Laws of Necessity

All of my new posts are on the website Laws of Necessity

I have 333 posts in the past three months!

Check it out! 

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth II

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/243

In Al Gore’s brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right. Gore’s stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates’ climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

Boulder’s Food Summit

Boulder County Going Local Keynote Speaker’s Presentation

http://www.bouldercountygoinglocal.com/2008foodsummit.html

http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/foodsummitkeynotevisuals.pdf

Input:

http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/documents/2008foodsummit.pdf

WHY LOCAL LINKAGES MATTER: Findings from the Local Food Economy Study, by Viki Sonntag, PhD, Sustainable Seattle.

BBC: “UN Calls for Farming Revolution”

A UN-sponsored report has called for urgent changes to the way food is produced, as soaring food prices risk driving millions of people to poverty.

The Unesco study recommends better safeguards to protect resources and more sustainable farming practices, such as producing food locally.

More natural and ecological farming techniques should be used, it says.

Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines and parts of West Africa have seen riots recently over the costs of rice, wheat and soya.

Unesco, a UN educational body, says increased demand for food in India and China, the growing market for biofuel crops, and rising oil prices are some of the factors behind the rising prices.

Executive summary of the IAASTD report [144KB]

A group of 400 experts spent three years researching the report, which was unveiled on Tuesday at Unesco in Paris.

The authors found:

• Progress in agriculture has reaped very unequal benefits and has come at a high social and environmental cost
• Food producers should try using “natural processes” like crop rotation and use of organic fertilisers
• The distance between the produce and consumer should also be reduced

The BBC’s Nick Miles says that with food prices at the top of the international political agenda, this is effectively a blueprint for the future of global agriculture.

Unesco says wheat prices have risen 130% percent since March 2007 while soy prices have jumped 87%.

“The status quo is no longer an option,” Guilhem Calvo, a Unesco expert, told a news conference in Paris.

“We must develop agriculture less dependent on fossil fuels, that favours the use of locally available resources.”

‘Alleviate hunger’

The report said rising oil prices had made transport and farm production more expensive and had led to more crops being grown to make biofuels for vehicles.

It said biofuel production had mixed effects, adding: “The diversion of agricultural crops to fuel can raise food prices and reduce our ability to alleviate hunger throughout the world.”

It also warned large swaths of central and western Asia and Africa were running out of water.

Farming was responsible for more than a third of the world’s most degraded land, it said.

Unesco noted the ”considerable influence” of big transnational corporations in North America and Europe.

By contrast, Latin America and the Caribbean are largely dependent on imported food, it said.

Over the weekend the World Bank outlined a plan of aid and loans to developing nations to help deal with the problem.

SOURCE

Global food system ‘must change’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7347239.stm

The Food Revolution Begins

Take the food riots now spreading across the planet because the prices of staples are soaring, while stocks of basics are falling. In the last year, wheat (think flour) has risen by 130%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and corn by 31%, while there are now only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks left globally. Governments across the planetary map are shuddering.

Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat.

Moreover, when the source of that hunger is not the absence of food per se, but the invisible barrier of social inequalities that stand between poor people and the food supplies their poverty denies them, things can turn pretty nasty, pretty quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing right now.

Hunger, in itself, is not sufficient to create a political crisis that threatens the very survival of the established order. But in many instances, it has been a necessary component of the despair that forces that has forced ordinary people to take extraordinary risks, confronting those armed to defend the existing order — and, of course, revolutions succeed precisely in that moment when the soldiers and policemen paid to defend the existing order look into the eyes of the “enemy” confronting them, on the streets, and they see themselves, their families and neighbors, and the state’s power to enforce its rule evaporates. As the great Bertolt Brecht once noted, “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: it needs a driver.”

Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/04/food_riots.html

SOURCE: http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/09/a-revolutionary-moment-in-egypt/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/13/food.climatechange

SOURCE: http://tomdispatch.com/

Trucker’s Strike

On April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking.

Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests — by CB radio and Internet — have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies.

70 percent of the nation’s goods travel by truck.

“We can no longer haul their stuff for what they’re paying,” said David Santiago, 35, a trucker for the past 17 years.

The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There’s talk of a protest in Indiana on April 18, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks on DC on April 28.

SOURCE

Welcome

Please help us bring about the peaceful end of Western Industrialized culture. It is killing us. We can do better!

My pen name is Publius2012 because Publius was the pen name of our founding fathers (Hamilton, Madison & Jay) when writing the Federalist Papers (a defense of the Constitution); also, Publius became the first Roman consul (the highest office)  when the Romans rejected totalitarianism and embraced a representative republic, as well as meaning “friend of the people.”  And there is an enormous amount of energy around the date 2012: it is the expiration of the Mayan calendar, the end of the Kyoto protocol, Nostradamus predicted  destruction, and on and on.