Fractal granola disarray

I mentioned something a few weeks ago which I’d like to explore more fully. I said that it’s impossible to solve ecological problems on an individual basis because they are fundamentally macroscopic or collective. I say this for two reasons: first, an individual doesn’t have access to the information needed to act wisely, and second, an individual has no way to convince or coerce enough others to act wisely.

I don’t deny that an individual can contribute to a sustainable society. Any one of us could live off-the-grid, travel only by foot or bicycle, eat local organic food, etc. However, there is no way for even a well-informed individual to know which action is most beneficial and whether their lifestyle is sufficient, insufficient, or excessive. He or she would likely spend a lot of energy on negligible causes and neglect important but non-obvious actions.

The clearest illustration of this is climate change, where damage depends mainly on the rate of fossil fuel use. At first glance, the course of action of a concerned individual is obvious, but given the complexity and ambiguity of the modern world, an “informed decision” quickly becomes an impossible task. We all know that vehicles are a major culprit, so let’s suppose our brave citizen forgoes a car. Yet no-one wants to spend their life within a 5 km radius of home. Should one rent a car once a month to get out of the city? visit The Big City by train? fly to a sun-soaked beach every few years? hitchhike or rideshare across the country? There is no practical way to judge what is the most ecological choice, or even whether the choice is meaningful at all, so instead we rely on hearsay and half-remembered factoids.

This complexity increases exponentially when you start to consider greenhouse gas emissions “embedded” in our food, household goods, and built environment. Who among us knows how much fuel was burned to bring us our cute new shoes, our latest cell phone, a show at our favorite movie theatre? Is it better to buy fresh apples from New Zealand or local ones which have been refrigerated for 6 months? Electricity use is a significant but invisible pollutant—should I piss off my roommates by unplugging the TV and sound system when they’re not in use? My office has an inefficient and overpowered air conditioner—if I can convince them to turn it off more often, how much impact would that have? We greens drive ourselves crazy trying to “live green.” A friend of mine was sorely malnourished one year trying to keep to a 100-mile diet. I myself have lived like a monk for several years, sometimes to the detriment of my health and my happiness, yet climate change continues apace; therefore my actions have been inadequate. It’s impossible to say whether another 5 years of monasticism, by myself or with 100 000 other individuals, would be enough to reverse the damage our society is causing. We can measure total pollution levels, but we just don’t have enough information to determine our individual pollution.


My first point dealt with those who are concerned and capable enough to change their destructive behaviour (no easy task in an industrial society like ours). Many others, however, are too indifferent or indecisive to change their ways. Because of the nature of, well, nature, the pollution of these inertial individuals becomes more significant the less the rest of us pollute. Even if most of the guests at a party drink moderately, it only takes a few alcoholics to empty daddy’s liquor cabinet. The health and healthfulness of fish in a given river depends on the local pollution levels, ie the total pollution emitted in the river’s watershed. Even if 99% of individuals have zero impact, there is still catastrophe if fish lice from a poorly operated salmon farm. Wisdom slowly spreads through social channels, and to a lesser extent through the Internet and the media, but this takes years and it is a simple matter for major polluters to ignore those they disagree with. There must be a way to curb this irresponsible behaviour, either through mass persuasion or coercion, and a legion of well-intentioned but unorganized individuals cannot do so. Approaching ecological problems from an individual perspective is overwhelming and frustrating.


This is the line of thinking that led me to join the Green Party 3 years ago. A collective approach solves both problems I described above. First, through the miracle of statistics, the forest of patchy information disappears at a national or international level. We know with reasonable accuracy where our greenhouse gases come from, and with some study we can determine the best way to reduce them. Second, a government can pass laws which modify everyone’s behaviour, not simply those who are supporters. A pollution tax, for instance, would make certain actions much more expensive, which would provide an incentive to pollute less.

I’m tired of environmentalists acting like a team of 6-year-old soccer players, all chasing the ball with no plan. There are serious problems with our political system and with the Green Party itself, but as far as I’m concerned it is the only avenue that can solve the crises we face.

These words will never touch the ground

I learned a useful word a few years ago: ephemera. It’s an art collector’s word, and it refers to manmade objects that were meant to be used a few times then discarded (streetcar tickets, movie posters, cigarette lighters…). It doesn’t include disposables which are considered memorable like stamps, clothing, or paper money. In recent decades, there has been a trend among collectors and historians to seek out and preserve this ephemera to give a candid glimpse at life in days gone by, before these inherently impermanent objects disappear.

I started to wonder what traces my own generation will inadvertently leave behind. In this “information age,” we all broadcast personal details of our lives (whether we like it or not) via e-mail, Facebook, cookies, blogs, forums, online shopping, e-petitions and membership forms, phishing, etc. etc. There is a mind-boggling reservoir of mundane information floating around. I’m careful to keep my privacy, but I just googled my name and got 140 different hits. Will any of this still exist 50 years from now? Will we ever see a museum exhibit “Amazon.com wish lists 2005-2010”?

Unlike traditional ephemera, electronic media requires careful maintenance and high energy and quickly becomes obsolete or unfashionable. With the disruptions of climate change and the decline of global energy supplies, there is no guarantee that this trillion gigabytes of information will continue to exist. Perhaps future historians will be left to comb through electronic flotsam like the Google search queries of August 2011, all MySpace profiles that start with “M”, the contents of individual computers, or all US e-mails with the word “bomb” in them.

Ironically, my generation will also bequeath a heavy legacy to the future—our ingeniously indestructible plastics, refrigerants, artificial sweeteners, etc., the steel and concrete bones of our cities, and the negative inheritance of an impoverished planet. Unlike the million whispers that make up our electronic personae, this legacy is more like a rolling thunder, a monolithic and overpowering sound that erases all beauty and individuality. Sometimes I worry that the beautiful things my generation creates will vanish with the end of the electronic age, leaving future generations to curse us for our selfishness and lack of aesthetics.

Goodbye Mary Lou, hello heart

Trailing a cord of false stops
Under a compass rose
I feed the ducks with raindrops
And fill myself with prose

Static receptors left me
Narrative disarray
The fragments of my story
Are buried in my clay

Monday to Friday, work burns
Memory from the floor
My steady calculation turns
One zero into more

Friday, I tumble down stairs
Carefully synchronized
I watch the moon for wet flares
Then wash out with the tide

Whispering bristles sand down
Saturday's morning face
Outside I found a ghost town
A silence meeting place

Sunday, I carry rag time
Skating without applause
Or slowly spend my odd prime
Composing traffic laws

Tenderness let her name brand
Venice in my skin
Years late, I clutch the mic stand
To speak above the din

Wrapped in a net of raindrops
Wearing a wild rose
I sow the dusk on dead crops
To harvest dawn's first glows

Left alone to get gigantic/Hard, huge, and haunted

I always thought those lines were a good description of the slow development of the US state from a backwater boy's club to a global empire. If anything says "hard, huge, and haunted," it's the US military.


It has been four months since Barack Obama assumed the US presidency, with his famous “yes we can” mandate. (We can do what? And who is we?) So far he has been just as managerial as his predecessors, showing no sign of mobilizing or even exhorting the American people towards a particular goal.

When he was elected, I predicted that he would have to make a choice between being a caretaker president like Clinton—to repair and strengthen the US state for its next mass expropriation—or making small fundamental changes and being a one-term president. It is clear now that he has chosen the former. Despite a financial catastrophe, he increased the Pentagon budget by 4% over last year. His “withdrawal” from Iraq closely parallels the multiyear withdrawal from Vietnam. His reforms to science funding, health care, energy efficiency, and credit card regulations have been similarly tepid. He moved to close Guantanamo Bay but not Bagram, Abu Graib, etc., and he has not repealed any pernicious Bush-era legislation or dissolved the organizations that administer them. His only ground-breaking action to date has been the $1100 billion (and counting) cash giveaway to Wall Street. At this rate, the “battleship of state” will be in full working order when Mitt Romney takes over in 2017.

Some defenders of Obama argue that I expect too much, that even the most well-intentioned US president must tread lightly in the 21st-century USA. They point to his modest reforms as victories. Presumably this need for accommodation explains Obama's uniformly pro-corporate and imperialist Cabinet. But in that case, who in their right mind would want to be president? To campaign for months, to ask for the trust of the American people, and then to stand in the corner while the real decisions are taken? Surely someone of Obama's intelligence would not commit to such a task if he knew he was powerless from the outset.

If nothing else, Obama could take the JFK route, and eloquently call for reform even though his own government won't allow it (I’m thinking of the 1960's death squads in Southeast Asia and South America). Maybe I missed that speech, but it seems to me he's been pretty bland since he got elected.

I don't think Obama is a bad person; I just think that he sees his job differently than the general public. In this day and age, a president is like a CEO for the US state, and that state is geared towards keeping American dominance worldwide much more so than helping the weak or unlucky. Historically, a president was like a king: the nation's chief diplomat, general, and judge, and a splendid and majestic father figure for the ignorant masses. As we saw at Obama's lavish inauguration, there are still elements of that today.

Incidentally, Noam Chomsky came out of retirement last week to pen an essay. Therein he patiently explains, yet again, that torture, repression, and imperialism (directly or by proxy) are not a post-9/11 phenomenon or even a post-1980 or post-1945 one—they have been part of the US government toolbox since its creation. The West didn’t win itself, after all…


PS For those who don’t recognize it, the title of this entry comes from a Tragically Hip song. It begins: “Me, debunk an American myth?/And take my life in my hands?”

Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon. Nothing substantive yet, but you never know.

BBMillions throws down the gauntlet

Capitalists* beware! The burning fire of my unstoppable logic shall reduce your palaces to small yet tasteful townhouses and your foot soldiers to part-time mall security guards. This is no dead letter, but an UNdead letter, who unnatural power and longevity are wholly bent on the destruction of your economic engine of doom. Tremble--yes, tremble! The fear you feel from this preamble is nothing compared to the bone-melting terror that will seize you when my rhetorical drumbeat reaches its bloody crescendo. Capital flight cannot save you; tariff walls cannot hide you; angel investors cannot protect you. Kiss your shibboleths goodbye because they'll be nothing but shi't when I'm done with them.

Now then, where was I?

Some months back, I tried to grapple intellectually with my discovery that private banks literally have a license to print money. (This contributes to inflation, exacerbates boom-bust cycles, and enriches well-placed individuals at the expense of the rest of us.) Lately I came across an author who developed this line of thinking more clearly and fully (Herman Daly, Beyond Growth, ch.12). He points out that traditional lenders charged interest in exchange for temporarily giving up the use of their cash. However, modern banks sacrifice nothing when they lend because they create cash out of thin air when they draft the loan (and destroy an equal amount when the loan is repaid). There is no longer any economic justification for charging interest on loans beyond the tiny bookkeeping cost.

I also discussed that, to prevent inflation, the money supply needs to keep up the with the uneven growth of the "goods and services" supply. I said banks are useful for that because they create money case-by-case for those who intend to spend on new goods or services. I realize now that that is wrong: the net money created is equal to the interest charged by the banks not the capital, so there will still be a mismatch between the growth of goods and services and the money supply. Daly has a different proposal: banks should only lend money which they actually have, and the size of the money supply is controlled directly by the state through the issue or redemtion of government debt. It would be controlled to keep purchasing power constant, ie to average zero inflation on a certain basket of goods. Something else to consider.

This monetary skimming is irksome, but it's far from the most important economic problem. The worldwide ecological damage is related only to the total physical throughput of the economy, not the amount or distribution of human currency. By throughput I mean the rate of input (trees cut per year, fish caught per year, oil pumped per year) and output (CO2 emitted per year, garbage landfilled per year, wastewater discharged per year). Daly combines neoclassical economics with the second law of thermodynamics (irreversibility) to develop a crude but useable economic model. (In contrast, mainstream economics is like mechanical engineering without heat loss, corrosion, plastic deformation, or any other irreversible behaviour.) Needless to say, his new economic model leads to very different economic policies than the pervasive perpetual-growth paradigm. He was a World Bank economist, and in more enlightened times he might have sparked a transformation there, but as it is this book is essentially an extended letter of resignation.

I don't have space to reproduce his arguments here, but his central postulate is that manmade capital (industrial machinery, buildings, consumer goods) requires not only labour and capital but also high-value material and energy from nature (coal, sunlight, soil nutrients) and that such "natural capital" is non-infinite. Sounds reasonable to me, but that heresy was enough to get him stonewalled at the World Bank.

I'll mention one last thing, which Daly doesn't address but which follows from his argument. There can only be environmental macroeconomics not microeconomics because it is unfeasible for citizens and firms acting independently to keep resource consumption and pollution within safe limits. To make a rational economic choice, they would need to know all the material and energy that goes into each item they could buy and how close each type of input and output is to its safe limit. In other words, microeconomics must be a subset of the human economy, whether or not macroeconomic planning incorporates environmental limits.


*Defined herein as those who live well by creating and/or exploiting flaws in the monetary/financial system rather than through their manual or intellectual labour. This includes bank senior executives, speculators, and most economists but not bank clerks or other salaried financial workers.