CHAPTER 3 The Imperative

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

 

Viktor E. Frankl

 

This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those that receive the rewards are totally separated from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership.

 

Spock, “The Cloud Minders,” Star Trek

The “Cloud Minders” episode of the original science fiction television series Star Trek takes place on the planet Ardana. The planet’s rulers live in peaceful splendor in the beautiful city of Stratos suspended on a platform high in space. Far removed from the planet’s desolate surface, they are also far removed from the misery and violence endured by the Troglytes, who toil under slavelike conditions in the planet’s mines below to earn the interplanetary exchange credits used to import the luxuries that the Stratos rulers enjoy. The rulers consider their privilege to be wholly fitting given their perception that it is their superior intelligence, cultural refinement, and moral sensibility that set them apart from the Troglytes below.

This transparent political allegory speaks to the stark division between the elite rulers of planet Earth who live in gated mansions, work in tall office towers, and fly by private jet to meetings and luxury vacation homes and those whose toil makes their luxuries possible. To legitimate the injustice of the imperial system, the Stratos dwellers of our planet Earth construct stories that praise their personal virtues and glorify the greatness of their rule and of the institutions that place them beyond accountability to ordinary mortals. It is virtually impossible for rulers to rule wisely when they are so far removed from the reality of the lives of those who shoulder the burdens of their decisions.

The consequences can be deadly, especially when the isolation of the rulers prevents them from recognizing and responding to rapid and dramatic changes that create an imperative for adaptation to new human realities. That is our present human circumstance. Our profligate consumption is destroying the living systems of the planet on which our lives depend. Modern weaponry has turned war into an instrument of self-destruction.

Far removed from the realities of the rapidly changing human context, conditioned by the beliefs of imperial culture, and constrained by the imperatives of imperial institutions, those who rule from the clouds attribute the growing threat to life, civilization, and the existing institutions of social order to external enemies and to those who question established authority. In deep denial of the truth that the root source of the problem traces to the institutions of Empire that secure their privilege, they respond as imperial rulers have for five thousand years: by seeking to secure and expand their own power they thereby hasten the impending collapse.

The imperatives of this distinctive moment in the human experience have been long in coming. The earliest humans, Homo habilis, appeared on the planet some 2.6 million years ago. Living as one with the animals of plain and forest, this physically unimpressive species exhibited little of the capacity for choice and self-reflection that would manifest in future generations. Our early ancestors learned to cultivate and use their capacities in a slow but steadily accelerating progression that set us ever further apart from the other species with which we share the planet.

During the twentieth century, the speed at which we humans acquired new technological powers to reshape our relationship to one another and the planet accelerated to a blur, arguably exceeding the sum of the technological advances of the previous twenty-six thousand centuries. Within the space of the last hundred years alone, we have reached out to the planets, looked back through time to the origins of the universe, and delved into the deepest mysteries of subatomic particles and genetic codes to acquire seemingly godlike powers of destruction and creation. We have not, however, used these powers wisely—in large measure because those to whom we yield the power to lead continue to live and rule from the clouds.

This chapter deals with the imperative born of massive institutional failure. The following chapter will address the opportunity.

A PLANET UNDER CRIPPLING STRESS

Somewhere around 1980, we humans crossed an evolutionary threshold: the burden we place on the life support systems of the planet passed beyond the sustainable limit. The figures are sobering. Just since 1950, in barely more than fifty years, the global human population more than doubled from 2.6 billion persons in 1950 to 6.4 billion in 2005. The value of the global economic output increased from $6.7 trillion in 1950 to $48 trillion in 2002, as measured in constant U.S. dollars. The number of motor vehicles is ten times what it was in 1950. Fossil fuel use is five times what it was, and global use of freshwater has tripled. Spending on advertising aimed primarily at getting the 1.7 billion people—27 percent of humanity—who currently enjoy material affluence to consume even more goods and services was nearly ten times greater in 2002 than in 1950.

By 2002, humans were consuming food, materials, and energy at a rate of about 1.2 Earth-equivalent planets. The difference between human consumption and the regenerative capacity of Earth is made up by depleting the natural capital of the planet—both nonrenewable capital, like minerals and fossil fuels, and renewable capital like forests, fisheries, soil, water, and climatic systems. The consequence is to extract a temporary and unsustainable subsidy from Earth to support current consumption at the expense of our children and their children for generations to come.

The World Wildlife Fund regularly publishes a Living Planet Index that tracks the health of the world’s forest, freshwater, ocean, and coastal ecosystems over time. This index declined by 37 percent over the thirty-year period from 1970 to 2000. The index is unlikely to reach zero—a dead planet—because the planet will surely rid itself of the offending species long before this occurs.

About 420 million people now live in countries that depend on imported food because they lack sufficient farmland per capita to feed their people. By 2025, this number could exceed 1 billion as population grows and the amount and quality of cropland decline. More than a half billion people now live in regions prone to chronic drought. This number is expected to grow to as high as 3.4 billion by 2025.

A combination of ecosystem disruption, malnutrition, a lack of access to clean water, and the rapid movement of people and goods across ecological boundaries has spread devastating new diseases such as HIV/ AIDS with unprecedented speed. Diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, once thought to be all but eradicated, are reasserting themselves in more virulent forms. Climatic disruptions and the imminent end to the ready availability of cheaply extracted oil that has made many of our contemporary human excesses possible will accelerate the crisis and constrain our human capacity to address it.

Climate Disruption

The scientific consensus that climate change is real and is in substantial measure caused by human activity grows each year as the evidence becomes ever more compelling. The average global surface temperature increased by 0.6 degrees centigrade over the twentieth century, with accelerating increases projected for the twenty-first century. The warming is greatest in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in the Arctic region, where the polar ice cap has thinned by 46 percent over twenty years and may begin melting entirely in the summer months as early as 2020. The ocean thermals in the Atlantic that drive the Gulf Stream that warms Europe have substantially weakened, creating concern that it may slow or stop entirely —with devastating consequences for European nations and particularly European agriculture.

Even small increases in temperature can have major climatic effects, as demonstrated by a steady increase over the past five decades in severe weather events such as major hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Globally there were only thirteen severe events in the 1950s. By comparison, seventy-two such events occurred during the first nine years of the 1990s. The cost of the damage caused has risen from roughly US$3 billion annually in the 1950s to $40 billion annually in the 1990s. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which ravaged the Gulf Coast of the United States and Mexico in 2005, are only a foretaste of what is to come.

Agricultural disruption and major population displacements are now imminent because of climatic change and a resulting rise in the sea level. A study commissioned by the U.S. Pentagon warns that global warming during the twenty-first century could “result in a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of Earth’s environment… [and] potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints.… Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.”

The End of Oil

A sharp rise in oil prices in 2004 and 2005, coupled with revelations that Shell and other oil companies were systematically overestimating their proven petroleum reserves, spurred a lively discussion of when global oil production will peak and begin an inexorable decline in the face of growing demand and rising extraction costs. Referred to as “peak oil,” this event is predicted to send energy prices skyrocketing and result in massive economic dislocation as the cheap oil subsidy that fueled much of the economic expansion of the past hundred years is withdrawn.

According to Fortune, the most optimistic estimates from credible sources place peak oil as much as thirty-five years in the future. Other credible experts suggest that 2005 may have been the fateful year. Meanwhile China has gone from having virtually no private automobiles in 1980 to having a projected 24 million in 2005, with anticipated exponential growth for the foreseeable future. In 2004, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil. The United States, of course, is the number one oil consumer. As Fortune correctly notes, it really does not matter whether peak oil has already occurred or will not be encountered for another thirty-five years. Reconfiguring the world’s economy to move beyond dependence on petroleum and reverse the buildup of greenhouse gases must be an essential and immediate priority.

If we humans do not choose to act on our own, Earth is poised to make the choice for us by forcing the mother of all market corrections. It will be a traumatic lesson in the market principle that subsidies cause markets to misallocate resources, the systems principle that infinite growth cannot be sustained in a finite system, and the cybernetic principle that failure to take timely action to restore system equilibrium results in overshoot and collapse. In everyday language, we humans have used cheap oil subsidies to create economies and lifestyles that depend on the unsustainable consumption of Earth’s resources, our consumption already exceeds sustainable limits by a substantial margin, and if we do not take immediate corrective action, economic collapse is imminent.

By the calculations of the Living Planet Index, we humans have been in ecological overshoot since roughly 1970. In fact, the process began nearly a hundred years earlier, when the modern transformation of human economies to petroleum dependence began in earnest. The intervening years have been devoted to building an infrastructure dependent on cheap oil while at the same time accelerating the depletion of Earth’s accessible petroleum reserves and the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The twentieth century has been Empire’s most profligate period of excess. We are poised to pay a terrible price. Slowly awakening from the stupor of petroleum intoxication, the raging headache of humanity’s hangover is starting to set in. We humans must now deal not only with the five-thousand-year legacy of Empire but also with the consequences of imperial excess that cheap oil made possible. The longer we delay abandoning the way of Empire for the way of Earth Community, the more devastating the collapse will be and the greater the price we all will pay.

REALITY ATTACK

The twentieth century was the century of oil. Cheap to extract and available in seemingly inexhaustible supply, we treated petroleum and natural gas as free resources and priced them primarily by the costs of extraction, processing, and delivery. We shrugged off the environmental costs of releasing CO₂ and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and ignored the fact that within the scale of human time oil and gas are finite and nonrenewable resources.

The forms of economic development that followed World War II, from the Green Revolution to export-oriented industrial policies, suburbanization, and automobile-dependent transportation systems, in many respects constituted a drive to convert the world to dependence on petroleum and natural gas. By 2001 world oil consumption was 7.5 times as great as its 1950 level. Consumption of natural gas, nearly 24 percent of current world energy use, increased to 12.9 times its 1950 level.

Earth creates the real wealth on which human life and well-being depend. We humans convert it to our use and consume it. During the twentieth century, we humans perfected powerful technologies to accelerate the rate of conversion by several orders of magnitude. We thought we had mastered the secrets to creating wealth without limit. In truth, we were not accelerating the creation of wealth so much as we were accelerating its consumption by drawing down the natural wealth and living capital of the planet. We similarly failed to recognize that the profligate lifestyles of the world’s consumer class that we had taken to be a measure of our economic and technological genius were unsustainable and more accurately represented a measure of our capacity for shortsighted self-delusion. We are now on the threshold of a serious reality attack.

Journalist James Howard Kunstler spells out the details in The Long Emergency. Virtually every feature of modern life now turns on the availability of cheap oil, including automobiles, computers, synthetic fibers, plastics, construction and manufacturing processes, central heating and air conditioning, air travel, industrial agriculture, international trade, suburban living, and modern warfare. Without oil, much of the capital infrastructure underlying modern life becomes an unusable asset, including the infrastructure of suburbia, the global trading system, and the industrial food production, processing, and distribution system.

Dislocations caused by climate change and the disruptions from terrorist attacks by desperate people will greatly exacerbate the consequences of withdrawal of the oil subsidy. Economic incentives will shift dramatically in favor of downscaling and localization, shifting the focus from mobility to making a life in the place where one is. Business models based on twelve-thousand-mile supply lines will become increasingly expensive, giving the advantage to a more energy-efficient, smaller-scale local production of food and basic necessities. The advantage will go to compact, self-reliant communities that bring people close to their places of work, commerce, and recreation; rely on wind, solar, and mini-hydro as their primary energy sources; and devote arable lands to growing food and fiber using low-input farming methods.

By any measure it will not be an easy transition. The adjustment can play out in the mode of Empire, as a violent, self-destructive, last-manstanding competition for individual advantage. Or it can play out in the mode of Earth Community, as a cooperative effort to rebuild community; to learn the arts of sufficiency, sharing, and peaceful conflict resolution; and to marshal our human creativity to grow the generative potential of the whole. The process depends on whether we find the courage and vision to embrace the transition as a moment of opportunity.

Too far removed from reality to recognize the stresses eroding the foundations of the societies they rule, the Cloud Minders of planet Earth have responded in classic imperial mode. They have sought to deflect attention away from tensions created by real security threats by declaring war on real or imagined enemies—apparently unmindful that changing human circumstances have made war itself a futile and irrational act of self-destruction.

WARS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

The military battles of the Roman Empire were fought with swords, spears, and arrows. Our wars are fought with bombers, tanks, missiles, cluster bombs, land mines, nuclear bombs, high explosives, lasers, computers, and munitions tipped with depleted uranium. The increased killing efficiency of the individual warrior made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history. As the killing efficiency of modern weapons continues to increase, they produce ever more devastating consequences not only for those they target, but as well for those who deploy them.

Weapons of Self-Destruction

The World Health Organization estimates that 72 million people died during the twentieth century from war and another 52 million from genocide. Other estimates place the combined total as high as 203 million. For every person killed another three were wounded—which in many instances means they were maimed for life. Millions more escaped serious physical injury but suffered permanent mental disabilities. Whole cities were reduced to rubble, economies were disrupted, priceless cultural artifacts were destroyed, millions were rendered homeless, and the wealth of Earth was consumed to destroy life rather than to nurture it. Worst of all, some modern weapons go on killing long after hostilities have ceased and render uninhabitable vast areas of a crowded world.

A buried mine can remain active for more than fifty years. The United Nations estimated in 1996 that more than 110 million active mines lie in wait for hapless victims in seventy countries, and that they kill or maim twenty-four thousand people every year—mostly civilians and often children. Depleted uranium, which is used to increase the power of advanced munitions to penetrate armor, vaporizes into a fine powder on impact to slowly kill and maim both friend and foe, deform the children they sire and bear, and render vast land areas permanently unfit for habitation. A 1996 United Nations resolution classified depleteduranium ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction. The United States and other nations continue to use it in large quantities.

Of the 696,778 U.S. personnel who served in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Iraq war, only 760 were killed or wounded in action or as a result of accidents. By May 2002, the U.S. Veterans Administration had classified 168,011 persons who served in the Gulf during 1991 as “disabled veterans” due to combat-related injuries or illnesses and reported that another 8,306 had died from service-related causes. This brought the total casualty rate from the first Gulf War to a staggering 25.4 percent—and the numbers continue to grow. Former army colonel Doug Rokke, who was in charge of the military’s environmental cleanup following that war, attributes the majority of these casualties to exposure to depleted uranium, as do other experts. Pentagon spokespersons deny the charge. Whatever the actual cause, the cost to U.S. military personnel was horrific, to say nothing of the cost to Iraqi civilians who live in the contaminated area.

The harm to the victors is not solely physical. When a nation sends its children off to war, it first sends them to boot camp not only to learn the arts of death but also to break down their natural moral resistance to killing other humans. Those who survive the horrors of the battlefield return to their families and communities trained and practiced in settling disputes by violent means and with minds filled with images of death. A study of soldiers returning from combat in the second Gulf War estimated that one in six suffered from major depression, generalized anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder. Big weapons in a small world have made the act of war a strategy of mass self-destruction.

Nuclear Bombs versus Box Cutters

The most powerful military forces are unable to prevail over small but committed terrorist networks and popular resistance movements in an age of easy access to high explosives, automatic firearms, shoulder-fired rockets, nuclear materials, deadly biological agents, cell phones, instant messaging, and the Internet. Such weapons give resistance movements the means to make sustained occupation by the military forces of a foreign nation virtually impossible and place the invading army’s homeland at significant risk. Call the armed resisters terrorists, guerrillas, freedom fighters, or minutemen, the mechanized military machinery of Empire is useless against a determined population adept in the ways of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. France faced this reality in Algeria and Vietnam. The Soviet Union faced it in Afghanistan, and Russia faced it subsequently in Chechnya.

The United States has the capability to liquidate whole nations, but its terrifying firepower is of little use in ferreting out clandestine international terrorist networks, gaining the willing submission of the peoples of occupied nations, or securing civilian populations against attacks by committed terrorists. Economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein points out that the U.S. military fought three serious wars between 1945 and 2002: Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. It fought to a draw in Korea and the Gulf and was defeated in Vietnam. None of the three opponents was close to being a credible world-class military power. Failing to learn the evident lessons of this experience, the United States was in 2005 bogged down in enormously costly, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conventional armies are organized, trained, and equipped to control territory. Since terrorist networks are everywhere and nowhere, the control of territory is not at issue. Responding to terrorist attacks with conventional military force can take a devastating toll in lives and property, but as a response to terrorism, it is actively counterproductive. The only way to defeat terrorism is to eliminate the conditions that motivate it.

The contemporary reality of warfare presents a strange paradox. Although modern technology has given the world’s ruling elites the power to make the planet unlivable, it has also stripped them of their capacity to impose their will on subject people by armed force.

Clueless rulers order searches for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and elsewhere, while ignoring the WMDs in our own midst. Jet airliners, chemical plants, oil refineries, nuclear facilities, power grids, gas pipelines, and municipal water systems are easily turned into instruments of death and disruption by a committed terrorist of modest means, as the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States so graphically demonstrated. Metaphorically speaking, in a contest between nuclear weapons and box cutters, the box cutters hold the strategic advantage.

As argued by geopolitical analyst Jonathan Schell, we now live in an unconquerable world. Unless we learn to live in peace by eliminating the causes of violence, we will live in perpetual fear and insecurity. Rather than address the root causes of the violence, however, the rulers of planet Earth respond by augmenting their security forces and attempting to lift their city in the clouds to a higher orbit further removed from the spreading devastation on the planet’s surface.

GOING TO A HIGHER ORBIT

Had the benefits of the sixfold increase in global economic output achieved since 1950 been equitably shared among the world’s people, poverty would now be history, democracy would be secure, and war would be but a distant memory. Driven by the imperatives of dominator power, however, the institutions of Empire allocated more than 80 percent of the benefit of this extraordinary growth to the most fortunate 20 percent of the world’s people.

Growing Gap

In the 1990s, per capita income fell in fifty-four of the world’s poorest countries; already high poverty rates increased in thirty-seven of the sixty-seven reporting countries. More than 1.2 billion people now struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. Some 2.8 billion, nearly half the world’s population, survive on less than $2 per day.

At the other end of the scale, the number of billionaires worldwide swelled from 274 in 1991 to 691 in 2005, with a combined net worth of $2.2 trillion. It is estimated that 1.7 billion people—27 percent of humanity—currently enjoy the material affluence of the consumer society. The demands of the existing consumer class continue to surge as its tastes turn to ever larger cars and homes. It would take at least an additional three to four planets to support the excluded populations of the world at the level of consumption now prevailing in Europe. The United Nations projects that the world population will continue to grow from the current 6.4 billion to 8.9 billion in 2050, requiring the resources of yet another one to two planets to support everyone at the current European standard. The human species is quite literally consuming the future of its children, consigning billions of people to lives of desperation, and calling the survival of our species into question.

It is a grim calculus. The response of the orbiting Stratos dwellers is to further shift the tax burden from the investor class to the working class, increase downward pressure on wages, ease restraints on financial speculation and the extraction of monopoly profits, and free corporations from bearing the social and environmental costs of their actions. Those who object are condemned as advocates of class warfare and instructed to focus on bringing the bottom up by giving greater freedom to the top to create new wealth, rather than on bringing the top down.

The persistent claim of the ruling Cloud Minders that raising the top will ultimately bring up the bottom by expanding the total pool of wealth is a cruel deception. Justice and sustainability are impossible in an inherently unjust and unsustainable system.

Grand Illusion

The key to the deception is money. To understand how it works, it is necessary to be clear on the distinction between real wealth and financial wealth.

Real wealth consists of those things that have actual utilitarian or artistic value: food, land, energy, knowledge, technology, forests, beauty, and much else. The natural systems of the planet are the foundation of all real wealth, for we depend on them for our very lives. Without these natural systems, none of the other forms of wealth, including human labor and technology, can exist.

Money by contrast has no intrinsic utilitarian or artistic value. It is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer file. It is an accounting chit that has value only because by social convention people are willing to accept it in exchange for things of real value. Money, however, bestows enormous power and advantage on those with the power to create and allocate it in societies in which access to most everything of real value requires money.

The Cloud Minders have enjoyed rapid growth in their financial assets throughout the period of deepening environmental decline, thus bestowing on them claims against a growing portion of the real wealth of planet and society, and creating an illusion that we are all growing richer, when the opposite is true. Take just one key indicator: the combined market capitalization—financial asset value—of the shares traded in the world’s major share markets grew from $0.8 trillion in 1977 to $22.6 trillion in 2003. This represents an enormous increase in the buying power of the ruling class relative to the rest of the society. It creates an illusion that economic policies are increasing the real wealth of society, when in fact they are depleting it.

Bear in mind that in the United States less than 50 percent of households own shares of stock in any form. The wealthiest 1 percent of households own 42.1 percent of the value of all stock shares, more than the total for the entire bottom 95 percent of households. Although specific figures are not available, it is a safe estimate that far less than 1 percent of households globally have consequential stock holdings.

Unfortunately, most people miss the true implications of this inequality because we are in the habit of thinking of money as wealth. Indeed, although the distinction between money and real wealth is essential to understanding the allocation of power in society, the language of finance provides no easy way of expressing it. The terms capital, assets, resources, wealth, refer equally to financial wealth and real wealth. If people understood the difference, they would know that when a financial pundit joyfully announces that a rising stock market is “creating wealth,” this means the richest households are increasing their claims over what remains of the real wealth of the rest of us. We might then feel less inclined to share in the pundit’s exuberance.

Living High on Borrowed Money

Entranced by the bubble economy of the 1990s, delusional pundits of the Cloud Minder class declared an end to the laws of economic gravity. By their reckoning, the business cycle had become a relic of the ancient past, U.S. trade and financial imbalances with the rest of the world no longer mattered, and environmental limits had been transcended. Realists who expressed concern about a financial bubble were dismissed as know-nothing pessimists, out of touch with the miracles wrought by the new information economy. The real value added, so the delusional argued, was in finance, marketing, entertainment, information technology, and intellectual property rights. They concluded that the most profitable economic strategy was to import finished products produced by cheap nonunion labor in the poorest countries rather than to import raw materials for domestic fabrication by workers who expect a family wage. The U.S. trade deficit, which in 2004 was an annual $665 billion and growing, was covered by borrowing from foreigners at the rate of $2.6 billion every business day. This accelerated a precipitous decline in the U.S. dollar, starting at the beginning of 2002. By the end of 2004, the dollar had lost roughly a third of its value. In his 2002 European bestseller After the Empire, French demographer Emmanuel Todd characterizes the United States as “a sort of black hole—absorbing merchandise and capital but incapable of furnishing the same goods in return.”

As the wave of corporate scandals in the opening years of the twenty-first century revealed, the supposed U.S. economic miracle of the 1990s was mostly a stock bubble built on accounting fraud and unfounded expectations. The growing U.S. trade deficit demonstrated that an open trading system managed by corporations to maximize shortterm profits results in dangerously unstable imbalances in the global system. Far from being concerned, however, the Cloud Minders stepped up their efforts to restore the bubble and accelerate the export of jobs and the related manufacturing capacities. Soon they were also exporting technological capacities, including those in advanced research and development—fueling a continuing precipitous increase in the U.S. trade deficit and international debt as we become ever more dependent on foreign factories, workers, and technology.

In the mid-1990s, the United States still produced 90 percent of what it consumed. By the end of 2004 it produced only 75 percent, and the decline was accelerating. U.S. exports of computer hardware fell from $45 billion in 2000 to $28 billion in 2004. U.S. companies were investing very little in new capacity domestically and the ranks of U.S. engineers were thinning. Young Americans planning their careers were quick to get the message. Reversing a previous growth trend, applications to U.S. computer science and software engineering bachelor’s degree programs fell by as much as 30 percent in two years. India and China now lead the United States in computer science graduates.

U.S. export surpluses are now mostly in commodities, such as oil seeds, grains, iron, wood pulp, scrap paper, and raw animal hides. The top U.S. import from China is computer components. China’s top import from the United States is soybeans. The U.S. trade profile is increasingly that of a third-world country that exports commodities and imports finished goods.

In the economic vision of the myopic U.S. Cloud Minders, the proper U.S. role in the global economy is to specialize in consuming the products and technologies produced by sweatshop labor in other countries and paid for with borrowed money, thereby keeping U.S. profits and unemployment high and wages low, while passing the bill to future generations. To paraphrase the late economist Kenneth Boulding, anyone who thinks this a winning long-term economic strategy is either a lunatic or a neoliberal economist.

The Perfect Economic Storm

The gathering clouds of a perfect economic storm have the potential to severely disrupt the corporate global economy and force a restructuring in favor of local production and self-reliance. Four conditions combine to produce an unprecedented threat to the status quo.

1. The imminent encounter with the point at which oil production peaks and goes into inexorable decline will eliminate the energy subsidies on which much of the capital infrastructure of the corporate global economy depends.

2. Severe weather events and climatic changes associated with global warming will disrupt food production and global supply chains.

3. A collapse in the international exchange value of the U.S. dollar will force the United States to restructure its economy to live within its means; those countries that have built economies geared to exporting to U.S. markets will need to redirect their attention to producing for their own domestic markets.

4. The changing terms of warfare will bring an end to the ability of militarily powerful nations to seize with impunity the resources of weaker nations.

These conditions will shift the economic incentives from favoring global supply lines to favoring local production and self-reliance. The adjustments will be made all the more difficult by a growing scarcity of freshwater, declining forests and fisheries, the paving over of arable land, soil loss, and declining soil fertility, all combined with continued population growth. The transition will be particularly difficult for nations like the United States that have become accustomed to living far beyond their own means and to depending on foreign labor, resources, and credit.

How we humans choose to respond to these changing circumstances will determine whether the situation degenerates into persistent wars for the last of Earth’s bounty or brings forth a new era of cooperation based on an ethic of equitable sharing to meet the needs of all. When economic collapse hit the people of Argentina at the end of 2001, they rallied as a community to make the latter choice. It is an inspiring story well told in the video documentaries Argentina: Hope in Hard Times and The Take.

History suggests that the ruling Cloud Minders are too captive to the addictions of Empire to respond in any way other than their characteristic pattern of competing for control of the last remains of the planet’s resources. Their delusions are well summed up in the 2005 book by Peter Humber, of the Manhattan Institute, and Mark Mills, of Digital Power Capital, titled The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. In an ode to the Magical Consciousness, they conclude, “The more energy we seize and use, the more adept we become at finding and seizing more.”

Leadership to create a world that works for all is more likely to come from those who live in the real world and consequently are intimately acquainted with the injustice, violence, and environmental failure that Empire has wrought.

THE GREAT WORK

Attempting to preserve imperial privilege is not a rational choice. We can choose by default to let the collapse follow its natural course of a massive dieback in the human population and a descent into a fragmented world of local imperial fiefdoms reminiscent of the aftermath of the Roman Empire. Alternatively, we can acknowledge the irreversible changes in human circumstance that create an imperative to join together as one people on one planet to bring forth a new era of Earth Community based on the strong and caring families and communities that are the true foundation of prosperity, security, and meaning.

Theologian Thomas Berry calls this affirmative choice the Great Work. It requires a commitment to

 

• bring our collective material consumption into balance with Earth to allow the healing and regeneration of the biosphere. This requires that we

• realign our economic priorities from making money for rich people to assuring that all persons have access to an adequate and meaningful means of making a living for themselves and their families. Because equity becomes an essential condition of a healthy, sustainable society in a full world, we must

• democratize human institutions, including our economic institutions, to root power in people and community and replace a dominant culture of greed, competition, materialism, and the love of money with cultures grounded in life-affirming values of cooperation, caring, spirit, and the love of life. Because recognition of the essential spiritual unity of the whole of Creation is an essential foundation of the deep respect for the rights and needs of all living beings on which fulfillment of this agenda depends, it is necessary that we individually and collectively

• awaken to the integral relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of our being to become fully human.

 

The technological revolution of the twentieth century fundamentally altered the relationship of humans to the planet and to one another, created an unsustainable economic dependence on depleting the finite resources and regenerative capacities of the planet, and placed the human species at increasing risk of destruction by its own hand. Yet the circumstances of the lives of Empire’s privileged rulers so isolate them from the negative consequences of this change in the human condition that they are unable even to comprehend the import of what is happening, let alone come forward with appropriate leadership.

Hope for the human future lies in the fact that Empire has created the conditions for the emergence from the bottom up of a new leadership of the whole. The same technological revolution that brings the imperative for change is also facilitating a global cultural and spiritual awakening to the interdependence of life, the unrealized possibilities of our human nature, and the opportunity before us to bring forth a cultural, economic, and political transformation as a conscious collective choice. It is the work of Ricardo and the Hacienda Santa Teresa on a planetary scale. Millions of people the world over are already engaging in it.

Some would call it a reawakening to the spiritual wisdom of our ancient past. Others might liken it to the sense of awe at the wonder and beauty of life that commonly follows a near-death experience. However we choose to characterize it, this awakening is opening the way for an evolutionary leap to a new level of human social, intellectual, and spiritual possibility. We now turn to the evidence that a unique and epic opportunity is presently at hand.