🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Brown writes:

>That the environment is being nickel-and-dimed to death implies that the
>power for *changing* this comes from the bottom, from the very people who
>are *doing* the nickel-and-diming, rather than from the top. 

Not usually. Indigenous people in Sarawak have no power to change transnational
logging in Sarawak. The next clearcut in a public forest in the US or Canada
is commonly made by local people whose livelihoods depend on cutting down 
forest.  Only changes of public land management from the top -- and stimuli 
for economic changes from the top -- can alter that. In Brazil people cut down
the Amazon to scratch out a living.  The Amazon isn't a particularly good place
to try to raise cash crops or cattle -- but all the good farmland and pasture
in the country is owned by a tiny percentage of the population and the Amazon
is what's left.  Land reform would make far more difference than anything the 
immigrants into Amazonia can do. In none of these cases are the people at the 
front line, the local people, able to change the system that controls their 
lives and trashes their environment. That is exactly what makes the system
so cancerous.

>It is thus
>more logical to arrange for the changes to happen from the bottom than
>from the top, particularly since the various nickels and dimes have their
>own properties and reasons for being there in the first place.

Usually they have been removed for the purpose of enriching somebody
who does not live there. Perhaps it's an executive in a wood-panelled
boardroom, but it's just as likely to be a blue-collar worker in a
wood-floored bowling alley, or a computer nerd sipping sugared coffee 
(two major cash crops). Always, of course, it's the stockholders
of the transnationals. Who are they? Do you have a retirement plan,
reader? Not that the blame is all shared utterly equally, by any means, 
but it *is* shared, by all of us in the overdeveloped world. We created
these concentrations of power, basically to enrich ourselves. We are
responsible for what they do to the planet, even when they use local people
as agents.

>>Sadly, that
>>is not true for a variety of reasons. Wherever industrial society and
>>the cash economy penetrate people are introduced whose livelihood does
>>not depend on the survival of the native ecosystem, but on trashing it
>>for immediate profit. 
>
>This depends entirely on how long these people plan on staying in business!!

Why, there is always more forest someplace else to be cut down when we are
done here. There always has been, right? The only operative concern is that 
the business continue, with the world as its oyster, for the lifespan of the
people who are running the business.

		*	*	*	*	*

Greens should be aware that this whole focus on "local people" and "local
control" is easily subverted by the political right wing to give the *real* 
powers of the world, such as transnational corporations, carte blanche to do 
whatever they please so long as they throw a starvation wage at a few local 
people here and there. In the absence of real international trade regulation 
with real concern for the environment, colonial powers and their modern 
transnational heirs have so structured the world that most "local people" 
are dependent on them for their immediate livelihood. The transnationals
are looking out for their bottom lines, not the long-range interests of the
"local people".  The local people are never allowed the luxury of long-range
interests, and do what is immediately necessary for survival, which typically
means what the transnationals (and the local governments they control) want.
You have only to look to the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest to see
examples of this even in the developed world. In fact, it is far from being
a third-world-only phenomenon. 

This points to a major weakness in the usual green conceptions of power 
relations in a bioregional world, I think. The security of each bioregion 
will be dependent on an international ecological security arrangement -- 
a global cop, in fact -- capable of enforcing international justice, economic 
justice, and ecological justice. In the absence of that today we have global 
anarchy and ecological devastation and much the same would be the case in a 
bioregionally organized world. After all, our world emerged out of something
rather like bioregional organization in the distant past, so bioregional
organization alone isn't stable against exploitation and empire-building.

This leads me to conclude that bioregionalism can only work if we have a
global federation of bioregional states, with the stabilizing federal power 
(presumably formed from the UN in the fullness of time) acting as the world 
cop. I am therefore one of the relatively few people who support both 
bioregionalism and global federalism, which are frequently (but I think 
wrongly) regarded as incompatible trends. 

Step 1) is to get a standing army for the UN. Fortunately economic pressures
make this an increasingly likely step in the not-too-distant future.

Step 2) is reduction of the military power of member states, over time,
and an increase of that of the UN. Again, economic pressures will conspire
to make this happen.

Step 3) is to turn over to the UN the control of all nuclear arsenals.
This was in fact proposed by the US after world war II, and turned down
by the Soviets. Probably it will come about as the only credible means of
controlling nuclear proliferation.

Taking these three steps would create the global federal power. Before
they can be taken, that power has to be circumscribed clearly and regulated
by something at least as effective as our US checks-and-balances and Bill
of Rights. But the resulting global "constitution" of federal powers must
also incorporate ecological justice at its very heart. It must be a 
constitution, not merely for man, but for the Earth.

-----------
Alan McGowen