural flow of water in their valley watersheds were not consulted. The practice of Hawaiian culture shriveled. many of those Hawaiians who survived intermarried with imported plantation laborers and they and their progeny ended up in work camps no longer managing their own valleys.

Military:
The US Navy realized quickly that basing a fleet in the Pacific Ocean was a strategic necessity. By 1887 the Navy had exclusive rights on Oahu to repair and fuel ships in the shallow bay that was part of the largest wetland in Hawaii (now Pearl Harbor). Just a few years later a conspiracy between the plantation owners and US military overthrew Hawaiian sovereignty. Pearl Harbor was needed to take down Spanish Imperialism in the Pacific and replace it with an American brand. Pearl Harbor was dredged out and bulkheaded. Docks were built and bilge was jettisoned. What had been a shallow wetlands and marsh rich in plant and wildlife became a machine for the US Navy... which is the single most destructive organization on the planet.

Here on the outer island of Kauai we certainly were not immune to the effects of plantations. In fact, it was the observations by missionaries of the rich and productive Koloa Field System of the Hawaiians that inspired the first sugarcane plantation.

The Hawaiians had diverted the fast flowing Waikomo stream and other southside fresh water systems into a sophisticated irrigation system of ditches, loi and fishponds that produced vast amounts of food to support a large population. The Koloa Field system was so productive that it exported yams and sweet potatoes from Koloa Landing to California, to field hungry Forty-Niners during the California Gold Rush. The Hawaiians also had been growing sugarcane for their own use.

By 1835 Ladd & Company had started the first commercially successful industrial sugarcane plantation. Others soon followed. Ditches were dug, reservoirs were built, fields were irrigated.

On the west side of Kauai was the largest level area of land in Hawaii and the second largest wetland after Pearl Harbor. Chris Cook, former editor of the Garden Island News wrote in an article in 11/27/2000:

...the land (of Mana) was populated by Native Hawaiians who landed canoes at Pokii near Kekaha, which was then but a village marked by a stand of palm trees. Other villages dotted the base of the cliffs that reach sea level at the base of the once marshy Mana Plain, and Lehua forests grew down to the bottom of the cliffs.

The plain would flood following heavy rains, allowing outrigger canoe paddlers to travel freely from Mana to Waimea. Some taro planters there grew their crop atop unique wooden rafts that could rise and drop with the floodwaters...

Vladamar Knudsen began operating the Kekaha Sugar Company mill and plantation in 1856. Knudsen drained about 50 acres of the marsh along the Mana Plain and planted the first crop of commercially grown sugarcane there in 1878.

By the beginning of the 20th century Knudsen and family with the help of Hans Faye had plans for the Kekaha Ditch and the Kokee Ditch, which together diverted the water of the Waimea River and the Alakai Swamp into ditches feeding the upper reaches of Mana Moku near Puu Opae, and the lower flatland of the Mana Plain. Together these fields were the highest and lowest altitude sugarcane fields in operation.

Mana in 1907
In November 1907 a map of the Mana Plain was drawn up using the framework of the US Geological Surveys we still see today. The map appears to be a preliminary map prepared to be part of the Hawaii Territorial Survey under the authority of Walter E. Wall, Surveyor. The map was created by W. L. Heilbron.



Image above: A preliminary plan of Palt #2422 of Mana was done in November 1907 for Walter E. Wall, surveyor. Click to enlarge. Note we have highlighted swamp in green and Knudsen Estates in yellow.

This preliminary map shows two roads from Kekaha out towards Polihale. One was Government Road along the base of the Mana Cliffs and the other was a road behind the dunes and kiawe forests. Heilbron noted the area with the simple word "Swamp" and noted "4.0' elevation throughout Swamp" above sea level. Only to the southeast extreme, in front of the estates of Augustus and Eric Knudsen, was "Cane" identified.


Image above: Hawaiian Territorial Survey Plat #2422 of Mana in December 1907 for Walter E. Wall, surveyor. Click to enlarge.

Only a month later, in December 1907, another map drawn by Heilbron. It the official HTS Plat Registered Map 2422. It shows much greater detail than the November map, including the layout of the town of Mana and the land use on the Mana Plain.

This included much more area planted in rice around specific large ponds and marshes. The largest pond is in Kawaiele Ahupuaa and it and its surrounding marsh were over a thousand acres in area. Another area pond and marsh mauka of Nohili Point was over 400 acres.

This map also shows the expansion of sugarcane planted along the base of the Mana cliffs from Kekaha past Nohili Point. Paralleling mauka of the government road, a rail line extends across the Mana plain to haul cane.


Image above: USGS Mana Quadrangle Map from 1910. Provided by former DLNR Chair Peter Young by way of Hope Kallai. Note village of Waiele (identified as Waieli) a the exit of Kawaiele Pond into the ocean. On later maps Wailele is not shown, but property entitled to "E. Knudsen" takes its place. This was important in that this outlet to the ocean was used to drain the waters of the Mana Plane by Knudsen and his cronies. Click to enlarge.

Peter Young, former chair of the Department of Land & natural Resources for Hawaii wrote on FaceBook 8/26/13:

Mana is a coastal plain with an ancient sea cliff at its inner edge, which extends from Waimea in the south to Barking Sands in the north on the western shores of Kauai. This region has been identified as a leina-a-ka-uhane (paths-for-leaping-by-the-spirit). These were almost always on bluffs looking westward over the ocean, from which the spirits of the dead were believed to plunge in order to enter the spiritual realm.

Throughout prehistory [pre-contact more exactly], large areas of the Mana Plain were covered by the great Mana swamp, allowing the ancients to canoe as far south as Waimea. Up until the mid-1880s, the great Mana swamp, east of the plain, covered large areas of the lowlands.

Approximately 1,700-acres of permanent, semi-permanent and seasonal wetlands were present on the Mana Plain. It is believed that these wet conditions encouraged the independent invention of aquaculture on Kauai and the construction of stone and earthen ponds for growing staples such as taro, yam and sweet potatoes.

Historically, native Hawaiians constructed four different types of fishponds - freshwater taro ponds, other freshwater ponds, brackish water ponds and seawater ponds. Aquaculture was employed to supplement their other fishing activities, and permanent fishponds guaranteed a stable food supply for populations in lean times.  

Tended ponds provided fish without requiring fishing expertise, and harvesting the pond, unlike fishing at sea, was not weather dependent. Evidence suggests that Hawaiian fishponds were constructed as early as AD 1000, if not earlier, and continued to be built until the 1820's.

Mana in 1920-22
In May 1920 another HTS Plat Map was done (#3026) for Walter E. Wall drawn by T. J. K. Evans. It is obviously based on the 1907 map and following 1910 USGS map. It labels the wetlands as the Kawaiele Pond Game Reserve (leaving off Limaloa Pond), and shows Hohili Pond Game Reserve.

Another two maps were created in 1921 by T. J. K. Evans for Walter Wall Surveyor. They were Plat 3026-A and  Plat 3026-B.

Plat 3026-A shows the area north from Hohili that includes Poli Hale. On that map, north of Nohili Point, an additional marshland area lies mauka of Queen's Pond Beach in the Kolo Ahupuaa. It is labeled Kolo Pond Game Reserve (as does the USGS 1910 map).

These identifications of wetland as a specific pond and game reserve indicate to me some level of regulation of the resources by the Hawaii Territorial Government.  Surrounding the Kolo Pond area is shown sugarcane. The land makai of Nohili Pond to the back of the ocean sand dunes is labeled Pastoral Land.

Plat 3026-B shows a more southerly view of Mana Plat 3026. It extends from the northwest near the Knudsens' estates to the southeast and the edge of Waimea Canyon. This is the first Hawaiian Territory Survey that show the route of Kekaha Ditch created by Hans Faye. The Kekaha Ditch diverts the Waimea River water to the Mana Moku for growing sugarcane.
 
Bad things were in store for the Hawaiians living in Mana the next year. The early surveys of Mana by Walter Wall appear to have been the groundwork for the USGS map of 1910. Unfortunately, they may also have been the base maps for the destruction of the Mana wetlands and replacement by plantation sugarcane. In 1922 Faye began filling in the Mana wetlands.

Wikipedia says about Faye's work:

With the draining of the Nohili and Kawaiele Marshes in 1922 and the continued expansion of sugar cane area, another period of well development took place in the 1920s and 1930s.

Initially, this consisted of batteries of closely spaced drilled wells, but Maui-type shafts (tunnels that skim fresh water off the top of the basal aquifer) located along the foot of the bluffs subsequently replaced these.

It was Faye's vision that created the systems and the intricate drainage canals that drained the large swamps of Mana.

In 1926, the Kokee Ditch was completed diverting water from Mohihi Stream and the headwater of the Waimea River in the Alakai Swamp at an altitude of about 3400 feet.

About one-fourth of the Kokee Ditch supply has irrigated the highland cane fields below Puu Opae reservoir on Niu Ridge, and the balance has irrigated the highland fields east of Kokee Road.

The village of Waiele with its few houses at the mouth of Kawaiele Pond never appeared on a map again. It's foundations are under the end of the southern 10,000 runway operated by the PMRF. 

The town of Mana lingered on for a while as the Kawaiele, Nohili and Kolo ponds and their surrounding wetlands were filled in to make room for more sugar. I have a 1963 USGS map that I have shows about 50 buildings out in Mana town. The town was just a bit southeast (to the right) of the intersection where you turn onto the dirt road to Polihale.  In my 1983 USGS map there were less than twenty buildings shown.

Today there are no buildings there. You cannot get there either. There is a gate that is always locked and controlled by Syngenta that keeps prying eyes out of what was once Mana. But long before the people and the places of Mana were disappeared, the Moku name itself was buried. On all maps afterwards, the Kekaha and Kokee ditches were operational the Mana Plain was designated as part of Kona - no longer Mana. That's because it was in Kona where the power was - where the Waimea and Kekaha mills stood.

The town was dismantled after Mana lost its designation as a bioregion in Hawaiian culture. I think that needs correcting. I think for the sake of life itself that Mana's wetlands and ponds should be restored.

Perhaps because Mana as a place no longer has any status it is the place on the island where bad things go to hide. This includes the landfill, the shooting range, the US Navy Pacific Missile Range Facility, the activities of Sandia Labs, DARPA, Raytheon and ITT corporations, as well as the activities of GMO companies like Syngenta. Evil abides there.  We call it "Mordor".

The Golden Plain Tomorrow
To heal the island and the ocean, we need to make Mana whole. One meaning of the Hawaiian word mana is "dry land". Certainly much of Mana fits that description much of the year. But the times when parts are wet with rain and connected to the ocean were important - even vital.


Image above: Aha Kiole Advisory Committee Mana Map with historic wetlands from 1907-1910 overlaid. Click to enlarge.

Another meaning for the Hawaiian word mana is "supernatural, miraculous or divine power". The place has some of that too. Spirits move through and beyond the place and will help us heal.

Hawaiian tradition held that the souls of the people, uhane, when separated from their bodies traveled along the cliffs of the northwestern edges of their island and dove from cliffs into the sea to reach the realm of the dead, Po, that was below the sea and beyond the setting sun.

As I understand it, souls migrated up the archipelago from island to island. They finally reached Kauai from Kaena Point on Oahu. Their final journey was to Mana and on to cliffs of Haelele over Polihale, the House of the Spirits. There they dived into the sea to find peace for eternity. 

The US military, its corporate weapons building partners (e.g. Sandia Labs, Ratheon, ITT, Lockheed Martin, DARPA), as well as the GMO Chemical companies (like Syngenta DuPont and DOW) and even entities like the Kauai County Landfill and Kauai Shrimp Farm are all occupying and damaging the westside of Kauai and particularly the Mana Moku.

 
Image above: Near Mount Doom sits Mordor with its flaming eye searching the world for anything it can destroy. Composite illustration using New Age Cinema image of Mordor from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy with a GoogleEarth image looking over Makaha Ridge at the Mana Plain by Juan Wilson. Click to enlarge. From IB post Ea O Ka AIna: Navy plans for Mordor.

It seems an abomination that these things have come to dominate such a supernatural place - this place of Hawaiian spirit. 

I am beginning a project to add to the moku and ahupuaa maps. It focuses on Mana Moku. I believe if we can heal Mana we can heal Kauai and ultimately Hawaii. We have much work to do.

For Kauai and the ocean to thrive we need to restore the Mana Plain as birthing and nurturing place for birds, fish and plants that it was. This will require ridding ourselves of the merchants of greed and death.


Image above: Queen's Pond, fully formed, as it rarely appears today due to beach erosion. Polihale in the distance and beyond Makaha Ridge. From (http://www.natgeocreative.com/photography/1136837).

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Entergy closing Vermont Yankee

SUBHEAD:  Entergy is shutting down the Vermont Yankee reactor in latest retreat of nuclear industry in 2013.


By Alex Frank on 27 August 2013 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/entergy-closing-vermont-yankee.html)


Image above: Photo of Vermont Yankee Reactor building. It looks like Fukushima because it too is a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor. From (http://www.reformer.com/localnews/ci_23880720/vermont-gop-leader-slams-dems-over-vy).

Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis, Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School and author of a July 17th report forecasting that three dozen reactors are at risk of early retirement, issued the following statement today:

“The announcement today by Entergy that it will shutter the troubled Vermont Yankee reactor is the latest – but certainly not the last – domino to fall for the failing U.S. nuclear power industry. Entergy, the nation’s second largest nuclear operator, already had started reorganizing its nuclear assets and slashed related staffing.

Consider recent developments:

• The announcement about Vermont Yankee follows the August 1st announcement by Duke that it is abandoning the Levy reactor project in Florida.
  
• The Duke decision to pull the plug on Levy came just one day the announcement that the French-subsidized nuclear giant EDF is pulling out of the U.S. nuclear power market due to the inability of nuclear power to compete with alternatives and the dramatic reduction in demand growth caused by increasing efficiency of electricity consuming devices.
  
• In recent months, we have seen the shutdown of four other nuclear reactors – San Onofre (2 reactors) in California, Kewaunee in Wisconsin, and Crystal River in Florida.
  
• The industry also has killed at least five large planned “uprate” expansion projects – Prairie Island in Minnesota, LaSalle (2 reactors) in Illinois, and Limerick (2 reactors) in Pennsylvania.

As I pointed out earlier this month, what we are seeing today is nothing less than the rapid-fire downsizing of nuclear power in the United States. It is important to recognize that the tough times the U.S. nuclear power industry faces today are only going to get worse.

Recent developments nationwide have sent what are truly shock waves through the industry and Wall Street. The spate of early retirements and decisions to forego uprates magnify the importance of the fact that the ‘nuclear renaissance’ has failed to produce a new fleet of reactors in the U.S. 

With little chance that the cost of new reactors will become competitive with low carbon alternatives in the time frame relevant for old reactor retirement decisions, we need to start preparing now for more early retirements or the threats of such retirements.” 

• Media contact for Alex Frank, (703) 276-3264 or afrank@hastingsgroup.com
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Coral Grief

SUBHEAD: It is clear that there is a disastrous connection between pesticide use and coral reef die-off.

By Katherine Muzik on 25 August 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/coral-grief.html)


Image above: Coral on the Great Barrier Reef. The same pesticides pushing along the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef are also linked to a raft of illnesses in humans. From (http://www.wwf.org.au/?6401/Dangerous-chemicals-a-threat-to-families-and-environment-Report).

I am writing to speak up for the voiceless members of our Kauai Island, including the corals, limu and numerous other marine creatures which are increasingly troubled by our human activities here on land.

While conducting their research, GMO companies on Kauai are apparently using still-undisclosed kinds and amounts of pesticides, which eventually reach the sea, where they can cause grave harm to our marine life.

A quick Google search for “pesticides and coral reefs” nets 31,200,000 entries, and a search for just one herbicide, “glyphosate (as in Round-up) and corals”, an astonishing 14,800,000.

Just now, my search for “herbicides and turtles” yielded me 8,130,000!

And for “herbicides and marine algae”, 4,450,00 results!!

It is clear there is a connection - a very important one.

It is a disastrous connection. We humans ignore it at our peril.

Let me summarize these many millions of articles for you: pesticides, especially herbicides, have been scientifically shown to have a deleterious effect on marine life, whether plankton, corals, limu, turtles…

Having studied coral reefs and their decline for many decades, all over the world, I am utterly dismayed.

Corals which have already been under intense pressure from sediments, oil pollution, overfishing, marine debris, military base construction and more recently, acidification and global climate change, are now facing an additional threat in the form of pesticides arriving from land.

In 2011, marine biologists in Australia reported that pesticides increase the vulnerability of corals to rising sea surface temperatures and other human-induced threats.

Another recent report from the Great Barrier Reef shows that corals can be harmed by agricultural chemicals at levels so low as to be practically undetectable: “Coral settlement was reduced by between 50 and 100% following 18 hours exposure to very low concentrations”.

Herbicides used on farmlands eventually run down to the sea, where they damage or destroy free-living phytoplankton (which provide us oxygen and are food for zooplankton and other animals); they damage the zooxanthellae in coral (the algae in their tissues, which help corals grow and thrive); and they damage the seaweed and sea grass communities (which turtles and we too eat).

In addition to herbicides, the insecticides and fungicides used on land also enter the sea, where they damage or destroy zooplankton and coral polyps. They cause further damage to the food chain by accumulating in the tissues of shellfish, fish and marine mammals and negatively affecting their physiological processes too.

Here in Kauai, we have unusual coral reefs, formed not only by coral polyps living with their zooxanthellae (remember, plants), but also formed by coralline algae (plants)! Yes, plants! 35% of our reef sands here in Kauai are from the skeletons of plants, the so-called coralline algae!
Uh oh! As plants, the coralline algae too have photosynthetic systems already proven to be disrupted by herbicides, and so they too will likely suffer and ultimately perish if we do not care for them properly.'

And again, about those turtles, eating turtle grass, well, take a guess.

Let’s keep our reefs alive! Our corals, our limu, our turtle grass, our turtles!

Let’s remember that corals were regarded as sacred since Ancient Times, and thus were honored in the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian hymn of Creation: “Hanau ka Uku-ko‘ako’a” or, “Born the coral polyp”. And so, eventually we humans too were born.

I am for passage of Bill 2491. We need to know, and simultaneously learn how to control and manage, what is entering our watersheds and then descending, so harmfully, to our sea. The corals cannot escape. Ultimately, neither can we.

• Katherine Muzik, Ph.D. is an Associate in Natural Sciences at the Bishop Museum and is a resident, Kapaa, Kauai.


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Rehypothecation of Ben Bernanke

SUBHEAD: The nervousness out there is epochal. Everyone waiting for the other shoe to drop after Labor Day.

By James Kunstler on 26 August 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-self-rehypothecation-of-ben-bernanke/)


Image above: David Horsey cartoon from 2009 showing bankers taking bailouts from US Treasury ATM. From (http://www.myqualitytime.net/2009/01/just-few-scary-thoughts-for-today-i.html).

Definition of "Rehypothecation" - The practice by banks and brokers of using, for their own purposes, assets that have been posted as collateral by their clients.

How then did Ben Bernanke finally summon the fortitude to entertain tapering Federal Reserve bond purchases from $85 billion a month to, say, $84.7 billion a month come September 18th, the world may never know, but now the deed appears to be done, in his absence, by remote paranormal transmission, while the other Fed board members, with their attendant economist factotums, servelings, and catamites all beamed the message out of horsey Jackson Hole that they expected — even pined for — the vaunted return to “a normal economy.”

Which left many bystanders wondering if that meant a Dow Jones industrial average at, say 3,847 around Columbus Day, the 10-year bond at 5 percent, and every pension fund in world bleeding out from a sucking chest wound — not to mention a Hindenberg-like conflagration of the US Treasury as debt payments went beyond critical.

Pardon me for saying that I don’t think these mooks of finance know what they’ve been paying for with the QE series of monkeyshines. They’ve been creating “money” for five years to offset the collapse of a no-longer-cheap-oil economy. It’s really that simple.

If any of these poobahs thinks they can run a “normal economy” at $106-a-barrel then they should run out and get a realtor’s license and buy as many Arizona REO’s as the foundering banks will admit to holding on their books, and then become landlord to renters working 29 hours a week on the WalMart loading dock.

Actually, I don’t think they will have to wait that long to see the consequences of their loose, silly talk. America’s major export is now working its hoodoo in many other parts of the world as currencies become unglued and economies look down at the flimsy bamboo scaffolding that holds them up so high.

America’s major export these days is economic uncertainty, specifically the question of what, exactly, will maintain the pretense that the hopelessly intertwined financial affairs of China, India, Brazil, Japan, Euroland, Russia, and everybody else, really, including ourselves, are not unraveling like some kind of cosmic sweater knitted with one needle by a cross-eyed god with the jim-jams.

A lot of people begin to suspect that there is something called “an economy” quite apart from the shenanigans and dumb shows put on by the banks and their imitators, the hedge funds. That actual economy is a very earthy thing, in so far as it is pegged to the biophysical realities of the planet — such as, can you harvest a turnip and therefore make turnip soup for dinner? After all, you won’t be making a soup out of interest rate swaps.

Of course, dining on turnip soup is not as sexy as driving to work in a Tesla to a hedge fund boiler room where you get to cream off millions every week by playing Where’s Waldo with the rehypothecated accounts of the muppets who foolishly entrusted you with their own ill-gotten savings.

The nervousness out there is palpable and epochal. Not only is everyone waiting for some other shoe to drop after Labor Day; they’re waiting for it to drop on their own heads. The most visible result, I think, will be a shocking flight into precious metals, of which there is precious little to meet the kind of demand soon to overwhelm that teeny-weeny market corner of the financial universe. What else is there now? The Fed taper talk is pretty much a case of holding a gun to a puppy’s head — the puppy being the equities markets.

The bond sector is a hall of mirrors. Cash is a lot less than king in several countries now, with the contagion running hot. Everything is mispriced to the upside except Gold and Silver, which are mispriced the other way, especially after the chicaneries of April and June when, depending on which story you believe, the banks ran a naked short campaign to knock the stuffing out of the metals so they could then go back in and hoover some of it up cheap in an attempt to conceal the multiple out-leasings (that is sale, or perhaps theft) of metal left by fools in their custodial charge.

Or, some other sages might say, the knock-down was done to defend the honor of the evaporating US dollar (a dollar with the vapors), making it appear sturdier than it actually is. Yes, well that worked, sort of, for a few months, while Wall Street repaired to the annual East Hampton endorphin splash.

I was not invited to Diddy’s party, where the pineal glands of the gathered .01 percent were audibly ringing with celestial euphoria as they swapped the reassuring pulsations of their own specialness. Those people, you can be sure, were not pining for a “normal economy.”

Long story short: we’re in for some interesting weeks ahead. Keep your hat on.

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