Toward a Bioregional State

Quotes from Toward a Bioregional State, the Book

2011-05-01T13:55:00.006+09:00

[I am in the process of putting links in to previous posts that elaborate certain points. Check back later for updates.]

This post summarizes some of the book, in quotes. I use the third person to describe myself below.

In his 2005 book Toward a Bioregional State: A Series of Letters About Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design in the Era of Sustainability, Mark D. Whitaker argues for another version of the green state. This version of the green state is a slow strategic and institutional means toward greater sustainability starting from our lack of sustainability presently.

This is different from other ideas of a green state for three rationales: first, other green state ideas start at the artificial point of an already achieved sustainability so they are mere philosophical conjectures of what a state might look like from the point of view of some mental conjectures about a non-existent situation; and second, therefore, other green state ideas ignore the most important issues: they are lifeless and without pragmatic strategies to move from unsustainability to sustainability; third, other forms of the green state only analyze state institutions in an artificial isolation from the rest of the political economy and the material world. Because of this third point, there seems to be a strange construct in others' view of the green state as if the state is some magical creation that can force change of the politics of society instead of seeing the state as merely being a reflection of the wider distribution of systemic power in other areas and in itself. Therefore, in the bioregional state, the green state is related to environmental capacity building in the real world in steady, slow, pragmatic steps from unsustainability to sustainability.

Toward a Bioregional State offers many strategic ways to move from unsustainability to sustainability by adjusting the wider political dynamics of state institutions, other institutions, and commodity choices as a means toward sustainability. Thus, the model for both unsustainability and sustainability are based on the same dynamics between formal politics, informal politics, and the environmental context, though a sustainable society has a more representative form of dynamics in its material choices, and an unsustainable society has a more unrepresentative dynamics in its material choices. A fully representative society is sustainable and uses sustainable materials. An unsustainable society is corrupt, and corruption creates unsustainability that locks in unsustainable materials from any removal or critique.

Therefore, bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms*, green constitutional engineering additions**, and larger Ecological Reformation like commodity reforms*** designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent majority 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 [2] and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections and other conflict resolutions of a larger national state.

* - This is the informal level of politics that requires greater checks and balances to create a competitive party system that competes for 100% of the vote instead of competes to exclude the electorate. This is achievable with proportional representation with majoritarian allotment (PRMA), and watershed based election districts [2] (among other things), described in the book. A truly competitive party system creates sustainability by creating representative elites. An unrepresentative-elite-biased, gatekeeping party system creates unsustainability by rejecting such concerns by building a formal institutional arrangement and materials policy that is designed to be degradative and unrepresentative.

** - This is the formal level of politics that requires greater numbers of checks and balances to avoid an unsustainable, unrepresentative state developmental policy; in an unrepresentative, unsustainable society, the state becomes formally structured to serve informal gatekeeping interests and forms of gatekept clientelism instead of to serve multiple real locations within its territory. This means green constitutional engineering: the phrase exclusively for the additions to the formal state apparatus. Plus, this means Ecological Reformation: the phrase for taking into account more than the state in how to improve the representation of a state elite's larger dynamic interactions with other power interests in society like the sciences/research institutions, consumption institutions [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8], and financial institutions. In this way, 'green politics' is hardly a special category of politics, and it is hardly best served by an ideological party since environmental concern and support for health, ecology, and local economics comes from across the political spectrum for green politics. Green politics is a natural form of politics in that it merely means fully representative democracy, where elites are representative instead of gatekeeping on development policy concerns.

*** - This is the level of material politics and potential conflicts between different commodities for the same positional use, where the outcome gets biased toward unsustainable, unrepresentative choices without a formal means to maintain multiple local choices of materials for the same social uses. This is an important material check and balance on power in corrupt materials domination. Demotion of local ecological self-interest, its ethnobotany, and the resulting natural bioregionalism worldwide leads to unsustainability. Different durable human uses of local commodities are a resourceful, material, and market-based check and balance against the collusion of corrupt state, science, finance, and consumptive powers actively demoting or passively gatekeeping against our many choices for sustainability we already have.

Instead of being as anti-market as Eckersley (2004), and instead of being as trusting of state elites as she is, Whitaker argues for concentration on constitutional engineering that will create a less corrupted state developmentalism and a more representative developmentalism instead. A politically biased market is seen as the origin of environmental degradation, instead of markets per se, so there are required checks and balances in both the state and in maintaining consumer choices in markets for different consumptive categories, to maintain sustainability. Many more durable and local regional commodities are required as material checks and balances against any potentials of larger unrepresentative versions of commodities in their categories. For example, oil, from once just a market choice, has become a corrupt unrepresentative regime of elites created by governmental corruption via the artificial removal of consumer choices more than markets. I suggest watching the film Who Killed the Electric Car (2005), as well as this:

Dirty Oil - A Documentary on The Alberta Tar Sands (2009)
1:15:49

The bioregional state is in the interest of long term sustainability of multiple ecoregions and bioregions as a check and balance against the materially consolidating effects of interaction between governmental corruption and consolidation with private economic consolidation and their equal responsibility for the reduction of market choices and destruction of real areas of the world. It's "environmental degradation without representation" that the bioregional state proposals solve.

Thus, Whitaker argues that the basis of environmental degradation is not capitalism or market relations. Environmental degradation is supremely caused by unrepresentative state elite decisions and how they manipulate markets to serve particular consolidated materials, so solutions should focus on additional formal checks and balances against these informal 'ecological tyrannies', via more green constitutional engineering. A poorly designed formal state apparatus in the past has led to unrepresentative, informal elite gatekeeping on state economic developmentalism. Such political corruption biases material choices of the whole society toward economic consolidation with the reduction of market choices per category of use. This process of unsustainability is political corruption. It is connected to market corruption and the expansion of environmental degradation and consumers being held captive within degradative choices of unrepresentative elites and the removal of more sustainable choices simultaneously. The political developmental power of the state has been captured by unrepresentative raw material regimes that gatekeep against political or material choices far more sustainable that we already have.

Two Levels of Changes: Larger and Smaller

The bioregional state proposals are for two levels of changes: a set of larger formal checks and balances on the state level [2] in interaction with other institutions as well as a set of two smaller, local grass roots organizations called commodity ecology and a civic democratic institution. The latter are to be implemented in all watersheds of the world as a material and cultural form of check and balance, respectively, against larger corrupt state developmentalism creating environmental degradation. Both larger and smaller levels work together in the bioregional state for a more representative state developmentalism.

Ecoregions as Political Feedback Against Unsustainable Developmentalism

Particularly within the proposals in the Bioregional State, ecoregions or watersheds aid in facilitation of the innate "ecological self-interest" of people. The "ecological self-interest" of peoples aim always to avoid externalities in human health, ecology, or economic relations that are impressed upon people living in a particular ecological area by potentially unrepresentative informal politics guided from larger state frameworks. Worldwide, one way to bring this type of ecological self-interest in sync with developmental policies would be to make watersheds/ecoregions as the mandated form for electoral districting and judicial dictricting, providing ecological based checks and balances in politics and the administration of law and lawsuits, respectively. This brings ecological self-interest in sync with state politics and courts instead of out of sync with it. A watershed based electoral districting and judicial districting provides feedback against unsustainable developmentalism policies in particular areas; provides for a more competitive informal party framework that removes the gerrymandered and uncompetitive districting that is key to how informal gatekeeping is involved in maintaining unsustainable development; as well provides an ongoing formal mechanism--legislative and judicial--for particular areas to participate in deliberations of developmental decisions within larger state levels for their own ecologically specific sustainable paths.

The wider argument of the Bioregional State is that much of unsustainable developmentalism comes from how exclusionary and undemocratic political, judicial, and material gatekeeping is organized and maintained in ostensibly "formal democracies."

The wider argument of the Bioregional State is that its frameworks are an improvement on democracy in general, that removes many different levels of elitist, exclusionary political gatekeeping which promotes unsustainable abuses in these three areas. Watersheds as electoral districts or judicial districts are only some of the more "charismatic" examples in the Bioregional State for how to operationalize local ecological self-interest as an ecological check and balance solution on the level of districting, against this wider potential issue of gatekeeping.

"The United States is used as the running example in Toward a Bioregional State, though the book argues "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." [Foreword, p. v]

Quotes from the Book

Other selected quotes about the green formal state in the bioregional state:

"A formal green political framework--sustainable and durable instead of unsustainable and self-destructive--innately comes about once further checks and balances are in operation that change the incentive contexts of informal power to be more fluid, more competitive, and more representative. Presently, informal power is a form of gatekeeping: collusive and unrepresentative. Enlightenment democratic theory and democratic institutional design require an update in order to check and balance against the corruptions of informal power and the part it plays in warping state developmentalism [influenced by biases in politics, judicial decisions, and material gatekeeping and market demotion choice for consumers] towards unsustainable goals. So, onward: toward the bioregional state." [p. x]

"State structures are far from the only aspect of importance [see, Ecological Reformation], 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." [p. v]

"A strong 'civil society'...is based on representative and inclusive institutions and districts that allow for a registering of geographic bailiwicks, instead of quarantining voters in uncompetitive clientelistic districts. State policies matter, and state policies will either make, break, create, or demote bioregionalism. Without the formal architecture, a sustainable politics from whatever party will always be marginalized, because the structures are organized to marginalize 'that type of voting:' environmental feedback on the state." [p. 18]

"If anything greens should support four different changes, four criteria and requirements for a democracy in practice: (1) geographically inclusive districts, (2) proportional representation with majoritarian allotment clause [PRMA] that sets up a context for 100% maximization of voting, (3) lack of 'special' legislation marginalizing third parties, and (4) 'clean elections.'" [p. 55]

"Simply because the political districts are drawn in a certain way, it only looks like Green issues are in a 'minority' everywhere. The polls show otherwise." [p. 87]

"Under proportional representation with a majoritarian allotment, then the Greens and Libertarian statutory rights for recounts in states where they were listed can be used as a real incentive to them directly under the potential for proportional allotment." [p. 115]

"In a nutshell I see the bioregional state as keeping the social and legal centralized around human rights discourses and keeping the economics decentralized [as a form of check and balance materially for consumer options and bioregions to be maintained economically, without environmental degradation from corrupt, consolidated frameworks; this encourages only forms of economic consolidation that are democratically accepted as well as environmentally sustainable, in league with multiple local areas of bioregional sustainability]. That to me is a bioregionalist green perspective on "what is to be done." It embraces what I feel has been the best of 'modernism' and democratic frameworks of nation-states while rejecting what has been the worst: its support for subsidizes for privatized centralized corporations presently swarming and destroying it because it still has the institutional capacity of being a jurisdictional route for checking and balancing against corporate power. This is hardly to say that the nation-state frameworks by themselves can regulate what has become a degradative transnational corporate framework. For that, other methods will have to be addressed. However, this bioregional letter discusses how to adapt the best of the nation-state to a process of [maintaining] economic decentralization [as a check and balance against materially on larger material corruption and state/corporate consolidation and as a check and balance to maintain consumer choices] instead of using it as a framework for protection of privatized monopolies that subsidize themselves toward environmental degradation." [p. 210]

"What particular issues do I see worthy of decentralizing, and other issues worthy of 'keeping' consolidated? What changes am I talking about for a Green platform that would facilitate 'structural bioregionalism'? If sustainability is to be institutionalized, then many frameworks in existence are illegitimate and sustaining only environmental degradation.

1. ON THE STATE AND NATIONAL LEVEL FRAMEWORK formal voting representation changes are required for structuring bioregionalism. The majoritarian voting procedure is a big mistake, when durable 40% or more are kept out of formal politics." [toward PRMA] [p. 214]

"2. GET TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS OUT OF UNIVERSITIES OR THE SCIENCE DEPARTMENTS THERE or make universities less attractive to them. All the mobilizations against the food services industries and prison service industry complicity are a start, particularly in campus recycling movements. If the schools in question are public land grant colleges, they should be questioned why they are destroying the land, air, and water, (and human nutrition and expanding pollution based diseases) in the service of unsustainable corporations. The practice of unsustainability is tangibly breeding in American universities, and this is exported worldwide [while some Universities are already moving toward sustainability with departments of Permaculture and Agroforestry, for example] [p. 219]

"3. GENDER, ETHNIC, SEXUALITY, HANDICAP, AGE, RELIGION EQUALITY issues. This is what I mentioned above: keeping social and legal recourses available on the national level against the parochial localisms that demote them, as a sort of legal check and balances of the social against the economic. I know very well that the inverse can happen--a corrupting, socially biased, centralized state supporting social inequality as well. That is why I suggest the CDI (Civic Democratic Institution--in other bioregional letters) on the local level as well. it is important to maintain both the local and the national as means of checking and balancing each other's biases, so those living under social inequality and discrimination have multiple outlets for their political input--instead of only one easily co-opted [gatekept] recourse of action." [p. 219]

"4. CONSUMPTION. Invest in local food infrastructures, in sustainable organics [and in sustainable interactions in the 92 material choices for local regions--see Commodity Ecology.] This brings in tow sustainable nutrition, sustainable jobs, sustainable farmers, sustainable markets. Two states already have established state level committees/plans on hunger and food security issues and for facilitating 'buy local' sourcing of state governments. These states are Connecticut and Iowa. That they are both very rural and very urbanized states shows that it is possible to work for sustainable localism in both urban and rural contexts. Plus, the number of farmers markets has skyrocketed in the past 10 years according to USDA data. People know they are being lied to by voluntary or misleading corporate labeling and consolidated supermarkets. Supermarkets typically only make about 1% profit markup, are thus are very sensitive to changing consumer demand and can easily be forced to change their sourcing practices for food items.

Frame bioregionalist green policies and institutions as a decided mix of national and localist polices. I consider the mantra here as widening citizen and consumer choice to include the local and sustainable (which is demoted by a corporatist degradative political framework), as well as stabilizing local economies, instead of as a reduction of choice. People, sure, can (and will) still shop at Walmart if they want. However, the point is stepping up ways and policies for creating more choices, for institutionalizing locality. Exposing the biased [corruptible and degradative] subsidies (road extensions, tax breaks, etc.) that support such Walmart[-style] operations is another strategy. This can go hand in hand with supporting more local choice.

5. URBAN PLANNING AND LAND USE. Sprawl is ecocide. Real estate speculators are the enemy: they overbuild for the rich and underbuild for the middle income or (the expanding) poor." [p. 220]

"6. FINANCE. Consolidated finance is the enemy and is a major driver of environmental degradation, destruction of localism, and political exclusion in the overall process. When the United States allowed interstate banking franchises, the ensuing consolidation was a huge policy mistake if the point of democratic government is to be to insure social, fiscal, democratic, and ecological accountability. Break up financial conglomerates, for they are the funders of ecological degradation 'big projects' almost exclusively. [Money, as one of the 92 material choices, requires checks and balances as well: local and state level currencies are required to be allowed as legal tender for all debts, public and private, to check and balance against the corrupt clientelism of dependence based on only having a consumer option of one national level currency with its potential manipulations against store of value in ongoing inflation and deflation.] That is only one of the connections I see to the 'anti-corporate globalization' movement I feel here, with green bioregionalism. In conclusion, I see these type of strategic points as getting people thinking synergistically about local changes for sustainability as an institutional changes, as a sustainability facilitation movement. Sustainability requires a particular plan for widening voter and consumer choices on the local level, for removing the gatekept clientelism--whether as consumers or as citizens--that simply frame human beings as support networks for environmental degradation inducing organizations. These institutional changes for sustainability are both concerned with informal party competition facilitation for voter choice and for more biophilic formal institutional frameworks whether they be the state, the sciences, finance, or consumption. Inversely, the point about environmental degradation is that it is a facilitation network of formal institutional and political endeavor that involves a great deal of informal corruption in how consumption is organized by political interests to remove choice and to force large scale, consolidated, clientelistic relationships upon people and the planet at large--instead of to allow a sustainable, more direct experience of people in the local places in which they all live. Removing the consolidated informal clientelism that arches across the state, the sciences, the finances, and in consumption is key to removing environmental degradation. There should be additional checks and balances formally instituted that guard against their interlocks in society at large. To facilitate more direct localism in these institutions is to facilitate the expansion of choice in local consumptive options. This is key to moving toward sustainability." [p. 221]

Chapter 20 rewrites the U.S. Constitution (without removing anything) by adding the ecological checks and balances, with an additional Ecological Bill of Rights.

"[T]his is a Constitutional blueprint for sustainability, regardless of geography or epoch, as it represents general requirements of governments in administrating and creating the conditions of sustainability, and maintaining the process of sustainability." [p. 222]

"We the People of the world, removing the burdens of unsustainability imposed on us by unrepresentative frameworks of government, science, finance, and consumption, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common social and ecological defense with the political inclusion of trading arrangements, promote the general Welfare therein, and do engrain ourselves and direct our governments to move towards [the freedom of] sustainability and away from the tyranny of unsustainability to secure the Blessings of Sustainability and its Liberties to ourselves and our Posterity. We ordain and establish this Constitution of Sustainability." [p. 224]

Additional wording in the Ecological Bill of Rights are as follows:

"Article 16. A well regulated Militia, jurisdictionally being based on watersheds, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." [p. 262]

"Article 17. Section 1. No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. Section 2. Military shall be prohibited from conducting or participating in civil police work." [p. 262]

"Article 24. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the people inhabiting particular watersheds and States respectively, in that order, or to the people as a whole." [p. 263]

"Article 27. Section 1. In the interest of a competitive party environment for democratic elections, where candidates are potentially independent of private capital for the launching and maintaining of campaigns or their content, all Local, State, and Federal Elections shall be publicly funded. Additionally, see Article II, Section 18.

Section 2. No where are private public relations personnel or advertising personnel to be employed by the local, state, or federal governments, or funded by the local, state, or federal governments. The government itself is already public relations incarnate and can speak for itself to the people.

Section 3. In all political party campaigns for office, political parties shall be prohibited from appointing personnel to their informal party administration of an election campaign from any simultaneously incumbent personnel in power in a state.

Section 4. Complete transparency and paper-based auditability of the entire voting infrastructure in local, state, and federal elections shall be maintained as a public jurisdictional issue.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation [for national elections; other local bodies will have regulatory jurisdictions on their requisite elections infrastructure, checkable on larger levels of jurisdiction.]" [p. 264-5]

"Article 29 Section 1. The Constitution of Sustainability shall support bodily integrity of all citizens and species. There are bodily rights beyond which all government shall keep from challenging and instead shall maintain them, running the gamut from environmental pollution issues that impinge on bodily integrity, to food issues, to commodity monitoring, to surveillance, and to abortion. The Constitution of Sustainability is based on bodily rights and bodily integrity assured through these rights. Government is limited to a social operation regulating only spaces and activities between individuals for sustainability and for human rights instead of regulating or having any jurisdiction on internal bodily activities or personal decisions about one’s own body. 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.

Section 2. State or private mandated implants or collars of various sorts for tracking humans shall be prohibited.

Section 3. State forced medication and external electro-magnetic manipulation of mental or bodily states shall be prohibited.

Section 4. In the interest of female bodily integrity, the female bodily right to choose abortion or birth control technologies or medications shall not be infringed.

Section 5. All peaceable citizens shall have the right to anonymous, publicly unmonitored outdoor civic spaces as to be free of intimidation as part of the proper redress of grievances against Government.

Section 6. Citizens have the right to unadulterated, healthful, organic foods. Citizens have the right to unadulterated environment, air, water, and earth.

Section 7. Citizens have the right to complete information on the path a commodity takes to their purchase.

Section 8. The Constitution of Sustainability shall preserve the unmonitorability and anonymity of citizens, extending to any commodities once they are purchased, in the interests of checking against undue state or corporate power against the individual. The bodily right to be unmonitored shall extend to post purchasing behavior.

Section 9. On the contrary, for public elected officials and appointees, live camera monitoring shall occur in all of their publicly funded office spaces, courtrooms, fully viewable and recordable by the public at large on demand..." [p. 265-6]

Chapter 26, the concluding chapter, is an index summarizing 37 additional formal checks and balances for a bioregional green state:

"[This chapter] pieces together all the issues mentioned in the Constitution of Sustainability and discusses them separately in terms of the four different types of checks and balances that are the additional requirements for linking democracy and sustainability. These additional checks and balances are missing in existing democratic frameworks which leads to state corruption from which follows environmental degradation...As of this writing, there are 37 institutional design points with 45 different checks and balances issues--since many of the 37 points have multiple checks and balances taken into account.

To get a general picture of these 45 considerations that have gone into additional checks and balances issues of the bioregional state, they are...grouped as concentrating on adding checks and balances above in this manner: formal-to-formal: 21; informal-to-informal: 5; informal-to-formal: 19." [p. 315, 335]

All of them are conceived of as ecological checks and balances, due to their effects on creating a political process without elite gatekeeping in elections, courts, and materials that has maintained and expanded environmental degradation.

So to get to sustainability:

"In the past 20 years, European sociologist Ulrich Beck has noted our whole political outlook has moved into a 'risk society' framework. He describes a nexus of politics that has moved from merely fighting for a distribution of material goods, into one more and more fighting to get rid of 'environmental bads.' Even though from comparative historical analysis, I would disagree that there is something novel or modern about this type of citizen pressure for environmental amelioration, I believe I am the first to take these ideas and apply them to formal institutional democratic theory by asking what kinds of additions to democracy would be required to facilitate an ecologically sound democracy, in order to let democracy as a process get rid of these 'environmental bads' through facilitating an ecologically sound democratic politics.

"In conclusion, I believe I have described something worthy of consideration--both because it is a novel idea and because it has a prescriptive intent even to the level of offering ideas for slow strategic implementation. I believe this will be a gauntlet for the next millennium that will define the existing issues of formal democratic political theory as innately flawed and totally politically illegitimate without addressing the main issues raised in the bioregional state: how to establish checks and balances on the competitive informal gatekeeping organizational contexts of parties, how to create a competitive marketplace of ideas in the party context, how to make parties compete for the full electorate instead of collude for the partial electorate, and how to align the state with the innately geographic specific issues of citizenship expression [to remove material gatekeeping as well]." [p. xxi]

In the Bioregional State, Nuclear Power Would Have Required Local, Ecological Approval: So It Would Never Exist

2011-04-29T11:32:00.008+09:00

In the bioregional state, doctors could spend much less time in politics and more on healing though these gentlemen help us understand politics in an unsustainable society is required as one of the arts of healing.

Physicians for Social Responsibility: Out with the Parasite of Nuclear Power; The Regime Choice of Nuclear Power and Its Missing Long View
April 26, 2011
52:31 min

"Chernobyl's Ongoing Disaster for Economics, State Finance and Health; Fukushima Data Parallels"

This is a video press conference from Physicians for Social Responsibility. It is a panel discussion by many of their present and past Presidents. It was filmed in the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. this month.

So much of our 'individual' health risks are really in origin social and political issues and require ameliorating on this level first. This is the point of the bioregional state.

They are discussing three things. First, it's an update on Chernobyl's ongoing disaster. Yes, it's still continuing as a never-ending nightmare; cesium in the 2,000 square miles of "inhabitable" soil is still not disappearing in 25 years "as was expected," and no one knows why). 70,000 additional square miles are still heavily contaminated as well outside the exclusion zone, where people live though suffer incredible health problems--forever, since nuclear radiation is a genetically inheritable disaster.

Financially, many of the countries still suffer under the extortion of nuclear power, and it has mortgaged their future. For instance, Ukraine and Belarus spend in 2011 about 5-7% of their whole economy on the aftereffect of this one disaster. A fresh containment dome is required for Chernobyl. No one is putting up money to build it, and Ukraine is unable to afford it. It's already 15 years late in starting the more permanent sarcophagus, and three years more late after they really decided to rebuild the sarcophagus. Ukraine can only put $850,000,000 up for the project, when it really costs $100,000,000,000. This means that without another 100 billion dollars of mortgaged future, Chernobyl's sarcophagus will collapse sooner or later starting another nuclear disaster death cloud around the world and further mortgaging all our futures beyond this cost.

"Sarcophagus" is perhaps a poor name for Chernobyl's hasty containment walls. That word implies something completed, that the accident is dead and finished. However, Chernobyl's accident is very much alive, right now--and will be alive for thousands of years. "Vampire" is the word that comes to mind for me about the Chernobyl accident. Why? Because the word "vampire" implies something that is temporarily blocked though very much alive and waiting to get out and attack people from its coffin. The Chernobyl vampire will be nearly immortal compared to humans that created it and upon us it will continue to prey for thousands of years. The vampire will live longer than any human government that has ever existed, longer than any durable spoken or printed language, longer than this version of our human species.

Second, they are discussing the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant's ongoing disaster. From Japanese investigations monitoring 1,600 school grounds within and outside the current Japanese exclusion zone of 20 kilometers, far more than this exclusion zone is contaminated heavily already. How heavily? Levels of radiation (absorbed dose) in the soil and at 1 meter height in the air outside of the Fukushima Prefecture's exclusion zone exceed levels that led to complete evacuation of 350,000 of people around the Chernobyl disaster. They found "Chernobyl evacuation levels of Cesium-137" out to 40 kilometers. In the United States, official policy is only a 10 mile evacuation from a nuclear disaster, though the United States has removed its troops from around Fukushima to a 50 mile radius. Watch what they do instead of the lies they say.

Plus, the scale of Fukushima is far wider than Chernobyl:

- due to oceanic contamination (the highest radioactive water is coiling south is is just outside of Tokyo already by late April 2011; some fishing is already banned)
- due to Fukushima being four nuclear reactors exploding (one of them with MOX (multiple oxide fuel), the #3 building),
- due to some of these nuclear stations being 30 years old before exploding, with 30 years of assembled wastes there (Chernobyl was only several months old when only one reactor exploded; four old ones have exploded at Fukushima)
- and due to the massive number of curies all make this far worse than Chernobyl.

According to this estimate, "Chernobyl released 50 million curies of radiation. Fukushima has released 9 billion curies and counting." Let's look at that with zeros:

estimated Chernobyl so far, 50,000,000 curies released (over 25 years)
estimated Fukushima so far, 9,000,000,000 curies released (ongoing, 6 weeks)

The estimate is based on the known first hour of high radiation at Fukushima's single explosion, and then assumed that at least this amount, spread across four reactors, happens spread across a full day after that till now. If Chenobyl was rated a "7", the worst possible nuclear disaster level, Fukushima should be rated a 7 four times over, for a 28. It's likely far more than this if the Japanese government already admitted a lie of what is going into the air: 24 terabequerels/day was really 154 terabequerels/day.

From Yomiuri Shinbun (9:15PM JST 4/23/2011):

"The Nuclear Safety Commission under the Prime Minister's Office disclosed on April 23 that the amount of radioactive materials being released from the TEPCO Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was 154 terabecquerels per day (1 tera is 1 trillion) as late as April 5 when the amount being released was considered stabilized.

On April 5, the estimated amount of radioactive materials released from Fukushima I Nuke Plant was 0.69 terabecquerels/hour for iodine-131 and 0.14 terabecquerels/hour for cesium-137. When the numbers were recalculated according to the INES method (converting cesium amount into iodine equivalent), the amount released turned out to be 6.4 terabecquerels/hour (which was 154 terabecquerels per day. Previously, the Nuclear Safety Commission had simply added the numbers for iodine-131 and cesium-137, and announced it was less than 1 terrabecquerel per hour."

And as for the water, add even more radiation: "Over 6 days, from April 1, 520 tons of highly radioactive water was released into the sea...much more than earlier reports suggested & 10,000 times more than Three Mile Island.")

Third, they are discussing the U.S. less from the downwind radioactive fallout from Fukushima (U.S. finds already clouds of plutonium, uranium, cesium, and iodine in its territory) and more related to the known risks of similar nuclear power plants in the United States. They are particularly concerned about all completely unshielded spent fuel pools throughout the United States's nuclear reactors that are highly over capacity. They are concerned about the many aged nuclear reactors, similar to Japan. They are concerned about the U.S. nuclear reactors that were built on earthquake fault lines, just like in Japan.

As I am writing this, there is simultaneously a nuclear scare of escaped radiation in Ohio, and tornadoes in the U.S. South have cut the external power to three nuclear power plants in Alabama. These three slow nuclear bombs are on internal diesel power generation only right now. Quoting their press release about the panel:

"[Previous President of Physicians for Social Responsibility] Dr. Jeff Patterson relayed his experiences at Moscow Hospital No. 6, where victims of Chernobyl were treated, saying 'The long-term effects of this spread of radiation are much more destructive than the one-time x-ray and gamma dose that people received at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We will not see the final outcome of this experiment for hundreds of years.'

The Institute for Policy Studies' Bob Alvarez spoke about how the Fukushima nuclear crisis underscores the vulnerability of spent fuel storage in pools to accidents or attack, especially the 31 reactors in the US with a similar design as the Fukushima reactors.

[President of Physicians for Social Responsibility] Dr. Andrew Kanter outlined the potential catastrophic effects of a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-scale accident in the United States and demonstrated PSR’s new online Evacuation Zone Map, which shows where a person lives in relation to a nuclear reactor and an evacuation zone. He discussed the difficult logistics of an evacuation and demands on medical personnel. [The map, which is available at www.psr.org/evacuation2011, shows a person's residence in relation to a nuclear reactor and an evacuation zone.]

[Previous President] Dr. Ira Helfand wrapped up the event with a discussion of the harm to human health from radiation exposure, concluding 'the risks to public health, the economy and our environment from nuclear power far outweigh the benefits.'"

The doctors' prognosis is uniform. Nuclear power is a political and socially inflicted sickness, a self-inflicted parasite on our bodies and our politics. Out with the parasite and the human body can heal. Out with the parasite and our politics can heal. No one requires this parasite.

As a parasitical 'energy' choice that destroys the host and its environment, nuclear is clearly irrational. It's costs are far more dear than anything it can provide. It is an unrepresentative raw material regime demoting other sustainable choices that exist already.

What does this have to do with the bioregional state?

It is very likely that if the institutions of the bioregional state were in place 50 years ago when the first commercial nuclear power plant was attempting to get commissioned, nuclear power would have been avoided.

That was then. Though we live in the now and we plan for the future in the now. With the institutions of the bioregional state in place on the local level, we can have a social movement process now and in the long term that would fulfill local political and economic priorities first in decommissioning all nuclear plants. They are already a waste of money, many of them seldom ever breaking even at all. [1] [2] [3] This is particularly so for the ongoing financial extortion on the future in nuclear waste storage. If that cost is figured into the accounting, plus other catastrophic cleanup and permanent health damage genetically to people and to ecologies, costs are estimated to make purveyors of the 'economics' of nuclear seem even more irrational. On unaccounted costs of nuclear choices that make it clearly parasitical and suboptimal:

The Convenient Solution (The Economics of Abundant Renewables vs. Non-Required Unrenewables)
Greenpeace UK
9 min 27 sec

(Note Bene: this film, in one small part, holds to the canard of 'scientifically discovered anthropogenic climate change', later exposed in Climategate as based on nothing scientific except data fraud from the main scientists working with the U.N.'s IPCC. Climategate reveals indeed "the worst scientific scandal of our generation.")

There is some talk of converting nuclear plants to natural gas plants. This is still hardly ideal because exchanging one parasite for another is to avoid the process of healing. Simply write it off financially, admit mistakes, and start on sustainability now, or we are continuing down the ecologically dead-end path in denial.

The interactions of the bioregional state provide an ecological check and balance [1] [2] [3] against unrepresentative state elite decisions in all our material choices.

In this way the institutions of the bioregional state can move us toward sustainability. It does this by fleshing out the multiple localized priorities of all areas left unvoiced in material politics that has brought a lack of representation over risk into our lives and which has gatekept sustainable choices from the market that we already have.

Sweden has already shut down all its nuclear power. Germany is now mobilizing to do the same. Some countries in Europe are already almost at half of their electrical generation coming from renewable sources. Meanwhile, the U.S. is the best place in the world for wind generation, though only generates 1% of electricity from wind, and 50% of the U.S.'s energy still comes from the coal raw material regime. Denmark makes 80% of the world's wind turbines. It is a growth industry, and the U.S. is falling way behind and self-strangling itself with the nuclear and oil tapeworms. The point is hardly to recommend a novel 'one size fits all' solution to technology and energy, because it seldom fits anyone except the supply-sided groups and unrepresentative state elites that foist it upon every separate region. The point is to start a process whereby people decide on materials in a "polytopian" way for themselves in their own region based on their own priorities and how it fits into their local ecologies and economies.

Polytopia is a word to describe the bioregional state: multiple real places require maintaining instead the promotion of a singular artificial ideological nowhere that tends to become a nightmarish dystopia regardless of its origin if encouraged. Even if it calls itself 'green', if it becomes a singular ideology repressively implemented, it is hardly green.

As said in the definition of the bioregional state:

"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."

The two local level institutions of the bioregional state have been discussed before: the civic democratic institution and the commodity ecology, in all watersheds of the world.

Build it, this polytopia, and we may have a lever to decommission the many dead-end materials foisted upon us and our larger bodies, the ecology. Build it, and we may have a lever to replace them simultaneously with the already existing sustainable materials. Inquire within.

"The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive." -- Polak, The Image of the Future [(1973), p. 19]

What kind of image of the future do you want?

The Raw Material Regime: How Politics Demotes Green Future Options for Clean Energy

2011-04-08T09:40:00.005+09:00

Environmental organization members wear yellow rain gear and carry umbrellas bearing symbols of radioactivity as they launch a campaign for the prevention of pollution from radiation in front of Sejong Cultural Center in Seoul, April 6. (Photo by Kim Jung-hyo)

Below is "Today's Column" from the Hankyoreh (English Version), the most respected paper in South Korea when journalists are polled. I wrote this last week. Now that radioactive rain has covered the world, including Korea, and milk is being dumped around the world because of the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, reflect on this fact: nuclear or oil are unrequired. They are less material regimes of market choice and are more of a politically repressive regime of extortion. We have many options for energy sustainability now that give us completely zero emission, green, clean energy without pollution. As said at that link,

"[E]nergy is perhaps the most politically contentious raw material arrangement for two rationales. First, it is because there is so much money and dependency to be created in energy. 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 a forced (non)-choice. It's like having a (non) 'choice' of 20 different brands of gasoline without having a choice in what engines run on, in your car."

Some of these completely clean energy options now are mentioned below. If unrepresentative politics and gatekeeping demotes our options, then only more representative politics in the bioregional state can provide for sustainability. I talk about that in my 30 minute interview, and you are welcome to listen to that here.

[Column] Korean Green Future Options for Clean Energy
By Mark D. Whitaker

Korea requires a well-planned energy future, and President Lee claims to be going full speed ahead--though to nowhere or oblivion? Korea has great, clean, green technologies that have been abandoned and ignored over the past ten years.

First, national policy should openly oppose oil or nuclear expansion because it’s easy: other native-Korean options exist. Second, oil and nuclear expansion should be resisted because expansion of such dirty industries is a form of extortion on the future.

There are two levels of oil or nuclear extortion. First dirty pollution creating lobbies convince governments to invest in nuclear reactors, oil pipelines, or terminals. After the bait is taken, corporations can hold a nuclear or oil gun to a government’s head to pay for their massive cost overruns because such toxic machines half built are good for little else. Second, once built, construction companies celebrate once more because such toxic creations have even more toxic waste storage costs and cleanup costs.

Particularly for nuclear, these costs mortgage the future and are required to be a top priority for perpetuity--or the rest of the existence of the country financially or ecologically, whichever one comes first. Once started, oil or nuclear are hard to keep from locking in their own extortive infrastructures and externalities for a suboptimal future. Once started, it is hard to keep their politics from locking out clean market options.

Dirty energy is a bad long-term politics, with catastrophically understated disasters while short-term construction interests get rich. Instead, construction industries should be getting rich expanding a clean, green infrastructure. If finance is the art of creating a preferred future, where are Korean finance and thus Korea’s future going?

On Friday, March 11, 2011, the largest ever-recorded Japanese earthquake struck its northeast coast followed by a 10-meter tsunami. It started one of the world’s largest nuclear accidents in previously “failsafe” technologies. Despite this, on the next business day, President Lee without a conscientious blink, officiated in a public ceremony in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The ceremony finalized a future plan for expanded dirty nuclear power internationally with construction of four Korean-made nuclear reactors. It is the “largest-ever energy contract awarded in the Middle East” at 20 billion dollars.

Tit for tat, Lee got equally dirty oil development in exchange for a dirty nuclear deal: “On the sidelines of the summit, Korea signed its largest-ever oil field development deal, potentially valued at 110 trillion won ($98 billion), with the UAE”. That is almost 10% of the current Korean economy, mortgaged to a toxic energy future. President Lee pretended nothing happened over the weekend to change his country’s path toward more risky, pollutive energy despite four nuclear reactors at Fukusihma Dai-ichi blowing up and the other two perhaps soon to do the same. He certainly sleeps soundly.

What’s the Korean, clean, green option? There are two domestic ones to think about and two others to worry about internationally. First, there are completely clean and green Korean techniques to generate energy for transportation instead of a requirement of hybrid cars. Several Korean corporations have completely electric cars. However, ultimately under Lee, instead of harnessing this technological option, his administration spent time creating signs banning electric cars from highways, discouraging market competition or improvement in fully electric transportation, and punishing people for using oil substitute additives in their cars. Already many electric cars go just as fast (or faster) than expensive, polluting oil cars. Energy refills are much cheaper: electricity, solar or otherwise.

Second, it may be mind bending to understand that water fuel solutions have existed for over a decade domestically. Korean corporation Best Korea won the 2001 Prime Minister’s award for their green, clean technology of water fuel: hydrogen on demand stored as water. They won another award from the Korean government for the best patented invention in 2000. The future is here. In fact, the future went by you ten years ago, Korea, and few noticed. Why? (“A Korean Manufacturer of Brown’s Gas Generators,” youtube.com/watch?v=0ItyiJ1uBUY (8 min).)

Third, while Lee fiddles as Seoul burns in smog and potential nuclear fallout from Japan, Koreans should worry about foreign green futures outclassing polluting Korean ones. Japanese company Genepax has an entirely water based car. (Reuters. “Genepax’s Water Powered Car,”　www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME; 1:22 min.) It goes 300 kilometers on a liter of water--even tea works.

Reuters. Japanese Company Genepax's Water-Engine Car
1:22 min

Fourth, Indian (Tata Motors) and French (MDI) manufacturers have an entirely air based car: no pollution in or out, with an onboard air compressor/recharger. They call it a half oil and air “hybrid,” though the oil can be switched off to run on air as original models intended. These air cars have been mass manufactured for several years in India.

A Car That Runs 200 Miles (or Forever Without Stopping for Recharging) on Compressed Air
3:24 min.

MDI's air car even recharges itself via compressed air, so no stopping to refuel ever in this working model featured--one ongoing fill-up completely for free. How can it keep running without stopping? Well, the air car is moving through its own fuel all the time, right: the air? Simply turn driving into the refueling process as they do via an on-board fuel compressor run by the compressed air itself just like the engine. The engine runs cool as well, so overheating is hardly an issue.

Korean chaebol like Hyundai should wake up and smell the clean air: hybrid cars are a dead end with these options around. Instead, Korean chaebol can invest in any of these corporations to expand businesses in Korea to manufacture air and water-based transportation futures or for other applications. (For instance, Taiwan’s water fuel manufacturers have great water-fuel based home appliances like stoves.) Moreover, Korean fully electric cars should get a boost, instead of the boot, from the Lee administration. China already has fully electric car manufacturing.

Nuclear or oil has no part in a Green New Deal. It is a Gray Old Scam of extortion on the future painted green. Don’t wait until the (nuclear) wind changes, literally, or the next oil slick on the soon canalized Korean rivers. Think about a native technological future within 30 years that is electric, water, and air based without pollution. It’s doable. Does Korea have any positive image of the future, or does it only have a passive drift despite a wealth of options trod underfoot so carelessly?

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_opinion/470616.html

Bioregional Videos: Savouring Europe, Severing the EU

2011-02-14T12:10:00.009+09:00

"With the lemon added to the eggs, and then the cooking water of the [native only] greens, a distinctively Arcadian taste is created--a taste that has survived Italians, Turkish, Germans, and others--though will it hold out against foreign fast food? For the momoment, they seem to believe so...The Lucius Gorge, this easily defended natural bastion, became the center of Greek identity, preserver of its religion, and its dreams of freedom from the occupying Ottoman Turks [or now the European Union's Euro?]. Monasteries cut into rocks high above the valley still cling to the cliff....In the 19th century, these monasteries, in the face of Ottoman oppression illegally schooled young men, who became the founders of the modern Greek state." Now they grow local organic crops. "At this waterwheel, built around 1800, the wives of revolutionaries had their maize and wheat ground into flour."

Below is an interesting set of videos entitled "Savouring Europe" by Journeyman Pictures, produced in 2009. They are on the European movement for localization of commodities, taken against the European Union's ecologically and economically eroding drive for homogenization.

These films state clearly with detailed regional examples how cruelly and ecologically irrational is the current arrangement of the European Union. This was mentioned in a section of the last post on the huge putsch against local democratic voting worldwide, particularly in the European Union and how the megapowerful states like the U.K., the U.S. and the European Union are filled with vote fraud and unsustainable material pressures as a result. It was mentioned here as well, a post about unsustainable monocropping choices of agriculture.

This is the point of the book about the bioregional state--that corruption is environmental degradation. Only solving corruption and elite gatekeeping will get us to a bioregionally sustainable form of government.

Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically "out of sync". He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.

Back to Savouring Europe.

Though there are 13 video segments, only 11 of them seem viewable to me. However, I put all 13 links below if you can see all of them.

In Europe, this localization or 'slow food' movement (a description is tucked into this post) has been coming about for a generation. It is occurring as a transnational, homeless, European technocrat class with loyalties to nothing except themselves--without elections, without referendums, without legality--blithely erode long term durable bioregionalism of humanity in Europe.

This corrupt EU project to destroy bioregionalism against rejected referendums to the contrary is attempting to pressure politically a material homogenization of all the commodity and regional identities of Europeans with their many cultures, foods, and folkways for the interests of only a tiny transnational political economic elite. The European Union is a corrupt aristocratic project instead of a multi-regional, representative, sustainable state.

I predict the EU will fail because it is an unsustainable project in its current version that rejects bioregionalism, the requirements of geographic voting, and ecological checks and balances. However, in the long interim learning process why the EU is bad currently, it will cause much damage to people's health, ecology, and economics before the EU fails.

That is what is so fascinating about these films: it balances well the coverage of the negative damage that the EU is doing to local health, ecology, and economy that is so bleedingly apparent, though the films additionally and beautifully interweave a positive message of how quiet, hungry, healthy, regional resistance is maintaining and even recovering older culinary traditions. This is a lever that can turn the world.

Why is the project of maintaining bioregional foodways important?

Without any particular order, first, it is because biodiversity of the human food varietal heritage of plants and animals fitted to particular regions is in danger, being politically pressured by other more consolidated choices that fit well nowhere and lead to degradation of health, ecology, and economy. Without this global larder of multi-regional knowledge for what fits in certain regions well, institutionally preserved by using and eating it daily, we will (and already are) living much risker lives with more crop failures and animal diseases. See the section "Seven Arguments Against Cloned Animals," here. At least you think, "I'm not eating cloned animals yet." However, if you live in the U.S. you are, or if you globally eat U.S. beef you are. Since 2008. The U.S. chose to hide the fact. Just search for "cloned U.S. beef" on the web:

#
Cloned Beef Has Already Entered U.S. Food Supply, Even Before FDA Nod
29 Jul 2008 ... Cloned Beef Has Already Entered U.S. Food Supply, Even Before FDA Nod The major cattle cloning companies in the United States have admitted ...
www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_13913.cfm - Cached
#
Dead cow carcasses "resurrected" to produce cloned beef
16 Aug 2010 ... (NaturalNews) We already know that cloned beef has entered the food supply both in the United States (http://www.naturalnews.com/023718_f. ...
www.naturalnews.com/029487_cloned_beef_DNA.html - Cached
#
Dead Cows Cloned To Boost US Beef Production
12 Aug 2010 ... Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../dead-cows-cloned-to-boost_n_680448.html - Cached
#
Cloned beef causing uproar in Britain traced to Wisconsin cow ...
14 Aug 2010 ... The world of cloning hasn't exactly been paradise for Wisconsin dairy ... have banned U.S. beef over fears related to growth hormones. ...
www.jsonline.com › News › Wisconsin - Cached
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U.S. beef is now being made from cloned cows? - Pioneer Living ...
16 Aug 2010 ... Pioneer Survivalist Blog has many survivalist topics for today preppers.
www.pioneerliving.net/.../4532522-u-s-beef-is-now-being-made-from-cloned-cows- - Cached
#
BBC News - Cattle 'cloned from dead animals'
12 Aug 2010 ... Beef, pig and dairy farmers are all trying to establish whether cloning is an economic proposition. Two years ago, the US Food and Drug ...
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10951108 - Cached - Add to iGoogle
#
Cloned beef in Britain's food chain spreads alarm - Health ...
4 Aug 2010 ... Meat from the offspring of a cloned cow in the United States entered ... cow disease in the 1990s that saw British beef exports banned for a ...
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38561984/.../health-cloning_and_stem_cells/ - Cached

"Cancerous Clones. It's what's for dinner."TM

Moreover, GMO crops fit nowhere except Monsanto's pocket, and there are well documented health dangers and well documented corruption that has been responsible for GMOs.

Controlling Our Food: The World According to Monsanto
1:48:57 min
2 years ago

"On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years."

The Dangers of Genetically Modified Food - Jeffery Smith Lecture - FULL VERSION
1:00:08 min
3 years ago

"This lecture was created by combining the 6 pieces posted on YouTube by The Kick Them All Out Project. http://www.KickThemAllOut.com This project shows you how we can take back control of Congress from the special interests that control it now and put an end to things like GMO foods. This lecture by Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, summarizes the contents of his book, which explains the health dangers of genetically modified foods, and the industry cover-up."

Second, why is the project of maintaining bioregional foodways important? it is because humans have become bioregional creatures over the recent millenia. We are from somewhere, a specific culinary and climatic somewhere in our genes. We are a bioregional species instead of an abstract human species. Our health is built into such regionalism, and our health in general decays without access to it. There is nothing called an abstract human being.

A book on our innate "bioregional diet" as important to resuscitate for our own health is Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, by Gary Paul Nabhan

From Publishers Weekly
With 21st-century science promising better living through genetic engineering, and myriad diet fads claiming to be the answer to obesity and disease, this exploration of the coevolution of communities and their native foods couldn't be more timely. Ethnobiologist Nabhan (Coming Home to Eat) investigates the intricate web of culture, food and environment to show that even though 99.9% of the genetic makeup of all humans is identical, "each traditional cuisine has evolved to fit the inhabitants of a particular landscape or seascape over the last several millennia." Sardinians are genetically sensitive to fava beans, which can give them anemia but can also protect them from the malaria once epidemic in the region. Navajos are similarly sensitive to sage. [Other cultural regions--of food, genes, and culture over time--thus build animal fats into diets as why people some people are healthy on these diets and others less so.] In both cases, traditional knowledge allows safe interactions with these powerful medicine/poisons through cooking methods or food combinations. Nabhan questions the wisdom of genetic therapy, which "normalizes" the "bad" genes that can cause sickness but also enhance immunity. Most inspiring in this bioethnic detective story are Cretans, maintaining their health for centuries through traditional living, and Native Americans and Hawaiians, whose communities, devastated by diabetes, find an antidote by returning to their traditional foods, customs and agriculture. Mixing hard science with personal anecdotes, Nabhan convincingly argues that health comes from a genetically appropriate diet inextricably entwined with a healthy land and culture.

From Booklist:
Ethnobotanist and nutritional ecologist Nabhan continues the paradigm-altering investigation into the matrix of food, place, ethnicity, and well-being that he's been conducting in such influential books as Coming Home to Eat (2002). A leading voice in the slow-food movement and a thoroughly engaging guide, Nabhan now delineates the evolutionary dimension of newly recognized interactions among cuisine, culture, and genetics that inspired him to modify an old adage: "We are what our [recent regional instead of ancient paleolithic!] ancestors ate and drank." He teases out the evolutionary secrets of chili peppers and explains why some folks like them hot and others can't take the heat. Since it's easiest to see the hidden benefits of ethnic cuisines in isolated island societies, he travels to Sardinia, where, for centuries, fava beans have protected the populace from malaria, and to Hawaii, where natives have discovered that traditional yet neglected taro dishes control diabetes [in their genotypes best]. With millions [really the majority of the world, he writes] of people suffering from little-understood food-related maladies, Nabhan's revelations of the complexities of our [regionally] inherited interactions with food, the true significance of the healthful "synergies" of traditional ethnic cuisines, and the essentiality of both biodiversity and cultural diversity are as critical as they are fascinating.

Therefore, beware the industrial pressures and corrupt states that attempt to demote your 'bioregional diet' of traditional regional foods, many of them (not all!) high in saturated, animal fats for some regions. And beware the people who tell you "animal oils are bad" (depends on your regional genetics! and) because that was a multi-generational industrial agricultural advertising based on fear to sell more of what they could sell more cheaply: what have turned out to be dangerous "unsaturated vegetable oils" instead of healthy after all. Data you say? Ms. Fallon can explain this better: she describes the U.S. as the worst case of a powerfully corrupt industrial destruction of bioregional dietary standards, where diet and scientific knowledge was sculpted or perverted for industrial profit with the introduction of unhealthy versions of mono-cropped vegetable oils, replacing healthier versions of animal and vegetable oils. Keep that general theme of politicized "supply versus demand" in mind, and start Savouring Europe. And start savoring the world's regions everywhere.

Savouring Europe: parts 1 through 13
Journeyman Pictures
http://www.youtube.com/show/savouringeurope

1 Savouring Europe: Dorset - UK
26:16

(Season 1, Episode 1) January-March: Winter is ending, the land comes alive with new season potatoes and is ploughed for early spring crops. The grasslands cycle begins; cheese and beer making and organic farming respond to the weather on the rolling hills which descend to the Atlantic where tiny boats ply for shellfish.

2 Savouring Europe: Lyonnais - France
26:20

(Season 1, Episode 2) In the hot June weather, starred chefs shout orders or create Zen like calm; artisan cheese makers and bakers, farmers and herdsmen supply the city from the surrounding hills. People use the vineyards and surrounding hills to celebrate wedding or just a get together.

3 Savouring Europe: Flanders - Belgium
26:21

(Season 1, Episode 3) Late spring but the Inns still produce stews reminiscent of the delicacy of France and the richness of Germany; their famous handmade chocolates roll off a small production line filled with surprises and stoic fishermen on horseback search the coast for grey shrimp against a backdrop of medieval cities glittering on working canals.

4 Savouring Europe: Dzukijos Forest Region - Lithuania
26:19

(Season 1, Episode 4) A dense forest produces mushroom, herb and fruit treasures; horse drawn ploughs and ancient cranky machines produce freshly milled buckwheat flour and just emerging from the aspic of communism, people celebrate their pagan past in a mid-summer eve filled with song and fire.

5 Savouring Europe: The Eastern Steppes - Hungary
26:16

(Season 1, Episode 5) A huge grazing land alive with wild horses and cattle rounded up by cowboys; trout from the rivers and piles of red and orange paprika fill the kitchens of the inns and steaming goulash and thick sour cream are served in generous heaps.

6 Savouring Europe: Transylvania - Romania
26:17

(Season 1, Episode 6) The Carpathian Mountains, the wildest part of Europe where bears and wolves still roam, where ancient machines still plough the land and a local fruit brandy is toasted at the ritual pig killing. In a Counts kitchen woman create pastry and bread in surprising ways.

7 Savouring Europe: Savouring Europe: Arkadia In The Peloponnesus - Greece
26:16

(Season 1, Episode 7) May and the early sun tickles the land. Donkey graze beneath an ancient monastery clinging to the cliffs above. In hill towns, cooking continues as it did in the 18th century -steaming lamb dishes informed by Ottoman and Venetian cuisines.

8 Savouring Europe: County Mayos Atlantic Coast - Ireland
26:18

(Season 1, Episode 8) Autumn on the coast as the sea rises, oysters and salmon pulled fresh from Clew bay are cooked. Cool green landscape with stretches of potato farms and russet moors with their sheep herders roving the commons blend beyond the song and stout filled pubs.

9 Savouring Europe: Sodermansland - Sweden
26:52

(Season 1, Episode 9) Summer and boar and deer are provided to be smoked and cooked as treats; lake fish and eels are provided for the new Swedish chefs to demonstrate their take on traditions and people speak of their passing culture in the reflection of deep blue lakes.

10 Savouring Europe: Franken in Bavaria - Germany
26:15

(Season 1, Episode 10) Very early spring on this river run flat plane dotted with medieval villages and towns where craftsmen and women hold onto memories of rich pork dishes,moist dark breads and smoky beer and where an ancient miller still operates his wooden and iron machines.

11 Savouring Europe: Rioja - Spain
26:18

(Season 1, Episode 11) Early autumn in the folds of a river valley where the grape vines are harvested and celebrated with food and dance in the villages; suckling lamb is baked in a wood oven and in the early morning the whole town turns out to witness the bulls which are challenged by the young bravos.

12 Savouring Europe: Puglia - Italy
26:18

(Season 1, Episode 12) Spring, now well set in the Mediterranean as herbs and early vegetables unwrap themselves. Here are the best dried pasta makers in Italy. In the white towns and on the Gargano Peninsula, Easter is celebrated with a night illuminated by burning wooden cones.

13 Savouring Europe - The Atlantic Coast Near Averio - Portugal
27:50

(Season 1, Episode 13) Its almost Christmas so the olives are harvested and celebrated; monks make a rare sweet liquor; an extraordinary pastry is stretched to the size of a room; the vines are cared for and fishermen pull eels from the Atlantic to be made into a Christmas stew.

BioregionalStateTV: "The Sustainability Channel"

For more videos, see my assembled BioregionalStateTV. BioregionalStateTV has expanding links demonstrating very inspiring ideas that are already working against monocultures to institutionalize bioregionalism, varietal food durability, independence, and profit. BioregionalStateTV will have well-produced videos that detail how to move biophysically toward more "watershed-centric" arrangements of material sustainability.

On Trends and Questions of Individually "Voting From Abroad:" Instead Vote Watershed Abroad, Worldwide

2011-02-08T18:55:00.015+09:00

("Yes, your vote is securely in our hands. Go ahead, you want to support this corrupt system, right?" A case of vote fraud by these men in white hats that had huge effects on U.S. history: the stolen election in Precinct 13 in 1948 in a small Texas town led to Senator, Vice President, and then President Johnson.)

What does the bioregional state think of individually "voting from abroad?" Vote Watershed Abroad. Individually voting from abroad is disastrous for representation and sustainability because of the degradative system that it supports and in how it erodes locality, and because of the insecurity of the vote in the hands of incumbents that gain by the process even though increasingly they find difficulty in getting together any support in their own country. If given the option of voting abroad, as an individual, it should be left unused, in abeyance, for the following rationales.

The Importance of the Geographic Quality of the Vote and Citizenship, Domestically or Abroad

To elaborate, what does the bioregional state think of "voting from abroad"? "Vote Watershed Abroad" in the bioregional state--home or abroad--because the watershed has a common representative, democratic basis of check and balance on the degradation of unrepresentative state elites abroad. Simply voting from abroad as an individual (instead of as a watershed bloc) into black boxes of increasing vote fraud and e-vote fraud in nationalist states is hardly an intelligent recipe for expanding representation or sustainability. Voting from abroad as an individual seems inspired intentionally to demote the unruly geographic vote feedback of its own state citizens who dislike the direction that many states worldwide are going: to make themselves less locally representative and far more civilly repressive. So voting abroad as an individual is a form of encouragement of this repressive policy at home, by demoting the proportional value of local regional politics and by how those states typically reject allowing you to vote in your local elections at home. Much (hardly all, data below) voting abroad 'squeezes' your abroad vote into only the very national politicians who have a hard time getting anyone to support them as they refuse to change their policies toward sustainability.

Instead 'vote watershed from abroad,' into other local watersheds at home. Enhance the value of the locality of your votes whether home or abroad, instead of merely voting as an individual into a fraudulent nationalist whirlpool of an abstract nationalist state. Simply doing the latter may make everything worse, civilly and environmentally.

And if you are without the political rights to do so, build them. Furthermore, utilize your vote in other ways-- economically, educationally, or financially--by what you support locally in where you are.

Voting Abroad Critically Analyzed

A majority of the world’s unsustainable state elites are keen to expand, so their citizens are told, their so-called democratic legitimacy by expanding voting privileges to those living outside the geographic jurisdiction of a home territorial state. Even Botswana is getting into the act.

This is hardly a small issue. What are the world statistics?

"Mr. Theophilus Dowetin, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an inter-governmental organization which supports sustainable democracy worldwide, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that 114 states and territories (as of March 2007, 115 as of 2010) [out of 203 states that means 56% of all states worldwide] had legal provisions which allowed their electors to vote from abroad. This figure includes five, which have legal provisions in place to allow external voting but, for different reasons, is yet to be implemented. These include well-established democracies along with the emerging or restored ones. He explained that 44 out of the 114 countries and territories with provisions for external voting applied it to only one type of election [limiting these voting rights of its citizens--typically for opposing local election participation, like the United Kingdom], but a number allow external voting for two or more types of election. In Africa, 28 countries have provisions for external vote. The Americas have 15, Asia 20, Europe 41 and Pacific 10. Mr Dowetin said the most common practice was to allow for two types of [nationally abstract] election [while rejecting local election participation]- most frequently presidential and parliamentary elections - which is practised in 22 countries. He explained that a little over 20 countries and territories used a combination of three types of elections or more."

There are at least three versions of this abroad voting that I see as trends: typically these added privileges are based on attempting to capture a large nationalist diaspora to shore up an unrepresentative politics at home. This shoring up of a degradative politics that is increasingly opposed at home is done by canny elites so they can continue their unrepresentative policies against local nationalist opposition. It can be done by three appeals: appealing to citizens at large, appeals only to state bureaucrats being given this right to vote (instead of its citizens, in the case of India currently!), appeals to military voting in the case of the (late great) United States as it expands unchecked e-vote fraud to throw elections to its unrepresentative Democratic or Republican incumbents as the local population increasingly rejects these parties. The Machiavellian United States particularly is keen in letting its massive ‘baseworld’ vote, ironically, while occupying other land’s illegally while they are unable to vote on the issue.

However, expand this principle. What IF the regular local people--the people beyond the military bases or beyond the transnational corporation’s compounds, had the rights to vote in the occupier’s country to provide feedback against unrepresentative decisions taken by that other country in THEIR land? This would go for unrepresentative development as well as military occupation.

So expand this principle. If you want to vote abroad, let everyone do it. Let all the people, all around the world's watersheds, vote in the 'home' state that influences their local watershed from abroad. Mentioned in the book, stop "extraction without representation."

Since only a handful of countries that have had external voting have rejected it after starting it, and since when they do apply it is typically to remove local participation in the process, it seems a global trend worth discussing for its bad implications in this lack of local representation that is enhanced with international voting.

Left undiscussed here, another trend that marginalizes the geographic quality of the vote is the large extent of work visas designed to grant only a form of indentured servitude without political rights or even economic rights to change jobs, demoting citizenship and common labor capacities to organize in a common geographic area. It is a work visa as 'feudalism,' similar to the abroad vote that in many cases only allows you to vote 'feudalistically' on unsecured nationalist levels under threat of vote fraud. Further 'feudal' about it is the fact that this 'squeeze' of additional votes from abroad is in common to only let bureaucrats vote, while denying it to everyone else: "Restricting external voting to diplomatic staff or to those employed by the government is a fairly common type of activity-related restriction: it is found, for example, in Bangladesh, Ireland, Israel, Laos, [India,] and Zimbabwe." So are they actually interested in "expanding the vote abroad" or only interested in expanding their incumbency while people reject their policies at home? I say the latter.

Obviously, the bioregional state book mentions how we can employ the idea of voting from abroad for its potential good implications as a form of unsustainability feeback by integrating those who experience the majority of externalities caused by another state though it's in their own country. Surely their feedback politics should be integrated in some manner this way. Since most pollution (hardly all), is waterborne, this feedback can be based on global watersheds throughout (across borders sometimes) all nationalist states of the world.

Though why do this? What kind of principles would be legitimate in this way? First, let's get a picture of the political world we are talking about. It is a more geographically real and stable world of politics than the artificial networks of voting rights being extended around the world.

This is a map of global watersheds, imaged as global ecoregions.

Greater Ecoregions and Lesser States

(larger, click here; from National Geographic Society with World Wildlife Fund)

First, voting from these areas is the basis of political feedback against unsustainability. It is a "natural" ecological check and balance of people's ecological self-interest against delocalized elites that, when left unchecked, work for their own private interests of consumptive consolidation and expansion of externalities into the economy, the ecology, and your health.

Anything that erodes these ecoregions--and the political rights of people who live within them and represent them--is unsustainable. The main point of the bioregional state is to stop the erosion of locality politically and environmentally while organizing a larger representative and sustainable series of Ecological Reformation institutions as interlocking additions to state, educational, financial, and consumptive choices durable for the many different regional priorities of interactive requirements of sustainability worldwide. This is the bioregional state, part of the larger Ecological Reformation of institutions worldwide that is required for sustainability.

New Zealand has a nice arrangement that does preserve the geographic qualities of the vote by allowing all people in New Zealand (whether foreign citizens there tempoarily on work, or its own nationals abroad for temporary or long term stay) to vote:

"When there is no special or additional requirement linked to the circumstances or personal situation of the potential voter abroad, a guarantee of universal access can be assumed in the sense that external voting is accessible to all citizens whether, for example permanently or temporarily abroad. The most common and widespread requirement, although not the only one, is that of citizenship, although there are exceptions. New Zealand, for example, recognizes citizens of other countries as external electors if they are permanently resident in New Zealand: they do not need to be New Zealand citizens in order to qualify as external electors. From this perspective New Zealand would be considered the most inclusive [geographic, and sustainable voting] case."

However, voting from abroad for most countries means a very limited type of voting that has demoted the geographic quality of the vote: typically only to support nationalist elites with reduction of allowances for local voting. As more understand that nationalist elites, left or right, have entirely abandoned their nationalist peoples and are selling off their democratic or somewhat vaguely representative jurisdictions to corrupt international corporate elites or transnational military elites without clear national loyalties, without clear checks and balances against them, though with clear criminal intent (like NATO for instance), such transnational gatekeeping national elites are being challenged. They are being challenged increasingly on this developmental paradigm they subsidize despite it being environmentally degradative, economically self-destructive, health eroding, and biodiversity destroying in their states.

As challenges to this lack of representation, they feel painfully the lack of legitimacy as the dupes wise up. This lack of easy dupes to support either a corrupt left or corrupt right party elite framework makes it difficult to continue with a state developmentalism that serves only a tiny state-subsidized transnational elite.

So as elites get more unrepresentative in their national policy actions, they do something that seems strange. First, they refuse to change their policies to win elections, and second, they instead attempt to appeal to other people who are missing or ambivalent about political representation to shore up their corruption and degradation in practice. (This is historically how the vote rights were extended to bring in more of the ambivalent in British history in the 1800s. The people complaining were attempted to be masked out instead of listened to, in an attempt to demote or to diffuse the political power of those complaining. The British rigged the geographic quality of the vote as well, by refusing to let Labor and Tories vote for a common candidate from a particular region, so they drew districts to isolate them from each other. The British state divided its communities and its population, demoting the bio-geographic quality of the vote.)

Returning to the present attempt to mask the geographic qualities of the vote and the ecological self-interest of areas, the intentionally limited and poor organization of the abroad vote can only encourage ongoing unsustainability, as in its most common form aims intentionally to intentionally remove local election participation for abroad citizens. (The link is one example. I love how this is a case of curtailing of rights in the midst of claiming to extend them. That part is left unexplained, at that British Government website.)

However, voting from abroad can enhance nationalist local voting as a natural ecological check and balance against unrepresentative national elite groups when the local vote is preserved for abroad citizens. This seems rarely done.

For three bad examples of how abroad voting is really curtailing people's geographic rights in their own home countries, we look at Britain, the United States, and the strange bureaucracy called the European Union which (to update Voltaire's statement on the Holy Roman Empire) "is not European, not a Union, and not a state." It's just a currency and trade arrangement taking increasingly illegal moves by its transnational ruling class to expand its money power to destroy European vestigial democracy.

'Who the Hell You Think You Are?' Nigel Farage throws egg in Eurocrat faces
November 2010
3:11

British politician and the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage has slammed EU bosses over European crisis. "It's even more serious than economics because if you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that" - Farage said at the end of his speech.

In the United Kingdom, the Crown extends voting for those abroad who are citizens though with the undemocratic aim of constricting their rights by banning them from participating in local elections in the U.K. The "European Union" does the same, by encouraging Europeans living abroad to vote for its unrepresentative centralized framework alone, while it has historically done everything possible to deny Europeans the right to vote in local arrangements--which have rejected the European Union in many cases, and over many times. The U.S. will be discussed below.

In summary of the elite unrepresentative strategy principle (or lack of) in many current attempts at external voting from abroad, it is attempted to be legitimated as giving (a boost to) low legitimacy institutions like the United Kingdom (about 50% of the population hates its government and wants to immigrate) or the European Union. Therefore the United Kingdom’s main parties or the unrepresentative European Union are both desperate for some sucker’s support even as they snidely demote British and European rights to vote in local elections, from abroad.

Frankly, everyone seems 'abroad' in the EU as that entity is desperate for people to suspend disbelief that it really is some kind of real state instead of a monetary and policy dictatorship without democratic checks and balances inside it.

From 2005, the United States openly is attempting to create a common 'security perimeter' and shared military (or is that just shared militarism?), shared economics (or is that just a shared managerial monopoly economic and political class?), and a shared currency called the Amero, with Canada and Mexico.

With the main policies entirely continued in Obama, in the first five years of Bush's 'rule,' or misrule the destruction of geographic contiguity was high on his list. He dismantled the national economy intentionally (money for the Labor Department actually went to hosting conferences on how to ship jobs overseas), along with demoting the civil rights of the Constitution, eroding job security, (the attempt to) sell off big ports, consolidate a transnational media, create porous and unguarded borders, and perhaps attempted to crash the U.S. dollar (through revoking taxes, spending trillions on wars, and printing money to destroy the national economy intentionally), privatize the military to transnational entities like Halliburton and other transnational mercenaries with no competition contracts (with 50% of these in Iraq going to one company, Halliburton, now headquartered in Abu Dhabi).

A QUARTER TRILLION DOLLARS was wasted in Iraq in the first three years. $250,000,000,000 dollars. And in five years, as Bush and his minions steered his country intentionally onto the rocks, from 2001-2006 in the USA, "the declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war...

Communications equipment lost 43% workforce.
Semiconductors/electronic components lost 37% workforce.
Computers and electronic products lost 30% workforce.
Electrical/appliances lost 25% workforce.
Motor vehicles/parts lost 12% workforce.
Furniture/products lost 17% of workforce.
Apparel manufacturers lost almost 50% workforce.
Employment in textile mills declined 43%
Information sector lost 17% of its jobs
Telecommunications lost 25% of its workforce.
Wholesale and retail trade lost jobs.
Bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%.
Computer systems design lost 9% of its jobs.

During this five year period under Bush's policies (long before the global financial crash due to his design of unregulated crony banks), the US economy experienced a net job positions loss in goods producing activities--while (hello?) importing about 8 more people."

For those who want to step behind the U.S. media's own Iron Curtain, these seven links are for you. Otherwise, skip them and continue below.

[1] newswire article reporting global 20.May.2006 19:33
Bush's Real Goal - Dissolve America Into NAU, the (Nazi) North American Union Fourth Reich
author: recap
What they are using in North America regarding fake 9-11 "justifications": "President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration's true open borders policy....North American Union plan, which Vincente Fox has every reason to presume President Bush is still following [since Bush and Fox decided upon it together, in person, in 2005], calls for...only border...around the North American Union -- not between any...countries....Discovering connections like this between the CFR recommendations and Bush administration policy gives credence to the argument that President Bush favors amnesty and open borders, as he originally said. Moreover, President Bush most likely continues to consider groups such as the Minuteman Project to be "vigilantes,"....Why doesn't President Bush just tell the truth? His secret agenda is to dissolve the United States of America into the North American Union. The administration has no intent to secure the border, or to enforce rigorously existing immigration laws....The perspective of the CFR report allows us to see President Bush's speech to the nation as nothing more than public relations posturing and window dressing. No wonder President Vincente Fox called President Bush in a panic after the speech. How could the President go back on his word to Mexico by actually securing our border? Not to worry, President Bush reassured President Fox. The National Guard on the border were only temporary, meant to last only as long until the public forgets about the issue,....[and a continental NATO military is occupying the whole North American continent with the next state terror strike they orchestrate and allow to happen?]
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/339726.shtml

[2] Title: CFR Plan to Eliminate US-Mex.-Canada Borders, to sync w/post 9-11 NORTHCOM/NATO occupation
Author: repost
Date: 2004.11.17 09:48
Description: There has been a great deal of very aristocratic, corporate, and military integrating going on internationally post 9-11 to destroy all democratic feedback against their transnational corporate regime in three major states of North America: US, Canada, and Mexico. See all three links for the continuities. I would have chosen this to go under "forest defense" and "energy & nuclear" categories as well, so read for that. COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: "A tri-national task force, chaired by former [Canadian] Liberal Party deputy prime minister John Manley, with the full backing of all three [unrepresentative state corporatist] governments, is plotting the roadmap for this new, bolder alliance meant to compete with the European Union. [so they say...there is always someone else to blame for their desire to removing any local democratic feedback to the corporate elites...] William Weld [from a deep political Bonesmen family], former governor of Massachusetts and Pedro Aspe, former Mexican finance minister, join Manley on the panel that reports directly to the Council on Foreign Relations." "The "NAFTA-plus" plan has also been referred to as "deep integration." Skeptics see it as a plan to eliminate national sovereignty and erode the American concept of representative government accountable to the people under the framework of the Constitution. Discussions so far indicate that Canada, under the new agreement, would immediately drop its own national defense and sign on to dependence of the U.S. strategic missile defense initiative. Canada would also make its vast lumber resources available to the U.S. degradative corporations, and Mexican markets and provide more open access and destruction of environmental laws with regard to these northern neighbors' oil, natural gas and hydro-electric power resources, further impoverishing Mexico. KISSINGER APPEARS HERE: "Other members of the task force include: Canadian Finance Minister Michael Wilson and Nelson Cunningham of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger McLarty Associates."
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/303653.shtml

[3] Title: U.S. invaded by Mex.,Canada, Dutch, German, Russian: Bush using sponsored foreign invasion of the U.S. as a "legal exception" to Posse Commutatus Act...
Author: northcom quoter
Date: 2005.09.18 06:35
Description: "Hey, no one told us international NATO military guys at Northcom we can't use foreign troops to invade--to get around the American Posse Commutatus ban against domestic troops...." Actually, Northcom has a well placed list of exceptions on the Northcom.mil website, already planned out: here's a list of already set up "exceptions" they mention to the Posse Commutatus Act. Expect these "exceptions" to be utilized by Northcom--or invented--as a context for further internationalized martial law in the U.S.A. "as the HAARP turns." However, Americans are well within their rights to conduct immediate citizens arrests of major Northcom figures, and these military figures get two years jail automatically: Section 1385 of Title 18, United States Code (USC), states: "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Since Congress DID NOT authorize this action--the only way it could fathomably occur--and it doesn't fit in their legal exceptions mentioned below we are to conclude fairly that Northcom's actions after Hurricane Katrina are a breach of the Posse Commutatus Act as well as a treasonous act combined, and we may conduct citizens arrest of major Northcom figures RIGHT NOW. Who wants to organize the PR for that?
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/325083.shtml

[4] Russian KGB Chieftain Finds Home at U.S. Homeland Security, Hired by Bush
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/318854.shtml

[5] Katrina Aftermath - Armed Mexican Troops Invade US
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/324441.shtml

[6] [After U.S. stood down in organizing against Hurricane Katrina,] U.S. invaded by Mexican, Canadian, Dutch, German, Russian troops--by invitation: exceptions to Posse Commutatus Act...
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/325083.shtml

[7] Rigged USA Elections Exposed
(Recorded at Ohio Legislative Session on Vote Fraud in 2006 I believe)
11:58

Computer Programmer Clint Curtis testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the House of Florida at the time [and close Bush family friend], currently US Representative...) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts [in Florida]. Curtis mentions on oath that he wrote "a prototype" program to rig the vote in 2000.

So, you want to encourage this country's unrepresentative elites?

What many of these United States examples have in common is an institutional strategy to demote the geographic worth of the vote, the economy, and the military as a representative institution in some ways--and that geographic removal of oversight is unsustainable.

Thus, only ‘voting locally from abroad’ is the way to enhance a check and balance on unrepresentative national elites.

What Else To Do?

[1] I would recommend allowing participation in localelections from abroad as well

[2] allowing all foreign nationalists who are permanent residents (whether they are home or abroad) to vote

[3] or allowing those with work visas in a foreign country to have election rights in that country or when they are out of the country as well (similar to New Zealand).

[4] I would voluntarily reject voting in national elections from abroad on principle currently unless those national elections come from specific geographic bailiwicks like Representatives or Senators,

[5] as well as encouraging the growing of whole watershed voting frameworks from abroad via institutions such as these.

Vote Fraud and Individual Votes From Abroad: Parallel Degradative Forces

However, our second main theme is unverified voting particularly e-voting is another bad context in league with this elite pressure for abstract individualized conceptions of citizenship attempting to mask the required geographic qualities of the vote and its real world, lived feedback.

Worldwide, a criminal mafia of e-voting companies is in league with various corrupt national state elites, across many nationalist states.

This is perhaps because many nationalist elites nowadays prefer to rig their elections when their policies are rejected instead of actually trying to win an election by being representative and sustainable in their geographies--despite how easy it would be to win such an election on such a platform since the majority worldwide wants to vote green.

Since many countries are promoting e-voting in the same moment as demoting geographic voting and promoting placeless international voting, there are two bad levels (placelessness and fraud, intertwined) being introduced into world voting now.

It's as if criminal U.S. President Johnson is hovering over us all now worldwide.

Quoting from Toward a Bioregional State:

"Convicted Felons, ‘Shadowy Financiers’ Own Companies Counting Votes," Mad Cow Morning News (November 15 2004): "An investigation into the surprisingly sordid history of America’s election services industry has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, ES&S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states....Investigating the ownership of the two companies that together dominate the American elections industry reveals evidence of routine and systemic bribery of public officials, not just here but overseas (the recent Prime Minister of Ireland, to give just one example.)"

I talk about this increasingly transnational, de-territorialized, unrepresentative elite-run state based on vote fraud for its developmental implications toward further environmental degradation against local representative checks and balances. and how to get around it, at length here.

For another specific example in France, as Wayne Madsen wrote, the runoff demographics weren't there for Sarkozy's win as President of France in 2007. Only Sarkozy supported unverifiable e-vote machines for France which were widely utilized and it was this government that is introducing abstract individualized voting from abroad as well--though these very same fraud creating vote machines:

"ES&S's I-Votronic machines were used in both elections across France. Only Sarkozy's party was supportive of the machines, with all the other political parties calling for a moratorium on their use. Turnout in the French election was 85 percent. [This government is now attempting to expand e-vote internationally, which seems to prove the point above.] With large turnouts historically favoring the left in France, the exit polling and actual polling were at odds with the turnout -- an indication of massive election fraud....As with the U.S. and Mexican presidential elections, the polls are being artificially fixed to reflect the upcoming skewed exit polls, a major component of the neo-cons' main contrivance to maintain political control -- 'election engineering.'"

That was France in 2007. Germany, with a strong (though fading) Green Party presence and multiple party, localized, democracy in general, in 2009 removed all its electronic vote machines because they were [and remain] a formal invitation to fraud. They were a fraudulent way that the whole 2007 Mexican election was rigged against pro-localist candidate Obrador in the last Mexican Presidential election as well (more).

As Madsen continues, he talks about this global vote fraud against organized localism:

"Similar polling irregularities were experienced in recent elections in Scotland, Wales, and England [in 2007]. In Scotland, 100,000 ballots, thought to mostly be cast for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, were declared "spoiled" in Scotland's election. [And the increasingly fraudulent U.K. government in this way loves the international ‘vote from abroad’ as well as expectedly has removed the right of the abroad British citizen to vote in local elections: they are only allowed to vote for the one’s removing their local representation!] That "glitch" cost the Scottish Nationalists a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament. Irregularities in Wales and England similarly affected larger margins for Welsh and Cornish nationalists. As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, regional nationalism [or participative bioregional localism in a larger framework] is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments. The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people...seize control...of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."

I suggest elsewhere they create two autonomous local institutions worldwide--a civic democratic institution and a commodity ecology (one for cultural representation of locality and one for material representation of locality)--and then work to reorganize their state's district drawing for elections, basing them on watersheds.

Watersheds are a metric for preserving the geographic quality of the vote and for competitive elections. As I wrote elsewhere:

"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."

Therefore, a watershed based voting from anywhere, abroad or domestically, seems a sounder manner of voting than simply extending it to a small elite minority diaspora of preferential voters in another country. Let whole watersheds in other countries vote in another country, based on the principle that if the manipulation of their political economies come from elsewhere, the whole area can get organized and deserves to provide the political feedback to the source of the degradation in the other state, by the people in the local area (abroad) who experience it as caused by another state’s politics.

Instead, in the bioregional state, it is the local elections that should be enhanced in their ecological checks and balances because only this ecological self-interest is against such crony elite degradative uses of national states.

Stop supporting the gatekeeping of unrepresentative nationalist elites leading us globally toward environmental degradation.

Voting for their ongoing degradative policies, from abroad no less, is hardly a solution. Voting locally against them as a bloc from abroad is a solution.

So how can this be organized? In many ways such as this through the Commodity Ecology and the Civic Democratic Institution, worldwide.

Where We Have Been So Far

In summary, currently, there are two poor assumptions concerning voting from abroad: there is the danger that it remains only an individualist conception of citizenship rights instead of geographic representation as being maintained as predominant. Geographic aspects of voting are important to maintain:

"...[A] people's self-interest is geographically specific and protective of a particular geography, as mentioned above. Citizen feedback is always in and from particular geographic spaces and human-environmental contexts. To create the additional checks and balances for an ecologically sound developmentalism is merely to latch onto and facilitate an already-existing affirmative feedback from watersheds/bioregions that is ignored though waiting to be formally organized. This is done by aligning political feedback as closely as possible to a direct feedback from particular geographically specific areas into the state. My first suggestion is through watershed based vote districting." [p. xix, Toward a Bioregional State]

This first danger of this voting from abroad is connected to the second, that merely expanding voting from abroad as a form of abstract individual privilege outside a territorial state encourages even greater corruption of the vote in the transfer of the totals than there is presently. Instead the multiple geographic qualities of the vote are required even more as a check and balance feedback against this unsustainability developmental policy of unrepresentative elites.

Thus, individualized voting from abroad only for a nationalist election contributes only toward unrepresentative development within the state itself instead of alleviating it.

Voting For Sustainable Development by Integrating the Externalized in the Current Economic Arrangement to Moderate It

Next, what principle justify such watershed based extensions, extensions of the vote to a whole geographic area, in an abroad vote? The main rationale is an equal geographic political feedback against unrepresentative trade policies that destroy the areas in other states and their peoples while those people's have little say in the matter directly as externalies mount in their health, the destruction of their ecology and the demotion of their local economy that is all interrelated.

Trade feedback externalities are part of politics, regardless of what state they are in (or outside of) in practice. Therefore, voting from abroad as a watershed group is required to maintain the geographic representation of different watersheds based on trade networks and global externalities created by them, whether inside or outside a country.

It's the only feedback possible to allow watersheds to vote in other nation's elections, since those 'foreign peoples' (so called) are intimately connected to another state's political economy in very perverse ways. Certainly, it would help to solve "The Perkins Dilemma" below:

Economic Hitmen
2:08

An animated interview of John Perkins, author of 'HoodWinked' and 'Confessions Of An Economic Hitman', copyright of the audio belongs to John Perkins.

Thus, so far 'voting from abroad' for the same consolidated politicians that are unrepresentative seems more like an attempt to make elections less representative and more gatekept and clientelistic against the required geographic feedback of the vote, making politics more corrupt and degradative.

On the contrary, voting from abroad in the bioregional state would have a geographic aspect instead of only an individual aspect because externalities are experienced as a form of politics anywhere and deserve to be directed toward the source of the damage: the other state.

For instance, since much of Africa is trade externalized and experiences externalities from other groups destroying its landscape, materials, and agriculture in a form of development that is regressive, then many Africans in watersheds destroyed deserve to vote (from abroad) in European countries, in the United States, and increasingly in South Korea, and Japan. Why? Well these are the countries that are buying up Africa and befouling it (with their own corrupt native elite supporting it), so Africans deserve to vote in the countries that are shaping their destiny from abroad.

Map of World Land Grab in 2000-2007

(Click for larger version)

This is only land ownership by foreigners in the country. If the deal in Madagascar does go through finally, then the people in many of Madagascar's watersheds deserve to be politically represented in South Korea via watershed inclusions based on how dominant the trade, extraction, or externalities are in certain regional areas.

Furthermore, below, these are the things Africans ship to other areas of the world. It shows how dominated many of 'their' African countries are by other political economies. Surely, some type of representation of Africans in Europe, the United States, and some countries of Asia is merely fair--and incredibly just--as far as human feedback goes, which will be sustainable feedback as well.

World Bank Data on African Trade

Political interest is innately an ecological self-interest, and can be integrated into voting from abroad into other local areas themselves. It is mostly the delocalized elites that are alienated from this ecological self-interest instead of workers, peasants and others, and their unrepresentative, unecological hegemony on policy leads to their ongoing destruction, taking the legitimacy of the whole framework with them instead of strengthening their hegemony. That is why most of the already illegitimate national elites are moving toward open militarized forms of rule and simply ruling people with terror instead of with legitimacy.

In the book, I offer a more durable framework. As I said, "I offer how unsustainable states can be made over piece by piece into sustainable states that support durable localized consumption and fair trade, now." (p. xii)

For other quotes from the book on these themes:

"Within the Constitution of Sustainability [Chapter 20 in Toward a Bioregional State] is a process of how existing unsustainable formal frameworks can be adapted to sustainability, for unsustainable States around the world. These sections describe how entry in the Constitution of Sustainability is possible for such States wishing to join the Union or claim their rights under the Union as politically and consumptively externalized trade colonies. These trade colonies experience “extraction without representation.” At present, they are socio-financially manipulated from afar by other States, and denied political feedback into these unsustainable relationships. It is demoting that difference, a difference that facilitates the unsustainability of trade relationships, that this addresses." (p. 223)

Additionally, for locality representation, another version of international voting is obviously secession. Even though I consider succession as an unoptimal outcome for all involved, it is still best to have a clear, formal principle of succession as the end result of a right of geographic voting, the most extreme geographic voting, instead of letting the externalities context be manipulated by both sides that leads to war which tends to leave the local area bereft of even what little they had and were complaining about in the first place, instead of war or autonomy improving their situation. Sometimes when autonomy is achieved, the economic situation can be worse instead of better as well.

So the principle of external, geographic bases of voting means feedback through adherence and/or escape--the latter a pragmatically required trump card for jurisdictional vetoes from localities to really mean something if they can trump the larger potentially degradative state by exit rights. Thus there is a justice argument in secession for environmental, economic, and health rationales--though there are better rationales to stay and make the relationship better.

On the Question of Secession as a Geographic Right--though as Part of a Larger Feedback System as More Geographically Optimal

Either way, only carrying this to the limit, in rights of secession, gives local regions equal power in jurisdictional deals with the larger delocalized state elite groups attempting to clientelize them from afar. An equal local jurisdictional power to the nationalist state is a check and balance on elite degradative misuse of power: it can encourage those external delocalized elite groups to moderate their bad developmental decisions in such local areas to keep the trade regular and sustainable in all senses of the world, humanly and environmentally. As said in the book,

"Section 8.
Existing States may secede, by following a Constitutionally mandated procedure. Secession is voted on by the Congress and by all bordering States’ legislatures.
These votes of the Congress of the bordering States are to occur within a year of each other, or the procedure of succession lapses. [If other states refuse a vote, this is unable to stop the issue by procedural default. Instead, it occurs automatically. Thus the voting requirements of all involve aim to create a context to craft a potentially workable situation whether it is real secession or integration under novel political terms. Either way, a more regularized arrangement is created--which keeps delocalized elites (historically like the Machiavellian 'Real Abraham Lincoln') from attempting to force war upon others to get his way.] Criteria for succession are based on degree of consanguinity in trade relationships of the State [or external non-contiguous watershed] with the rest of the [contiguous watershed based] Union. Succession when such trade relationships are very thin or only one-sided are grounds for legal separation. However, one sided trade relationships are grounds for admission as well, particularly if the Union of Sustainable States, through competitive disadvantage, is a trade partner of an external State that it places in an inferior position by trading with its competitors of a certain item elsewhere. The design of putting consumptive competitors in the same framework of Union is to provide feedback against the playing of one State group against another by the politics of one State, without those States in question having a political voice as a group, or set, within the Union in question. The consumptive infrastructure is the basis for political inclusions, just as it is the basis for political exclusions when it is absent." (p. 255)

A nested bioregional jurisdiction of different levels of jurisdictional vetoes is based on noting that people have natural rights to oppose pollution or regressive developmentalism politically ‘in’ their own jurisdictions even though comes from other places where they are denied voice.

In the bioregional state, this geographic principle of politics as environmentally virtuous feedback is applied to juridical frameworks as well:

"[A]ll courts shall be in a geographic hierarchy where the higher courts are in the downstream areas, thus giving them higher appellate context that can represent cases that effect the full brunt of any human health, ecological, or economic externalities—that a more geographically biased upstream located court may be ignoring. Only through appreciating that there is a geography, a geographic flow, and a geographic bioaccumulation to pollution--involved in how geographies procedurally bring court cases shows that since pollution goes downstream typically--court frameworks of hierarchy of jurisdiction shall be arranged accordingly to put the power of the courts in the appropriate downstream locations with downstream jurisdiction on their upstream watersheds instead of being absconded and isolated upstream while making judgments about inflicting pollution on other areas downstream. This is why higher courts shall be a downstream jurisdiction, and follow the issue of watershed jurisdictions similar to the voting district frameworks discussed elsewhere, though in a bioaccumulative sense of jurisdiction. The same shall apply within particular states as for federal frameworks. It seems to me there should be at least 22 (including Hawai’i) separate Federal Court jurisdictions arranged in this manner [given the 22 major watershed divisions across the United States..."

See a recent example of how to keep criminals from rigging the courts in this way: related to BP wanting to rig court case jurisdiction in its oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Picture this...Virtue Versus Virtual

Picture the world’s hydrology as the world's natural, virtuous, political jurisdictions. The flows of water innately are the flows of virtue, votes, and juridical decisions. This removes pollution biophysically (and removes corruption, politically)--though only this will occur with the institutional changes of the bioregional state that make localities' jurisdictions built from real biophysical boundaries (instead of corrupt, abstract, meaningless line drawings to protect incumbents instead of to protect the public). The bioregional state maintains geographic qualities: of voting, of judicial decisions, and of other politics, virtue, and knowledge instead of demoting them.

There can be virtuous delocalized elites, they just have to be representative of multiple ecological self-interests. Moreover, local groups can be unvirtuous as well if they destroy their own self-interest this way as well, so a larger recourse of ecological check and balance is in in the interest of the local watershed as well. In power and clientelism, there is nothing innately bad about them in principle, only when they are unrepresentative, gatekeeping, extortive, or manipulative when they are bad and unsustainable.

Both levels of checks and balance are required for sustainability to check against an extreme reliance on watersheds or nationalist states. They are checks and balances on each other, developmentally.

"How does this deal with bioregionalism? Presently, nothing is further from bioregionalism than [the attempt to remove the geographic qualities of the state, whether] these ungeographic gerrymandered districts [electoral or judicial], because they set up a situation where virtuous environmental issues--that are geographic--are unable to politically be transferred to the state because they are split across a political process that is monopolized by collusive gerrymandering of majoritarian parties, each interested in only their own districting versions of a one party state, an identical strategy regardless of whether it is a Democratic or Republican one party state district.

"Republicans who are concerned for their health or the health of their children, who ask why there is so much sickness, so much childhood cancer--are spurned in these districts.

"Democrats who are concerned about their children as well, thinking the Democrats are more ‘of the people’ are spurned as well. [Obama is just the "Black Bush."]

"As long as the bailiwicks are set up to be mutually uncompetitive monopolies for interests of these two parties, instead of bailiwicks organized to make geographically competitive elections for voters and organized to reflect the geography of pollution and social risk, environmental degradation and human health degradation will expand.

"Environmental politics [requires] a state feedback that is ecological[;] [it] requires a geographic politics instead of simply a political/ideological politics. A particular locality requires geographic representation before a party selectively represents it ideologically. Districts are required to facilitate this political expression that is already there: it is only divided by ideological appeals and decennial adjustments of districts that presently only facilitate one party state ideals of clientelism to nationalist parties, regardless of whether they be Democratic or Republican Parties.

"Instead, districts should be competitive mechanisms."

"Moreover, districts should be facilitating environmental feedback from geographically specific citizens against environmental degradation instead of simply seen as mechanisms for creating an uncompetitive and corrupting one party state on the level of districts--which is how the United States is mostly organized. [That is the point of origin of politics: environmental feedback for representation or delocalized elite attempts to mask it by their disbursements and consumptive or ideological mystification to follow elites hardly representative at all, in a system bound to fail as it gets worse, as externalities build.]

"It [environmental degradation] is this way because of the presently "un-geographic" formal structure of the state. The more the formal structure of the state is designed to maintain informal and un-geographic clientelist relationships, the more all political feedback can be monopolized and gatekept, and the more there is environmental degradation (and human health degradation and economic externalities) because the state fails to get this geographic feedback. This feedback exists though it is filtered out of the un-geographic majoritarian party bailiwicks that are only designed to 'return' parties instead of make them representative or competitive.

"Since the state is a developmental process (e.g., the policy power of the state, the infrastructure, the laws around consumption and its organization, the land tenure issues, the laws around finance, the taxation perks or lack thereof ), then the whole built environment and laws around consumption and waste get tailored as a degradative developmental process without this geographic feedback to the state.

"Instead, any 'voter' feedback is tailored to support the environmental degradative process through gerrymandered un-geographic bailiwicks, which leads to further environmental degradation. Any environmental amelioration pressures against pollution or the institutionalization of risk is gatekept by the ‘two parties’ that intentionally drop the ball, because they can.

"Because with the way their private bailiwicks are organized, they split environmentalist concern in the voters across Democratic and Republican engineered categories of districts that are innately uncompetitive, when environmentalism is a geographic polity issue that cuts across party lines, gender lines, ethnic lines, economic lines, every line.

"Fully 80% or more of the United States supports strengthening environmental laws, even among those who typically vote Republican or Democrat. If environmental degradation, institutionalization of risk, and waste streams are all geographic, we require of course geographic districts in states for Congress as well as within particular states for their state legislatures.

"Otherwise, risk assessment through the politics and “voting” (i.e., gerrymandered districts, actually) of the state will entirely be biased toward institutionalizing more and more risk, and more and more environmental degradation, since citizen feedback is guillotined by un-geographic bailiwicks—instead of used to turn developmental processes of the state towards more humane (and environmentally aware) paths.

This un-geographic bailiwick abets environmental degradation and impairs human health, because the formal state relies on informal parties as political feedback. However, when informal parties give themselves the power to selectively design their own uncompetitive polities, like they do in the United States, the state is built from informal politics of exclusion that keeps changing to maintain exclusion, instead of ever having stable geographic politics of inclusion. The Democrats and the Republicans keep changing the rules to maintain their lack of representation, to maintain low voter turnout, and to maintain environmental degradation--because it suits them both. None of them want to actually be representative.

"They only want to be the representative, which is a different issue altogether, and which has a strategy based on exclusion and district bailiwick 'updating' to maintain their shoe-in candidate. Bioregionalism is a state formation issue, a state creation issue. It seems to me that typically bioregionalism so far lacks a way to extrapolate a politics wider than the bioregion itself. By analyzing in each state, the differences between the bioregion and the congressional bailiwicks (or the counties, or the state bailiwicks), you can see why and explain why certain politics ‘dies’ as it is filtered through a very clientelistic, ungeographic, and unrepresentative party monopoly that demotes geographic politics of inclusion. Plus, this can offer a means to make democracy more competitive, as well as a means to actually enfranchise politics of environmental degradation and human health by removing ungeographic clientelistic monopolies of either party. This is a way to do so.

"The United States is so hideously degradative, even to its own people with such high and expanding cancer rates--38% for women; 41% for males. It was
‘only’ 25% in the 1960s, for each gender group. Plus there is declining fertility. Major swaths of the world’s species are dying off as we speak, many of them because of ecological destruction and/or bioaccumulative pollution that do sexual and hormonal damage. Such bioaccumulation issues are affecting. Brain cancer has become the predominant killer afflicting tiny children in just a few years, expanding from nothing. The brain is mostly a fatty organ, and much bioaccumulative pollution gets stored by the body in fatty tissues.

"In terms of human health, ecological health, and economic health, the majoritarian parties are killing us, by being unable to address these issues of environmental degradation and health concerns that are geographic, instead of demographic.

"Look at a map of the congressional districts. Environmental polities are entirely removed from the architecture of the state, presently. Is it any wonder
that Green party-ism or any other third partyism finds itself drawing the short straw when the game is rigged geographically (to demote geography)? And it is
any wonder that the vampires drew the long straws, because they drew the map of uncompetitive districts among themselves privately? The environmental feedback that does exist is splintered by their local level clientelism that makes the unitary bailiwick of environmental degradation and the desire to alleviate its suffering through political challenges, intentionally divided on federal level as majoritarian party fingers extending from the capitals of the states or from Washington, D. C., in the case of Congressional districts, only see the districts in their own interest
instead of in the public interest. Organize the watershed. Draw maps." (p. 12-16)

And build the bioregional state institutions that make this a reality. Sit and listen to an interview with me.

Can you think of anything else that would be sustainable?

Parrots, the Universe, and the Bioregional State and All That

2010-12-06T19:13:00.003+09:00

I post this "last will and testament" of author Douglas Adams (d. 2001) particularly for the summation from 1:07:00 minutes into his talk. Paraphrasing him: we are caught up in our seemingly successful short-term thinking that most use to judge how successful we are based on how well we adapt the world to us, instead of how well we adapt ourselves to the world's ecology. The former myopically seems to serve us well as we pretend that the world was made for us to manipulate right up to when we pass a point of our own ecological self-destruction or self-poisioning. However, with our chosen ongoing ecological destruction, if this attitude is kept we may be soon as extinct or near extinct as the kakapo, or the aye-aye, or the baiji. We are required to radically rethink the way we do things to integrate ourselves with the environment and its particular regions, to socially relate ourselves to our environments varieties because we have been for a long time destroying the basic ecological premise of our own lives on this planet as we continued to adapt the world to us instead of adapt ourselves to the world. To continue without changing is to leave ourselves feeling smug though truly unadapted to solve our mounting self-destruction. The bioregional state is an answer to solving this process of ecological self-destruction.

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything
From: UCtelevision | May 22, 2008 | 254,251 views
1:27:37 min

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity. Series: Voices [5/2001] [Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few days after this presentation. It makes a good, poignant last testament I think.]

Youth in the Bioregional State

2010-11-13T11:22:00.005+09:00

"Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power--economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed. Period. Which part of this don't you like?" --William McDonough

To adapt the quote of the architect above to socialization that facilitates sustainability, the bioregional state's goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, and feels that it starts with youth. This is because youth can learn to create clean air, water, soil and power in their regions to be economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

Bioregional Hellenization: Youth in the Bioregional State

What kind of adulthood do you want? And if you are an adult already, do you feel like an adult providing a good model for youth? What kind of world do you want available for your generation or the next generation? If you want one that is sustainable, ethical, just, replete with knowledge and skill bases for living in your region of the world, and built for passing that world on to your children who can expand, improve and update it, I suggest you keep reading for some ideas of how to share your passion for this with others. Even if you are far from living it now, know that you can live it.

I suggest that a strong independent, sustainable society starts with the children, giving them forms of socialization that prepare them to be more than passive fatalistic consumers of someone else’s degradation decisions. The aim is helping them be active creators of a sustainable world. This is something that they can enjoy and take pride in now as well as be assured they are doing something durable instead of self-destructive, passing it on to their next generations.

What is there to be proud of nowadays? Are many societies really worth preserving as they are, when environmental degradation, corruption, and material forms of globalized feudalism increasingly grip the world with fatalism and fear, sapping people’s vitality for change?

A purpose of training, educating and teaching the youth of today should be to imbue them with sustainability ethics, and imbue them with the knowledge that sustainability is already here, technologically and materially, so nothing has to be invented. It merely has to be implemented by someone’s actions. That someone is you.

The current generations from five to twenty years of age can see a sustainable society, and can themselves build this society. These current generations should know that seldom will they find a more noble, moral, and ethical purpose of life than to build a sustainable society for their region. Intertwined issues of environmental justice, sustainable development, and human rights can be expressed in the same actions because damages to human rights are typically associated with damages to the environment and visa versa. (Read the books Deeper Shades of Green or Blessed Unrest for more on this.)

Previous posts (though I've changed my mind there about how misled people are--being coerced to provide free advertising for only selling international banker's carbon credits markets) and the book in certain areas mentioned the importance of the institutions of the bioregional state and its larger ideas for a sustainable society as providing socialization frameworks to build youth leadership in sustainability in the current and in the next generations. This post summarizes some of those ideas, and lets you start on your own with a model that is scalable worldwide.

Build it and They Will Come: Civic Democratic Institutions and Commodity Ecology

The bioregional state aims to build two similar sustainability organizations in youth society on the watershed level, worldwide. These non-governmental, volunteer institutions are the foundation of the bioregional state—simultaneously a non-governmental foundation, a material/technological foundation, and a cultural foundation for later expansion. It builds material and technological change options, as well as builds representation, skills, and leadership that can represent for the long haul a 'world shared though always localized' ecological self-interest that is intertwined with our built environmental decisions.

Civic Democratic Society

From age 5, a youth in a particular watershed gets to vote. This is for the Civic Democratic Institution, a 'living poll' of notables in the region who are liked for providing a mediation part for their local culture instead of based on what kind of promises they have for the future. It spots them in whatever capacities they are doing and liked for already. See above links for detailed descriptions.

Thus the age of 5 becomes a youth transition into the community as a voter.

By the age of 10, a youth can be nominated as a candidate themselves. Particularly if youth are unrepresented in many states of the world formally, surely with their smaller and growing bodies, their environmental toxicity deserves some representation at a earlier age as a check and balance against degradative adults pushing them full of badly chosen toxins? Thus the bioregional state calls for existing youth organizations in all watersheds of the world to ally to build common non-governmental frameworks mentioned in Article I of Constitution of Sustainability, particularly the Civic Democratic Institution. Quoting the above:

Article I.

Section 1.

...To further secure the blessing of sustainability, and to assure that the roots of democracy and sustainability thrive, check, and balance any nascent semblances of a corrupt governmental apparatus, a council of citizens shall be established in all watersheds as a monitoring and civic appreciation body along the following lines and for the following rationales: the framework of the citizen councils shall be a facilitation tool for coalitional building, for the prioritizing of political interests in particular geographies, for environmental monitoring, and for political party agenda formation. To whit, this is summarized in six sections, as follows.

Section 2.
There shall be two stages of voting for the council members, in accordance with two tiers, or procedures and levels, of voting. This is to avoid political party clientelism and to assure the representation of a wide variety of groups and interests. These council members are informal and external to the governmental apparatus, though their existence has a great influence upon later formal politics, grounding and adhering to a particular geography of interests, instead of being manipulated from afar by ideological interests.

There shall be a long first tier followed by a short second tier of voting. All voters with the below qualification can vote once for any persons who have resided in their watershed for at least 10 years. The candidates are the pool of all people who have lived in the watershed for 10 years or shall have been born within a particular watershed and reached ten years of age. The voters for these candidates shall be all citizens over the age of five, though with these residency and/or watershed naturalization requirements. The voters can vote for as many candidates as they want who fulfill their qualification. This is to be a culturally representative body, designed to be comprised of those whom a society of voters in aggregate feels worthy of recognition.

The accumulated social totals will reveal who and where the potentially admired leaders are, without requiring them to ‘run’ for an office—which draws a different caliber of people. This procedure simply ‘spots’ in an informal capacity any citizens in society, in whatever capacities in which they are already being successful or widely admired. It’s a recognition for what they are doing already, instead of related to how well they can convince people of their future good intentions."

Thus two sustainability 'youth transitions' are given at age five and ten, building pride and participation experience with status and identification within the local watershed or bioregion.

These are one institution's socialization structures for sustainability that provide a better youth experience and then a better adulthood than any degradative societies give for many people today. The bioregional state’s institutions encourage youth actions toward health, ecology, and economy intertwined in a particular region, aiming for its optimization, nested with other regions. It can be scaled worldwide.

Culturally and economically, respectively, these two are the local non-governmental checks and balances against governmental corrupt power and its influence on developmental decisions and choices. Corruption is a lack of representation from those injured in development decisions in the long or short term. Corrupt developmental power is a degradative pressure toward bad developmental choices in plans and material choices without local input with the aim of creating a clientelism over people by removing their choices and establishing an ecological tyranny.

It works well with secular or existing religious organizations, and can serve as a cross-religious working group in all of them.

Russia: Worse Case Cultural Scenarios of Political Alienation Still Have a Natural Political Concern for the Environment

What about places with little faith in anything, religiously, governmentally, or collectively? Well, this institution is designed to build that base from scratch at a locality's own pace. Let's take Russia as the poster child having experienced almost 80 years of harsh environmentally degradative policies in the Soviet Union without any local feedback at all, then a collapse of that system itself in the 1990s which made it even worse for a decade. However, even in Russia’s degradative context with its widely apolitical youth alienated from most formal politics, they have the 'natural politics' of our human species--a very high environmental voluntarism and localist concern.

Mentioned in Anna Stetsenko's chapter "Adolescents in Russia" in the book The World’s Youth (2004):

"A nationwide survey [in Russia in 1997] examined political orientations of 1,897 young people, aged 16-29....Over 50% saw no opportunities to make an impact on the life of their communities; only 10% trusted political parties and movements; 16% trusted the Parliament; and 22% trusted the government. Similarly, a 1996 survey of 700 students (aged 15-27) in a typical small Russian town revealed a complete absence of youth organizations, with the school being the center of social activism. Less than 1% of all youth participated in political parties. More than half of all participants of this poll were not members of any organization. However, 13% said they would like to participate in some ecological organization, and about one-half said they would like to take part in saving a local lake (1997 survey). Young people’s concerns seem to lie mostly in the areas of sports, health, culture, and local environmental issues. A study that compared environmental awareness in German and Russian adolescents found that the willingness to engage in environmental behavior was at similarly high levels in both groups (1995 survey)."

So even with the massive breakdown of trust in larger political action, there is still seen the natural, real world concern politically for collective action in their own regional self-interest. That is why this motivation, as a base worldwide, is better to build from than some abstract ideological commitment pushed by untrustworthy international pressures or national parties.

Thus even here youth may be motivated to establish the CDI and Commodity Ecology, contexts instead of accepting someone else's hierarchies. After this local base, it can scale worldwide on a grassroots level, particular to each watershed of the world. The Commodity Ecology helps link producers of a region's sustainable choices together with consumers to build a 'grass roots command economy' of producers who know what markets are there by agreement beforehand instead of only using the market mechanism. This dynamic is discussed elsewhere above, and here.

This can form a real, grounded, worthwhile even idealistic adulthood different from the empty consumerist, cynical, empty participation and lack of knowledge of youth or adults in mass consumer crowds without a particular home. This is a different youth and adulthood form, different from an endlessly empty youth without adulthood encouraged by many Western-modernistic, corporate-dominated, stateless, civicless globalized worlds of identity based on some corporation's degradative products.

Such institutions can be crystals, crystallizing a different sustainable culture outward, with four levels of interest:

1. State politics - after the non-governmental institutional base, a more sustainable and culturally representative localism is an ecological checks and balance toward a sustainable political policy in larger institutions degradative ways.

2. science/educational institutions - once the above two institutions are established, novel paths of learning, monitoring, and building an optimal local integration of materials flows with people of their region is started; this implies a more knowledgable appreciation and discrimination for the framing of development to fit particular regions characteristics and environmental contexts--by choosing wisely in the 91 categories of materials and avoiding choices that undermine the region.

3. financial localism - with the community currency of the watershed or region discussed as part of the Commodity Ecology context, what is networked into acceptance is a stable producer base for a local currently which has historically been the main difficulty of maintaining a local circuit of capital in this way (instead of lack of consumer desire) as a financial check and balance on centralized banking.

4. and consumptive sustainability - within the 91 group producers of the Commodity Ecology context, and local arrangements for material flow changes in choices can be shared. I suggest the publication of a watershed based "Whole Earth Catalogue" or magazine reviewing the developments in each category of producers, as well as which services are available in the region or how to attract them. A suggestion from another magazine is to encourage producer's interest by free advertising for their products (only their sustainably labeled products, labeled by the CDI above). The magazine is paid for by the subscribers willing to see the network of sustainability services taking shape in their region. In return, the subscribers get a coupon card for rebates on these sustainable services featured in the magazine/catalogue in exchange for the free advertising. Both producers and consumers gets something they want this way: the former gets free access to markets and the latter gets rebates in those services, materials, and technologies. It’s a price rebate club for sustainability and a community as well somewhat similar to the community that developed around the more despatialized Whole Earth Catalogue that sold millions of copies several generations ago. This is a "Whole Watershed Catalogue" instead.

Permacultural Practice for Sustainability and Youth Outreach: The Watershed Design Center As a Change Force Itself

Third, other ideas are for the built 'physical plant' of the community watershed center, its organic gardens, and its growing agroforestry projects--making the watershed community center itself as a group learning experience to demonstrate these technologies and materials in action--as well as how this changes their sense of themselves in the process of creating it and then inspiring and helping other watersheds to organize their own.

Self-recruitment could expand through existing networks, for who friends who as best for the watershed in question. This simultaneously builds institutions bioregionally in a networked fashion, and allows people to learn techniques of socialization, prioritization, voting, and constructing a future when they are young as a form of civic education and organizing as a normal daily activity.

People could learn to construct their own sustainable technology choices in sustainable methods and materials for and from their regions’ options. It can provide a truly selfish and intelligent opportunity to better themselves though education and employment and network building in the watershed or bioregion of their choice. It is an appealing ideology of ecology, sustainability, and human civil rights and market choices enjoined in harmonious relations.

It could be organized as a non-profit for property ownership of land, for constructing a manner for wayward or delinquent youth to be turned around toward a worthwhile adulthood that they could later share with others, to inspire them to education and further self-esteem.

It can include arts mastery, musical skills, and musical instrument construction from regional materials. This could become a school of troubadours of sustainability, as touring musician groups of the watershed as well, etc. Thus music, art, technological innovation/design, redesigns the arts on sustainable materials, mixed with diversity of regional culture, regional materials, and democratic representation.

The CDI/CE groups could organize yearly festivals or watershed fairs. It could help organize competitive sports teams, self-defense training in the martial arts for the mental health, bodily health, self-control, and mental focus that it provides.

It can serve as a reserve army for construction of outreach--for other sustainable buildings in different regions in natural disasters or in their own--creating "shock building" quick construction.

It could conduct rural or urban field trips to each other’s regions, to build urban and rural versions of the institutional forms. It could build its own school from local materials, replete with gardens and growing forests, as an experiment for what is right for the region in the long term and what works is useful for other neighboring watershed's attempts later as a skill base of expansion.

The whole idea is to keep these institutions non-governmental, i.e., keep them from becoming a tool of a coercive state or singular ideological vision of a political party that always polarizes and fails to represent the geographic quality of green concern that is across the political spectrum instead of limited to a particular ideology.

Let youth have these institutions and they will expand these networks like lodges of sustainability around the world’s watersheds within half a century, learning and sharing information in their travels between them in all areas of the world in these 'houses of sustainable technologies' (HOSTs, for an abbreviation).

And seed technologies. The permaculture inspired watershed community center design arrangements can be a living museum or archive of well adapted living materials like seed sharing of heirloom crops--a living art that requires a practitioner each generation or its art dies. Biodiversity and the bioregional state is very important. Institutionalizing biodiversity means putting it in our regular daily social networks instead of keeping it separate from us. We can fit in particular situations far better instead of overshadow them as a destroying alien creature in the landscape. Around the heirloom living gardens that spread the seeds for free for travelers or for sale by mail, youth as they grow into adults can see themselves like the forest agroecology growing tall around their sites on permacultural principles. This is similar to Gaviotas where their community was expanding forestry instead of cutting it down. Take a clue from them by reading the book by Alan Weisman about Gaviotas or my analysis of it applied to sustainability and what they failed to do well and how to improve it. Or pick up my book. Today might be the first day of the rest of your life.

Global Green Majority Organizing Against Ecological Tyranny in South America: Brazil and Colombia

2010-10-14T21:16:00.013+09:00

The Greening of South America: Green Colombian Presidential Candidate Gets 27% (2010); Green Brazilian Presidential Candidate Gets 20% (2010); Other News from Ecuador (2009) and Bolivia (2006-2010)

Global polls show a global green majority. It's bound to organize sooner than later though will have both internal as well as external difficulties finding a way to organize this majority without the bioregional state.

Soon there as well they will find participating against a corrupt, criminal edifice is pointless without formal institutional change. The majority ecological self-interest of peoples may move toward this suggestion of praxis related to this theory. Some other examples below.

This relates to previous posts from South America (Ecuador and Bolivia) and Africa (related to open repression of Rwanda's Green Party).

This increasing global grassroots pressure sick of corrupt politicians destroying our health, ecology, and economies is now organizing more than ever; it is organizing to participate against the corrupt elite political clientelism that makes an ecological tyranny around the world that holds environmental degradation in place politically by keeping us from sustainability by hiding alternative materials and technologies as well as gatekeeping against the globally popular sentiments of 'health, ecology, and economy' interlinked.

This is an excerpt from independent London journalist Gwynne Dyer's recent article "Green Brazil" where a green religiously conservative religious movement is gaining political 'presidential kingmaker' status by pulling both conservatives and leftists away from elite parties that look quite similar:

"Marina Silva, leader of Brazil’s Green Party...persuaded one-fifth of Brazil’s voters to support the Green Party. Twenty percent is the second-highest share of the vote ever won by any Green Party anywhere. (The record-holder is Antanas Mockus, the Green candidate in the recent election in Colombia, who got 27 percent of the vote.) Brazil, with more than 200 million people, is the country that really counts in South America, and what has happened there is...[being called]...a "green tsunami." Greens are generally assumed to be on the left...Marina Silva has the classic biography of a Brazilian leftwing hero ― born in the Amazonian state of Acre, the daughter of rubber-pickers, illiterate until 16 ― but she is also [green and highly religious as] an evangelical Christian. As such, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a substantial portion of her vote came from Christians...As a social conservative..."

That's a common theme in world history for religious movements to start housing environmental sentiments right before the whole state becomes illegitimate.

Actually, this Green Party total of 20% for Brazil might be considered the third-highest since (somewhat Green/Environmentalist) French Socialist Party candidate Marie-Ségolène Royal got 25.87% first and then 46.94% in the runoff in 2007 against Nicolas Sarkozy--and Sarkozy clearly used open vote fraud to win. That is the 'external rationale' linked above why merely participating as a green party by itself will be a failure without green constitutional engineering of the bioregional state: because this criminal corruption maintains protection of environmental degradation. (The only thing that Sarkozy thought was environmental was expanding banker wealth in the financial roulette wheel for carbon credits--soundly trounced in 2009 by the French Constitutional Court because his plan did more to undermine environmental laws than improve it: "too many exemptions for polluters" was his idea for a green revolution. More critique of how mistaken it is to consider carbon credits an environmental social movement is below, in a link from investigative author Mark Shapiro).

As Wayne Madsen wrote in 2007, the runoff demographics weren't there for Sarkozy's win. Only Sarkozy supported unverifiable e-vote machines for France which were widely utilized:

"ES&S's I-Votronic machines were used in both elections across France. Only Sarkozy's party was supportive of the machines, with all the other political parties calling for a moratorium on their use. Turnout in the French election was 85 percent. With large turnouts historically favoring the left in France, the exit polling and actual polling were at odds with the turnout -- an indication of massive election fraud....As with the U.S. and Mexican presidential elections, the polls are being artificially fixed to reflect the upcoming skewed exit polls, a major component of the neo-cons' main contrivance to maintain political control -- 'election engineering.'"

That was France in 2007. Germany, with a strong (though fading) Green Party presence and multiple party democracy in general, in 2009 removed all its electronic vote machines because they were a formal invitation to fraud. They were a fraudulent way that the whole 2007 Mexican election was rigged against pro-localist candidate Obrador in the last Mexican Presidential election as well (more).

As Madsen continues, he talks about this global vote fraud against organized localism:

"Similar polling irregularities were experienced in recent elections in Scotland, Wales, and England [in 2007]. In Scotland, 100,000 ballots, thought to mostly be cast for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, were declared "spoiled" in Scotland's election. That "glitch" cost the Scottish Nationalists a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament. Irregularities in Wales and England similarly affected larger margins for Welsh and Cornish nationalists. As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, regional nationalism [or participative localism in a larger framework] is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments. The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people...seize control...of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."

"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."

Expect more open vote fraud against green-localist pressures worldwide, particularly in South America soon. However, if you want more environmental representation, parties by themselves are hardly enough because of 'internal rationales' as well (see above) so look up more information about the bioregional state.

As I said before:

"I do support various forms of green parties however just without expecting that the model of political change for sustainability can ever be achieved by a singular party...[T]he bioregional state argues that a single informal party is a poor strategy for change to sustainability. A single party can be corrupted like the fading greenness of Die Grunen in Germany (discussed at that link above). Second, a single party it is a poor strategy for sustainability because support for greenness comes from across the left-right spectrum seen in above polls for global supermajorities supporting green politics. This makes a single informal party a poor strategy for mobilizing toward sustainability. It is perhaps ultimately self-defeating and self-divisive of the commonality of views on greenness to attempt to fit 'green' into one party framework." Instead, it can fit easily into features of the bioregional state like watershed election districting for instance.

A more competitive party framework in the beginning is crucial in sustainability instead of reliance on a singular party.

This is achievable through informal and formal change, first, after which the arrangement itself (instead of an individual party) provides checks and balance on political corruption and gatekeeping. This is because with a more competitive election framework, the common geographic self-interest of all populations (regardless of their different ideologies) could shine through. When it shines through, it forces any and all parties in a district to adapt to local conditions to win elections instead of allowing parties in an uncompetitive context to selectively appeal to positions that gatekeep only and tend to support the same degradative policies."

Here's the full article:

Green Brazil
By Gwynne Dyer

“This is now the great mystery of Brazilian politics: what will Marina do?” “Marina” is Marina Silva, leader of Brazil’s Green Party, and the speaker, Altino Machado, is a journalist and one of her oldest friends.

But Marina has already done something remarkable: she persuaded one-fifth of Brazil’s voters to support the Green Party.

Twenty percent is the second-highest share of the vote ever won by any Green Party anywhere. (The record-holder is Antanas Mockus, the Green candidate in the recent election in Colombia, who got 27 percent of the vote.)

But Brazil, with more than 200 million people, is the country that really counts in South America, and what has happened there is, in the words of the Rio de Janeiro paper O Dia, a “green tsunami.”

Among other things, this remarkable result makes Marina Silva the kingmaker in the second round of the Brazilian election. It was the voters that went to her that deprived Workers’ Party candidate Dilma Roussef of victory in the first round of voting on Oct. 4. To win in the first round, a candidate must get 50 percent of the vote; “Dilma” ended up with 46.9 percent.

So now Marina (they are both known by their first names) must decide whether to tell her supporters to vote for Dilma in the second round of the election on Oct. 31, or to give their votes to the relatively conservative runner-up in the first round, Jose Serra.

Greens are generally assumed to be on the left, but it is not a foregone conclusion that Marina will back the Workers’ Party candidate.

Marina Silva has the classic biography of a Brazilian leftwing hero ― born in the Amazonian state of Acre, the daughter of rubber-pickers, illiterate until she was 16 ― but she is also an evangelical Christian.

As such, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a substantial portion of her vote came from Christians who were horrified by Dilma’s advocacy of reform in Brazil’s stern anti-abortion laws.

As a social conservative, Marina might even try to throw her votes to Serra. She is wringing every drop of drama out of the situation, and won’t announce her choice until a special party convention late this week.

However, her decision matters less than it seems: Dilma only needs a few million extra votes to cross the 50-percent barrier, and Marina cannot really compel all the Greens to vote for Serra.

The headline story is still the rapid economic growth Brazil has enjoyed under outgoing president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva ― and, just as importantly, the way the new wealth has been shared out.

Fifty million Brazilians have been rescued from poverty (an income of less than $82 per month) by Lula’s “family plan” of subsidies for the very poor, and 25 million other low-income Brazilians have actually ascended into the middle class. So Lula leaves office after eight years with a stratospheric approval rating of 80 percent.

He is so popular that he could choose a complete nobody as his successor and get him or her elected. Dilma Roussef is much more than that ― a former guerrilla during the military dictatorship of 1964-85, a skilled administrator, and Lula’s former chief of staff ― but nobody has ever accused her of having too much charisma.

No matter. She’ll win the second round anyway. What’s really interesting here is the emergence, two decades after the restoration of democracy, of what you might call Brazil’s political personality.

All three big political parties, the Workers’ Party, Serra’s Social Democrats, and the Greens are on the left in terms of economic policy, though Marxist ranters are scarce in all of them.

Social conservatives are still well represented in the latter two parties, but they all promise to continue Lula’s wonder-working brand of pragmatic socialism. Together, they got 98 percent of the vote in the elections on Oct. 4.

The rapid rise of the Greens is linked to Brazilians’ growing awareness that they are the custodians of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, and that it is in serious danger from global warming. That may explain why 85 percent of Brazilians think that climate change is a major problem, while only 37 percent of Americans do.

[Unable to resist: if people knew more about Climategate fraud, "the worst scientific scandal of our generation," they may reconsider the reality as closer to paid-off scientists hired as public relations to justify global carbon credit billions in profit--a $300 billion fraudulent financial bubble that is only growing--despite little connection of carbon scientifically to causing global climate change--it just being required to sell the idea of the connection to sell carbon credits. We can protect the rainforests and ourselves from carbon pollution (and a protect ourselves from a lot more than this myopia about carbon) without buying into 'global climate change' scaremongering. Environmental concern has shrunk to merely selling carbon credit futures frauds. See Harper's Magazine article by Mark Shapiro on this "carbon trading shell game" showing how fraudulent a 'carbon credits solution' is, more accurately called Conning the Climate (full article at link) and conning you and distracting ourselves from the many real sources of pollution.]

It’s a striking picture. Brazil is the only one of the BRICs, the big countries with high economic growth rates, to have both a powerful industrial sector (like India and China) and self-sufficiency in energy (like Russia). By the time it hosts the Olympic Games in 2016, it will probably have the fifth-largest economy in the world.

It is still one of the world’s most unequal countries, with a gulf between rich and poor that makes even the United States look egalitarian. (20,000 families control 46 percent of Brazil’s wealth, and one percent of landowners own 44 percent of all the land.)

But it is moving in a different direction now, without any of the doctrinaire excesses that usually mar such efforts. In fact, Brazil is becoming not just an important place, but a very interesting place."

---

Mr. Dyer mentions Colombia's green wave, and a little research reveals that the ex-mayor of the capital of Bogotá, Mockus ran in the 2006 presidential election as a member of the Indigenous Social Alliance Movement. At the time he finished fourth in the election, attracting only 1.24% of the vote. He went on to be President of Corpovisionarios, an organization that consults to cities about addressing their problems through the same policy methodology that was so successful during his terms as Mayor of Bogotá.

"In August 2009, Mockus and two other past mayors of Bogotá (Peñalosa and Garzón) joined a new political movement, Colombian Green Party and decided that one of them would run for office in the 2010 Colombian presidential elections. Mockus, Peñalosa and Garzón embarked in a very innovative campaign, in which they acknowledged and honored each other's qualifications and preparedness for the job, and telling people to choose whomever they liked best. Through a popular consultation carried on March 14, 2010, which he amply won, Mockus became the Colombian Green Party presidential candidate.

"On April 4, 2010, Antanas Mockus teamed up with [another localist politician, ex-mayor of] Medellín...choosing [him] as his vicepresidential formula which signified the unification of two groups at the center of the political spectrum.

In other news, "Petro Gustavo, the leader of Colombia's most left-wing political party Polo Democratico [that did terribly in the Presidential Election under his candidacy soon afterward], propose[d] his party, the Green Party and other independent Colombian political forces work together....The former presidential candidate cites issues such as the universal right to clean drinking water, the suspension of the controversial military pact with the U.S., plans to return land to the displaced and the restoring of ties with neighbor states, as reasons why "for the good of the country" the Greens and [hard leftist ideologue] Polo should form a united front regarding these matters. The Colombian political scene is rife with rumors that Petro has created a serious divide...and may leave the party. This is not the first time Petro has sought to align with the Greens,...***but Mockus declined the offer.***

Perhaps the ongoing green centrism will finally be evident to more people and green constitutional engineering will be more evident as well, to reflect it. Given external and internal difficulties of organizing our ecological self-interest, the bioregional state is required.

VIDEO: Toward a Bioregional State: A Novel Theory and Praxis for Sustainability

2010-09-22T16:08:00.014+09:00

Ideas for a Sustainable Region, Country, and World

"Toward a Bioregional State and Ecological Revolution: Green Constitutional Engineering for the World" by Mark D. Whitaker
July 2010
23:28 min

Recently, I gave a public talk about my two books Toward a Bioregional State (2005) and Ecological Revolution (2009). The talk's title began with "Fresh Shoots from a Dead Tree." I really do think this melodramatic analogy of all of us living inside a dead tree (our current forms of states) means we are in danger of destroying everything when these trees fall. They will fall from internal rot via the intertwined environmental degradation, corruption, and consolidation they encourage. As they do these three things, it makes them more illegitimate and more reliant on repression to maintain control.

However, there are fresh shoots from below, and this is what I concentrate on. How to encourage this green growth at the grass roots and build it into a novel formal framework instead of merely part of the breakdown process? And keep it from being co-opted or channeled by the existing degradative frameworks that have little interest in sustainability except to use it as a discourse to legitimate their ongoing degradation in a novel ideology?

I spoke to other environmental sociologists at this international meeting. However, why we have environmental degradation and what to do about it matters to everyone.

The session was entitled "Addressing the Earth in Peril", and I did so in a novel way because I disagree that policy change or novel political parties (by themselves) will get us to sustainability.

I disagree with the ongoing Malthusian revival (or here), the ecoMarxists attempt to blame economic logics alone, and the social constructionists that claim the topic is merely a power play by elitists instead of a material issue, the ecological modernizationists who say that we have to wait for technologies to be invented to make it work (however all solutions for sustainability are already here--meaning adding checks and balances to the politics protecting crony degradative materials is more important first), and the "New [sic] Ecological Paradigm" that fails to be aware of how 'old' environmental degradation is.

Given time constraints, I try to provide a talk about both theory and praxis--a novel view of sustainability and the way out of environmental degradation via green constitutional engineering. This novel view of green constitutional engineering means formally removing politicized consumptive infrastructures and unrepresentative elite clientelism in materials and their gatekeeping against other already available choices as the main cause of environmental degradation. Removing their gatekeeping formally may be the best solution toward sustainability that everyone could agree upon, from their different more bioregional areas that would have interest in maintaining more local optimums of life and materials destroyed by external political pressures.

Sorry for the speed of the presentation, though I think the audio is fine if you turn everything up. If you like, the paper upon which the talk is based is here.

A Novel Dance of Theory and Praxis...

Praxis means a practice based upon a theory, i.e., in this case 'how do we get to sustainability and by what methods.' The methods people choose to solve environmental degradation are affected by a variety of choices of theoretical orientation whether people analyze that theory always in the back of their minds or otherwise.

For me to have a different praxis for sustainability means to have a different theoretical view of what is creating environmental degradation. In this case, this novel theory was based on research coming from many others and myself following environmental degradation for long historical durations across different societies in the past and the present and looking for differences and commonalities instead of artificially limiting discussion to the past 100 years. I believe that this is a sounder basis to build any praxis for sustainability, to be aware of the many difficulties of sustainability and environmental durability in the past and what was causing destruction of societies in the past over time.

To cut to the chase, key to solving environmental degradation is solving political corruption and making corrupt state politics more representative via formal changes first and via independent, non-governmental watershed based institutions that can be started now, first.

Why formal changes first? Because unrepresentative elites cause environmental problems with their crony choices of formal laws, material choices, and institutional choices across four social areas through which they gatekeep against solutions that already exist, in their desire to keep a degradative informal hegemony over development and politics in their own profitable materials despite it leading to self-destruction. And for the latter, because autonomous, non-governmental formal institutions helping to organize local culture and local material flows for sustainability are required to represent the local ecological self-interest that is harmed in most unrepresentative governments' policy decisions.

What about the other popularly lauded alternative, forming another informal party and participating in politics first, before formal institutional change?

I suggest that by themselves any green parties are pointless, without their support of a bioregional state change as well. Why?

Internal Difficulties: Why Green Parties (By Themselves) Fail To Help Us Toward Sustainability

In a previous series of posts, 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.

External Difficulties: Why Green Parties (By Themselves) Fail To Help Us Toward Sustainability

In another post of that series, I analyzed the 'external difficulties' of any decentralization party--green or libertarian--keeping them from participating: there is current, huge systemic vote fraud across many countries (see the post) and corporate/media corruption interlocks in many countries of the world.

Therefore, without altering formal institutional frameworks of politics toward wider representation first, and without independent institutional frameworks on the watershed level first, I argue environmental degradation will continue.

The Three Elephants in the Room No Pro-Degradation State Politician Touches-- Health, Ecology, and Economy--Despite This Being the 'Silent Green Majority'

In current formal institutions (without much ecological checks and balances), informal elites take the political stage and enforce their ecological tyranny upon us all via clientelistic materials and ideologies that demote consumer choices of regions and demote citizen awareness or feedback on huge upset with the increasing health, ecological, and economic problems. Current frameworks of elite politics gatekeep on these three main issues which are truly the three elephants in the room of degradative politics--elephants that degradative elites pretend fail to exist.

Getting Serious: Polity Creation Instead of Policy Creation As What To Do About Environmental Corruption

Thus, removing an ecological tyranny can only be a formal institutional project--of novel non-governmental watershed based institutions as well as of green constitutional engineering. This is what I mean by "polity formation instead of policy formation" should be the main concern. To be seriously green means being interested in constitutional engineering and alternative non-governmental institutions working together.

For green constitutional engineering, the novel ecological checks and balances described in the book can remove those corrupt politicized raw material regimes that create environmental degradation and demote consumer choices.

For the non-governmental institutional additions, two different watershed based institutions help to express the non-ideological "ecological self-interest" of populations into a political force for check and balance against forms of degradation in their regions.

Ecological self-interests of multiple regions are the main political priorities of the world as noted in polls though this 'silent green majority' has been demoted politically through gatekeeping via different left and right ideologies splitting it up, though self-destructive internal ideological division (caused by attempting to put green politics in a left/right oriented party first which is counterproductive as described at the above link), and through economics/markets because suppliers or politicians refuse to provide a welter of technologies and materials for sustainability that already exist because it removes some elite's already established informal ability to create political clientelism and economic power for themselves, if materials were suddenly more representatively chosen based on all those experiencing the externalities of these choices in certain regions organizing against them in novel state constitutions as well as in non-governmental watershed institutions.

Formally removing the political and technological gatekeeping of degradative raw material regimes removes the ecological tyranny that we live within.

Unsustainability is enforced upon us by revoked choices as much as by poor choices made for unrepresentative clientelstic benefit.

Checking and balancing against corrupt, degradative elite politics in materials is key to unlocking the potential for sustainability. Why?

This is because all the materials and technologies for sustainability exist though are demoted primarily via politics of current corrupt raw material regimes that dislike competition with better technologies and materials--despite all the while creating a context that destroys even themselves in the end.

...And If Otherwise...

Without changes toward green constitutional engineering and more 'ecological checks and balances,' I anticipate the same predictable historical pattern of environmental problems. You can see this in the distant past as well as our hyper-globalized present: corruption steers environmental degradation. There is a corruption-based consumptive consolidation and it increasingly meets an opposition from a plurality of religio-environmental movements--some individualistic, some communal, all increasingly regionalized movements that delegitimate any form of elite clientelism. The latter movements dissolve the legitimacy of the larger increasingly militarized territorial state elites strategies oriented toward repressing everyone to consume unrepresentative choices. This process is without any dramatic or romantic resolution--just the same historical process of degradation at a larger scale once those rebellious discourses are co-opted and tamed to serve at a larger scale for future state formation.

For instance, you see this in our current era. Much of green thought, once rather decentralized, is increasingly steered to sell a global scam of carbon credits and a larger globalized jurisdiction on development that only puts oil companies and international banks that make money on trading and controlling the required markets in carbon futures. This only gives the carbon/oil/gas/coal raw material regimes greater control over development paths by institutionalizing them financially as well, instead of removing carbon.

So many other real issues of our environment--human and other species' health, chemical pollutions, and economic localization--are far more important and far more dangerous to ignore. Meanwhile, massive propaganda implies state-forced carbon trading will solve everything. It will only make the billionaires richer and the globalizers more in control of the poorer areas of the world without any connection to environmentalism. This corporate/state propagandized carbon regime has nothing to do with sustainable economics alternatives because it means only neo-carbon imperialism projects for everyone else, tax breaks for the real polluters, and they are granted the rights to pollute in the process. All real environmental concerns get increasingly left without 'elite sponsorship' except this strange one for carbon that merely encourages even greater globalized unrepresentative elite jurisdiction, greater global massive profits on novel state-forced markets in an unmonitorable commodity, carbon, (what a great scam--how do you trade an unmeasurable gas on a stock market as a futures contract? It will soon be even more corrupt than arrangements that created the U.S. mortgage housing bubble, in a 'carbon credits bubble'). It may lead to a greater corrupt raw material regime of oil being unchallenged after it is given rights to pollute via carbon credit frameworks.

Meanwhile, the real environment gets more toxic on the tangible pollution pathways--and social pressures mount against it. Though how they mount and what praxis they take is of great importance. Many praxis ideas offered just lead to more environmental degradation, consolidation, and lesser representation.

Conclusion

To make a sustainable movement toward greening requires a formal institutional plan, because [1] mere autarky by itself without a way of dealing with cross-border pollution issues can contribute toward greater environmental problems instead of remove them (as the ex-Soviet Union area went from bad to worse for instance with regional independence and the quick dying of green sentiment in the process); [2] and because informal party change is unable to reach sustainability by itself.

Follow the links for more information to previous posts, or find my books.

Demoting Our Ecological Tyranny by Local Jurisdictional Dominance: Recent Examples

2010-06-23T18:52:00.010+09:00

Echoing the previous post on local watershed jurisdictions and how they are connected to achieving sustainability and democracy is how another feature of local jurisdictional dominance in court decisions and resource use is how it creates a durable local political feedback against degradative ecological tyrannies of state politics and can preserve biodiversity politically as well (noted in another previous post).

Here is a short film about the expansion of local jurisdictional power in Namibia, Africa as the country sees its first political stability, finances for education and livelihood--combined with wildlife protection--in its 50 year postcolonial history.

Community Sponsored Conservation is the Financial Infrastructure in Namibia: John Kasaona: How poachers became caretakers, and created a sustainable developmental, financial, and consumptive framework
18:00 min.

John Kasaona is assistant director for the Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), Kasaona works on ways to improve the lives of rural people in Namibia by involving them in the management of the lands they live on -- and the species that live there with them.

In his home of Namibia, John Kasaona is working on an innovative way to protect endangered animal species: giving nearby villagers (including former poachers) responsibility for caring for the animals [and the local environment instead of turning jurisdiction over to a distant, corruptible gatekept state of ecological tyranny like in Ecuador]. And it's working.

Kasanoa's Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program helps rural villages set up communal conservancies, which manage and use local natural resources in a sustainable manner. Essentially, it's about restoring the balance of land and people to that of pre-colonial times, and allowing the people with the most interest in the survival of their environment to have control of it. His work was featured in the recent film Milking the Rhino.

"Our attitude is important. If we pretend to be concerned and helpful but still see the community next to a conservation area as a threat, conservation won't work."--John Kasanoa

Another example of local community jurisdictions getting stronger and facilitating ecological restoration comes from Indonesia:

Willie Smits restores a rainforest
20:39 min.

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, [a] biologist [forced to become a local community developer to preserve the environment] Willie Smits has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans and local communities -- and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.

The same recovery of local jurisdictional dominance in material decisions can occur in more 'developed' areas that have historically been more core to the ecological tyrannies of the current extensive global system encouraging environmental degradation. It seems 'core' areas are finding their ecological voice once more.

These areas require it just as much, to defend themselves against the ecological tyranny. For instance:

In the ongoing BP oil disaster, areas in the United States are rejecting the mismanagement of an uncaring federal government in league with BP polluters--instead of linked to local people in particular environments. Local people are taking back their 'natural jurisdiction' over their local ecologies and over their politics by challenging the claims of a corrupt state that maintains their ecological destruction.

For example, there is the Governor of Louisiana as well as the Plaquemines Parish President (in deep coastal Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River). These were some of the first places to experience the oil hitting land from the portion of this oil disaster on the surface waters. Both complain that the so called organization of response is keeping them from saving their areas and failed to protect them in the first place--as it spent more time policing to keep people from responding than actually responding.

The Coast Guard stopped Louisiana Governor Jindal from cleaning up oil as well as earlier challenged his desire to protect the coast of his state with sand berms as BP was doing nothing. Governor Jindal's independent response without the federal government is illegal, though he is doing it anyway because the federal jurisdictions are unwilling to help--and only willing to claim policing jurisdiction.

The mayor of Grand Isle, LA asked for clean up technology and booms--and was refused aid by BP and the Coast Guard. Thus, local elected leaders declared an open challenge to the federal government, paraphrasing 'go ahead & and try to arrest us for protecting ourselves while you fail to do so.'

Being unwilling to help while claiming jurisdiction over someone and trying to stop them protecting themselves is the recipe for an ecological tyranny.

Other areas see the federal corruption associated with protecting environmental degradation of their areas and keeping them from living in a cleaner environment:

Alabama Governor Riley blasts the so called federal 'oil spill response leadership,' and he as well wants a more decentralized response like the Lousiana Governor Jindal wants. So has Florida Governor Crist.

Palm Beach County, Florida mistrusts a BP-compromised Coast Guard and Florida state. It independently (in federal eyes, 'illegally') started own oil oil disaster protection against BP/US's mismanagement.

Other areas of Florida beg for assistance and receive zero help like the oil washing up on shore at Destin Pass or heavy tar balls on Santa Rosa Beach, Florida from June 18, without any BP or Coast Guard clean up despite repeated calls for several days.

Snorklers at Panama City were shocked 'their' government (they thought) would warn them of oil contamination, and they learned otherwise that it was hardly their government anymore. Authorities refuses protect in Panama City. Florida snorkelers were "covered in crude oil", though officials failed to issue warning.

This is why the Florida Keys is (once more in the eyes of a corrupt government, 'illegally'--I would say 'naturally') organizing itself to fight both the oil disaster and claims of federal jurisdiction or of criminally negligent BP corporation over them. Both are doing little to help, and the little help they do is more harmful.

In the Florida Keys, residents are planing their own oil cleanup without the federal government ('illegally' in the eyes of the federal government that has given criminal BP jurisdiction over them). Dan Robey of KeysSpill.com gathered 4,000 volunteers with 300 boat captains, who offered to help before and after potential arrival of oil. Patrick Rice, the dean of marine science and technology at Florida Keys Community College said: "we will not allow inept responses...to happen here."

However the "problem" (sic) with plans for grass-roots activism is federal inept responses are the only ones the U.S. wants, as BP (Deepwater Horizon's Unified Command, run by BP with Coast Guard and others) "has so far insisted on complete [monopolized, mismanaged] control of the cleanup operations."

As the BP spokesman told the Key's volunteers to register with BP leadership, the Key's leadership shot back that this is foolish because "according to BP's numbers, only a third of 7,200 boats 'under contract' to BP are in active service."

Moreover, Robey said they started this independent organization of Florida Keys' captains to protect themselves since they were unable to register with BP. Robey said BP is a "total joke" because they called BP for over a month to register. No one at BP returned their phone calls.

Plaquemines Parish Pres. Nungesser said while visiting Louisiana, Obama "chewed me out" for hurting the President's projected fake 'image' of credibility with facts on the ground. What was he saying? Just the truth as experienced by Floridians in the Keys, that BP refuses to deploy all the people it claims to be 'organizing' for cleanup. The frustrated Plaquemines Parish Pres. Nungesser lashed out: there is "no leadership" and "they let it happen" (4:34 min.) CNN reports the same. Parish Pres. Nungesser said fisherman 'hired' by BP are left unorganized with no calls." "Shame on you BP," he says.

In late June, U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, flying over the oil and viewing BP's non-response, got off his oil-disaster tour flight angry. "It’s criminal what’s going on out there [in Mississippi],"; "This doesn’t have to happen." More than 60 days after the disaster started, he saw no skimmers as oil was going into Mississippi State water. Confirming this was "a scientist onboard, Mike Carron of Northern Gulf Institute, [who] said without skimming, there will be oil" on Mississippi beaches of the mainland shortly. "There’s oil in the Sound and there was no skimming," Carron said. "No coordinated effort." Rep. Taylor said as well: "I'm having a Katrina flashback. I haven't seen this much stupidity, wasted effort, money and wasted resources, since then." The U.S. Representative was shocked and "concerned Coast Guard Cmdr. Jason Merriweather, assigned to Mississippi, doesn’t have the authority to act independently."

However, as this ecological tyranny expands in the United States, the federal government seems both to be banning local self-organizing aid and banning local states from responding--and by doing so encouraging 'disaster justifications' for a national military and an international military 'invasion of help'. Tyranny is always justified with disasters and crises, so tyrants love to encourage their destabilizing creation.

As it bans local response, the Department of Defense approved 17,500 National Guard troops from other states to travel to the Gulf States. It does this while refusing to allow Governors the right to use their own state guard for the same thing.

Furthermore, international troops are being considered by the U.S. to be brought into the Gulf states to police people. Ban local states from responding, while federal gov't troops consider teaming with international troops/workers, policing the USA in an oil disaster?

Currently, the Department of Defense says, other countries' militaries under consideration for being let into the United States during this 'non-response exacerbated disaster' include: Canada, Mexico, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, S.Korea, Spain, and Sweden. Even United Nations teams want into the Gulf states.

(The same foreign response was allowed to occur in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Bush let in foreign military teams into the United States--from Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia into the Gulf States with their technical aid groups, while demoting or stopping local response. Unbelievable, you say? You are simply kept ignorant of what this ecological tyranny has been doing. Go look at the pictures they posted proudly on U.S.'s NORTHCOM's website. Go look.)

So, we have an ecological tyranny waiting for disasters to act to justify itself--disasters that it socially created and let happen by poor regulation administration in the first place. Why would you think that THAT kind of government will help you, when it just harmed you?

While hypocritically parading the "Jones Act" to keep out '25 foreign registered oil skimmer ships'--really owned by a Dallas, Texas banker and merely registered overseas though in the Gulf and already fitted for oil skimming ("no returned calls" he says from Coast Guard or BP), the U.S. ignores other constitutional bases and invites foreign military into U.S. coastal waters. The tyrants running the U.S. wait until a day before Hurricane Alex to bring international military into the Gulf--when it could have invited them in earlier for oil disaster prevention if prevention was their goal. It could have done this over a month ago if prevention of disaster, instead of capitalizing on disaster, was the U.S.'s goal. I am skeptical 'help' was their goal if they wait to 'invite' foreign military until extensive contamination makes clean-up superfluous and a hurricane is already in the Gulf as well. Remember when you were taught that 'inviting a foreign military' into your country (while stopping your own citizens from defending themselves) was the height of treason and tyranny? Well, it still is.

"US accepts international assistance for Gulf spill"

US [only] accepts international assistance in dealing with massive oil spill in Gulf of Mexico [and represses aid from its own States and citizens]

On Tuesday June 29, 2010, 6:43 pm EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is accepting help from 12 countries and international organizations in dealing with the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The State Department said in a statement Tuesday [June 29] that the U.S. is working out the particulars of the help that's been accepted.

The identities of all 12 countries and international organizations were not immediately announced. One country was cited in the State Department statement -- Japan, which is providing two high-speed skimmers and fire containment boom. [While the U.S. tyrant neglects to 'invite' 25 oil skimming ships moored in Texas and unused.]

More than 30 countries and international organizations have offered to help with the spill. The State Department hasn't indicated why some offers have been accepted and others have not."

Instead of only via material pollutions and their protected creation, an ecological tyranny expresses itself in propaganda. It studiously ignores and edits out its own damages. It represses people from talking about its self-created and self-protected damages.

For example, the BP brainwashing department attempts to dominate independent information. BP bought the top Google search result for 'oil spill'. Second, BP ordered its cleanup workers to destroy evidence and to be blind to what they see, and to stop documentation of dead animals and sea life as they clean up.

A BP contract worker said BP told them to avoid taking pictures, and to avoid helping dying/dead animals. The worker said BP knows ocean will destroy the evidence of its crimes.

(Others note this as well, since BP is incinerating endangered live turtles in oil (3:14, video) to destroy the evidence out at sea, interfering with turtle rescues called off because of BP thuggish interference.)

However, one BP worker rejected being a BP propaganda tool. He talked to the media, leading them on a tour of the devastation: "When we found this dolphin filled with oil, oil was just pouring out of it. Saddest darn thing to look at."

More ecological tyranny on the ideological level is how media is curtailed by a degradative, corrupt state protecting its ongoing destruction. Within hours of the now famous oil disaster fly-over video (5:38) by Riverkeeper Alliance member John Wathen on May 7, the FAA imposed a no-fly zone ("no media zone") over much of the Gulf spill area. (FEMA has that tyrannical power as well: to ban local media coverage.)

And Obama lied to the world (what's news about that?) in his speech addressing the oil disaster, by saying "we’re years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid." Totally false. He's lying because his lips are moving.

Additionally, for positive formal institutional news toward recovering a local jurisdictional dominance--taking it away from an ecological tyranny--the Florida Supreme Court a few days ago gave rights to Floridians to sue for destruction of public property instead of only for destruction of their private property.

This is an encouragement for similar collective, democratic, local environmental jurisdictional sovereignty against placeless, external destruction via an formal ecological tyranny that groups like BP take advantage of or other corporations that destroy more capital than they produce:

Florida Supreme Court says tourism and sea-related companies can sue polluters of public waters instead of only sue for damage to private property:

Floridians & Gulf Oil Spill
ABC Channel 20 WCJB
North Central Florida
Jun 18th 2010

"A Florida Supreme Court ruling Thursday [6-17-2010] may have significant implications for future legal action against BP.

The Court overturned a ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeals, by saying that commercial fishermen in Hillsborough County can sue and recover damages from a fertilizer company that polluted the public waters they fish, even though the anglers have no ownership rights in those waters....

Floridians that argue the spill, though in public waters, affects livelihoods such as fishing, tourism, and other sea-related commerce, will have the state’s backing in those claims against BP."

And here is a video of the malfeasance of state ecological tyrannies federally in the USA, where federal officials have the rights to stop local protection pressures or clean-up. This is an intentionally gatekept form of non-action that endangers our health, ecologies, and economies.

Tar balls ashore on the beaches of Seaside, FL, 6-19-2010 as US and Florida without much care for the people or environment
4:10 min.

Oil reaches the beaches of 'planned community' Seaside, Florida on June 16, 2010. Though authorities would rather it was ignored than solve the issue. Coast Guard actively refusing to shut down the beach, and "waiting for BP" to tell them what to do. What about the kids with carcinogenic oil on their bodies? Well, they gave them some paper towels. Beach remained open.

Watershed Court Jurisdictions to Avoid Ecological Tyranny

2010-05-28T18:28:00.008+09:00

Recent news on the BP "Oilpocalypse" reminded me of the sore requirements of another ecological check and balance mentioned in Toward a Bioregional State: court jurisdictions based on nested watersheds.

The principle of watershed jurisdiction was applied in watershed electoral districts discussed earlier here and here. What to do about the oceanic jurisdictions was discussed here.

Watershed jurisdictions are a way to avoid either placeless, corrupt elites gerrymandering election districts or, in this next case clear case of BP, we discuss two things: first, how the BP corporation attempts now to escape judgment from an oil-toxified 'environmental jury of its peers'; and in general, second, how all global corporations are 'legally' allowed to hold over us an ecological tyranny to escape local monitoring by foreign flag registering.

Current 'international law(lessness)' allows stable oil rigs/wells to be registered as 'moving ships'--thus allowing oil rigs to escape ecological self-interest of the local population that feels the externalities.

Global corporations, shippers, and oil rigs all take advantage of the same corrupt framework of false flag or flags of convenience registration. A placeless jurisdiction is an ecological tyranny for all peoples in any particular area.

The Deepwater Horizon drill platform, leased by BP, was owned by a Swiss corporation. It was registered as a 'ship' named the Deepwater Horizon in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Where? This is a tiny, impoverished country in the Pacific Ocean incapable of international monitoring despite 'international law' saying it does. Surely the Marshall Islands failed to monitor or failed to have any local 'ecological self-interest' to monitor toxicity concerns in the Gulf of Mexico, so these international laws encourage an ecological tyranny as well.

These two ways highlight how the degradation of our world is institutional: badly ecologically adapted frameworks degrade our world and set up an ecological tyranny that defends itself from any improvement. Corruption is a formally degradative framework, an ecological tyranny. To maintain that ecological tyranny is why the Swiss company registered its Deepwater Horizon thousands of miles away from the Gulf of Mexico: because there was little chance of any policing of regulations against any ecological tyrannies it might be responsible for--and now it is--though the 'laws' that the degraders arrange keep them protected, keep them as tyrants over the whole planet.

The general point is that an ecological tyranny is a formal jurisdictional framework--and you are living within it. If you want something different, it requires formal institutional changes toward a bioregional state to remove these ecological tyrants and their bad material decisions and bad choices:

First, how is BP taking advantage of this ecological tyranny to keep itself from being punished?

And then, second, how does an ecological tyranny organize a Gulf of Mexico oil rig registration to a 'responsible country' thousands of miles away from the ecological self-interest of the people who experience environmental risk?

Any feedback from the people most damaged in an accident around the Gulf of Mexico--whether because of BP or the Swiss corporation--require removing the formal institutions of our ecological tyranny: integrating into our constitutional thinking more ecological principles of political and legal feedback on a daily basis.

Follow:

First, our case focuses on victimized Louisiana, though it is only one of five state jurisdictional venues of court suits been filed against BP. Many different jurisdictions against the Gulf suffer oil damage from BP--because of BP's actions and inactions both.

However, BP wants to shift all its court suits, judgments, and court jurisdictions to Texas. Most of the oil has hit Louisiana so far. Nothing has hit Texas directly so far.

In terms of watershed jurisdictions, the only environmental lawsuits that should be heard in Texas, are pollution events in three nested watershed catchment areas--#11m #12, and #13 "Watershed Federal Court Districts," lets call them. This is a map of nested watershed "HUC" (hydrological unit codes) for "the United States."

United States is in quotes because some of these larger "Watershed Federal Court Districts" are both U.S./Mexican issues. The ancillary issue, before we continue with BP's shenanigans, implies that the U.S.-Mexico border deserves a common court jurisdiction as well--where borderline-resident persons sharing a larger watershed experience in #13 split artificially by two countries, deserve to have court rights to sue in both Mexico and U.S. courts.

Returning to the BP story, "Louisiana" (inclusive of some areas upstream) would have its own watershed court jurisdiction, labeled #8. All the other Gulf states in teh U.S. affected to the east would be in a single "Watershed Federal Court District #3".

It's scientifically rational to do this with court jurisdictions when it comes to the environment. It's only humanly fair as well, since these are the areas that experience the externalities of the pollution, therefore they should be the judge of suitable compensation and/or punishment.

However, BP is potentially fleeing from its legal responsibilities and already filed court suits in polluted areas in the ongoing aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP is desperate to use its oily tendrils to escape the mess that it made. BP wants: to flee across the watershed border, to "choose its own prosecution," and to choose the jurisdiction under which it will be judged!

Can you think of any potential criminal, personal or organizational, graced with such a corruptible triptych of powers? There is little incentive for environmental recidivist individuals or organizations to improve and to avoid ecological damage in the future, if they are confident they can escape an environmental jury of their peers. Only with a watershed based court jurisdiction, is there a the real world incentive for them to improve bad environmental behavior.

More details on BP's legal moves in our 'ungreen state' of affairs:

July 26, 2010
BP wants Houston judge with oil ties to hear spill cases

MIAMI — Facing more than 100 lawsuits after its Gulf of Mexico oil spill killed 11 workers and threatened four coastal states, oil giant BP is asking the courts to place every pre-trial issue in the hands of a single federal judge in Houston.

"Time to Escape to Texas"

That judge, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, has traveled the world giving lectures on ethics for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a professional association and research group that works with BP and other oil companies. The organization pays his travel expenses.

Hughes has also collected royalties from several energy companies, including ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy, from investments in mineral rights, his financial disclosure forms show. ...

Legal experts say the request for a single judge,...is unusual....

No one has suggested that Hughes — or any judge — would rule a certain way before hearing the evidence [despite it happening quite often enough to unseat 'high judges' before--data from the late Sherman Skolnick removed and jailed two members of the Supreme Court of Illinois on a similar case of judges corrupted by financial connections in 1969]....

The company [BP] wants all of the oil spill lawsuits — at least 98 as of May 21 — to be heard in Houston....BP is facing suits in at least seven different courts in five states, including Florida.

BP requested the judge in papers filed with the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, as part of a larger request to have all pre-trial matters decided in one court....The special panel of judges will decide in July if the BP suits should be consolidated in a single court — and if Hughes should handle the cases.

Shrewd lawyers often try to steer cases to judges viewed as potentially sympathetic to their arguments, said Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, an assistant professor of law at Florida State University.

"Sometimes they will ask for a judge by name," Burch said. "Other times, they are a bit wilier about what they'll ask for, so it looks less blatant."

Other lawyers were surprised that BP was seeking to select its own judge; in both state and federal courts, cases are typically assigned to judges randomly.

"I'm utterly horrified," said David Guest, an environmental lawyer with Earthjustice with decades of experience handling complex pollution cases. "That's not to impugn the integrity of the judge, but something is fundamentally wrong when you're doing a thing like that."

Lawyers for BP referred questions to a spokesman, who did not return calls Wednesday....

Plaintiffs' attorneys have filed their own request to have the BP cases heard in New Orleans.

BP could potentially face hundreds of millions of dollars in claims stemming from what U.S. officials are now calling the worst oil spill in American history. In addition to suits from those injured in the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the company faces a litany of claims from commercial fishermen and others who say the oil spill fouling the Gulf has harmed their businesses.

BP has already paid $29 million to settle more than 12,000 claims, the company said in court papers.

If the outstanding claims against BP are set before Hughes, he will have considerable sway over how those cases are handled, deciding which lawyers will lead the case for the class of plaintiffs, and how the law should be applied. If the cases go to trial, they will be transferred back to their original courts.

For the past two years, Hughes has served as a "distinguished lecturer on ethics" for the American Association of Professional Geologists, a Tulsa-based organization representing 35,000 geologists around the world, most of whom work in the oil and gas industry. During that time, the judge has given 13 speeches for the organization, from Texas to Cape Town, South Africa.

Just days before the rig explosion that triggered the spill off Louisiana's coast, Hughes spoke on a panel at an AAPG convention in New Orleans.

The AAPG pays for Hughes' travel costs from the organization's $32 million charitable foundation, said Larry Nation, an AAPG spokesman. BP does not contribute to the fund that pays for Hughes' travel, though the company has made other donations to the AAPG foundation, Nation said. The judge receives no fees for his speeches.

The AAPG is primarily a scientific organization [and we know how commercially motivated to lie scientific workers can be, for a price], not a trade group, Nation said,....

Geologists who attend the judge's lectures can also earn educational credits that count toward their state licenses, Nation said. Hughes' tenure as AAPG's lecturer on ethics is scheduled to end in July....

Hughes also has dabbled in the oil business himself, leasing the mineral rights on 11 parcels to different oil and gas exploration firms — none of them BP — according to his financial disclosure form filed last year. The report indicates Hughes received between $7,500 and $26,000 in royalties from those leases in 2008.

As a judge, Hughes has handled many cases involving BP and other oil companies — including disputes among oil companies — as have other federal jurists in Houston, a petroleum industry hub.

In one controversial 2002 case, Hughes ruled in favor of oil companies seeking to avoid the $100 million cost of moving their pipelines for a dredging project in the Port of Houston. An appeals court later reversed the judge and said the industry, not the government, was responsible for the cost.

In 2007, Hughes ordered three European oil companies to pay $26 million in fines for paying off Nigerian officials for an offshore drilling expedition — the largest fines ever levied for violating U.S. foreign bribery laws.

Hughes is now overseeing a suit brought by two former auditors with the federal Minerals Management Service, who have accused Royal Dutch Shell of under-reporting almost $4 million in royalties owed to the U.S. government. The case is pending.

Hughes has also managed multi-district litigation in the past, and he oversaw a special docket of asbestos-related lawsuits [how interesting...] in the 1990s."

The comments on that news article on how BP wants to tyrannically choose its own judge has a lot of people upset with BP's "nerve" and "gall." However, this will continue to happen without structural change.

U.S. Constitutional Framer James Madison wrote, paraphrasing and updating: 'we require government (ecological) checks and balances on corruption because men are not (environmental) angels.'

To handle the scale of organized environmental degradation caused by corruption, we require additional ecological checks and balances in many different areas. The bioregional state offers at least 60 additional ecological checks and balances.

One of these are court jurisdictions. Bioregional state court jurisdictions are based on nested watersheds, instead of built from non-environmental frameworks as in most states worldwide. If pollution happens in a certain jurisdiction, it is only right to have the trial in that polluted jurisdiction, or in a jurisdiction that is affected by that pollution.

It is unfair to have that court case transferred out of the affected area, particularly in a case where the petroleum regime has a federal judge associated with it.

The bioregional state's solution to judicial jurisdictions:

Section 17.
The Congress shall have Power...To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court, though only based on single watershed jurisdictions or on Congressionally decided watershed aggregates derived from multiple boundaries of contiguous watersheds based only on the principle of tangible high levels of nestedness within Hydrologic Unit Codes.

Picture these judicial frameworks sliding in:

The second example of an ecological tyranny of 'false flag oil rig and ship registration' has clear formal institutional frameworks that protect the degraders and punish the victims. Seven solutions for oceanic jurisdictions were discussed earlier, here.

June 14, 2010
Foreign flagging of offshore rigs skirts U.S. safety rules

"The Marshall Islands, not the U.S., had the main responsibility for safety inspections on the Deepwater Horizon.

Reporting from Washington — The Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico was built in South Korea.

It was operated by a Swiss company [Transocean] under contract to a British oil firm.

Primary responsibility for safety and other inspections rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a tiny, impoverished nation in the Pacific Ocean.

And the Marshall Islands, a maze of tiny atolls, many smaller than the ill-fated oil rig, outsourced many of its responsibilities to private companies.

Now, as the government tries to figure out what went wrong in the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, this international patchwork of divided authority and sometimes conflicting priorities is emerging as a crucial underlying factor in the explosion of the rig.

Under International law, offshore oil rigs like the Deepwater Horizon are treated as ships, and companies are allowed to "register" them in unlikely places such as the Marshall Islands, Panama and Liberia — reducing the U.S. government's role in inspecting and enforcing safety and other standards.

"Today, these oil rigs can operate under different, very minimal standards of inspection established by international maritime treaties," said Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Some offshore drilling experts, as well as some survivors of the explosion that led to the massive spill, say foreign registration also permitted a confusing command structure and understaffing — factors that may have contributed to the disaster.

Senior members of Congress — including Oberstar and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.) — have begun looking into the inspection and staffing issues.

The House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation will hold a hearing Thursday on foreign-flagged rigs in the Gulf of Mexico [and how it contributes to an ecological tyranny].

Different types of rigs are classified differently, and the Marshall Islands assigned the Deepwater Horizon to a category that permitted lower staffing levels.

"Over the years, the manning dwindled down and down," said Douglas Harold Brown, chief mechanic aboard the Deepwater Horizon, who had been assigned to the floating drilling rig since shortly after it was manufactured in 2000. "I believe that safety was compromised by this," he said in an interview."

Brown's lawyer and others say the Marshall Islands licensed the Deepwater Horizon in a way that allowed rig operator Transocean Ltd. to place an oil drilling expert — the so-called offshore installation manager — ahead of a licensed sea captain in making decisions on the day of the explosion.

The dual command structure created confusion that delayed an effective response to the growing crisis aboard the Deepwater Horizon, he and others allege.

...

A deepwater oil rig floats above the well, connected by thousands of feet of pipe, and is kept in position by thrusters and elaborate navigational systems.

Since World War II, thousands of ships and rigs from the U.S. and other industrialized countries have been registered in less-developed nations like the Marshall Islands.

Some members of Congress are expressing concern about the Marshall Islands and other countries that outsource their inspection responsibilities to private companies. Coast Guard officials confirm that more rigorous inspection procedures apply to the relatively small number of rigs registered in the U.S.

A foreign vessel will be reviewed by the Coast Guard, but the inspection is relatively cursory, relying on inspection reports prepared by outside firms that have been paid directly by the owners of the vessel.

The federal Minerals Management Service, which also has a role in overseeing offshore oil operations, deals only with issues "below the waterline" of the floating rig. It was not responsible for rig staffing, command structure or other above-water operations.

John Konrad, a licensed captain who publishes a maritime blog and is consulting with survivors, said oil rigs should be under the command of licensed sea captains.

"On the Deepwater Horizon you had the guy who does the drilling plans able to make the call on safety," Konrad said.

Such dual command structures would not be accepted for U.S.-flagged operations, experts say.

The Deepwater Horizon captain testified to investigators last month that he conferred with the drilling manager before he attempted to disconnect the rig. By the time a crew member decided on his own to push the emergency disconnect, it was too late.

Kennedy, the spokesman for Transocean, said, "Having two complementary positions that reflect the dual functionality of the rig, as the Horizon did, provides a clear but collaborative chain of command that has been employed by the industry for decades."

But Steven Gordon, a maritime lawyer in Houston representing Brown, six other survivors and the family of one of the 11 workers killed in the blast, said, "This course of action cost men their lives."

"It led to a jumble of disorganization on the Deepwater Horizon at the moment when organization was needed the most," he said.

Conclusion

The common localist moral of these two stories of placeless environmental tyranny is that instead of only 'the polluter pays,' the polluted jurisdiction is the area that has 'paid' (as a victim first) and thus deserves first jurisdiction, naturally.

From the first story highlighting the ecological tyranny taken advantage of by BP, instead, any preexisting county judges would have a novel watershed based jurisdiction on environmental lawsuits extending around them, and sometimes some parts of their square-drawn county would be under another judge from that point on. It's the only ecologically rational option for court proceedings, unless you want more environmental degradation and systemic corruption.

There was another corrupt outcome to a switch of jurisdiction that removed the lawsuit against Dick Cheney that he was ineligible to stand for Vice President in 2000 because he and the Presidential Candidate came from the same State, which is illegal in the U.S. The judge venue was transferred out of the location where it was residing first, into Texas where Bush and Cheney were claiming to be residents simultaneously, and the Texas venue of jurisdiction found, to make a long story short, that the U.S. law failed to apply to the U.S. political elites who can be effectively overlord criminals without the checks and balances of the bioregional state.

For the second story, instead, watershed jurisdictional principles could be done on the oceans by removing many forms of corrupt formal institutions that encourage environmental degradation on the high seas:

This could be done via:

1. An oceanic coast guard: only for policing environmental issues, fisheries technology usage, and pelagic preserves on the high seas.

2. #1 implies a removal of all flags of convenience. Thus, there should be one global shipping registry; the removal of all near criminal "flags of convenience" would be beneficial because the former encourages organized crime, drug running, and shell corporation protections from any crimes they commit in another countries waters. Plus, flags of convenience are a form of environmental risk as well, as made clear by the Jule 2003 article in The Ecologist on how with their lack of policing or investigatory power, shippers (and oil corporations) have basically let their ship/rig tonnage stay in service until it rots without required maintenance or monitoring. Particularly on liquid carriers, energy carriers, or on oil rigs, leaving false flags for oil rig tyrants is a formal institutional recipe for their ecological tyranny that creates oil slicks and long term ocean damage.

Perversely, the whole "flags of convenience" framework has gotten so corrupt that even complete landlocked states like Bolivia claim to have the power to "register and police international ships"! Sure. I'm sure the international shippers or oil rig corporations using Bolivian or Marshall Island registrations quake at the thought of these impoverished countries coming after them.

In short, as a solution, all international shipping should be registered with only one body, and policed separately by this oceanic coast guard. This removal of all flags of convenience and their "race to the bottom" of ever lowering standards of registration and policing of registration would be highly beneficial to cleaning up the oceans from the point of view of the shipping and oil rig trades. Particularly, oil rigs should be removed from the 'mobile ship' category as a example of high corruption that has encouraged environmental degradation.

To keep oil rigs in this category--without local territorial state policing jurisdictions--has created a context for flags of convenience expanding systemic risk in the shipping fleet tonnage or oil rig tonnage in the oceans, and it encourages organized crime and environmental tyrants at the same moment.

The registers know that the states of registration are in many cases unable to police their licenses. It's a huge joke, and the victim is the environment at large and through that it punishes the health of us all.

These novel "skull and bones" pirate flags of convenience have been flown quite a while in other words--deceptively being the flags of a handful of tiny statelets across the world used as flags of convenience for hiding the really big fish shippers of countries that use them, when tyrants want some form of removal of legal liability for what would hardly be tolerated in their home countries, on land.

A side issue would allow for subsidiary nation state policing to aid the oceanic coast guard in that nation's waters. Only with this allowance, for a working agreement for a 'gray area' of jurisdictional overlap in this near-coastal oceanic jurisdiction area, will it work. This allows a double check and balance: if the land-based state regulation is corrupt, people can always appeal to the international coast guard. On the other hand, if the international coast guard is corrupt, people can appeal to the land jurisdiction. The point is to give the local groups impacted as many venues as possible to avoid the gatekeeping of an ecological tyranny over them.

I would recommend that any country found corrupt in these frameworks should be banned (at least for a number of years) from all future shipping/registration related jobs in their own waters, as more, for a period, is passed to the international venue. When it is better, it is passed back to the local or international venue of registration simultaneously.

2. complete removal of frameworks of subsidies of the age-old (and outdated) maritime state (discussed here) that have only caused the self-destruction of the oceans through subsidies for increasingly supply-side biased large scale high technological fishing. The maritime state is subsidizing ocean fisheries into a dead abyss.

3. perhaps running something like a Grameen bank for funding the sustainable boat building designs for smaller sustainable social relations of fishing or energy production offshore for Third World areas (and First World areas). Along the lines of Michael Bradley's design styles mentioned offhandedly in his book Dawn Voyage, or along the many ideas in the energy category of Commodity Ecology.

4. To make #1 clear, and to elaborate, this implies policing international marine reserves and the high seas against illegal technological fisheries use on the waves; serious reduction of seine, drift micro-filament netting and industrial fishing; longlines, trawlers, and drift nets as described above should be banned as technologies of fishing because they are closer to technologies of clear cutting or and strip mining; if that fails to politically fly work on it slowly first with perhaps only licensing all such technologies, with later capacities of revoking or arresting those on the high seas for illegal fishing behavior, and then, slowly shrinking all the licensing of these down to zero, combined with aid to reequip those thrown out with different technological bases of fishery. Punishment is hardly the issue. The issue is successfully making the transition from unsustainable fishing practices to more sustainable (and efficient) technologies employed in them as well as help recover the fishery base that provides even more jobs.

5. Countries could fund the oceanic coast guard through a small percentage of their catch or offshore profits in general, for a start. Then it could be self-funding: as the catch gets better with the sustainable security, the budget is rewarded as well; fish hauls get administered physically in such a way that the oceanic coast guard or the territorial state's equivalent (perhaps a dual team to prevent corruption in one or the other) measures it and will get its .5% percentage cut of the catch profits for maintaining its fleet, crews, and perhaps its "Grameen style" shipping bank for aiding technological conversion (though the latter could be done by others, feasibly).

6. Only to reiterate, the weight and measurement frameworks of all internationally registered shipping will be set by uniform standards, instead of multiple different (and unpoliced standards) under flags of convenience that has led to a "race to the bottom" on safety standards, environmental standards, and fishing standards. These standards make #5 possible to generate as well.

7. Perhaps, for the consumer, the oceanic coast guard could have a branch that was based on validating that shippers or fishers can advertise successful sustainable practices, with a label, thus giving such practices consumer financial support (and getting the producers interested in aiding the consumer with more information). It will be as well a mass political support by providing the consumer with more information about sustainable fishing practices of their operations over other unsustainable operations. This could be a series of different oceanic-to-consumer logos for different issues (like "sustainably caught, verified", the type of netting used ("caught without a longline/drift net" logo; "non trawler" caught logo; or "bycatch reduction bait used"; "this energy unit supplied in this way, etc."), etc. This is already being done in part by some non-profit certification organizations.

These were just seven interlocking ideas for how to apply our ecological self-interest in good environmental outcomes to bioregional motifs on the sea. Before that I gave several ways to put interlocking jurisdictions into place on the watershed level on land.

Remembering that most of the planet is ocean, and as the unsustainability crisis is already on our collective doorstep, something like this should be done as soon as possible.

If you enjoy the way things are, continue to watch well-organized environmental degradation sponsored, protected, and subsidized by your government. And paid for by your children in money and in their health.

If you are interested in change, check out Toward a Bioregional State.

The point is without structural change, this will keep happening and ecological tyrants will keep ruling badly and making environmental degradation. Demand a Constitutional amendment putting environmental based court suits in watershed jurisdiction, and demand the removal of 'flags of convenience', false flag ecoterrorism from corporations.

We live within a non-ecological formal structure that encourages eco-criminals to reward themselves to damage our health, ecology, and economics.

A bioregional state would provide the ecological checks and balances on degradative tyrannical power.

Ecological Tyranny: The Origins of Corruption and Environmental Degradation in Unrepresentative Raw Material Regimes

2010-05-13T09:05:00.012+09:00

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” --John Godfrey Saxe, American poet (1816 – 1887)

“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.” -- Phil Angell, Monsanto’s Director of Corporate Communications, New York Times, 10/25/98

'Tony Hayward, the beleaguered chief executive of BP, has claimed its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is "relatively tiny" compared with the "very big ocean"'. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." Hayward insisted that deep-water drilling would continue [to be an ecological tyranny over us all]..."

John Waythen, Hurricane Creek Riverkeeper with Waterkeeper Alliance: May 7th airplane flight footage over Gulf oil disaster area: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8JHSAVYT0 (5 min.)

The only comment I object to in Mr. Waythen's commentary is "We have to have fuel. We have to have gasoline." On the contrary, there are many options. We have gasoline because of a corrupt political regime that, in an ongoing manner, demotes other working options. Environmental degradation is a political regime, and thus requires political solutions.

To get to sustainability we are required to remove the corruption called an ecological tyranny. An ecological tyranny is a form of politics that enforces environmental degradation and protects it from being removed whether by politics or by market forces, respectively, by gatekeeping by corrupt politicians and gatekeeping by demoting consumer material and technological options. Currently, we live worldwide under informal ecological tyrannies that destroy our health, our ecologies, and our economies--and even destroy the corruptive frameworks of the politicians that protect them.

An ecological tyranny is an unrepresentative raw material regime. There are better ways. There can be representative raw material regimes, chosen by a more representative political process and more representative political institutions.

Continuing the theme of the previous post about extending checks and balances on power beyond the state institutions, what are the basic issues of degradative corruption that the bioregional state aims to solve?

The bioregional state aims to solve unrepresentative raw material regimes, substituting for them more representative raw material regimes. To do this, removal of forms of political gatekeeping is required. The environmental implications of political gatekeeping have material choice, technological choice, and environmental condition implications. Thus, such political gatekeeping can create an ecological tyranny.

There are two levels of ecological tyranny described below: the ecological tyranny of one raw material regime dominating all consumer choices in a category or its market, while demoting other frameworks toward sustainability politically; and the ecological tyranny of one raw material regime corrupting various forms of state politics, scientific workers, banks or financial lending institutions, and corporations into supporting an environmentally destructive flow and keeping out more sustainable flows that already exist.

These two levels of ecological tyranny require a detailed discussion of how particular politically chosen materials are threaded through society in institutional practices instead of discussing materials as if they were only ruled by equally interchangeable forms of abstract, timeless, market behavior or ruled by equally abstract conceptions of Marxist class warfare either.

On the contrary, it will be argued that evidence is already in: that there is nothing called abstract market behavior or generally abstract commodities and as a result nothing called abstract class behavior--there is raw material specific political and market behavior. However, I argue we can have abstract, general historical principles about particular materials (instead of abstract principles about abstract materials or abstract classes)--in how in their particulars they flow through human societies and interact with each other comparatively, historically and politically.

Methodologically, I use an inductive analysis of consumption instead of one based on mere philosophical assumptions of macro-reductionist class analysis or micro-reductionistic economic analysis.

It is based on aggregate case observations of many different particular consumptive flows and human behavior in relation to them as the basis of theory instead of using deductive, timeless theories of economics about philosophical constructs of abstract commodities, abstract human behavior, and abstract classes.

It is important to ground discussion of materials in empirical and historical case studies and fine-grained institutional analysis. Otherwise, we are substituting (or merely blending) a metaphysics of the abstract market or abstract classes for (and with) the metaphysics of the abstract environment without much empirical improvement. None of these three abstracts arguably exists materially beyond their conceptual use.

From this method, what is key is respecting that consumptive flows are particular, politicized flows that are unable to be reduced to any abstract analysis. It is an independent variable capable of making causal, dependent changes in both economics and politics.

There are two levels of these political flows.

Once a particular infrastructure is in place as a status quo and it meets market challengers in history in a free market, it first can use its status quo economic power to strangle market competition through its institutional structures and, secondly, it can use its political allies (i.e., use its political power).

This can explain why there is so much green technology available though little is applied. This topic is addressed later.

One of the difficulties of getting to sustainability is corrupt politics of a crony unrepresentative choice of material status quo, instead of a lack of technological and material options or instead of blaming consumers either. The issue is the gatekept and repressed lack of options--options that already exist, sometimes for generations.

This clientelistic point is typically ignored in economic theories based on assumed abstracts called commodities, markets, and classes despite a world full of many clear instances where materials are forms of political, repressive power against other materials, technologies, and social formations, instead of being abstract economic repression alone.

This power is expressed through its consumptive clientelism--how groups connected to such materials can dominate and sculpt flows of particular materials or dominate aggregate consumer use to forebear against economic/political change in certain consumer use categories (over other choices).

This is an interscientific method to explore and to conceptualize how common political power aspects of consumption have filtered or winnowed human political economic choices of our varied biophysical environment of choices to political goals of secure clientelism and secure wealth forms--making them political infrastructures causing environmental degradation politically insulated from any path change.

This environmental indeterminist view argues materials can be integrated into social analysis in two levels: through at least 90 kinds of markets (or distinct "social use sets of materials" without any "abstract theory of markets" ever possible) where materials are in contention with each other only within a specific set for the same position of use, as well as (for a generality) through having common characteristics of how the politics of hegemonic versus subaltern social relationships are reproduced or altered in socio/material conflict with each other in these sets. This merges competitive human agency and structural perspectives effortlessly.

Both Smithian or Marxist views abstract to inconsequentiality actual historical cases of singular material flows and their changes: one of them instills in the believer a social philosophy of abstract, fair, equilibrium-based, depoliticized commodities and their market relations; the other instills in the believer a social philosophy of equally abstract, unfair, inequitable class conflict of ownership relations of abstract wealth. Both ignore that once singular materials are historically established in use, they are a form of clientelistic power, hardly entirely a fair market phenomenon and hardly entirely an unfair repressive power. It is in the middle: a form of guided representativeness or unrepresentativeness in material selection to achieve consumptive ambivalence with repression of options simultaneously.

Typically, we are offered a pabulum of "just so" philosophical stories attempting to describe all commodities and economic behavior from the safe distance of mathematical economics. This distant gaze is connected closely with morality tales about the godlike neutrality of the supposed blind justice (or injustice) of the market when it may only be nearsightedness and blurred vision from the lack of experimental observational methods in approaching commodities and consumption without the abstract filters of Smithian economic preconceptions or Marxist class conflict.

Instead, real commodity histories are unpleasant to witness because so much interest-based politics (for all social interests) goes on clearly around certain commodities though people tend to look away analytically from the political sociological aspects of particular raw material flows. We are generally sold only a clean, abstracted, well-packaged casing of the final product whether sausages, laws, or economic ideologies in relation to “commodities” or the grand terms “the environment,” “the economy,” and “the origins of power.”

I argue that peeking in the kitchen for the recipe of specific material policy can contradict many ideas of neutral economics or Marxist thought--while improving them both. It can challenge the Smith-inspired functional theory of the “greater good” served in certain material policy by explicitly noting whom it serves more than others in organizations and consumers alike in clientelistic fashion against other options, as well it can improve preconceptions about Marxist inspired forms of “alienation” beyond the mere work site to how consumers and others are alienated from sustainability by others’ non-local unoptimal material choices imposed upon them. It can merge both economic traditions to analyze politicized consumptive infrastructures.

Many people, technologies, materials and ideas are conveniently put out of the way to have stable regimes of political raw material flows that define themselves as ‘sane,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘neutral outcomes’--that however depend on their hegemonic power by processing, creating, and managing to label and to marginalize material and technological heretics to keep particular durable market hegemonies of ideologies and materials in place as legitimate powers. Alternatives exist (in thought and material practices) though they are conveniently no where to be seen or no where to be discussed to maintain the power/knowledge of commodity choice.

The case of corrupt petroleum raw material regimes against its working energy alternatives and the case of the equally corrupt ‘tree paper regime’ against hemp are politicized discursive, material-institutional practices (with their expected hegemonic power to create or ban heretics institutionally to survive, instead of its power based on claims of ‘market success’) and are very clear politicized infrastructures for example.

I will introduce five interrelated terms to reorient our ideas of consumption to capture the political and organizational alliance aspects of material flows. The five are [1] ‘consumptive infrastructure,’ [2] an environmental definition of ‘the state’ as a contentious regime of political material flows, [3] ‘raw material substrates,’ [4] ‘raw material substrate sets’ and [5] ‘raw material regimes.’ These are the bare minimum for understanding our ecological tyranny and how to change it.

[1] Consumptive Infrastructure

The first term I propose is ‘consumptive infrastructure’ because it is a methodological corrective to economic reductionist analysis of consumer behavior or firm behavior as universally and simply atomistic, anomic, and as individuals following economic rationales among abstract commodities. I prefer this term “consumptive infrastructure” more than consumptive flow because it is a wider term that includes consumptive flow. The wider concentration here is on the dual 'institutional and built environment'-to-consumptive flow that is infrastructural: the durable chosen technical infrastructures, material flows, and politicized institutional practices combined. All are variables that sculpt the consumptive flows, and are more influential and more interesting instead of the flow by itself. An overconcentration on the consumptive flow misses these three interactive issues of durable social issues sculpting all consumptive flows.

There is already much on politicized technical infrastructures though it is required noting that technical frameworks lock to particular material handling flows instead of manipulating abstract materials. They are an artistic hybrid, a particular technical/material relationship interacting as a single infrastructure, instead of any sense of there being an abstract infrastructure or any sense we can discuss technology or materials respectively as separate.

[2] An Environmental Definition of 'The State' as a Contentious Regime of Political Material Flows

Keeping a political consumptive infrastructure perspective in mind, and seeing the graph above as a trellis to be filled by particular case studies and their variables, there are many other positional sites than simply the state institutions’ legal approval and applied science institutional practices that manipulate consumption and its power/knowledge/commodity choice relationships.

Particular consumptive infrastructures require jury-rigging in many other different positional venues as a common institutional alliance to get a raw material substrate to ‘work’ for some interest(s) (plural) as an imposed political consumptive infrastructure.

Four cross-cultural, strategic positional sites in political consumptive infrastructural analysis are offered: [1] the particular formal institutional and formal policy orientations of the state and their material/technical/infrastructural practices, [2] of science and their material/technical/infrastructural practices, [3] of consumptive organizations (corporations, co-operatives, community gardens, etc. all would fit the positional issue) and their (different) material/technical/infrastructural preferences, and [4] of financial organizations (corporations, co-operative lending banks, private banks, Islamic banks, state banks, etc.,--all would fit the positional issue and tweak the politics of the institutional power/knowledge/commodity choice differently) and their material/technical/infrastructural preferences. These four positional areas of any society work either in allied unison or in contention in constructing the material, technical, and infrastructural particularities of consumption.

In this alliance, a shared material alliance and a shared ideological alliance can flow and interact through these sites of potential political contention as an informal alliance to hold or to smooth the same policy with regard to certain materials over others. Originally, the woolsack was placed in the English House of Lords by the English king so the “separate” debates over financial policy would keep in mind what the king wanted: the defense and enhancement of his preferred financial instrument and a large portion of his budget at the time: the English woolen raw material economy. Political contention is manifested over exactly what type of formal institutions and formal policies, practices, and material/technical preferences appear as a regime in these ‘contentious, empty positions’ of state, science, consumption, and finance in societies--with the issue being over what raw materials these institutions support and discuss (or leave voiceless and deny) in their administration over aggregate others.

For sustainability interests, comparable evaluations can be made. These political consumptive infrastructures can either be clientelistic and unrepresentative or representative enfranchised varieties with democratized input on materials and technologies. Sustainability requires demotion of material and technical core areas of private political consumptive clientelism. These consumptive evaluations are based on how publicly representative or responsive (or unrepresentative or repressively clientelistic) the state, science, finance, and consumptive organizations are discursively and materially with respect to material, technical, and institutional practices of commodities and their choices.

One can empirically research both physical issues clientelism and democracy/representation (degree of externalities) associated with particular material choices and the types of institutional practices (from repression to participation) involved in formulating materials/technology policy as well as discourse analysis of the productions of these institutions compared and evaluated for what is voiced and what is left voiceless. This repression or reflectivity is the difference of degree the populace at large are consulted or are enfranchised in different institutional practices to provide feedback against unsustainable developmental potentials built from alliances of unrepresentative consumptive choice, discourses, and institutional decisions across the “SSFC” (state, science, finance, and consumptive organizations in a particular material case).

This takes views of commodities away from mostly economic reductionist and micro-reductionist analysis into a view of a planned and implemented political infrastructure in certain materials and technologies, protected and sponsored against challengers as a form of unrepresentative clientelism or as a more representative sense of policies of wider consumptive choices toward sustainability.

By following the commodity or material choice in question (and what institutional practices and decision frameworks of material regime led to the choices of policy,) this is really materialism instead of the philosophical materialism of Marx--limited artificially to analyze only one point of ownership (the consumptive position) and limited by his putting analysis in an entirely philosophical binary inherited from Hegel instead of a binary even materially demonstrated.

Cases of how materials are threaded through or hamstrung across these four main positional sites become a common research interest. The same material and organizational support is knitted through the whole consumptive infrastructure.

This is the first environmental perspective on defining ‘the state’ as a changing series of biased (or representative) consumptive alliance and clientelism organizations stretched between formal state institutions, scientific institutions, consumptive institutions, and financial institutions in their material practices and policy choices of materials, technologies, and infrastructural investments.

Either representative political alliances (via more plural democratic inputs on material choices about evaluating externalities) or unrepresentative political alliances (biased/hegemonic and degradative) would use the same four positional areas of state institutions, applied science, consumptive organizations and finance to network together versions and visions in certain materials through formal policies.

The stories of native autonomous amaranth (and its planting opposition in South America by the wheat-growing Spanish conquistadors interested in an alienated and clientelistic peasantry), aspartame, U.S./U.K. water fluoridation (while all of the major Western European countries reject it on health and ethical grounds), lead additives in gasoline, or genetically modified crop introductions can familiarize the reader with how various systemic power biases become a political regime first (not an economic regime first) that is generated out of certain institutional practices through their organizations’ discourses and choices of materials over aggregate populations without market demand. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its ‘update’ by Karen Steingraber, Living Downstream (1997) both are about the institutionalization of biased choices of herbicides/pesticides materials from certain military-institutional and supply-side choices first instead of consumer demand--and the discourse creations and cultural defamations in defense of critique, as mystifications generated by powerful institutional actors. Both books are an excellent (re)introduction to orient ourselves to political consumptive infrastructures.

It is hardly my intention to imply that only certain materials exhibit political consumptive infrastructures.

I only imply here that these written treatments recommended above are clearer than others about data showing the general phenomena of political consumptive infrastructures as built from alliances of institutional practices first imposed instead of derived from markets and ownership first and later leading to institutionalization. Marx who turned Hegel on his head has to be turned on his head once more to avoid his presumption of our economics instituting a ‘superstructure’ instead of the more demonstrable ‘superstructure’ causing (and changing over time) and defending ownership patterns as political alliances that change over time as well. This is closer to the historical record instead of one causing the other or visa versa as a timeless statement.

Sometimes opposed, sometimes allied, political and economic power require being historically specified in certain cases instead of defended philosophically by timeless foundation statements as Marx attempted to argue with causality always going one way of economics causing politics in the abstract. Sometimes politics causes economics, and any pattern of their interactions are always in particular material alliances versus other organizational forms and material choices as the warfare medium: different versions of clientelism against others, some more representative than others. Sometimes these clientelisms are rejected wholesale.

To rephrase Marx, there are six types of alienation involved in consumptive materials.

1) Instead of merely the worker being alienated from the object or the result of his production, whole societies can be alienated in material issues by small powerful material regimes of a few people with political support of major institutions for their material choice; the consumer is alienated from the object or the result of his consumption because of its externalities, and the consumer is alienated from their choice of materials in a gatekept and winnowed form of supply side politics as it gets larger and moves against demand’s interests of consumption. This is the principle of politicized ‘supply versus demand’ as scale increases that is discussed elsewhere.

2) Instead of merely alienation arising inside productive activity itself, it is hardly limited to productive activity. There is nothing categorically special about productive activity that shows more alienation than other forms of political unrepresentation down the whole politicized consumptive infrastructure and its institutional alliances when oriented toward alienation/clientelism instead of representation. Alienation at root is hardly an ‘economic’ issue; it is a political issue across many different institutional sites either oriented better toward representation and sustainability or oriented poorly toward clientelism/alienation and unsustainability. There is nothing particular special or unique that Marx identified in his production node of alienation. It was one of many political-organizational nodes in a raw material consumptive path of environmental flows which Marx falsely framed as ‘economic’ because of his reductionistic intent to analyze one particular venue of political conflict and extrapolate it to the rest of society’s institutional forms which can instead show a variety of different orientations of representation or clientelism/alienation at the same moment potentially. Instead of thus a class warfare based reductionism on one production site in the larger institutionalized consumer flow of materials, there is an organizational design warfare occurring throughout all positions of the consumptive path over the degree of representation and sustainability of geographic self-interest of the organizational form, or the degree of unrepresentation, clientelism, gatekeeping, alienation and unsustainability in the organizational form that ignores geographic self-interest.

3) Instead of because of external labor, man externalizes himself (Self-alienation), it depends on how representative are the organizational frameworks in which labor and the whole gamut of consumption takes place--some organizations representative than clientelistic/alienating others. Yes, Marx identified a form of unrepresentative clientelism as a form of self-alienation though there is a difference in representative, mutually beneficial clientelism and unrepresentative clientelism that is alienation. All clientelism is not alienation. Some is. Some is not.

4) Instead of people alienating themselves from each other only through external labor, the alienation is on the level of choices (what kinds instead of all)--some more unrepresentative and unsustainable and some more representative and sustainable. Thus instead of categorically timeless, the alienation is due to external material choices and technical productions choices that are out of sync with particular ecological and sustainable ‘species-being’ situations which would either lead to a mutual lack of alienation versus mutual self-alienation between people. This is an alienation of all species life: an alienation of a person from himself/herself, an alienation of a person from other people, and an alienation of a person's particular ecological self-interest, i.e., an alienation of their interest in being a member of a particular region in which they encourage its durability or undermine it through the choices of materials and technology optimized for their ecological self-interest. Additionally, there is thus a wider social and cross-species geographic alienation, shared across species in an area, instead of only Marx’s individual creativity is what is marginalized in particular state/urbanist supply-side consolidations. Regions are alienated under unsustainability. These unrepresentative state “SSFC” relationships lead to unsustainability and thus alienate particular regions from political voice and material, technical, and organizational optimal choice--whether urban or rural areas or both--in the rush to integrate only clientelistic consumers politically into clientelistic/alienating choices of materials, technologies, and organizations that support an environmentally and consumptively alienating regime built from themselves as individualized, alienated consumers while demoting politically and economically the institutionally durable forms of geographic representation of consumption that would represent all species being in a particular region, instead of alienate all species beings in a particular region.

5) Thus, it is hardly ‘capitalism’ as a strange abstract that is causing the difficulty--an abstract derived from Marx’s reductionism gaming the system of his analysis instead of a wider materialism than productionism that would show the difficulties with alienation/clientelism are a society-wide embedded politicized raw material regime of alientating and clientelistic unrepresentative materials, technologies, and organizational forms pressuring people into alienating/clientelistic positions of others choices--instead of within external material, technological and organizational forms that would be involved with more representing-clientelistic material relationships. It is a cross-organizational political framework instead of an economic one at root holding people in alienation/clientelism. It is a political one of poor social choices biased toward supply versus demand, unsustainability, and self-destruction in the long term.

6) Thus the politics of unrepresentative state-elite-led environmental degradation and their material, technical, and organizational pressures to integrate people via alienation/clientelism versus a building movement for environmental improvement through more geographically-sensitive optimal choices of material, technical, and organizationally representative clientelism have been the core ‘green’ dynamic of world history. The whole dynamic is green versus gray in world history. I challenge the whole Eurocentric modernist British economics/Marxist idea of different eras. Instead, different ‘eras’ show the same dynamic, past or present, at ever-wider scales of the same process. A second reductionism is the historical misspecification that Marx and all modernists perpetrated when they talked of ‘capitalism’ supposedly replacing ‘feudalism.’ Instead modernists were talking merely of the early stages of a larger ‘feudalization’ (or privatization--a state-supported private material, technical, and organizational clientelism and alienation) extending larger than previous forms.

[3] Raw Material Substrates and [4] Raw Material Substrate Sets'

Raw material substrates are the (estimated) 90 general positional frameworks of consumption for different social uses. They are empty social positions of consumptive use, chosen to be filled by a particular raw material. Raw material substrate sets are the potential gamut of choices of raw materials for the same social positional utilities of consumption into which many various consumptive items would ‘fit,’ each of them with different physical/biological characteristics that would influence the ‘tweak’ or look of various social aspects of consumption.

A case example of a raw material substrate set is textiles, in particular looking at comparisons across cotton, wool, and silk which is what Marx should have done as a materialist instead of adopting British falsely abstract ideas about commodities in general. Despite being the same presumed abstract textile industry, the three materials have radically different (and historically durable) social morphologies, social stratification regimes (different levels of proletarianized work organization), organizational sociologies, technological comportments and scale potentials directly caused by different biophysical and supply characteristics of the chosen thread in how this affects urban industrialization differences, proletarianization differences, and political capital ownership and control differences.

Every raw material of human use can potentially hold a raw material substrate position, in set-based competition. Any of them could be chosen for a consumptive infrastructure. For example, we have the raw material substrate set position for textiles, the raw material substrate set position for agricultural staples and the raw material substrate set position for building materials.

[larger image]

Others would be the raw material substrate position set for energy--a society’s set-based choices. Coal, oil, wood, solar power, nuclear power, compressed air car engines (clean air in and clean air out--no pollution or combustion; mass manufactured in India from 2007), or split-water hydrogen power (with no waste or pollution except the same water once more, Japanese manufacturers are ready; Philippine inventors like Dinkel are repressed; American inventors like Stan Meyer ended up with international patents, though dead in a U.S. jail once he started to work on water engine conversions with a local automotive dealer.) All would all be considered contenders in the set for the same general position of raw material substrate choices(s) for energy supply.

As in the textiles excerpt above, each would tweak the position and organizational politics in the above four areas of ‘the state’ in their own case-specific direction. As such, each material in contention for the position of social use would be associated with various and different state, science, consumptive, and financial sponsorships, attempting to promote themselves and demote challengers politically and institutionally.

See this link for more discussion.

[5] Raw Material Regimes

Raw material regimes join all the above concepts. They are infrastructures of informal/formal pressures and simultaneously public/private political alliances used to institute select materials and interests over others along the raw material substrate path of institutional politics. A raw material regime is a secure informal consumptive administration framework that involves demoting other (or promoting/protecting) choices through three areas: formal institutions, formal policies, and informal political pressures.

Additional to these three areas of political institutional practices of materials, there are three infrastructural positional levels of any durably orchestrated raw material regime: institutionalization, legalization, and legitimation--suggesting both how they are durable or challenged and changed.

Institutionalization of a Raw Material Regime

Institutionalization of a raw material regime involves two distinct levels of social embeddedness of raw material use: (1) meso-organizational and macro-organizational habit (satisficing behaviors of firms, particularly (1.1) due to technological ‘built infrastructure’ investment in previous fixed capital requiring material flow deliveries in bulk to make the organization’s scale profitable and durable in this manner and (1.2) via the path of how technological manipulation typically is used at supply-side ideological scales as a strategy or excuse to fix specific material pre-choice capacities physically into dedicated machinery without capable of being adapted later to changing supply contexts. The infrastructure is built to require a certain material use, and that use in bulk as well. It only fits that material, hand in a glove.

(A counter example or exceptions that prove the supply side ideological rule would be infrastructures that can preserve choice like the ‘flex fuel’ engines in history that let the consumer decide the fuel instead of being decided upon by the engine makers beforehand: like the current Brazilian automotive industry, the early 20th century original multi-biofuel Diesel engines, or Paul Pantone’s GEET (Global Environmental Energy Technology) fuel processor that runs on any waste hydrocarbons though 80% water without any carbon exhaust and more oxygen extruded than came into the machine).

Either way--whether supply-side informed that removes choice or demand-side informed that preserves choice--all infrastructural investments institutionalize particular choices of raw material flow relationships specific to the technology or built environment at hand.

The second level of institutionalization of a raw material regime is (2) the micro-level aggregate consumer or individual habit. This is either the laborer’s or consumer’s ‘consumptive familiarity’ or symbolic association with the material, instead of a presumed daily-conducted search for material optimality in market relations.

These are the macro/meso and aggregate micro levels of institutionalization, respectively, working interactively in alliance or opposition depending on the case.

This enculturation of use is always of particular raw materials over others--associated with organizational and/or individual habit. This ‘habit’ side of use comes from satisficing behaviors in a raw material search strategy. Disagreeing with those who put economic habit in a residual category of “past, traditional” economic rationality, more modern day action is habitual instead of rational calculating than most would surmise.

Habit is arguably a far more important issue due to the larger-scale consumption of the present, in our consumptive infrastructures that calls forth more meso and macro institutional political pressures upon winnowing micro consumer choices, than in a supply-side politically marginalized past.

Since consumption, particularly on the individual level is so involved in ‘comfort’ issues, identity/status issues, ‘escapist’ issues, laziness, or satisfaction out of sheer habit, once consumption is institutionally ‘locked in’ then consumers in aggregate can have incredible connections to particular consumptive items, that facilitate in turn the justification of investment for more systemic consumptive administration (and politicized supply-side bias winnowing pressures) on the organizational habit level, and visa versa.

Habitual and identity-based consumers and technology that encourages only certain forms of material manipulation are something that breaks down the primary assumption of modernist economic epistemes: demoting past beliefs in the individual, autonomous, primarily-rational economic actors always looking for simply the cheapest commodity.

That is “rational” of course, though only one form of rationality, for the rationale why people consume particular things. There can be nothing called “irrational” consumption, only different rationales of consumption.

On the level of the individual (though aggregate) consumer, politicized consumptive infrastructures even though they are political economic administration frameworks are imbibed within thousands of individualized narratives about identity and personal comfort even if something once decided upon as part of an identity turns out to be highly carcinogenic later.

For instance is bread, the Christian ‘staff of life,’ going the way of this into a pyx of death through more knowledge about its dangerously high level of acrylamides?

Some may change their behaviors based on risk information, a rational response. Others may be mad at the information and pretend to ignore it--another quite “rational” response if the rationale is habit and comfort.

Of course, systemic powers rarely tell them about the product’s or material’s dangers that have been discovered, instead of keeping it secret.

Legalization of the Raw Material Regime

Legalization of the raw material regime refers to particular strategic political alliances with varying degrees of representation or unrepresentation (respectively, clientelism/alienation or institutionalization of choice) between government organizations, raw material procurers/suppliers, and consumers that are institutionalized from the level of the state into formal laws and formal institutions dealing with the raw material in question across the full raw material substrate path.

This can be for direct sponsorship (like an overt state monopoly) or an indirect sponsorship (like a protected private monopoly or hegemony that makes other consumptive options or challengers illegal thus enforcing by default a consumptive heresthetics and consumptive administration frameworks in the indirectly selected material); or alternatively, state legalization frameworks that expand and protect instead of contract consumer choices of materials in the consumptive set.

Legitimation of the Raw Material Regime

Legitimation of raw material regimes refers to open-ended contentious political and discursive processes of material support. It involves mobilizing cultural frameworks and discourse--talking about certain materials employing language, symbols, associations, ideas and emotions. In contentious political talk about a raw material regime, one will typically find this talk organizes itself along a differential of power: those that are interior to a raw material regime defending it versus those exterior to the raw material regime, with the latter being a plurality of different groups either fellow-traveling and/or mutually oppositional who experience its externality effects, and/or who would offer different materials for the position, or who wish to widen consumer choices.

Legitimation refers to cultural social-movement offensives against (or countermovement defenses for) a particular raw material substrate use. In the socialization around certain raw material flows, there are open-ended jockeying attempts to legitimate or delegitimate certain raw material regimes from current hegemonic locks on formal institutional and formal policy governmentality over the whole society.

Materials change proponents wait for certain political opportunities like any other social movement would; and raw material regime defenders act like any countermovements do: defending their materials through typical countermovement behaviors like biased and corrupt state power policing, state-sponsored vigilante action, and funding agent provocateurs.

However, publicity and propaganda can backfire from desired attempts to legitimate and can turn into self-delegitimation as well. Therefore institutional practices and strategies of silence or secrecy about the material practices as much as strategies of talk are crucial to legitimating a raw material regime down the raw material substrate path--via both institutional pronouncements and a lack thereof.

the data on carcinogen DDT led Rachel Carson to write the book Silent Spring (1962). This is one case example of the knowing institutionalization of physical risk by scientists as they simply maintained a code of silence to keep the public consumptively ambivalent. Their institutional job security along the raw material substrate path of the raw material regime of chlorinated carbon compounds (particularly DDT) kept them systemically in line. The material links of salaries as well can be considered in a form of raw material regime as well.

After Carson published, there was a huge corporate and government countermovement public relations attack on her to delegitimate and to discredit any listening consumers--instead of dealing with the toxics information--who wanted to pull away from the raw material regime around the novel toxic chlorinated herbicides and pesticides. However, chemical corporations hoped that already coddled consumers would go back into consumptive ambivalence with very little prodding. Thus the institutional silence around toxic chemicals as a response was another form of the silence in Silent Spring.

A third example of the use of silence along the raw material substrate path to maintain the raw material regime can be analyzed through the consumptive infrastructure of “fluorine”--a very electronegative and very small element and its compounds used in many institutional practices of materials choice despite its well known toxicity. In the United States the legal label of ‘fluorine’ actually means any number of different types of physical compounds each with differing toxicities that are put into water. Mostly, these fluorides in the United States were directly considered an expensive to remediate nuclear or industrial waste by-product seconds before they were put into the water supply and magically, through the alchemy of laws and certain institutional handling practices and allowances, turned into something somehow treated differently than the carcinogenic, mental-developmentally-damaging, neurotoxic, abortifacient, and skeletal fluorosis-causing industrial toxin that it is. All Western European countries have rejected fluoridated water on public health and medical ethics grounds combined. The U.K. and U.S. alone (with some of its allies like South Korea) legitimate this industrial toxin in their water as if they were unaware of the dangers.

They are aware, as noted in the book The Fluoride Deception. It’s a fluoride raw material regime with a great deal of strategic silence and co-ordination down the raw material substrate path--a well-documented, cross-institutional code of Mafia-like ‘ometra’ to ignore discussing the dangers of fluoride. The outcome is that many British and Americans are allowed to be poisoned by fluoride--cynically legitimated as a public health intervention and legitimated by individual-level habit and individual interpretation as well--a very solid raw material regime indeed.

Conclusion

One of the points of this discussion is to call the lie upon the economic idea that we live in a world of actual choices where ‘supply equals demand’ toward equitable models of markets without history, to call as a lie that the main conflicts are class oriented instead of consumptively oriented, and to call into question the fraud that we live in an ‘economic’ world instead of a politicized material flow based world based on domination or representation.

No where have we ever lived in a politically-neutered commodity situation in human history, and the politicized state-consumptive institutional practices issues of raw material regimes may be more extreme at present that ever due to the huge scale in many consumptive use positions.

Ecological Tyranny, or the Bioregional State

Furthermore, no where will we ever live in that de-statized, depoliticized and ahistorical situation with regards to commodities in general: it (and sustainability) will solely be a question of how representative or unrepresentative are these 90 social relations of commodity choices of materials. In other words, raw material choice is an institutional practice that can be representative and reflexive of physical, ecological and economic risk, or it can be involved in unrepresentative institutional practices and generate such risks, clientelism, and alienation unsustainably.

Instead, we live in a world of politically-manipulated consumption for ill or good. We have always lived in a world of this merged and administered socio/material consumptive power where various institutions have winnowed consumer choices well before consumers actually get to them for the interest of political economic elite clientelisms as a form of power, and where choices of social ideas and choices of material consumption can be constrained by the same institutionalized practices or opposed by them as well.

As mentioned above, the issue becomes less how romantically to ‘overthrow’ this mélange of power relations, as some sort of power relations will always be there.

The issue becomes what would sustainable, bioregional, participatory and democratic power, knowledge, and commodity institutional practices and choices look like organizationally instead of aristocratic, gatekept, clientelistic, and unrepresentative socio/material inducements and consumptive institutional pressures on consumers leading to environmental degradation?

Commodity choice as a phenomenon has been misspecified as an economic policy when it is a political, cultural, and ideological policy issue: do you want unsustainability or sustainability?

And many of these politicized material flows are ecological tyrannies destroying our health, ecology, and economies all at once.

The question is: what would representative consumption look like, institutionally speaking, that would demote the institutional practices of clientelistic and risk-facilitative aspects of consumptive choices? The answer is a a bioregional state can oppose these ecological tyrannies: a representative material framework of institutional practices in consumption, state, science, and finance instead of one that alienates and leads to unrepresentative clientelism and environmental degradation by ignoring the different optimums of ecological self-interests of people in different regions of the world.

It is up to us to identify what does allow people a certain liberation, voice, choice and human action toward sustainability. Sustainability is a democratic and representative framework of locally optimal consumption in all its variations, instead of “pseudo-public” private infrastructures or consolidated “nationalized” infrastructures both biased to create environmental degradation, ignore citizen outcry, and impose physical risk--the latter as the “pseudo-opposition” from Marx-Leninism that self-limits the whole analysis and fails to note the specific material practices of particular flows is wider than organizational ownership politics?

And it is up to us to have a way to analyze and to evaluate the root issue--the ecological tyranny of these unrepresentative politicized consumptive infrastructures--toward a sustainability of more locally optimal material and technical choices.

Ecological Reformation: Extending Checks and Balances Beyond the Government to Maintain Ecological and Bodily Integrity

2009-11-25T12:44:00.010+09:00

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 companies buying 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

2009-11-01T20:50:00.004+09:00

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.

-------------------

10-23-2009 16:40
Green Constitutional Engineering in Korea

By Mark D. Whitaker

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"

"Institutional Standards for Democracy": Really Developing the Bottom Billion Means Ecological Reformation There and in the Other Five Billion As Well

2009-10-15T22:24:00.014+09:00

(If only Collier were wearing the Green Phrygian Cap)

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.

I would only extend his arguments about corruption environmentally to say that the whole world requires an Ecological Reformation of institutions in various areas to match us to green, ecological concerns that are human concerns instead of being opposed. This demographic of humanistic greens are already the majority concern of the world for the past 18 years at least with some global polls from the early 1990s.

(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

2009-10-03T14:16:00.012+09:00

"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:

---

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.

---
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/18-ecuadors-constitutional-rights-of-nature/

Listen to a Half Hour Interview with Me Discussing the Bioregional State

2008-12-28T04:03:00.009+09:00

(The politically crushed zero-emission, no-oil, all-electric, 'EV1' cars by General Motors, from the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006))

Today we learn more about politics that stop sustainability, and politics that can implement it. I just finished a 30 minute interview webcast via BlogTalkRadio, talking about the bioregional state. Listen for yourselves here or here (scroll down to my name, click 'play').

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.

You can share the link and listen to the recording online; and you can download the program from this other page.

De-Institutionalizing Monoculture: Adding Biophysical and Political Checks and Balances for the Corrupt Monocultures of the Mind

2008-11-25T10:03:00.004+09:00

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.

As said before in the Bioregional Democracy encyclopedia entry:

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."

Under the extended Ecological Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Sustainability (in Toward A Bioregional State).

"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."

Green Majority in Ungreen States

Polls show it with 'right wing-environmentalism' just as strong in support as left-wing environmentalism.'

"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.

# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

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:

# 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

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.

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In conclusion, the best 'gene banks' are the living animals and plants themselves: institutionalize living biodiversity with the bioregional state.