Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Ecological Reformation: Extending Checks and Balances Beyond the Government to Maintain Ecological and Bodily Integrity
Opposing Tyranny Beyond the State: Novel Institutional Design and Institutional Coordination Principles for Science, Finance, and Consumption
Some recent tyrannous news about (carcinogenic) RFID chipping companiesbuying credit monitoring databases and how British police are under equally tyrannous orders to steal suspects private DNA and put it in a public database regardless of innocence or guilt findings reminded me of one of the principles of the bioregional state that all tyrannous governments break: maintaining bodily integrity. The bioregional state maintains bodily integrity.
I discussed the bodily integrity principle at greater length in a previous post:
"Codex Alimentarius's current versions, in terms of the bioregional state, cross the 'bodily integrity' line "that government shall not pass." The fuller quote of bioregional state [bodily integrity] principles, from Toward a Bioregional State's Ecological Bill of Rights, says in part:
"Attempts of some to pressure government to enforce certain moralities to regulate internal bodily issues are forms of bodily tyranny that break the skin barrier that government shall not pass. The Constitution of Sustainability shall assure bodily integrity through upholding bodily rights, instead of demoting them."
Additionally, the tyrannous news above that only works when other tyrannous versions of institutions are associated with state tyranny reminded me of the promise in the preface of Toward a Bioregional State to extend analysis of tyranny beyond the state:
...[W]hat I am arguing is that these are general structural requirements for all states as they move towards sustainability....Structurally, the state in general requires changing, instead of only a change on the level of political party ideas for instance. These bioregional letters propose how existing unsustainable states could be 'made over' into sustainable states: typically, a different topic is addressed in each letter. There are 26 bioregional letters--so far. [However,]...[s]tate structures are far from the only aspect of importance [in avoiding tyranny], though they are a formal requirement. I am working on other issues beside the state--the institutional interactions between science, finance, and consumption are equally important in sustainability because the 'state' influences consumptive politics in these four issues."
In the 30 minute interview I gave about the book, I talked about this as well, how a wider ecological tyranny depends upon agreeable institutional practices beyond the state and their material and developmental choices.
So Toward a Bioregional State is 'book one' dealing with state institutions that oppose ecological tyranny. It is the first book in the world on green constitutional engineering.
It implies its companion book, 'Toward an Ecological Reformation,' that is on a wider "Ecological Reformation" of institutional design and institutional interaction required in other areas to move to sustainability.
To elaborate these other institutional areas toward sustainability, first it is required to discuss why we are required to discuss novel levels of checks and balances beyond state institutions: [1] because politics is animated from other areas of institutional design beyond the state in order to keep tyrannies in place, and [2] because there are as a consequence interactive institutional practices that create tyranny and unsustainability--or alternatively, #1 and #2 can make sustainability. In short, more than state institutions create good or bad developmental policies and developmental choices.
Toward this wider Ecological Reformation, it is important to note our ecological tyrannies are this wider cross-linked tyranny agreed upon by interactive institutions beyond, though with, the state institutions. Any ecological tyranny requires unrepresentatively designed and unrepresentatively interactive institutions in four areas: state institutions, science institutions, financial institutions, and consumptive institutions.
A sustainable society has [1] institutional designs, [2] checks and balances between these, and [3] multiple simultaneous choice allowances within these categories to keep unrepresentative and unsustainable collusions and clientelism from coalescing, while encouraging coordination only via open, representative, and politically transparent ways.
The Three Dimensions of Tyranny: Political, Bodily, and Ecological
The idea is that political, bodily, and ecological tyranny depends upon the same interaction of informal power animating these four institutional design areas and their institutional alliances. First, an analysis of tyranny is unable to be limited to only the political institutions and human issues. It requires an analysis of how tyranny is a form of unrepresentative, unecological development effects beyond mere human and beyond mere state institutions--that of course have human health tyranny repercussions in full circle. Second, an analysis of tyranny is unable to be limited to only analysis of state institutions since states are unable to be a tyranny by themselves. They require equally tyrannous institutional designs and collusive behavior between unrepresentative scientific, financial, and consumptive institutions. These other areas of potential tyranny work with an unrepresentative state to create these three dimensions of tyranny.
This means that sometimes maintaining this bodily integrity requires maintaining ecological integrity. This means that opposing tyranny in the state goes beyond mere state design suggestions. To achieve sustainability is to offer novel checks and balances for the institutional design and the institutional interactions between state, science, finance, and consumption institutions.
That is one of the arguments of Toward a Bioregional State and its "book two" in progress which has examples of [1] institutional design frameworks to achieve this in these additional areas, [2] conceptualizes how to maintain checks and balances against their degradative institutional collusions to avoid politicized clientelism, and [3] how to have multiple institutional alternatives (in each of the consumptive categories for wider consumer choice; and in the four areas of state, science, finance, and consumption to maintain regional institutional practices capable of constructing their own optimal interests in particular areas).
This implies that to avoid political, bodily, and ecological tyranny requires a larger Ecological Reformation of 'the four sovereigns' and how they interact. Most political science reductionistically limits analysis to state institutions and only human-to-human relations. These are only a small part of how political power is exercised through the other three institutional forms' practices and design motifs as well as through particular politicized materials and technologies as a consumptive infrastructure.
Political, bodily, and ecological tyranny can be their unrepresentative interaction, or sustainability can be their interaction via checks and balances against degradative material regimes of collusion.
In the introduction's examples, checks and balances on one consumptive material corporation (VeriChip) from owning another 'science/knowledge/database' gathering corporation (Steel Vault) is one example. The other example would be checks and balances on state power (the British state) from being able to gather material DNA, the material/consumptive position. Keeping these institutions separate maximizes greater public input from particular regions instead of regimes of centralized political power, knowledge, and materials flows as clientelism. Another example would be how oil corporations would be checked and balanced from buying up their functional alternatives in the energy category (and mostly, just refusing to utilize them, thus securing their political clientelism in the energy category via oil as a form of tyranny). The same check and balance within the consumptive category would keep genetically modified crop (consumptive) corporations from (a) being half owned by the state (like in the case of some of them) or from buying up their functional equivalents (natural seed companies) in the same consumptive category (and refusing to sell them, just to have more control and clientelism in the reduction of choice arrangement they desire in their consumptive category). All these checks and balances would reduce very real frameworks of political tyranny that is exercised outside of exclusive state institutions.
Another recent example of this form of collusion between science institutions, informal state elites, and corporate ownership as an interlocked as tyranny is the "Climategate" issue: that there are various Al Gore financial kickbacks created behind the scenes, justified by a climate science that is heavily partial and even conspiratorial (and see this) instead of based on open peer review as real science is. Meanwhile, Gore's corporations are being funded by the federal government in the process--three levels of tyrannous collusion that is without political transparency:
"Yesterday we reported on how Gore was set to become the first "carbon billionaire" on the back of vast profits from companies invested in the "green revolution" that the former vice-president has a hefty stake in. We also highlighted how the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has direct ties to both Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering. Gore's investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of CCX. Gore stands to make windfall profits from his stake in carbon trading systems that would be used to manage the cap and trade system currently being readied for passage in the Senate, but his admission that CO2 is far less of a threat than global warming alarmists have been claiming could be a terminal blow for such a proposal. As Andrew Bolt writes in today's Australian Herald Sun, his flip-flopping "Suggests not only that was Gore wrong to claim the science was "settled", but that the hugely expensive schemes to "stop" warming by slashing carbon dioxide emissions will be less than half as effective as claimed."
I'm interested in demoting polluting, corruptible, and degradative raw material regimes as much as the next guy. We can do it because all the solutions for sustainability already exist. I note many at Toward a Bioregional State's companion blog, Commodity Ecology. There I list 89 categories of consumptive use and the more sustainable technologies and materials that already exist, waiting to be applied. The technology and materials for sustainability have been available for decades, though left unapplied. I suggest we look to political corruption around status quo raw material regimes in their categories as the rationale why we are denied local optimal solutions for sustainability. Solving political tyrannies is of the first order--to be a good ally for those introducing the sustainable technologies we already have available.
However, back to the carbon regime of tyranny, to create a novel tyranny sold as a solution is counterproductive and will only contribute to unsustainable politics by soldering together a form of repressive, exclusively centralizing institutions that merely claim to be dealing with environmental issues, when their centralization will be a cause of future forms of political tyranny and ecological tyranny as well.
There are at least four rings in the environmental circus (i.e., four ways to respond to environmental crises), and the bioregional state solutions toward more local representation of ecological self-interest by freeing up technologies and local optimal uses of them and encouraging removing political corruptions that maintain unsustainably are in contrast to corporate media suggestions of tyrannous arrangements that remove local optimality despite being sold as environmental solutions.
The Four Unrepresentative Institutions of Tyranny: State, Science, Finance, and Consumption; or the Four Representative Institutions of Sustainability with Different Institutional Designs
Ecological Reformation is the wider argument that ecological tyranny requires solutions inclusive of though beyond state-level political tyranny to solve. States are only one quarter responsible for ecological tyranny, since ecological tyranny is a series of other institutional designs and top level personnel exchange and policy coordination between between how state, scientific, financial, and consumptive institutions work together to construct such a tyranny (typically recycling the same people in different positions to "HARMonize" everything) that destroys political, ecological and bodily integrity. Over time, this destroys the state itself through lack of legitimacy that I discuss this historical process of organizational blames for environmental degradation in my recent book Ecological Revolution (2009).
So a wider Ecological Reformation assuring both design and interactions of 'the four sovereigns' avoid institutional and personnel collusion is required to address these interactive issues of avoiding political, bodily, and ecological tyranny. Otherwise, environmental degradation processes are just another form of 'normal accident' from a tightly coupled system of corruptions.
Therefore the bioregional state is required to recommend a wider Ecological Reformation: a series of more sound institutions for more political, bodily, and ecological protection, in more sound versions of scientific institutions, financial institutions/instruments, and consumptive institutions taking into account their interactions with each other in a larger social context that can either encourage environmental degradation or environmental sustainability.
The current environmentally degradative hegemonic versions of state, science, finance, and consumption are collusive forms institutionally speaking, and lead toward an historical environmental degradation processes.
Other versions of institutional design and institutional interaction checks and balances are suggested in future posts. This is the first in a multi-part series detailing institutional adaptations and ideas for how to generate checks and balances in areas of state, science, finance, and consumption to avoid the forms of environmental degradation through collusive unrepresentative clientelism limiting our choices in these areas--toward mass support of only what tyrants allow materially.
Green Constitutional Engineering, in a Thousand Words
For all those who want a weblink to pass to others with a very short discussion of the book, this is it.
Below is a recent editorial of mine about Toward a Bioregional State.
It was published in the Korea Times, an English language publication, on the web as well as in the printed paper as "Today's Column."
In South Korea presently, there is a a huge support for constitutional change. This is among the public (72.2% support), among a huge proportion of both major (gatekeeping) parties of the left and right (and minor parties), and among a few governors of provinces that want greater autonomy. The President wants electoral district changes and voting law changes combined.
Many frameworks in which politics are conducted are seen as increasingly illegitimate among a wide amount of people who disbelieve their left and right parties equally (with 35% and 30% support, respectively, among the public).
South Korea is drifting toward widespread constitutional change. This potentially solders in greater corruption, gatekeeping, and environmental degradation of the current systemic status quo that wants to destroy the state frameworks that interfere with its degradative policies, or, such change can actually solve it and lead to a more legitimated state and a more competitive party system. We shall see. My suggestions are of course for the latter.
Besides constitutional engineering debates, there are huge environmental concerns about inequitable state decisions on the environmental and health policies; and there is an increasingly inequitable development policy in Korea that is wrecking their agriculture, their disappearing middle class, as well as demoting regional biodiversity potentially. Solving all three points--constitutional engineering, inequitable elite development policy, and gatekept environmental concern--is what Toward a Bioregional State is all about.
So I decided to shrink-wrap a summary of Toward a Bioregional State for the Korea Times. This newspaper has been close to the 'political English-reading public' in Korea since 1950. I describe how the constitutional engineering change can solve all three things simultaneously--with green constitutional engineering.
Toward a Bioregional State is the first book on green constitutional engineering.
Three major political concerns of Korea ― equitable economics, constitutional change and the environment ― are seldom discussed together despite being interlinked.
I suggest a method to interlink them with green constitutional engineering, widening the "Green New Deal" toward one of political stability, demotion of corruption and more representative equitable development. Three ideas are offered for constitutional revision debates in Korea in how green constitutional engineering can solve them.
The first debate is over districting; yet, no one has offered how to avoid districting that is partisan gerrymandering. Many accuse parties involved with "district reform" as merely scheming to elect more partisan incumbents by "pre-rigging" elections with creative line drawing.
This fails to create a competitive election and merely divides opposition artificially into separate districts or stuffs ballots (residences) of one party's supporters in one district. A real electoral reform of districts would draw them in a nonpartisan manner.
The public can be assured of this by making stable watersheds as the mandated form of electoral districting. Watersheds are biophysically real lines separating different drainage basins (water catchments). Drainage basins concentrate more than water.
Since much pollution risk is waterborne, watersheds represent areas where common environmental risk experiences exist. Therefore, watershed election districts should be the durable form of environmental risk feedback into state politics.
As a publicly desired neutral, nonpartisan way of drawing election boundaries, it has positive effects on party competition by removing gerrymandering to create truly representative parties. Parties should compete to represent the people's interests, not simply win by default because of gerrymandering.
A second debate is over whether multimember districts (multiple seats per district) or majoritarian districts (one seat per district) would provide stability. Political scientists note that stability problems exist because of ``pure'' static types of biased incentive structures for competition before elections and cooperation after them.
As a check against this, I offer a compromise by suggesting that "flexible seating" be institutionalized depending on the election's outcome. If a watershed district votes more than 50 percent for one candidate, then one person should be seated to accurately reflect the result of the majority.
If a district votes for only a plurality winner (less than 50 percent), then the top three multiple winners should be seated (with their direct percentage of the vote seat) to accurately reflect the result of the majority as well ― since voters in this case want multiple people representing them. This "flexible seating" puts the decision in the hands of the people.
It is achieved by "PRMA" (proportional representation with majoritarian allotment) potential voting rules. Both structural outcomes are options that simultaneously work as a check and balance on the biases of each and also encourage an interparty competition to have incentives to integrate the full electorate.
Smaller parties are assured their contention is worth something under plurality wins, and larger parties are encouraged to be more integrative for majority wins. Korea has had ever-lowering vote totals and party legitimacy. PRMA would provide parties with incentives to be more integrative.
A third debate is the relative power between the executive (prime minister/president) branch versus the legislature. I suggest a similar merged solution in a "flexible executive" arrangement based on election outcomes as well.
Let the outcome of voting determine the structure in each election through how their level of trustworthiness of a candidate is reflected accurately in how much power a winner is allowed to have each time.
For instance, if an executive candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote, the executive branch goes presidential for that term given the greater trust shown. If an executive gets a plurality win (less than 50 percent), the winner has less trust, and the public wants him or her on a tighter leash.
This means the executive goes parliamentarian, and the winner is a prime minister that rules in closer association with legislative checks. This provides legislative checks on executive power.
However, multiparty legislatures can have their own hamstrung "gridlock" difficulties and require a check against their power by allowances for having a stronger executive as president when election outcomes demand it.
It's encouragement for any executive to win as much power and legitimacy behind his or her party nationally beforehand instead of forcing it afterward in a partisan manner. A "flexible executive" solves several debates at once.
These three ideas (of about 60 in my book) are worth tabling to concerned Koreans wishing to avoid repeating mistakes of static, anthropocentric constitutional engineering. Stable constitutions can provide party incentives to integrate the full electorate and to integrate the environment.
States are eco-centric institutions that manipulate for good or ill variegated environments, and South Korea is a very regionalized polity. This regionality can easily be extended in the event of North/South Korean unification, unlike other plans tabled.
President Lee Myung-bak talks about bulldozing regionalism. He sounds like the late former President Roh Moo-hyun. However, that would be disastrously destabilizing, because Korean politics are regional. The state can work creatively with regional reality to be more legitimate and stable.
Opposing regionality is political suicide as Roh's attempt showed while in office, and Lee's attempt would result in the same failure. With an abysmally low approval rating for Lee's Grand National Party (GNP) and its main opposition the Democratic Party (DP) with only 35 percent and 30 percent, respectively, the only way to get referendum approval is to make it clearly a nonpartisan change.
Suggestions I have are nonpartisan, multiparty enhancements with green multiplier effects. When you integrate the full electorate in this fashion, in stable watersheds of environmental risk feedback, you are on the road toward a bioregional state with a representative development policy and a stable multiparty system of legitimate government. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2009/10/160_54108.html
"Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias." -- Wendell Berry, "Last Words"
I'm glad to see that Paul Collier (video below), author of The Bottom Billion, is getting some media play about his desire to refocus the global development agenda on political institutional development in the 'bottom billion.' From statistical arguments, he argues that economic growth typically only occurs in the bottom 60 countries of the world by GNP when they have the political checks and balances to protect themselves from political corruption like from bribery and much else that derives from outside their countries from the top billion's developmental models for them--that is, if they are lucky enough to avoid the recurring civil wars and other systemic difficulties they experience.
He says popularizing basic forms of globally required institutional standards of democracy as checks and balances is a cost free cultural solution. I would agree.
However, the argument of Toward a Bioregional State is that additional ecological levels of checks and balances are required as well for sustainable development, and they are required worldwide instead of only in the bottom billion. The whole world requires equal redeveloping in green, sustainable lines instead of artificially limiting our discussion to the bottom billion as if they were the exclusive source of their own problems, as Collier tends to argue. I think this is mistaken though quite diplomatic, though diplomatic to a fault because it artificially brackets the debate to leave out some of the 'top billion''s corruptions that interact negatively to create the bottom billion from the outside instead of just the difficulties being from the inside of the bottom billion, as Collier argues.
The bioregional state could provide his idea of globally required "institutional standards for democracy" for political security against open warfare and political economic corruption in post-conflict states of the bottom billion--and for avoiding degradative self-destructive development that comes from unrepresentative politics the world over mostly. Collier argues that this lack of political checks and balances leads to development insecurity in the bottom billion as well, which starts the violence cycle over, gauged from statistical analysis of which particular socioeconomic and political variables are correlated across the bottom billion.
Earth to Collier: it is important to add that unecological development because it is corruption can lead to political insecurity and economic insecurity in the bottom billion as well. I've read his book, though Collier lacks data or even interest it seems on whether there are correlations between the bad environmental repercussions of unecological economic growth versus more ecological growth that in the former might cause difficulties in the future instead of claiming as he does that all kinds of economic growth regardless of their ecological impact are equally going to 'solve' all difficulties--instead of creating other ecological ones as well.
So I think one flaw in Collier is his lack of data on the environmental implications of economic expansion. He fails to really have comparative data about environmental issues and conditions correlated to his traps concept.
Some (ecologically sound) economic expansion is better than others, and I expect that if economic expansion that Collier in the abstract argues removes the conflict trap comes with widened pollution, can even some economic expansion lead to the conflict trap as well? So perhaps Collier should disaggregate 'economic development' into a scale of more degradative economic development versus less/zero degradative development. And then run his correlations once more with social stability and socioeconomic data in these two pairs.
The trick of course is getting the empirical data to prove or qualify this idea, as well as separate out all the different historical case variations that I am sure matter as well.
(Perhaps it has been so for longer, though global polls seldom go further back on environmentalism for us to judge. However, from comparative historical analysis in my recent book, I argue that the environmental concern of localities is an "ecological self-interest" that has always been a global political pressure. It is expressed in our political feedback when we experience environmental degradation whether linked to what occurs locally or whether it is from outside and forced upon us because in either sense that degradation is hurting our health, our ecologies, and our economics in local areas in the long term without ever diminishing benefits benefits for these degradative connections. This my recent book is a "green theory of history" that ecological self-interest versus a corrupt, elite-biased state penetration of the local is a political dynamic in world history. The local ecological self-interest is seldom integrated in self-destructive, corrupt, elite-based gatekeeping state politics that prefer ignoring it or repressing it for short-term, degradative, consolidating, state (un)development. As I said, this self-destructive pattern that repeats throughout world history at larger and larger scales. Local areas of ecological self-interest are inequitably integrated into an unsustainable, corrupt, state-elite biased polity which is self-destructive of even the biased elite state formation in the long term as it is based on increasing immiseration tied to ecological destruction. The ecological self-interest is resolutely there in all human history, and it is starting to show through once more with the global environmental concerns being the world's majority concern whether people are left or right or inbetween politically. I've uploaded around 15 pages from the introduction. To view them in order, click 'see 16 customer images' / 'most recently added').
Add the Ecocentric Checks and Balances
So while agreeing with Collier on requirements of more humanocentric checks and balances, all countries can stand to introduce other ecocentric checks and balances as a global standard instead of only the bottom billion requiring greater checks and balances in independent standards for democracy for post-conflict states.
Collier discusses how he sees this change as coming through the top billion or developed world concerns of self-interest. I think this is a noble idea though unfortunately naive because it ignores that the self-interest of the top billion is equally involved currently in keeping the bottom billion from developing because the corruption serves the top billion corrupt elites who get wealthy on artificially low-cost raw materials extraction in the corrupt countries there as well. Moreover, selling weapons and destabalization is a major 'growth industry' of some corrupt sectors of the top billion economies. So instead of the root of the corruption being in the bottom billion, it is the corruption in the top billion for rarely sponsoring sustainable development and only sponsoring situations that keep themselves unchallenged in the top billion and keeps others in the bottom billion out of some sectors of the top billion self-interest.
So expecting as he says major institutions like the collective imperialist U.N. Security Council (currently overseeing and providing troops for a U.S. coup in Haiti!), or like the profit-driven and developed world-biased World Bank and International Monetary Fund to encourage the economic and political independence of poorer areas of the world would go against a corrupt, developed-world interest in keeping the bottom billion under their thumbs: this has been achieved in the past 50 years [1] through intentionally indebting countries with unlikely to be re-payed loans based on faulty development models which is the top billion's plan for the bottom billion, [2] through intentional and very lucrative external destabilization which is the top billion's plan for the bottom billion, and [3] through artificially cheap raw material extraction relationships without environmental standards via sponsoring corruption in the bottom billion a corruption that derives from the top billion. Collier is blind to these dynamics that self-interest is unfortunately the self-interest of many corrupt elites steering the top billion countries of the world for their own personal self-interest.
Of course there are "reformers" as he says in the bottom billion (just as there are "reformers" in the top billion), though he ignores corruptions in the top billion. These top billion corruptions require being solved first perhaps, or perhaps in tandem with removing their developmental clientelism via corruption in bottom billion.
Collier overlooks that it is in the current interest of some the top billion's corrupt elites to continue the clientelism of the bottom billion. I would agree that it is hardly in the interest of all of us, though he blithely ignores that corruption in the top billion--and even corruption within his own home institution the World Bank at one point. Read Hancock's old book Lords of Poverty about the IMF and World Bank as creating poverty and profiting from it economically more than alleviating it; or watch a recent documentary Life and Debt about Jamaica's forced indebtedness to a developmental model that even the World Bank summarized in internal secret documents had made their country worse on all levels--sending them backwards ecologically, economically, and politically while encouraging the removal of their democratic checks and balances entirely to get access to short term loan money.
The Eden Project: Green Economic and Political Development Strategies for the Bottom Billion
Collier's larger statistical correlation based argument states that in immediate post-conflict situations there is the importance of securing several things quickly before civil war restarts: these things are jobs, basic services extension (particularly health care), and specific checks and balances in clean government interacting instead of just 'elections and walk away.' I would add clean green government is required in the bottom billion as well as the top billion and inbetween.
However, it is hardly in the interest of the corrupt elites of the top billion to spronsor unclientelistic expansion of independent economies or jobs. The majority of the money in 'aid' in the U.S.'s Iraqi invasion actually is going to the U.S. economy of mercenaries and their corporations instead of building independent Iraqi capacity in institutions. Embarrassingly I think, even Collier's 'capsule history lesson' of the Marshall Plan which he calls a "mixture of caring and self-interest," was far more self-interest of the U.S. to extend its hegemony over Europe through the Marshall Plan. Soviet state clientelism or U.S. corporate monopoly clientelism backed by global invasion becomes mostly semantics when it comes to their common unsustainability removing local developmental optimal frameworks and options for localized priorities in technology and material integration instead of supply-side biased ideologies of development as always involving larger scales like Collier still clings to securely.
I would have a darker counterhistory for all of Collier's mentions of his slew of "global benevolent institutions" he seems to really feel were invented for their self-proclaimed purposes in the wake of World War II. I would add that national sovereignty, unlike he says, fails to have to be eroded to have the wider markets of globalization that he calls for exclusively. Removing national or local material and technological sovereignty on developmental choice can create more difficulties in undermining globally the ecological self-interest from crafting economic institutions that preserve and maintain local biodiversity upon which any sustainable development or sustainable society will be required to proceed. Collier is a failure here in recognizing this.
So besides solving the corruption of the top billion through additional ecological checks and balances, it is likely going to take an independent alliance of "green missionaries" (similar to the permaculturalist diaspora from Australia and New Zealand that descended upon Cuba to help it go majoritatively organic in the early 1990s) instead of just imports of skilled workers for temporary aid. Skills for living in a particular place sustainably are required, and skills for recognizing how to integrate many classes of human consumptive use in multi-use landscapes instead of degradative mono-crops are required. Collier's people of various skills required to descend on the bottom billion in post-conflict situations can be green workers--perhaps people who know to coordinate a commodity ecology across 87 different specializations in a particular area's economy. A full commodity ecology can be introduced to assure local optimal frameworks of human-environmental-economic relations from the start.
Greening Collier's Argument into "Green Jobs, Non-Toxic Health Care/Services, Clean Green Government"
So Collier's triptych of "jobs, health/services, and clean government" for the post-conflict bottom billion, means that for the bioregional state's version even more checks and balances are required ecologically to keep unsustainable forms of development expanding once more and causing future conflict as well. The extended requirements are "green jobs, non-toxic versions of health care (many free non-toxic solutions have been repressed repressed by political economic monopolies can be easily popularized in the bottom billion), and green clean government."
The bioregional state argues that only green government is clean government because it alone has the additional ecological checks and balances that avoid corrupt, degradative forms of development politics. Otherwise a state and its elites are self-destructive ecologically, health-wise, and politically since it leads to larger corruptions in developmental processes and corruptions in political feedback to ignore or undermine the ecological basis of economics and politics.
Collier's idea is for independent service authorities competing for state-disbursed, and state-chosen aid funds to keep them accountable and honest in the bottom billion's "aid free for all". This is seen as a temporary coaching solution or grafting solution for quickly introducing services in a state without capacities after conflict. These can be supplied by green versions of these services.
Conclusion, or a Green Restarting of Post-Conflict Societies
The bottom billion is a large chance: a chance to start bioregional state global development and commodity ecology from the (green) ground up instead of from the unsustainable corrupt top down, as Collier suggests.
As I indicated above, I feel that Collier's exceptions of top-billion-led independence of the bottom billion economically or ecologically is a dead letter. It is unlikely to occur without solving the ungreen corruptions of the top billion's developmental models and their ungreen political institutional arrangements as well.
The bottom billion does seem to want green developmental solutions, so much that it scares the corrupt crony states (re)implanted by the corrupt U.S. in Rwanda for example. A national Green Party of Rwanda delegation from all districts had their first meeting broken up by U.S. approved clients there.
[This is what you get without the bioregional state's ecological checks and balances to maintain party competition: "On October 2nd, 2009, over 900 delegates from every district in Rwanda came to Kigali for a conference of the new Rwandan Democratic Green Party, formed on August 14, 2009. The meeting was abruptly stopped by the Mayor of Nyarugenge District, as party delegates looked on in disbelief. (Inset) Party leader Frank Habineza."]
"It's hardly surprising that, on October 2nd, 2009, 900 delegates to the new Rwandan Democratic Green Party weren't allowed to meet [for the third time] in Kigali, Rwanda. The Kagame government, which Clinton, Warren, and the Obama/Clinton State Department all point to as the triumph and future of Africa, shut them down, again, for the third time. How much longer will so much of the world accept the U.S. State Department's official lies about the Rwandan police state, U.S. puppet Rwandan President Paul Kagame, and the Rwandan Defense Force, the U.S.A.'s African proxy army in D.R. Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa, as needed? During the previous week, on September 29, 2009, former President Bill Clinton presented Rwandan President Paul Kagame with a Global Citizenship Award. On Friday, Reverend Rick Warren hung his International Medal of Peace around Kagame's neck at a "Saddleback Civil Forum on Peace and Reconciliation," at Warren's evangelical Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. ([On how useless that mafia-dubbing award is] Warren hung his first "International Medal of Peace" around George Bush's neck last year.)"
Therefore, to work toward greening the world, means working on the corruptions and collusion of the top and bottom billion corrupt elites simultaneously--as well as much of the developing billions inbetween.
So, the bottom billion--having destroyed everything and having hardly expanded economically in the past 40 years--is perhaps the place to introduce the "Eden Project" of getting more than post-conflict politics right, by getting development green and politics green from the (re)beginning.
This can be done by explicitly green independent service districts, organized by the commodity ecology teams, and by adoption of the bioregional state's additional ecological checks and balances.
These services could do more than just provide basic services. It can start the global Ecological Reformation that would cover four areas: state, science/educational, consumptive, and financial institutions--working in ecological tandem instead of against the environment.
The educational/scientific institutions might take a clue from Cuba's citizen-run scientific labs--a decentralized "Solomon's House" of pro-local forms of science keen in recognizing the requirements and pecularities of particular areas instead of ignoring them. Cuba has the world's largest organic sector of agriculture with 80% of its production being organic. These 'civic scientific base communities' were instrumental in expanding and decentralizing scientific expertise to allow farmers themselves and local groups to solve their particular ecological issues with agriculture without synthetic pesticides by raising insects and nematode based biopesticides instead of toxic materials dependencies via clientelistic imports.
Such an Ecological Reformation would add consumptive organizational checks and balances as well, making sure the capitalist supply-side sector is always one choice among many market choices of production instead of the only monopoly one that brings its own corruption and damages the market of choice of institutional forms. It can be balanced with forms of local jurisdictional input on materials, technological, and scientific certification so it avoids its own corruptions.
The Ecological Reformation would cover financial institutions as well, with assurances that clientelism to particular singular currencies are avoided as another root of corruption, replaced by financial checks and balances of having recourse to multiple institutionalized currencies equally acceptable as legal tender to assure that a store of value currency is maintained somewhere for the people at large, to avoid elite's artificially creating a loss of buying power by expanding the credit money supply to serve only exchange value instead of store of value. Store of value can be balanced with exchange value by having recourse to institutionalizing multiple currencies equally acceptable as legal tender on national, state, and local areas. Give the people institutional choices of currency to keep them from being clients to an unsustainable form of clientelism.
In short, the wider Ecological Reformation of institutions in general would assure that there is a check and balance in state, scientific, consumptive, and financial areas to avoid supply-side consolidations and corruptions of a country's people, their biodiversity destruction, health destruction, and economic destruction in the cynical name of development that has seldom if ever been anything except depredation writ large.
Here's the Collier film:
Paul Collier's new rules for rebuilding a broken nation TED Talks, June 2009
"Long conflict can wreck a country, leaving behind poverty and chaos. But what's the right way to help war-torn countries rebuild? At TED@State, Paul Collier explains the problems with current post-conflict aid plans, and suggests 3 ideas for a better approach."
If Collier finds that there is a greater statistical correlation with checks and balances and democracy and long term development that avoids corruption, I expect that a whole additional level of ecological checks and balances will help developmentalism bloom and shine even brighter when it is green, to remove the crony political materials and unrepresentative raw material regimes that keep us from achieving sustainability and keep us at sub-optimal levels. This requires political solutions and institutional checks and balances solutions to remove corruption, because all the materials and technologies for sustainability are already available. It is simply a matter, "of throwing the bums out," as James Robey interpreted correctly when he interviewed me about the bioregional state. Shine on:
"In a cruel, hard word, it's a miracle to find--someone good--someone whose love, it shines!" -- Mick Hucknall
Centralized Constitutional "Rights of Nature" Comes Up Short Versus Localized Jurisdictions for People Protecting Nature in the Bioregional State
"Rights of Nature" without rights to local watershed development participation is a dead letter: one year after the Ecuadorian Constitutional change giving "Civil Rights to Nature" shows little has changed to remove developmental corruption and unsustainability
The Real Natural Rights of Humanity: Ecological Self-Interest of Localities, Still Demoted in Ecuador
After a year of being in place, the recent Constitutional change in Ecuador in 2008 that gave constitutional rights to "nature" shows the limitations of avoiding a formal institutional strategy to sustainability, argued for in the bioregional state.
The fine print of the Ecuadorian constitutional mandate is that it is a central state model of institutional jurisdiction being maintained. This, in the name of 'representing local nature,' takes rights out of the hands of localities, with the anticipated corruption already being seen one year later in the below article. "A fundamental flaw in the constitution also exists due to [the Ecuadorian President] Correa’s refusal to include a clause mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development project that would affect their local ecosystems." With this additional clause "mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development projects that would affect their local ecosystems" it would be closer to the pro-humanistic bioregional state model: a series of expanded human civil rights over developmental processes that would be greater checks and balances against corrupt unsustainability--in the name of sustainability and environmental security because of local human ecological self-interest being institutionalized.
Other countries are moving on this 'rights of nature' position as well, like Nepal--writing its first constitution after centralized monarchy demoted in the past few years. Therefore, the same centralized corruption difficulties may be seen there as well, without the bioregional state or the "free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development projects" that is required to move to sustainability.
The bioregional state argues that only formal institutional checks and balances like this can bring about sustainability. This is hardly an argument for complete decentralization, because it is a check and balance between both because localities and centralized states can be equally corrupt. The bioregional state argues for checks and balances between both as redress of grievances for both, thus a nested system of jurisdictions. The Ecuadorian model of trusting only to a centralized jurisdictional control over 'nature' shows flaws.
After one year in place, it seem that the Ecuadorian 'rights of nature' is an interesting motif, beautiful on the surface though allowed state level corruptions in charge of administrating the 'rights of nature' and gatekeeping against citizen feedback from different localities that complain.
In practice, Ecuador has shown such constitutional 'rights' fails to mean any systemic change without formal institutional changes to make sure that these rights are exercised out of daily politics by particular regions instead of extra-jurisdictional court cases.
As expected for such symbolic politics, it already seems a dead end strategy due to how the novel mining law in Ecuador is being used to get around this supposed 'right of nature.'
The bioregional state argues that only formal institutional changes to enhance processes of localization and democratization to avoid corrupt centralized elite gatekeeping will bring about sustainability--instead of only lists of presumed centralized rights by themselves. The bioregional state offers a list of novel rights in the Ecological Bill of Rights though always introduces these with the institutions that will practice these rights instead of leaving it half complete as the Ecuadorian constitution notes.
The only beneficial bioregionalist motif institutionalized is that people in localities can represent "nature" in court even if they were left unharmed and even if it is limited to centralized court systems. (This is actively denied in the U.S. system: no one can take another person to court typically for pollution or externalities unless they are personally harmed. A U.S. judge simply threw out a class action suit to protect a river a few years ago, for instance, since he claimed since the specific people in the court suit were unharmed, thus it was an unjustified court case. However, people were harmed, though they were outside the class action suit to stop the pollution and outside the required consent in a sustainable developmental process. This is why localized human jurisdictions are more important than annotated centralized environmental protection rights.
However, second, lawsuits by proxy are opened up with these 'rights of nature' that could slow or make unprofitable any degradative, unrepresentative development. However, another drawback to rely on court cases to establish environmental protection is that the framework is entirely after-the-fact environmental protection (when it may be a lost cause when pollution is already in the environment) instead of before-the-fact (when it can involve political input into future development beforehand: the preferred route of the bioregional state).
As the Ecuadorian constitution now says: "Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature..." They can demand all they want: they fail to actually have power on a durable basis that would be provided by the bioregional state's civic democratic institutions and commodity ecologies.
Since the rights of humans on the local level are embedded in real nature biophysically, rights of local humanity and rights of local nature require combining in institutional forms that allow for their local jurisdictional dominance in economic path decisions, which will yield a state that has different optimalities of human and economic uses of technology and material choices, without demoting common civil rights of the national state. As the working definition of the bioregional state notes:
Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names--all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.
My commentary is in the relayed article below:
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Source: Upside Down World, September 25, 2008 Title: “Ecuador’s Constitution Gives Rights to Nature” Author: Cyril Mychalejko
Student Researcher: Chelsea Davis Faculty Evaluator: Elaine Wellin, PhD Sonoma State University
In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection.
Reflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” This right, the constitution states, “is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people that depend on the natural systems.”
The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.
Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, worked closely over the past year with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which mark a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.
Ecuador’s leadership on this issue may have a global domino effect. Margil says that her organization is busy fielding calls from interested countries, such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution.
For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s constitution represent, however, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground. A fundamental flaw in the constitution also exists due to Correa’s refusal to include a clause mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development project that would affect their local ecosystems.
“I expect them [the multinational extractive industries] to fight it,” says Margil. “Their bread and butter is based on being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”
The new Mining Law, introduced by Ecuador’s own President Rafael Correa and backed by Canadian companies, which hold the majority of mining concessions in Ecuador, is a testament to Margil’s forecast. The Mining Law would allow for large-scale, open pit metal mining in pristine Andean highlands and Amazon rainforest. Major nationwide demonstrations are being held in protest, with groups accusing Correa of inviting social and environmental disaster by selling out to mining interests.
Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of the environment against transnational mining companies, says that while the new constitution looks good on paper, “in practice governments like Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty,’ overrules the rights of nature.”
Yet even as Ecuadoran President Correa embraces the extractive economic model of development, the inclusion of the rights of nature in a national constitution sets inspiring and revolutionary precedent. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will successfully fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without their president.
Update by Cyril Mychalejko
When Ecuadorians drafted and passed a new constitution, which gave nature inalienable rights, the US media largely ignored this historic development. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, one of the few mainstream outlets to cover the story, the newspaper’s editorial board trivialized the development (“Putting Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution,” September 2, 2008) by suggesting it sounded “like a stunt by the San Francisco City Council” and that it seemed “crazy.”
“As ecological systems around the world collapse, we need to fundamentally change our relationship with nature. This requires changes in both law and culture, and ultimately our behavior as part of nature,” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Defense Fund, who is disappointed in how the US media largely ignored the story.
In Ecuador, at the time of the constitutional vote, the optimism over how the “Rights of Nature” clauses would translate into policy was guarded.
“As exciting as these developments are, it was also inevitable [without the bioregional state] that the people in power would, and will, find ways to circumvent, undermine, and ignore those rights,” said Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag.
According to Zorrilla, a major disappointment has been President Rafael Correa’s new mining law.
“The law takes rights-to-nature loopholes and widens them so that giant dirt movers could easily drive through them,” said Zorrilla, who has been working with communities of Ecuador’s Intag region to resist mining and promote sustainable development. “To mention a couple of examples, the law does not prohibit large-scale mining in habitats harboring endangered species, nor the dumping of heavy metals in rivers and streams.”
Indigenous leaders responded by filing a lawsuit before Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in March 2009, seeking to overturn the mining law, which they believe is unconstitutional. Article 1 of the “Rights of Nature” clauses states: “Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.”
Regardless of the ongoing struggles to ensure that the true meaning and scope of the constitution is upheld, Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, believes that the nature clauses which reflect the traditions of indigenous peoples could offer a path to an ecologically sustainable future. [Development fails to be built from ideological standards, it comes out of the interplay of formal institutional regimes of people who have to be consulted before development proceeds. The 'rights of nature' by itself fails to change the dynamic where the local people--the best people to adjudicate rights to nature because it is in their ecological self-interest--are consulted beforehand. It puts the onus of pressure on them to defend themselves from unrepresentative development instead of putting their energies into constructive, representative development, so this 'rights of nature' is a poor model by itself without other jurisdictional changes on whom is consulted in the developmental process.]
“I consider that the recognition of the ‘Rights to Nature’ as a progress on a global scale and one that deserves to be globally broadcast and commented on as a contribution from Ecuador towards the search of new ways of facing the environmental crisis due to climate change.”
The struggles of Ecuadorian social movements and the Ecuadorian government to uphold the “Rights of Nature” and to create a new development model that places human beings as interdependent parts of nature, rather than dominant exploiters of nature, is something we should continue to monitor and learn from.
It was on James Robey's Radio Show for the Water Fuel Museum. The typical discussions of this program run to the material, though we stretched some minds on how important it is to think of political organizations of democracy to protect more optimal materials from political corruption that can demote them and that has demoted them in the past.
After listening to it myself, I thought it was a good discussion of some themes of the bioregional state.
De-Institutionalizing Monoculture: Adding Biophysical and Political Checks and Balances for the Corrupt Monocultures of the Mind
Echoing themes from a previous post on the issue of monocultures, the bioregional state is designed to maintain long term forms of biodiversity. Monocultures, instead of providing us with cheap food plant and animal products provide us with massive long term externalities that are incredibly costly. In biological products, how do we maintain a check and balance against monocultures as a production method?
"This is one major issue that I think about, as important in the grain of the bioregional state. It's actually the major point I pondered long before penning the bioregional state. Whether we see it in the formal institutional ecological checks and balances against unrepresentative developmentalism and state corruption, or see it in watershed commodity ecology arrangements, the bioregional state is a framework of protecting preexisting forms of ethnobotany and human diversity. Species die for lack of diversity, including humans. Species as well die because of ignorance of the destructions of their environment--because bodily their environment is themselves.
However, the bioregional state is more than wistfully or sentimentally protecting pre-existing forms of ethnobotany and human diversity, it is a manner for such frameworks to be the developmental and political economic program itself--expanded as much as protected, institutionally."
It is important to maintain, for risk demotion and long-term human choice, access to the global inheritance of plant and animal varieties. We have over millennia laboriously created very ecologically suitable forms of animal and plant varieties for certain forms of climate, soil, and social use. Their ongoing existence is part of the material, ecological checks and balances against unsustainable development in the bioregional state. Their ongoing biodiverse existence, economically, assures that there is human interest motivation to protect particular ecological niches.
What specific two institutions does the bioregional state see as maintaining these ethnobotanical creations as an ecological check and balance against unsustainable development and against political corruption?
In every watershed around the world, the bioregional state encourages the creation of the institutions of [1] Commodity Ecology and [2] Civic Democratic Institutions as a check and balance against monocultures of applied science (to adapt and use a Vandana Shiva book title) as well as against monocultures. The 85 different consumptive use categories can be maintained durably and 'grown into' particular watersheds in this manner (when these two institutions are added by sustainability volunteers in their area, see links for suggestions) as a check and balance against our own sociopolitical destruction as well as against ecological destruction. It is a very noble project where anyone can be a hero in their actions. This fails to mean that other choices traded from other watersheds would be unavailable. That is left up to a particular watershed's 'bionationalization' initiatives which are left open for a watershed to decide through the Commodity Ecology institutions themselves. 'Bionationalization' is decentralized collective oversight as the highest material jurisdiction in the locality to decide while leaving civil rights durable in larger structures as the higher jurisdiction. It's very similar to Elinor Ostrom's ideas of local organizational forms of sustainability that she notes around the world.
Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names--all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.
According to major polls, these are hardly odd ideas as a majority of the world has 'gone green' in its orientation.
It comes down to protecting bodily integrity--the integrity of our own bodies' health, as well as plants' and animals' bodily health, and I would argue our body politics' health and durability as well since these forms of monoculture tend toward state self-destruction as well.
"The frameworks of the bioregional state came out of long term comparative historical analysis of the collapses of human societies. Those collapses were instrumentally involved in slow alterations in formal, material, and ideological hegemonies. They were increasingly repressive and intentionally ambivalent toward mounting environmental degradation despite the majority of their population knowing about it."
"What follows is an excerpt from the book....Particularly "Article 29", on bodily integrity I think is a general principle that should be enshrined, covering many issues in one statement of belief covering everything from abortion, to animal rights, to food security, to avoiding forced vaccinations, and to attempts to monitor post-purchasing consumer/citizen behavior through the materials themselves, like with RFID."
There are many choices already to avoid monocultures in agriculture and animal husbandry. These can be adaptable readily now for particular ethnobotanical uses and, to coin a phrase, ethno-"ecohusbandry" uses. For it is a marriage, eh, of plants, animals, and people in particular areas that is sustainable? While monocultures are innately a divorce from the environment and a divorce from our own long term human ecological self-interest.
"The argument of the bioregional state is that pro-humanist views are solutions to environmental degradation, because it is in human ecological self-interest to reflect a sound ecology--as it is all bound up in their human health and durable economies."
"[The] strand here is that it deals with institutionalizing biodiversity in human uses, instead of leaving them out of the social human loop (like in utilizing native bees for pollination, for example). Once they have a social use, there is a systemic human desire to innately preserve them and their ecological interrelations. When the local biodiversity is integrated in commodity production, then humans take over--for their own self-interest and politics--the protection and representation of voiceless plants and animals that is in sync with them."
"[T]he seat of any concern over human rights, health, ecology, and economy isn't an ideological issue. It is a geographic issue that appeals to particular geographies, instead of parties. Note in the article below that the organized frameworks here that are for these issues are entirely local. We should reconceptulize the whole basis of politics here, to take into account the Local Wing versus the National Wing. In the National Wing, they use whatever flavor of the month ideology to gatekeep against the Local Wing.
The Local Wing is why called 'left' environmentalist and so called 'right' gun rights organizations are working together on the local level to create local conservation corridors for wildlife in the Rocky Mountains--while these ideological groups on the national level pretend these issues are enemies of each other. They aren't. The ideologies are. The issues aren't. Another good example of 'right-wing environmentalism'--and a serious critique of how misleading it is to frame it as a left issue--is the book Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America.[link]
'A new merger of movements is aborning. African-Americans, who had largely ignored much of the environmental movement as irrelevant to their primary social and economic concerns, became increasingly aware that racial discrimination can take the form of environmental injustice. Workers, long accustomed to the adage that jobs are more important than preserving the environment, have discovered that they were often sold a bill of goods....In the process, these groups have found each other. They have become America's newest, most radical, and most committed environmentalists. Radical, not because they adhere to esoteric theories about humankind's ecological crimes against the biosphere, but because they have discovered a mother's passion for true family values when her child's life or health is in danger. Committed, not because they believe deeply in a particular political philosophy, for most come from fairly unremarkable backgrounds, but because they are America's real communitarians. They believe that neighborhoods matter and that government should be in the business of protecting, not destroying, our sense of community.'
And that is why the Local Wing--full of people on the left and right--are totally opposed to the neocons and their health destroying, economic destroying, and environmental destroying policies.
Just goes to show you that the Local Wing knows how to run society much better than the criminals on the national level."
"The majority (77%) think we should do "whatever it takes" to protect environment. --- In another poll, reported in The Ecologist, upwards of 80% of the U.S. with little difference between left or right want their environmental laws seriously enforced, as well as strengthened. [This is the issue...that many of the people who 'vote right' and may be more interpersonally conservative, have the same social policies and weigh in 'on the left' [sic, it's a geographic instead of an ideological issue!] on the health, ecology, and economy issues.]"
This is why institutional adaptation via green constitutional engineering of the bioregional state is is a better strategy than attempting to fit green into a particular ideological party vehicle:
"There are equal disagreements among greens as they attempt to take the geographic, non-ideological, cooperative, localist ecological self-interest and turn it into an ideological vehicle, mostly through unlikelihood of bottling green and putting it in one political party:
The idea of moving a singular political party into the state and then reorienting the state from only that singular political party basis is a faulty model of sustainable change. Instead, the state should be reoriented first to generate a more competitive party framework to remove the gatekeeping of any party--because the grand majority of the population supports a combination of green sentiment in many countries worldwide."
Back to the specific topic of biophysical checks and balances against monocultures. Monocultures are extreme forms of unrepresentative raw material regimes. Everything is already solved. However, we have a political corruption issue keeping these existing solutions from being implemented currently. Addressing political corruption in material consolidation requires novel institutional checks and balances because policymaking is in the hands of the corrupt who only want to encourage and to subsidize more monocultures which subsidize our own biological, economic, and ecological self-destruction intertwined.
"[Monocultures of materials are]...the most politically contentious raw material arrangement for two rationales. First, it is because there is so much money and dependency to be created...Second, it is because none of that centralization or dependency is required. Only massive amounts of political corruption hold it in place as raw material regimes that hold off consumer choices in the interest of achieving consumer clientelism and power in that way in a forced (non)-choice."
BioregionalStateTV: "The Sustainability Channel"
See my assembled BioregionalStateTV . BioregionalStateTV has expanding links demonstrating very inspiring ideas that are already working against monocultures. BioregionalStateTV will have well-produced videos that detail how to move biophysically toward more "watershed-centric" arrangements of material sustainability.
There are such things as material ecological checks and balances, and the bioregional state aims to animate these as much as adding at least 60 other human institutional checks and balances to remove pre-existing corruptions in our conceptions of formal democracy. (See that link for an extensive four part series summarizing issues about sustainability and the bioregional state approach).
The below repost on monocultures was part of Project Censored 2007 list of top 25 stories ignored in the corporate media.
It ignores unlabeled cloning [1][2] as another danger to our health and ecological durability, though it's a good article.
Sources: Trade BioRes, September 21, 2007 Title: “Conference Agrees Steps to Safeguard Farm Animal Diversity” Author: The International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development
La Via Campesina, September 11, 2007 Title: “Wilderswil Declaration on Livestock Diversity” Authors: Representatives of pastoralists, indigenous peoples, and smallholder farmers
Student Researchers: Maureen Santos, Andrew Kochevar, and Stephanie Smith
Faculty Evaluator: Nick Geist, PhD
The industrial model of livestock production is causing the worldwide destruction of animal diversity. At least one indigenous livestock breed becomes extinct each month as a result of overreliance on select breeds imported from the United States and Europe, according to the study, “The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources,” conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Since research for the report began in 1999, 2,000 local breeds have been identified as at risk.
The industrial livestock breeding and production system that is being imposed on the world requires high levels of investment in technology and receives subsidies and other resources that have distorted the market.
Consequences of the livestock industry’s globalization include the threat to sustainable development and global food security, destruction of the livelihoods of over one billion [more sustainable] people worldwide, smallholder bankruptcies and suicides, and the extinction of some of the world’s hardiest breeds of animals.
The FAO report, which the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) contributed to, surveyed farm animals in 169 countries, and found that nearly 70 percent of the world’s entire remaining unique livestock are bred in developing countries. The findings were presented to over 300 policy makers, scientists, breeders, and industrialized livestock keepers at the First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources, held in Interlaken, Switzerland, from September 3 to 7, 2007.
In response to these findings, scientists from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, ILRI’s supporting organization, have called for the rapid establishment of gene banks to conserve the sperm and ovaries of key animals critical for the survival of global animal populations. Over the past six years, ILRI has built a detailed database, called the Domestic Animal Genetic Resoures Information System, containing research-based information on the distribution, characteristics, and statuses of 669 breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens indigenous to Africa and Asia.
Meanwhile, concurrent with the Interlaken summit, around 300 representatives from thirty organizations of pastoralists, indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers, and NGOs from twenty-six countries met in a parallel conference, to establish opposition to globalized industrial livestock production. The Livestock Diversity Forum to Defend Food Sovereignty and Livestock Keepers’ Rights met in Wilderswil, Switzerland, and presented an alternative Declaration on Livestock Diversity on September 6, 2007.
The Wilderswil Declaration maintains that while the FAO report contains good analysis and squarely points to the industrial livestock system as one of the main forces behind destruction of diversity, the FAO Global Plan of Action contains nothing that addresses these causes.
The Declaration states:
It is totally unacceptable that governments agree on a plan that does not challenge the policies that cause the loss of diversity . . .
Defending livestock diversity is not a matter of [privatized] genes but of collective rights.
The social organizations of pastoralists, herders, and farmers have no interest in participating in a plan which does not address the central causes behind the destruction of livestock diversity, but rather provides crutches and weak support for a collapsing global livestock production system. Because the Global Plan of Action does not challenge industrial livestock production, we reinforce our commitment to organize ourselves to save livestock diversity and to counter the negative forces bearing on us.
This peoples’ proposal asserts that it is not possible to conserve animal diversity without protecting and strengthening the local communities that currently maintain and nurture such diversity. These livestock keepers maintain that governments should accept and guarantee collective rights and community control over natural resources, including communal grazing lands and migration routes, water, and livestock breeds.
The Declaration further states:
Local knowledge and biodiversity can only be protected and promoted through [local 'bionational'] collective rights [similar to the bioregional state]. Collective knowledge is intimately linked to cultural diversity, particular ecosystems, and biodiversity, and cannot be dissociated from any of these other three aspects. Any definition and implementation of the rights of livestock keepers should take this fully into account. It is clear that the rights of livestock keepers are not compatible with intellectual property rights systems [i.e., gene banks] because these systems enable exclusive and private monopoly control. There must be no patents or other forms of intellectual property rights on biodiversity and the knowledge related to it.
The organization maintains that they want livestock keeping that is on a human scale, based on the health and wellbeing of humankind not industrial profit. They point out that the dominant model of production is based on a dangerously narrow genetic base of livestock that is propped up by the widespread use of veterinary drugs. Yet this risky and high-cost system is providing more and more of our food: globally, one third of pigs, one half of eggs, two thirds of milk, and three quarters of the world’s chickens are produced from industrial breeding lines.
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Other articles in Project Censored deal with corruptions of monocultures this year:
Sources: Inter Press Service, July 23, 2007 Title: “Mutiny Shakes US Food Aid Industry” Author: Ellen Massey
Revolution Magazine, October 1, 2007 Title: “Starvation, Aid Agencies and the Benevolence of the Imperialists” Author: Revolution Cooperative
Student Researchers: Susanna Gibson, Cedric Therene, and Chris Armanino
Faculty Evaluator: Keith Gouveia, JD
In August 2007, one of the biggest and best-known American charity organizations, CARE, announced that it was turning down $45 million a year in food aid from the United States government. CARE claims that the way US aid is structured causes rather than reduces hunger in the countries where it is received. The US budgets $2 billion a year for food aid, which buys US crops to feed populations facing starvation amidst crisis or enduring chronic hunger.
The organization’s announcement prompted argument about the forms and objectives of the aid given by the US and other big powers to third world countries and the role that most charity organizations are playing. The reasoning behind CARE’s decision is part of a years-long debate that has influenced everything from US trade and domestic legislation to the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization talks.
CARE’s 2006 report, “White Paper on Food Aid Policy,” points out that the current food aid program is motivated by profit rather than altruism. The policy, which dictates that donated money be used to purchase food in the home country, results in a program driven by “the export and surplus disposal objectives of the exporting country” and not the needs of people in hunger.
The US policy implements the practice of monetization, a food aid policy in which the US government buys surplus food from American agribusinesses that have already been heavily subsidized, and ships it via US shipping lines (generating transport costs that eat up much of the $2 billion annual food aid provided by the US government) to aid organizations working around the world. The aid organizations then sell the US-grown crops to local populations, at a dramatically reduced cost. The aid organizations use proceeds from these sales to fund their development and anti-poverty programs. But several groups, with CARE at the forefront, have pointed out that this policy has the effect of undermining local farmers and destabilizing the very food production systems that aid organizations are working to strengthen.
A policy that puts local farmers out of commission and undermines agriculture in developing countries becomes part of a process by which those countries lose the means to develop—and thus grow more dependent on the stronger and more dominant nations. These countries become more vulnerable in every sphere, not only economically but politically as well. The result is likely to be more hunger and less sovereignty as countries are tied ever more tightly to the world market.
“We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine,” CARE spokeswoman Alina Labrada said, “but local farmers are being hurt instead of helped by this mechanism.”
The European Union has also been critical of the US food aid program. European countries all but phased out the practice of monetization in the 1990s. Only 10 percent of their budgeted food aid is reserved for crops grown in Europe. Suspicions remain that the US uses monitized food aid programs to avoid limits on its universally contested farm subsidies.
The UN World Food Programme, the largest distributor of food aid in the world, has rejected the practice of monetization and does not allow its grain to be sold by NGOs.
The past two US congressional farm bills presented proposals to shift portions of the food aid budget from grain to cash donations, to be made available for people in need to buy locally grown crops. Both attempts were voted down.
---
In conclusion, the best 'gene banks' are the living animals and plants themselves: institutionalize living biodiversity with the bioregional state.
Fresh Shoots from a Dead Tree: The Bioregional State Compared and Contrasted to Green and Libertarian Ideologies (4/4)
Join Watersheds, Or Die.
For the rest of this post, I will show libertarianism as highly divided: as a variety of different political ideologies. I will analyze some policy and institutional solutions aspects of libertarianism and green ideology as well as comparing both to the 'nested decentralization' or 'bioregional commonwealth' of the bioregional state.
The typology of different libertarian schools derives from an interesting and informative half-comical/half-serious list that I recently read in Mother Jones Magazine.
To summarize where we have been so far, as mentioned in part one, there are historical similarities between the libertarians and the greens, with a bit o’ green in the history of libertarianism and a bit of libertarianism in the history of the greens. From that previous post, green ideologies are very similar to a strong libertarian/decentralization sentiment:
“Some Greens feel that the principle of decentralization should have been a fifth pillar, as it is essential to Green politics. All Green proposals are built on the conviction that people must have more direct control over the complex interplay of social, ecological, economic, and political forces. They maintain that overbureaucratization and the hierarchical structure of government thwart the initiative of citizens. Moreover, the Greens state that the impenetrability behind which various economic and political interests hide has become a danger to democracy. They oppose the strong tendencies in industrialized nations toward authoritarian measures, such as surveillance and censorship of books [or demotion of technological/commodity choices]. To facilitate greater participation by citizens, the Greens advocate decentralizing and supplying administrative units with a greater share of government revenues going to states, regions, counties, towns, and neighborhoods....The Greens advocate not only small units of domestic government but also smaller countries, which they refer to as regions. They believe the nation-state is inherently dangerous because the enormous centralization of power is inevitably used for economic competition, large-scale exploitation, and massive wars. Many Greens mention Max Weber's observation that the state is the seat of legitimized violence. They argue that smaller units of population would result in a safer world on all counts, and they suggest that cultural and ecological boundaries could determine the regions. [This is a tenet of bioregionalism--instituted in the 'bioregional commonwealth' of the bioregional state]. There are many such regions in Europe, usually determined by a shared dialect. They often stretch across [current] national borders, such as Friesland (West Germany and the Netherlands), Flanders (Belgium and France), Alsace-Lorraine (West Germany and France), and Dreyeckland (West Germany, France, and Switzerland).” [p. 47-8, in Spretnak's Green Politics]
Given the officially unrecognized green pillar of decentralization, a split developed immediately in the German green movement: a split between the Ecological Democracy Party and Die Grunen--both equally green. The Ecological Democracy Party disagreed with Die Grunen’s heightened statism and co-option that has only grown over time.
On the other hand, the bioregional state argues that smaller units may lead equally toward more systemic warfare. Such autarky has little capacities for coordinating support for the type of pollutive flows across jurisdictions that would require forms of cross-watershed democratic feedback to solve on a long term basis--in the name of maintaining local watershed security actually. Another post already addresses this issue.
Additionally in the previous part one, I summarized much of the information of the bioregional state with informative links.
In the previous part two, I analyzed the 'internal difficulties' of attempting to work toward sustainability only through an informal party. I argue [1] it is unlikely to put all the spectrum of greenness into one party because greenness translates poorly as an ideology: instead it represents an ecological self-interest, more geographic and cross-ideological based on location, than ideological vehicles called for political parties. The moment green parties form, they become splinter groups of a particular limiting variant of greenness. I argued [2] splinter groups of a particular limiting variant of greenness set themselves up for co-option and merely participating in the ongoing greenwashing of environmental degradation despite greenness being a global majority viewpoint now.
More information at the link.
In the previous part three, I analyzed the 'external difficulties' of any decentralization party--green or libertarian--keeping them from participating via current, huge systemic vote fraud and corporate/media corruption interlocks in many countries of the world.
(Douglas Campbell, Legal Green Candidate for Michigan Governor, 2002: Physically Carried off Stage of "Public Debate" and Roughed Up While Democrats and Republicans Twiddle)
(Legal Libertarian Presidential Candidate Badnarik's arrest armband in ‘the land of the free,’ for seeking to debate other legal candidates openly.)
This 'external difficulty' in addition to the previously mentioned 'internal difficulty' belies expecting such informal parties--by themselves, I still support them--can be the first strategy toward sustainability. Instead the institutions of the bioregional state are recommended as instituted first to assure a competitive framework of parties first as well as direct ecological self-interest politics into the state developmental policy cycle in a long term arrangement. One way out of 60+ in the bioregional state, is by using watersheds as permanent, ungerrymanderable, electoral districts. This is more ecologically sound as it removes the formal gatekeeping of pre-existing corrupt party frameworks in power that encourage environmental degradation. It removes the gatekeeping against the global green majority to have a more competitive framework as all parties will struggle to be more representative of particular stable ecological districts.
In this part four, the short point is that bioregional state has been compared by some to a form of green libertarianism. However, instead of an ideological position either green or libertarian, the more accurate term for the bioregional state is a form of Green Jeffersonianism or Green Madisoninism: it is a green constitutional engineering against various forms of tyranny that lead to environmental degradation and can only be understood as such. We require an Ecological Reformation of the state (and a whole lot else):
“This is a wholly novel ecological approach to democratic political theory and the purposes and responsibilities of democratic states. It is a wholly novel formal institutional design concept for how to achieve sustainability. It involves asking what was unfortunately left out of Enlightenment democratic theorizations, and it involves asking what are the other formal prerequisites for an age of sustainability. It means joining our sense of formal institutions and environmentalism as interrelated instead of unrelated topics. The significance of the bioregional state is that it is the first attempt to analyze sustainability or unsustainability as the outcome of the way formal democratic institutions are organized. Most environmentalists and academics entirely lack the vocabulary to discuss this.
First, in terms of what Enlightenment theorists neglected, different formal institutions of democracy always are involved in different informal political and environmental contexts which have been left under-theorized as to their interactions with the formal institutional frameworks. These three factors of formal institutions, informal politics, and environmental contexts should instead be considered holistically as one piece in the bioregional state, instead of simply concentrating on a biased approach that only analyzes formal institutions by themselves. Otherwise, only formally degradative states which facilitate and underwrite informal politics of environmental degradation can result because existing formal institutions are based on ignoring and denying these innate interconnections.
Second, following from this, I would argue that on these informal political and environmental factors that influence all formal states, existing democracies are innately biased on levels of formal design by informal political interests toward expanding environmental degradation and ignoring citizen input from particular geographic areas that aim to re-prioritize state politics toward more sustainable developmental paths. Formal institutional biases are what are maintaining an informal politics of environmental degradation.”[p. xi, Toward a Bioregional State]
This means “rescuing Jefferson” from an anachronistic reading that he was only proto-individualist in liberty issues. A more accurate wider reading is that he was more interested in demoting public government tyranny and demoting private corporate tyranny while a lobotomized form of anti-statist economic libertarianism argues we can ignore tyranny coming from private economics equally. See Thom Hartmans’ book on the subject of Jefferson misguided appropriation for only right wing anti-government tyranny sentiments. From a review:
"The right for years has sought to co-opt the Founding Fathers, particularly the great spokesman for liberty who penned America's Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson, as one of their own. If a liberal dared to quote Jefferson, a right-winger would smirk and say, "Have you ever read Jefferson? You liberals want big government. Jefferson stood for limited government. He wanted to extend individual liberty [sic], not create a gigantic bureaucracy like you people do."
Thom Hartmann has done an adroit job of puncturing this right wing myth in his thoughtful and energetically researched work, "What Would Jefferson Do?" The principle launching point that draws the distinction between what the right has long proclaimed and the reality of Jefferson's beliefs is the period and circumstances under which Jefferson and the Founding Fathers who synergized with him,...such as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, lived and functioned.
It was Hartmann who authored the thoughtful work "Unequal Protection," and this book segues snugly into the same ideological framework. A major element of concern in the time of Jefferson and Franklin, which remains increasingly prevalent today, is the existence and robust operation of the corporation. In "Unequal Protection" Hartmann traced the road traveled in the post-Civil War nineteenth century to eventually succeed in legally constructing an important governing principle of the corporation as a fictitious person, investing it thereby with gargantuan powers unforeseen by the citizenry at the time of America's creation.
[I note that De Tocqueville predicted as early as the 1830s that he saw a form of hereditary aristocracy coming into being in the United States with the expansion of the corporate form of economics, arguing that the 'private' corporate form was hardly only a form of economics--it was a form of public aristocracy and inequality among citizens because of the political economic power of who controlled (and inherited) the major corporations and who was left out of that control.]
Hartmann reveals that Jefferson sought to expand [public governmental] rights of the average citizen, putting him thereby in the liberal or progressive ideological camp rather than that of the doctrinaire rightists who for so long have insisted that he was one of them. At the time of the country's beginnings Jefferson and other exponents of individual liberty were successful in fighting for limitations of time and scope on corporations, recognizing that they were, if unchecked, gigantic octopus-like instruments that would suffocate democracy.
Thom Hartmann fine-tunes his arguments by jumping back and forth between the America of Jefferson and the one emerging today. It was Jefferson, he notes, who opposed Alexander Hamilton's efforts to create a highly expansive national bank, which he saw as a dangerous instrument of control.
When he campaigned for the presidency the High Federalists who linked themselves to the early economic [state corporatist] establishment fought Jefferson tenaciously....Jefferson's bitter opponents sought to destroy him politically...because they feared his steadfast opposition to...[big private] corporate designs [instead of merely opposition to big public government designs]."
Libertarian, Green, and Bioregional State: An Institutional and Policy Comparison
In reading an article in Mother Jones Magazine about libertarian variants, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, Nick Gillespie, opines about the variants of libertarianism: "it is an endless operation of trying to figure out more and more ways in which people who agree on 99.9 percent of everything can really hate each other's guts." [P. 44, Mother Jones, January/February 2008]
It fits well given the global majority is openly green--solidly green instead of adhering to an outmoded spectrum of despatialized ideologies called right and left. Left and right increasingly are seen as openly ideological manipulations run by the same corporate funding, globally. [1][2][3][4].
Thus, both the left and right as the same state corporatist gatekeeping are unable to get to sustainability when they are joined at the hip in a political economy creating environmental degradation--working against the multiple areas of the 'local wing' of politics: the ecological-self interest.
There are equal disagreements among greens as they attempt to take the geographic, non-ideological, cooperative, localist ecological self-interest and turn it into an ideological vehicle, mostly through unlikelihood of bottling green and putting it in one political party:
"The idea of moving a singular political party into the state and then reorienting the state from only that singular political party basis is a faulty model of sustainable change. Instead, the state should be reoriented first to generate a more competitive party framework to remove the gatekeeping of any party--because the grand majority of the population supports a combination of green sentiment in many countries worldwide."
For example there is the aforementioned early split in the Greens in Germany into the left and right wings of the movement, the Die Grunen side and the Ecological Democracy Party, respectively, because greenism is unable to be captured in one ideological movement since it is a geographic politics [1].
Similarly, the libertarianism we know presently started out as a form of ecological self-interest, then turned into many placeless ideologies and mere philosophical positions as well. Variants of this earlier version of the ecological self-interest movement are very splintered in counteroppositions just as the green movement's ecological self-interest is splintered into ideological dissension (and co-option) when it ignores the geographic basis of its original concern.
However, for greens the issue is seen as additive instead of divisive: the optimism (and hard data) of Blessed Unrest is that environmentalism is the largest mass institutional movement in world history, and surprisingly, none of its variants are counteropposed, and even more surprisingly, many of them are starting to network together. The bioregional state would be ideal venue to channel this Blessed Unrest into constructive movements and policy deliberations for the long term toward sustainability in particular areas--particularly the CDI and commodity ecology frameworks to start in each watershed of the world.
Environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author Paul Hawken discusses his latest book "Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It" as part of the Authors@Google and Google.org series. This event took place on May 9, 2007 at Google's main campus in Mountain View, CA.
(This compatability is untrue for one supposed green group--or I should say greenwashed group: the more statist and eugenic 'greens' (like Die Grunen now) and other elite state managerial wings attempting to steer the movement toward old fashioned 1930s fascism and authoritarian policies.)
Against this, even Republicans from Texas can sound like Greens sometimes in opposition to authoritarian, corporate-state, crony versions of greenness that have little to do with solving environmental difficulties, and only solidifying venues that create it like the unrepresentative centralized state.
I am unable to agree with his pitch for oil at the end (I can almost here the "and now a word from our sponsor..."), though everything else he says is worth thinking about: about why U.S. "energy" policy is designed to subsidize totalitarian ecocidal China instead of bringing about a plurality of domestic energy alternatives; and why "energy" policy frameworks are chosen to be very carceral and authoritarian strategies instead of pro-democratic--when an authoritarian unrepresentative state is the best recipe for environmental degradation and corruption there is, these being one in the same issues.
This co-opted totalitarian green side even adopts a latter day Nazi-heritage of eugenic plans that I discussed before--as they attempt to greencoat the 1930s fascist eugenic policies to sell them once more. And they have the same family salesmen. Follow the money and people from the 1930s fascists and they lead right to the same people in the 1970s eugenical Club of Rome. You can see this greencoating clearly at the link.
Gillespie’s libertarian spectrum of disagreements is compared to some forms of green ideology as well as to the bioregional state:
[1]
"Anarcho-Capitalists: The most radical of the lot, they want to abolish government entirely (though, unlike regular anarchists, they do support private property rights. "The state acts like a band of thieves and killers," explains Lew Rockwell, the best-known exponent of the strain. "The private sector doesn't do that."
This position is being willingly blind by ignoring issues like the WorldCom bankruptcy, the Enron scandals, the DotCom collapses, and the fact that 90% of US capital is tied up in speculation of private ‘thieves and killers’ instead of stable investment.
From the bioregional state view, the private sector and the public sector are entirely wedded together, and their 'difference' is a false figment of political discourse, a media spectacle only: private property always depends upon the public state to protect it in all cases. Instead of this airless and empty ‘either/or’ philosophical argument, the bioregional state argues that it is important to discuss what kind of socially-moderated property rights would help create sustainable property relations instead of creating environmental degradation. For examples of sustainable public/private admixtures of property relations, Elinor Ostrom’s work is beneficial in this regard.
It is different than two ideologically opposed variants: the easily brushed aside so-called 'tragedy of the commons' discourse. To the contrary, there are many commons that are durable even now, and little success of a ‘free market environmentalism’ approach to securing environmental sustainability that is based on merely individual self-interest. These ideas for policy are equally leading to environmental degradation.
On the other side, is the desire for extreme nationalization--which can only lead toward corruption as well as entirely a privatized framework.
On the contrary and avoiding this dichotomy, there is the long term interactive, group self-interest of different individuals that leads them toward more cooperative local arrangements of property rights. A mutual check and balance between public and private property rights durably, similar to Ostrom's examples worldwide, would seem to be required in particular watersheds to give people in a specific watershed a long term institutional choice of access and feedback instead of forcing them into one ideological position of property rights jurisdiction one way or another (entirely public or entirely private). I believe this can be done with the local political and economic commons-facilitating institutions of bioregional state: the CDI and the commodity ecology in each watershed, respectively. Institutionalize choice. Institutionalize both. Ostrom notes it is good for sustainability in her Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990).
"The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways--both successful and unsuccessful--of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.
"In this ambitious, provocative, and very useful book Ostrom combines a lucid theoretical framework with a series of diverse and richly detailed case studies...she tightly reviews and critiques extant models of cooperation and collective action and argues powerfully that communities of actors are sometimes able to maintain a common resource for long periods of time without outside intervention."...."Ostrom's book is an important contribution to the problems of Commom Property Resources that is, the lack of well-defined property rights over a certain resource. Elinor Ostrom convincingly shows that there are many different viable mixtures between public and private, in particular self-organization and self-governance by the users of the common property resource. The book makes fascinating reading, particularly as it is well written."...."This is an important book that deserves to be read widely in the policy community as well as the scholarly community....this analysis leaves us with provocative questions whose examination promises to broaden and deepen our understanding of human/environment relationships at many levels."...."Students of common-property resource regimes will find much of great interest in the volume."...."...timely, well-written, and a useful addition to our understanding of the challenges of natural resource management....useful for undergraduate and graduate students as well as field practitioners interested in the development of scientifically based research. It provides a firm grounding in the theoretical underpinnings that should guide empirical investigations....Ostrom offers a unique source of information on the realities of resource management institutions coupled with the challenge for continued examination of institutions in order to develop better ways to address the CPR challenge."...."This is the most influential book in the last decade on thinking about the commons. For those involved with small communities...located in one nation, whose lives depend on a common pool of renewable resources....Governing the Commons has been the intellectual field guide."...."A classic by one of the best-known thinkers on communities and commons."
The bioregional state can remove that philosophical dichotomy about property management solution strategies and their environmental impact with two institutions that should be in every watershed: the aforementioned CDI and commodity ecology frameworks--very similar to Ostrom's demonstrations. They link producers and consumers in teamed relationships to work toward a specific human-environmental optimal solution for a watershed in the long term. Institutionalize our options instead of supporting crony raw material regimes of centralized power and we can get to sustainability.
[2]
“Minarchists: Archrivals to the anarcho-capitalists, they support a minimalist version of government: Let the state handle roads, policing, and defense--but nothing more. Many, including Ron Paul, view the Constitution as the ultimate minarchist document.”
There are commonalities with some green thought in this minarchism. However, the bioregional state view is that the bioregional commonwealth arrangement in a “join or die” motif is the wider protection and conflict resolution framework for maintaining local sustainability, since autarky is little security that the next-door watershed will remain pollution free and keep its pollution out of a better-managed watershed. Moreover, autarky would be inherently dangerous to local civil rights of minorities. I discuss both these points about the 'humanist greens' of the bioregional state.
Only forms of cross-watershed conflict resolution can maintain this. Ignoring ascriptive inequalities and losing universal civil rights protections is the result of such a ‘hard minarchism.’ This is why the bioregional state “denote[s] democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state." Humanist greens of the bioregional state, unite!
It should be clear that decentralization serves sustainability in only economic issues (with wider local capacities for prioritization of optimal technologies and materials for a particular ecological niche concerns and material availability--exemplified in the commodity ecology of a watershed) while ‘nested decentralization’ serves it in politics.
However, complete ideologically-hard decentralization (or centralization) in politics leaves forms of social inequality in gender, ethnicity, sexuality, handicapped status if the local area or the national state is misogynist, racist, classist, religious bigoted, etc. There’s a tyranny to structurelessness, as Jo Freeman noted years ago. There's an old fashioned tyranny to centralization as well.
For protecting general civil rights protections it is important to maintain as a resource the larger national state, while economic issues can be decentralized. It is true that national states can be equally ascriptively biased, though that ignores that issue of the bioregional state being an ‘either/or’ capacity of local feedback choices and national feedback choices instead of forced support of either one only by demoting other options. There is a more detailed discussion of this point in the book Toward a Bioregional State.
[3]
"Cosmopolitan Libertarians: Term used by the minarchist editors of Reason to describe their embrace of world citizenship and their rivals as hayseeds."
There is a similar 'cosmopolitan greenism' division in green thought about this ranging from local autarky/green anarchy (critiqued earlier by the bioregional state to the cosmopolitanism of green consumerism and international ‘fair trade’ movements. However, the bioregional state leaves this open to decide for people in their local democratic watershed institutions instead of having an ideological ax to grind or impose over all.
"In other words, if a lot of "green anarchists" (or anyone) wanted to get together and run their watershed they way they wanted, that's fine because that's the way it would work--as long as externalities to other watersheds are demoted. It would be up to the people involved in a particular watershed, of which there would be many different variations--as long as externalities to other watersheds are demoted."
[4]
“Economic Libertarians: worship free-market absolutists like Milton Friedman…”
Friedman was actually an uber alles state-centric supporter of imperialistic military action. Milton in his own state-centric words: “For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is....The [so called] hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist...McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” – Thomas Friedman, from "What the World Needs Now" in the New York Times, illustrated by an American Flag on a fist.
Friedman failed to believe in laissez-faire like all corporate imperialist apologists before him. He was such an ideologue that he conveniently ignored that the people most interested in his ideas were his worst enemies: the corporate monopolies (the monopolists disguise it as ‘free trade’ discourse, when it really means 'their freedom to expand their monopolies' and destroy locality). He was guilty of doublethink to think that military power interactions across the world could support open markets.
Friendmanites and their likes (as the corporate libertarian 'guru-of-the-month' has always been updated in its face for 200 years in the ongoing US/UK co-empire though always with the same ideology) have covertly relied on state coercive power.
For a detailed view of the earlier Friedmanites--the ‘classical economists’--being equally state-centric, read Perelman. Perelman quotes their own words:
"The originators of classical political economy--Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others--created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories [the ‘shock doctrine’ of the 1700s] with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy--to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land [and to politically deprive them of other options that insulated them and gave them a choice against wage labor]. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance...."
However, it’s hardly ‘capitalism,’ as an identifiable phenomenon. That 'capitalism' is just a discourse for mystifying a dynamic of corrupt state corporatism and crony monopolization involved in environmental degradation instead of ever being able to separate the Janus face of political economy like the academic discipline of economics misleads and mystifies us into believing is possible.
Merely for the United States case in one example, a state corporatism instead of ‘the economy’ or ‘capitalism’ was the germane core issue in environmental degradation, state corruption, and 'economic' expansion. Browse through this 50 book list of mine:
Recently even ‘natural disaster’ forms of terrorism have been utilized to covertly introduce highly politicized state-corporatist policies under the mystifying guise that such change is a neutral ‘market’ move instead of a crony politicized monopolist move. Such huge privatization moves occur under extreme privation of political coups and 'natural disasters'. Threats of further disasters and dislocations are a 'selling tool' so it is hardly chosen as a ‘market solution’ willingly. It is chosen under state-duress and 'markets' are sometimes only chosen because of dictatorship. Naomi Klein discusses this in her recent book The Shock Doctrine. Read Naomi Klien’s The Shock Doctrine and John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit man back to back with Dave McGowan and you will see the pattern of shock doctrine in economics (Klein's work on the Shock Doctrine and Perkins' in Confessions) and in politics toward pressuring people to accept a more militarized public of police states (McGowan's work).
"John Perkins started and stopped writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man four times over 20 years. He says he was threatened and bribed in an effort to kill the project, but after 9/11 he finally decided to go through with this expose of his former professional life. Perkins, a former chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, says he was an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business. "Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars," Perkins writes. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an extraordinary and gripping tale of intrigue and dark machinations. Think John Le Carré, except it's a true story.
"Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn't afford. The loans were given on condition that construction and engineering contracts went to U.S. companies. Often, the money would simply be transferred from one bank account in Washington, D.C., to another one in New York or San Francisco. The deals were smoothed over with bribes for foreign officials, but it was the taxpayers in the foreign countries who had to pay back the loans. When their governments couldn't do so, as was often the case, the U.S. or its henchmen at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund would step in and essentially place the country in trusteeship, dictating everything from its spending budget to security agreements and even its United Nations votes. It was, Perkins writes, a clever way for the U.S. to expand its "empire" at the expense of Third World citizens."
That's the so called market: a corporatist monopoly, intelligence-agency riddled empire of banks, corporation construction contract, and money transfers to merely expand empire on the backs of citizens of both the USA and other countries, lathered with bribery and corruption on both sides' governments.
Here's Naomi Klein talking about the economics side of this Shock Doctrine.
Instead of only in the USA where "disaster capitalism" (I would have called it "disaster crony corporatism") disguised sugar coated as "economic libertarianism", even English stock markets fail to show autonomous market action in their so-called ‘economic history’ and show a bit of how the shock doctrine of the 1700s was utilized by different political economic factions to decimate each other's economic holdings intentionally.
If ‘capitalism’ fails to exist in either the USA or in the UK variants, where on closer case inspection it looks like endless versions of "disaster corporatism" fighting different variants of each other with economic warfare or against the people at large, then 'capitalism' fails to exist period. This discourse of mystification called 'capitalism' was required more than elsewhere in the USA and UK to hide these open high level corporatist/financial manipulations that are more prominent in the economic history of these core countries.
[5]
“Hippie Libertarians: worship freedom-loving freaks like Larry Flynt [sic, Mother Jones’ phrase instead of mine.]
As I said above:
"In other words, if a lot of "green anarchists" (or anyone, including hippie libertarians) wanted to get together and run their watershed they way they wanted, that's fine because that's the way it would work--as long as externalities to other watersheds are demoted. It would be up to the people involved in a particular watershed, of which there would be many different variations--as long as externalities to other watersheds are demoted."
[6]
“Religious Libertarians: Worship deities of their choosing, care about politics primarily as it affects religious freedom. In 17th-century England they were Puritan Roundheads. In 21st-century America they are Mormons."
On this point, greens are for religious freedom and choice and a separation of church and state. Libertarians certainly would hold the same position as the greens here.
The bioregional state concurs: separation of church and state and religious freedom is required in the interest of keeping the state from becoming a one-party state, or, moreover and more subtly, keeping the democratic state from being legitimated entirely based on one form of economic ideology (another name for a theocracy). It is additionally in the interest of keeping religious sentiment unmanipulated by state elites for private unsustainable clientelistic goals that this separation should be maintained. I think the latter was originally Jefferson’s argument for separation of church and state: that the corruption in the human heart and spirit in a linked church/state theocracy is important to avoid as well.
[7]
“Gold Bugs: Advocate a return to the gold standard, or some equivalent, as a way to diminish the fiscal powers of the state: dismiss foes as “inflationists”
Greens generally support forms of local currencies as additions that keep money ‘at home’ and in circulation. This is opposed to having money consolidate and flow to distant banks that creates artificial financial scarcity regimes in localities that give the latter wealthier organizations huge relative financial power through banking inflation of currency and loans to consolidate wealth.
The bioregional state supports tangible store of value currencies (your choice in particular areas) as a check and balance against such private (or public) manipulations against the people that would remove their hard earned currency earned by their labors by artificial inflations or recessions to manipulate the value of currency either by the public state or the private banks. An interesting book on this topic is Gold Wars: The Battle Against Sound Money As Seen from a Swiss Perspective.
The bioregional state would allow local currencies to be accepted as legal tender, for debts public and private, i.e., local currencies accepted in paying state-level transactions (like taxation and fines). Federal level forms of taxation have a federal currency. Private banks shall be disallowed from consolidating themselves across state boundaries--with the state being the largest level of public consolidation allowed instead of cross-state banking empires that corrupt the purposes of a federal structure and lead to huge amounts of unsustainable power clientelism and unsustainable developmental policy pressures. A central private bank is the epitome of corruption and manipulation in this manner. It only benefits its owners and those it corrupts. Read the bank chapters in The Unseen Hand by Epperson or watch The Money Masters.
[8]
"Objectivist": Followers of philosopher Ayn Rand and love morality tales, hate anarchy, and endorse a scorched-earth foreign policy. If "flattening Falluja in the Iraqi insurgency will save American lives," Ayn Rand Institute director Yaron Brook has written, "to refrain from [doing so] is morally evil."
To the contrary, the current crop of Libertarians in the USA are more decidedly pro-peace--around Libertarian/Constitutional sentiments of Dr. Ron Paul. Greens are for peace--as well as for dismantling empires and violent states into a 'decentralized state' arrangement:
"...[T]he concept of a non-military, decentralized Europe of the regions is [or was] the official Green position, in West Germany as well as any other European countries. The idea of a [bio]regionalized Europe has resonated especially strongly in Belgium which, perhaps more than any other European country, is an artificial unit composed of three cultural groups--Dutch-speaking Flemish, French-speaking Walloons, and a small German minority....For many Belgians their state has no real significance and the Green concept of ecological and cultural regionalism seems very natural to them. [p. 189, in Spretnak's Green Politics]
"In advocating a cooperative world order, green politics rejects all forms of exploitation--of nature, individuals, social groups, and countries. It is committed to nonviolence at all levels." [p. 190, in Spretnak's Green Politics]
There is dissension within greens on this point of peace somewhat (particularly in the 'green anarchy' versions) though only on property issues and development policy--instead of against the principle of avoiding violence to people.
Like many peaceful libertarians, greens have a ‘live and let live’ view.
[9]
"Neo-Libertarians": Libertarian neocons; big supporters of the [war profiteering in the] Iraq war.
This is another example of how libertarianism gets manipulated to legitimate and to mystify the corporate state, calling neofascist corporatist ideologies "politically neutral" and "neutral free-market" when on closer inspection there is nothing of the kind. Halliburton's illegal noncompetitive contracts and monopoly relationship with the U.S. Army for supplying, make it a latter-day I.G. Farben.
These libertarians are very similar to the economic Libertarians of Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine--people who encourage economic blitzkrieg, destruction, and military coups as a form of 'developmental terrorism' to wipe away the old and institute novel relationships, mostly corporate crony fascism, under guise and discourse of libertarianism.
"Paleolibertarians": Old-schoolers who despise neo-Libertarians for selling out to the system. Also think atheism is overrated.
Though that was meant flippantly for the very religiously conservative opposition to the neocons from the right, many Greens as well might be said to think "atheism is overrated" despite believing in personal religious choice. Much of green politics is involved in a somewhat religious-identity change movement. Once more drawing from Germany in the 1980s, many greens then agreed that 'atheism was overrated' though without implying they desired a theocracy:
"[T]he first step in overcoming the crisis is to recognize a new "paradigm"—a new vision of reality....The paradigm that is now beginning to recede as dominate our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influence the rest of the world. This paradigm, or worldview, consists of a number of ideas and values, among them the belief in the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary material building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief and limited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and--last, not least--the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. During recent decades all of these assumptions have been found severely limited and in need of radical revision....The emergence of green politics in many countries is part of that revision. It is an ecological, holistic, and feminist movement that transcends the old...framework of left versus right. It emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomenon, as well as the embeddedness of individuals and societies in a cyclical processes of nature. It addresses the unjust and destructive dynamics of patriarchy. It calls for social responsibility and a sound, stable economic system, which is ecological, decentralized, equitable, and comprised of flexible institutions, one in which people have a significant control over their lives. [This sounds rather like the first libertarianism in the late 1800s, with their green equity ideas, eh?] In advocating a cooperative world order, green politics rejects all forms of exploitation--of nature, individuals, social groups, and countries. It is committed to nonviolence at all levels. It encourages a rich cultural life that respects the pluralism within a society, and it honors the undergrowth that leads to wisdom and compassion. Green politics, in short, is the political manifestation of a cultural [and religious] shift to the new paradigm.” [P. xxv, in Green Politics]
“The Greens include in their analysis of our into related crises in the "spiritual decay" and "spiritual impoverishment" of our industrial societies, and they call for the inclusion of "spiritual subjects" in the education of our children....Many, if not most, of the greens...consider themselves Christians but are not often involved with institutionalized religion. When we asked Greens at all levels of the party and in most parts of the country whether there is a spiritual dimension to green politics, most emphatically answered "Yes" although almost no one could discuss the concept except in vague terms. The main reason spirituality remains largely on articulated in the Green party is that Hitler manipulated the pre-Christian Teutonic myths, or sacred stories, to serve the propaganda machine of his National Socialist party. Hence, as Petra Kelly remarked, the overt linking of spiritual values and politics is mostly forbidden: "A problem in the Realpolitik of West Germany is that anytime you mentioned spirituality people accuse you of talking about something perverted--because it was perverted by the Nazis." In addition to the Nazi legacy, there is the Marxist insistence among most of the radical-left Greens that the spiritual dimension of life does not even exist so naturally it is not permitted to be discussed in connection with political goals....Many of the early members of the Greens recalled that the spiritual impulse was stronger in the days before the movement became a party, partly because moving into party politics within the post-Nazi context they been cautious about expressing spiritual principles and partly because the influx of radical-left members after the impressive showing in the European Parliament campaign in June 1979 squelched expressions of spirituality. However, during the early period of the Green movement the Anthroposophists, followers of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual and ecological teachings, played an important role,...They are still a strong force in the Green politics of Baden-Wurttemberg: Dr. Giselna von Kugelgen, a wise and charming white-haired woman who is well-known in the Anthroposophist community, was the top vote-winner for the Greens in the Stuttgart city Council election of June 1980." [p. 53-4, in Green Politics]
Other religious backgrounds to green politics are seen in the Netherlands:
“After long negotiations, which were pressured by the fall of the Second cabinet...and the subsequent earlier elections, the party entered in the 1989 elections as part of the GreenLeft. They are joined by the progressive Protestant Evangelical People's Party. Ria Beckers was top candidate and she became chair of the GreenLeft parliamentary party. In 1991 the PPR dissolved itself into the GreenLeft. In the same year the GreenLeft's only MEP, former PPR-chair, Verbeek announced that he would not give up his seat in the European Parliament, to allow a former member of the PSP to enter the European Parliament. He would continue as an independent and would be top candidate for the Greens in the 1994 European elections, without result....The name Political Party Radicals referenced the origin of the party, it was founded by the a so-called Christian Radicals: progressive Catholics. Because they wanted to open their party to all Christians as well as to non-Christians, the dropped the reference to Christianity in their name....Although the party had Christian roots, it denounced a direct relationship between religion and politics. The party can be seen as an early green party with a post-materialist agenda consisting of environmental protection, third world development, nuclear disarmament, democratization of the economy and grass roots democracy. During its existence the party changed from a Christian ally of the PvdA with its roots in the Catholic trade union movement to a party on the left of the PvdA with links to the environmental movement.” [p. 176, in Green Politics]
The bioregional state supports a separation of church and state, in the interest of avoiding corruption, one-party statism, and theocracy (religious or economic policy types of theocracy). All of this can demote the integration of the non-ideological 'grain' of the world--the multiple, local, ecological self-interest groups in particular areas. It can lead to their repression instead of expression.
[11]
"Technolibertarians": Extropians, transhumamists, sci-fi-fans, they strive to transcend humanity's meat-puppet limitations and take self-determination final frontier”
Perhaps this comes out of asocial computer geeks developing a comfortable political philosophy for separating themselves further from their fellow human beings? This of course has been a recipe for earlier dark movements of eugenics killing off whole populations. It represents a techno-cultural form of corporate fascism implanted into the body similar to the Borg in Star Trek. They think they're getting freedom and enhancement, though in many cases there is the danger of getting only a mass-market corporatist form of their own self and future sold to them. A world of massive social and intellectual bio-tech enhancement would have triage leading to bioenhancement inequalities like a caste society would encourage.
Greens typically support more natural, shared, equal access, and low-impact forms of medical choice of options and self-enhancement:
“The American holistic health movement...spread to West Germany...via a stream of books, pictures, and workshops. Since that movement is a leading force in the development of a new understanding of human nature, the relationships between people, and our indebtedness in the surrounding ecosystems, it is not surprising that the Greens' Federal Program calls for a system of "ecological medicine": "Ecological medicine is holistic medicine. The sick person must be treated as being subject to various environmental conditions [where the technolibertarians might be treated for computer addition and their microwave radiation toxicity]. His or her self-conscious and self-determining personality must be strengthened and placed at the center of all care. Ecological medicine supports peoples bodily defense mechanisms. Treatment should not focus on a single organ, as it often does in the current medical system. The patient must neither serve as a guinea pig for the pharmaceutical industry nor as a factor in the cost-benefit analysis for expensive pieces of [technological bioenhancement] equipment. Hence ecological medicine must avoid the over consumption of drugs, unnecessary surgery, and overly technological mega-clinics....In addition, alternative healthcare projects exploring methods of natural healing and promoting healthy life-styles should be developed....The Federal Program of the Greens identifies old-paradigm thinking as a major part of the problem with health care, not only the invasive allopathic treatments mentioned above, but also the unrealistic separation between health problems, environmental conditions, and "our work, our leisure, our life in general." They maintain, "The forces destroying our health and the health of our environment are the same forces driving the present economic system." [p. 121-22, in Green Politics]
The bioregional state perspective is that of American Framer Benjamin Rush. American Founding Father Benjamin Rush wanted medical freedom as a basic human right in the U.S. Constitution, arguing that "Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship . . .[T]o restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic....The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom."
Rush sounds like a combination of green and libertarian ideological sentiments--from the late 1700s. Same as anti-corporatist Jefferson.
This "Bastille of medicine" is the case with the “cancer ‘(non-)treatment’ industry” in the USA and in many countries worldwide that have made illegal any known, free, workable options that target malignant cancers naturally. Apricot or Essiac anyone?
“South Park conservatives: find their politics articulated in a show created by two Libertarians; a seminal episode follows a race for school mascot between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Which, says Reason's Gillespie, “pretty much sums up how most libertarians approach politics.”
On the contrary in the real world, instead of the limited world of the TV addicted, Greens and Libertarian Parties at least in the USA agree to support competitive democracy of factions. They support transparent voting infrastructures against the privatized election infrastructure that the USA has at present, discussed earlier in part three.
U.S. Voting: Place Your Rigged Bets (Larger version click here)
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"Paulitards": Blogosphere dis’ for those who annoy online masses by relentlessly shilling for their man and comment threads, polls, and social networking sites.” [Mother Jones, January/February 2008, page 44]
"Paulitards" are hardly a separate libertarian category, since much of Dr. Ron Paul’s ideology is one of a paleolibertarian gold bug with ideas of economic libertarianism and minarchism. Say that three times fast.
In conclusion to this review, Greens are hardly libertarians though the point is that there are interesting commonalities of these two decentralizationist ideologies--as well some common origins and common point of agreement to talk about in making a more competitive party system and a more sustainable world if the libertarians regain their original green roots.
The bioregional state holds that a more competitive party system would be innately more sustainable. This is because democratic gatekeeping and democratic corruption keeps a form of selective, unsustainable, environmentally degradative cronyism in place politically and expands it. However, as said above,
"The idea of moving a singular political party into the state and then reorienting the state from only that singular political party basis is a faulty model of sustainable change. Instead, the state should be reoriented first to generate a more competitive party framework to remove the gatekeeping of any party--because the grand majority of the population supports a combination of green sentiment in many countries worldwide."
Overall, as I absorbed the libertarian typology and reflected on the issue of a green libertarianism mentioned in the first of this series, I think ‘plain vanilla’ libertarianism is unable to maintain itself in the face of the reality of civil inequalities both political and economic that can come from both a state though can come from a private form of power they desire as well. In other words, states can be beneficial in moderating ascriptive civil rights. This is hardly in all cases: that is the point in the bioregional state of having a ‘dual doctrine issue of the state’—having a choice between CDI and commodity ecology, as well as local and federal interactive issues instead of only one and the other.
In short, ‘neutral non-state’ political claims are quite ideological. Many libertarian ideologies can promote sources of maintaining systemic social/ascriptive inequalities. Such policies of libertarianism even would destroy the 'libertarianism utopia' itself in practice as political inequalities mounted and were studiously ignored instead of were demoted.
Conclusion: Some General Issues of the Bioregional State, Summarized
The bioregional state is an institutional support of interlocking checks and balances against many forms of tyranny instead of coming directly from an ideological view of left or right.
It is an institutional vehicle for competitive democracy and sustainability rolled into one since they are interactive:
1. Competitive Factional Democracy and Sustainability as the Same: Demoting Gatekeeping Informality and its Crony Developmentalism against the Ecological Self-Interest.
"…[T]he bioregional state continued an interest in facilitating competitive party democracy as much as human health, ecological, and economic security. Soon, I found that 'theoretically' the main thread through all the additional checks and balances were coalescing around was the demotion of the 'gatekeeping issue,' i.e., the demotion of the informal clientelism issue of power that destroys both competitive democracy as well destroys citizenship developmental feedback toward ecological security. That same issue of gatekeeping and clientelism in democracy takes the blame for supporting and expanding ecological and human health damage as well. Thus, the issues of democratic facilitation and ecological security circled back on each other and were shown to be one in the same."
In the bioregional state, there is a 'bodily integrity' line "that government shall not pass." This is very much a libertarian sentiment I think as well as a green one. From a fuller quote of bioregional state principles in Toward a Bioregional State's Ecological Bill of Rights:
"Attempts of some to pressure government to enforce certain moralities to regulate internal bodily issues are forms of bodily tyranny that break the skin barrier that government shall not pass. The Constitution of Sustainability shall assure bodily integrity through upholding bodily rights, instead of demoting them."
3. Gun Rights and the Bioregional State
The original purpose of private guns in a democratic constitutional setting is to protect against corrupt government. Private guns are a formal check and balance of government in other words. This is seen in (voluntary) state militias and in private guns--both against a federal government intentionally. That is the way the U.S. checks and balances were arranged.
These state and individual arrangements are major checks and balances militarily against “the most dangerous of all monopolies”--the undesired monopoly on violence, a quote from James Madison at the following link just in case you were skeptical that they thought about tyranny of their own federal military. The link succinctly notes that ‘gun control is not a leftist position’:
Gun control is not really a leftist position historically or currently. Gun control is a right-wing (or left-wing) totalitarian, genocidal, classist, ethnic caste, and religious caste domination policy by powerful minorities. I'm really surprised that more lefties don't want to understand it though as they say "there are none so blind who don't want to see". The Chinese have a version of this I have read: "you can't wake a man who is pretending to be asleep." At least you'll have to pretend to be asleep now. Don't simply blame those people introducing such legislation, you should blame yourselves for having your idealism manipulated by very cold blooded people against your own very rights. If scale of unrequired deaths shows anything, there are many other things that you could concern yourselves to talk about--from the first chart below.
Top Underlying Causes of Preventable Death* in the United States, 2000
Cause Number.........................................Percentage of All Deaths U.S. MEDICINE HAS BECOME THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN THE U.S. Iatrogenic [induced inadvertently by treatment] deaths...783,936 2001 heart disease annual death rate.....................699,697 annual cancer death rate.................................553,251 Tobacco..................................................435,000........18% Diet/activity patterns...................................100-400,000....17% Alcohol..................................................85,000.........4% Bacteria and viruses c...................................75,000.........3% Toxic agents.............................................55,000.........2% Motor vehicles d.........................................43,000.........2% Firearms.................................................29,000.........1% Sexual behavior..........................................20,000.........1% Illicit use of drugs.....................................17,000.........1%
* deaths caused neither by old age nor by genetic disease a Estimates vary. b Number of deaths is a rough estimate, since different studies have looked at different locations (in-hospital versus out-of-hospital) and different types of errors (surgical, medical, pharmacological). c Does not include deaths related to HIV, tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs, or infections caused by non-microbial diseases. d Includes motor vehicle accidents linked to drug use, but not to alcohol use. cites here: http://www.mercola.com/2004/jul/7/healthcare_death.htm
And the U.S. has a 'war on drugs' and a 'war on guns'? That chart only proves only one thing: guns or illicit drugs are not really a problem, hardly of much concern. However, they are a concern since they have been a cover for introducing police state legislation and infringement on individual constitutional rights.
Frankly, a "war on bad diets and pesticide poisoned foods" would be more appropriate way to address mental imbalance if that is what this is. If schools had organic food, everyone would be much better. A 'war on bad medicine' would be even better. A 'war on bad food' even better. Impeaching Bush (and the enabling Democrats) who have paid to have 665,000 Iraqis killed recently would be even healthier.
Some will still argue for gun confiscation thusly:
"It is often pointed out how different the contemporary world is from the one in which Madison and Jefferson lived. In those days what passed for tyranny was "send[ing] hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance," "cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World," and calling "together Legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant," and other such complaints. [However,]...[e]ven with the example of the French Revolution before them, Madison and Jefferson could hardly have imagined in detail the characteristic perils of the twentieth century [like systemic state genocide typically undertaken only after gun control/confiscation legislation was created]. But they certainly understood the crux of the problem. After all, more than two thousand years earlier, in 416 B.C., the Athenians put the population of Melos to the sword, exempting only those deemed suitable for sale as slaves. The lesson Thucydides drew from this incident remains persuasive today: "The strong do what they will, the weak endure what they must." The Founders of American democracy saw the persistence of this Thucydidean reality. They rejected the concept of a [federal] state monopoly of armed power--"the most dangerous of all monopolies," according to Madison--****in favor of "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."**** http://law.wustl.edu/WULQ/75-3/753-4.html
A federal state monopoly on armed power (combined with a disarmed populace) is a form of invitation to rapacity and corruption--and historically it has been the institutional recipe for genocide.
The key ingredient of state genocide has been gun confiscation. In the interest of avoiding more genocides by criminal, corrupt, and unrepresentive states--since unrepresentative state elites are the largest murderers in the world--gun ownership is a right in the bioregional state because the other terrifying alternative (confiscation and genocide) is visible in the historical record for horrible contemplation:
“This book is a must read for all those opposed to "gun control", and all those who support "gun control" will be horrified to find the murderous downside to it; genocide. Lethal Laws proves that all murderous governments of the 20th Century, which included Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, had previous "gun control" laws, allowing them to disarm the population and murder them later on with such horrible acts in history like the Holocaust. Lethal Laws also destroys any argument for "gun control", stating firmly that an armed citizenry is the only way to end mass murder....This book gives you hard proof that the downside to "gun control" is genocide, not inconvenience to firearms owners. [Perhaps that will get more leftists concerned.] Lethal Laws contains the authentic original texts of "gun control" laws--with facing translations--that cleared the way for seven major genocides between 1915 and 1980 in which 56,000,000 persons, including millions of children, were murdered. The book also shows how America took all but the last step of a major genocide just over 50 years ago, with the approval of the Congress and the Supreme Court. This work proves that "gun control", which is really civilian disarmament, delivers not safe streets but mountains of corpses.” There's little evidence that gun control makes for less crime either: it tends to make for more crime because only the criminals have guns then.
So this martial check and balance via a rejection of a monopoly on violence was the point of view of the U.S. Framers noted above: “They rejected the concept of a state monopoly of armed power--"the most dangerous of all monopolies," according to Madison--in favor of "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation." And for the leftists: “Gun control is not really a leftist position historically or currently. Gun control is a totalitarian, genocidal, classist, ethnic caste, and religious caste domination policy by powerful minorities.”
In conclusion, it is interesting to note that private gun ownership and private parity with government in martial force is rightfully interpreted as a form of check and balance. At least in Madison's view, he wrote it was the most important check and balance.
4. Protecting Local Minorities in their Universalistic Human Rights
The bioregional state "denote[s] democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state." Given that most gun control legislation starts out as going after ‘minorities’ historically, state protections for universalistic human rights protections should be a concern for libertarians as well since gun control historically is a classist, ethnic caste, and religious caste domination policy by powerful minorities—that only expands to everyone later.
I think you can see how all these four points interlock well to support one another. Breaking one can lead to others being broken. This may get libertarians more concerned about universalistic human political rights.
With informal corruption yielding an unrepresentative developmental policy and yielding in turn environmental degradation, the same corruptions can be linked to forms of human inequalities in party politics and forms of maintaining inequalities in ‘life-chances' in the population at large--where typically a social minority experiences the brunt of environmental degradation. This is why universalistic human rights are very important in environmentalism:
"Environmental racism can be defined as: Racial discrimination in environmental policy making and the enforcement of regulations and laws; the deliberate targeting of people of Colour communities for toxic and hazardous waste facilities; the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities; and the history of excluding people of colour from the leadership of the environmental movement.1
Others have added to that definition by saying environmental racism refers to "any government, institutional, or industry action, or failure to act, that has a negative environmental impact which disproportionately harms - whether intentionally or unintentionally - individuals, groups, or communities based on race or colour."2
It is important though, to understand environmental racism in an historical context. "The exploitation of people of colour has taken the form of genocide, chattel slavery, indentured servitude and racial discrimination - in employment, housing and practically all aspects of life. Today we suffer from the remnants of this sordid history, as well as from new and institutionalised forms of racism, facilitated by the massive post-World War II expansion of the petrochemical industry."3
In the United States, the victims of environmental racism are African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders, who are more likely than Whites to live in environmentally hazardous conditions. Three out of five African Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Native American lands and sacred places are home to extensive mining operations and radioactive waste sites. Three of the five largest commercial hazardous waste landfills are located in predominantly African American and Latino communities. As a consequence, the residents of these communities suffer shorter life spans, higher infant and adult mortality, poor health, poverty, diminished economic opportunities, substandard housing, and an overall degraded quality of life.
For more than a decade environmental racism in the United States has been well-documented by NGOs, universities, and even the US government.6 However, the government has provided no effective remedies to the victims of these racist practices, nor has it taken effective action to stop such practices from occurring in the future. Environmental racism, therefore, is a new manifestation of historic racial oppression. It is merely "old wine in a new bottle."
In other words, inequality and corruption can utilize the discourse of libertarianism to maintain itself. The same can go for greens. In Germany, it has started utilizing the green discourse to this effect. That is why only state institutional frameworks are the ‘best philosophy.’ Particularly if these institutions can help engender forms of long-term local civic enhancement outside the state as in the bioregional state’s CDI and commodity ecology arrangements.
Ideological philosophies are things one falls for--and which can be puppeted by hypocritical delocalized elites and twisted into something entirely different (like the current Die Grunen or the ‘neo-libertarians’ mentioned above), instead of based on frameworks of common belief or trust.
A full exposition of the checks and balances against all this are in Chapter 21 in Toward a Bioregional State, a.k.a., the Constitution of Sustainability.
Whether green or libertarian, mass delocalized party ideologies can be utilized by unscrupulous elites to maintain themselves over the public, aping discourses they fail to believe in (like Leo Strauss, the progenitor and tutor to many of the Bush neocons who encouraged intentional hypocrisy and democratic erosion as state elite policy). This co-option of a discourse makes it difficult to challenge hypocritical elites and their gatekeeping, because as Bush rightly said, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you have to concentrate on.”
That is why all ‘reform’ should cut to the chase and be formal institutional instead of merely philosophical or party-based participation and self-delegitimation in the same broken institutions. Any attempts to decant ‘new wine of reform into old corrupted bottles’ will only leak in the existing broken arrangement in other words. Concentrate on making a better bottle first and the best wine will be enjoyed for much longer.
In conclusion, the bioregional state is hardly a philosophical position like libertarianism or greenism. It is a series of institutional adaptions uncapturable by any singular philosophical/ideological discourse except perhaps its interest in identifying the common theme of many different ways to demote various forms of public and private tyranny via added checks and balances on power.
These added checks and balances on power deal with informal corruption of many kinds that equally lead to environmental difficulties.
The conclusion here is that elites will eventually perhaps come around to this position--seeing all their hubristic dreams being built on sand without the bioregional state providing for durability of democratic competitive party politics, economic sustainability, and ecological diversity against their own self-destructions.
The irony is that as the U.S., U.K. and Zionist neoliberalists rush to consolidate the(ir) planet under one military regime, the strategies being chosen for this consolidation are completely self-defeating. It’s like they want to lose their grip, and want to see us win? It’s coming down to Blessed Unrest of six billion meeting the G8 Shock Doctrine.
The point of this four-part post is to note differences between the bioregional state and a mere ideological/policy position of both green ideology and libertarian ideology.
The bioregional state aims to expand the types of formal checks and balances we have in democracy into environmental issues and toward party politics to interrupt and to solve issues of state decline processes and unsustainability that are typically intertwined historically.
The bioregional state additionally aims both engender as well as reflect pre-existing 'bioregional civic virtue' that can animate such bioregional commonwealth institutions in the long run.
The bioregional state is a work of political philosophy, based on empirical sociological and comparative historical study of processes of environmental degradation. It is designed to avoid a common theme of state failure--typically in the midst of self-created environmental degradation, mixed with consumptive consolidation, and mixed with general public immiseration.
The global sustainability politics of the ecological self-interest of people is already here. It is seen in polls that show supermajorities worldwide supporting such a plan based on the huge scale of how poorly world populations think their current states are performing in the face of environmental challenges.
Since a supermajority in many states of the world considers their current forms of state doing poorly on getting to sustainability, this would be a good basis to achieve what the bioregional state promotes: green constitutional engineering to get to sustainability combined with commodity ecology in every watershed.
We are beyond arguing about ‘converting’ people to green thinking when the majority of the world already is exhibiting different shades of green.
Our solutions are more clearly conceived by focusing on how we got environmental degradation in the first place: through unrepresentative politics. This unrepresentative ‘gray’ political economy is being organized against a population already gone green.
Environmental degradation is a political organizational problematic that requires political organizational solutions. This includes solutions based on ideological/ecotheological or technological change. However, these ecotheological or technological changes will be stillborn without a long-term backing organized by political changes channeling the common ecological self-interest into maintaining them in the short and long term.
A very down to earth* kind of guy.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
