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President Obama addressed The United Nations earlier today (Wednesday) to announce a continued, if more vigilant, U.S. commitment to provide foreign aid to developing countries ( http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16141218). Way back in the last millennium, I was a student of Development (political, economic, cultural), and the various competing theories (Modernization, Dependency, World Systems). Modernization theorists tended to see nations as autonomous units, undergoing their own history, developing or not developing according to their own endogenous variables. Dependency and World Systems theories saw the world as more tightly intertwined, the relations among them affecting the fate of each.
The descriptive value of Dependency and World Systems theories is hard to deny: Due to client state and economic dependency relations to powerful nations, the small ruling classes in less developed nations are, more often than not, in either explicit or implicit league with the larger wealthy classes in some more developed nations, benefiting together as islands of wealth and comfort in a sea of suffering. To be sure, that’s not the whole story: Nationalism and other allegiances exist as well, with the ruling classes in those less developed nations generally identifying more with their own people of their own class at home than with those of their own class abroad, and sometimes even with the poor of their own country more than the rich of others. There are cross-cutting solidarities involved.
And it is overly simplistic to argue that the poverty of much of the world is a direct artifact of the wealth of some enclaves. Much of that poverty is, in reality, due to a lack of indigenous development, and would have existed with or without the rise of other wealthy and powerful nations. It’s also important to recognize that, in some ways, “a rising tide” really does “raise all ships”, and the wealth and institutional and technological innovations of the developed world have contributed positively as well as negatively to the development of less developed countries.
It’s hard to measure exactly to what extent that’s the case, and to what extent the rise of the European world empire did indeed suppress development elsewhere. Certainly, the history of colonization, of imposing inequitable trade relations, of dismantling sometimes diverse and vibrant indigenous economies in order to turn whole countries into plantations growing low value-added tropical crops and primary natural resources for the benefit of the lords across the seas or to the north, has to at least some extent exerted a suppressive developmental force on the late-comers. There is some mixture of both truths in play.
But let’s look at the world through the Dependency lens for a moment. We can as easily see the world as one divided by separate international classes as one divided by national boundaries. And a comparison of modern history to Medieval and ancient history bears out such a view. Ruling classes within nations or continental cultures developed historically from the descendants of warriors becoming landed nobility on the estates that their ancestors stole in conquest, with the former inhabitants reduced to serfdom. And global ruling classes began developing in the early modern era when European conquistadors found new lands to conquer, new native inhabitants to reduce to serfdom or other forms of marginalization, and new expropriated wealth to enjoy as a result. Our smug (and historically conveniently amnesiatic) belief that our relative wealth has no connection to the relative poverty of others in our own and other lands is simply not borne out by an honest survey of world history.
And that’s why foreign aid, and much else about the modern world, reminds me a bit of a scene from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Madame Defarge, eager to spill the blood of any members of the hated aristocracy, was testifying at the trial of innocent aristocrat Charles Darnay during The French Revolution, recounting how Charles’ father had once carelessly run over and killed a peasant child with his carriage, and stopped to toss the distraught parent a coin. Needless to say, Charles was sentenced to be guillotined, a fate only averted by his look-alike barrister, the down-and-out Sydney Carton, who redeemed his own squandered life by taking Charles’ place, and thus doing “a far, far better thing than (he) had ever done before.”
As Charles Dickens said of that era in his opening lines of the novel:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Some things never change.
The only thing uglier than tossing the peasant parent a coin after running over her child is having your hand held back by a member of your household in the moment of doing so, admonished not to waste “our” hard earned cash on such lazy riff-raff.
I don’t know the answers to the vexing problems of our age. Development happens when and where it happens for reasons other than foreign aid, and independently of most of our theories. Some have successfully instituted export-driven growth, finding niche markets, and developing on the capital thus generated. Others have successfully leveraged the wealth derived from natural resource endowments. Occasionally, targeted protectionism for nascent industries has helped those industries acquire the breathing room necessary to become competitive in the long run. Infusions of capital from the developed world can certainly help (as it did in The Marshall Plan), and can also hurt (as it did in the Latin American debt crises of the 198o’s). But one thing’s for sure: In the long run, there is no “Us” v. “Them”; there is only an “Us”.
We may find the Madame Defarges both past and present to be hateful individuals. But those who are their enemy have always helped to create them. You run over enough peasant children in your carriage, and people start to want to send your adult children to the guillotine, or fly airplanes into your skyscrapers. You draw enough lines in the sand with opportunistic military conquests, lines above which to prosper and below which to languish, and the desperate mass of humanity you locked out will eventually come flooding through.
We live in a world increasingly acutely locked into an anachronistic global political landscape. Sovereign nations, which were on the slow path to gradually compromising their sovereignty to some form of weak global federalism throughout much of the twentieth century (during the breaks from their extraordinarily destructive demonstrations of why it was absolutely imperative that they do so), have now, under the decreasingly enlightened leadership of The United States, begun backpedaling once again into global balkanization and mutual antagonism (except in the cradle of modern civilization, Europe, which has coalesced into the most vibrant of all supranational entities, and has tried to march proactively into the future despite, once again, the absence of an American willingness to see past its own nose and do the same).
But as the United States discovered early in its history, a degree of shared fate, of shared challenges, of shared opportunities, requires a commensurate degree of effective shared governance. And as I’ve said elsewhere, it is inevitable, and pragmatically necessary, that whatever form that takes, it does not simply wish away or disregard the real distribution of political and material power in the moment preceding its creation. That distribution of power has to be leveraged, to create something better from the soil of what preceded it. America has to be a major player in the creation of a functioning world order, whether Americans or non-Americans find that an attractive prospect or not.
As President Obama rightly noted in his speech, foreign aid is an act of self-interest. But that interest is best served when those aided are perceived to be less foreign, and instead are recognized as fellow human beings in a world too small for some to hide from others behind walls and across oceans. We can’t close our eyes and plug our ears and expect to live unmolested in our enclave of relative wealth and comfort, while horrors are the norm in so much of the world. That won’t protect us from the tsunamis that will continue to hit, with increasing force, all of our shores and borders. We are a part of this world, whether we like it or not. And it’s time to take our noblesse oblige seriously.
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Amendment 63 on Colorado’s ballot this November would prohibit the state from forcing people to buy health insurance, a provision of the new federal health care law , further cluttering our state constitution with yet another amendment which violates the U.S. Constitution (in this case, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, to be precise, which states that federal law takes precedence over state law). Many think this is a good idea. And the argument for it seems straightforward enough: Free people should not be compelled to buy any good or service from any private company that they do not wish to buy.
But most people acknowledge (albeit grudgingly) that some taxation is necessary, and so the qualifier “private company” is necessary. Taxes, after all, are the government forcing people, collectively, to buy goods and services from the government. You don’t get to choose if you want to contribute to the provision of a military, police and fire departments, schools, and other public services that we have not yet been foolish enough to eliminate (though some are trying to get us there), and most people don’t object to that. Certainly, no rational people do.
There are some who advocate for more privatization of public services, contracting more out (as the military has done, for instance), more private-public partnerships, more market dynamics and competition (in the form of school vouchers and cap-and-trade regulation, for instance). Few, again, would argue that government cannot tax citizens for any service that it contracts out in part or in whole, so, again, the prohibition we are discussing must be against government forcing people to buy any good or service directly from any private company; government forcing people to pay private companies indirectly is fair game.
What, exactly, is the moral or pragmatic distinction between government using tax revenues to pay for contracted services, and government cutting itself out as the middleman, and mandating that citizens buy certain services directly? Is the issue a concern that we mandate only taxation for the provision of public, not private, goods?
But insurance very much is a public good. It is the spreading of risk so that all pay some part of a collective burden that we all share, rather than allowing the whims of chance to dump crushing burdens on a few at a time when they are least able to bear them. Ideally, we would dispense with “insurance” altogether, and instead spread the risk universally, and seek to reduce it together through a preventative and proactive health care regime, conceptualizing health care not as an individual service that is individually consumed, but rather as a basic need that we collectively provide to all of our citizens.
In the absence of that ideal, in a compromise with our dysfunctional prior system, the next best choice is to have a highly regulated private market, one which uses private insurers as agents of a public function. To ensure that the pool of contributers is sufficient to cover the demands that will be placed on the system, mandating that people pay into it is functionally no different from mandating that people pay their taxes for services that are publicly provided.
Some argue that this is just a boon to the “evil” insurance companies, that exist to maximize profits by collecting the highest premiums possible while denying as many claims as possible. There is some truth to this, and it points to a basic defect of private insurance: When you pay now for a service whose future provision depends on a judgment by those responsible to provide it, you create the perverse incentive for those enterprises to be biased in favor of judging against providing it. As long as we rely on private insurers with some discretion to accept or deny claims, we will be facing an uphill battle, individually as consumers of that service, and collectively through our government agents, to force them to uphold their end of the bargain in good faith.
As an aside, in the case of liability insurance, it creates the added defect of commercializing the meeting of moral or ethical burdens in such a way that they will be minimally met if at possible. If a parked car is totalled by a drunk driver, that driver has a moral obligation to make the owner of the parked car “whole” again, to ensure that no loss of any kind is borne by the victim. But insurance companies have no incentive to view that moral obligation as being as compelling as it is; they will not pay for anything that the victim cannot document is owed to him or her, despite the fact that no burden should fall on the victim at all. (This observation is derived from personal experience, in which, in the above scenario, State Farm Insurance sought to pay me less than the real value to me of the car the drunk driver had totalled). In other words, when you buy liability insurance, you are paying a company to fulfil your possible future moral or ethical obligations, and that company is then motivated to do so its best to shirk that responsibility on your behalf.
Relying on private insurance is problematic in a variety of ways. The insurance companies are incentivized to refuse those most in need of insurance (those most likely to have to collect on it), to bear too little of the crushing burden of health care expenses when most needed by clients who have already paid for their insurance, and to charge exorbitant prices for the under-provision of these services. With the enormous wealth thus amassed, these financial giants can then aggressively lobby Congress to do their bidding, legally bribing and blackmailing their way to almost unstoppable heights of political influence.
But, boon to private insurers or no; a sad and frustrating tribute to a corrupt system or no; our goal is not to punish insurance companies or cut off our nose to spite our face, but rather to move incrementally toward more functional social institutional arrangements, and this often means acknowledging and accommodating existing distributions of power and influence, in order to move in a direction which makes their exercise more utility-producing. The best road we have forward, both to diminish the future political clout of insurance companies and to constrain them more narrowly to provide the service for which they’ve been contracted, is to increase government regulation, and increase public participation.
Requiring everyone to buy into health insurance pools is a necessary step toward developing a fully functioning national health care system.
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The South Jeffco Community Organization (which I founded) has been trying to persuade Jefferson County Public Schools to implement a community volunteer tutoring and mentoring program in Jeffco Schools. I spoke at a School Board meeting on the subject, had an article featured on it in the Columbine Courier, and finally met, last June, with the area superintendent for South Jeffco, Holly Anderson, to discuss it.
In that first (and only) meeting, Holly told me that I, a Jeffco resident and home-owner, the father of a Jeffco second grader, a former Jeffco teacher, the founder and president of a non-partisan community organization, and an independent policy consultant trained in law and social sciences, was disqualified from being directly involved with Jeffco Schools as an interested community member by virtue of being a candidate for our citizen legislature (though it’s hard to imagine that the sitting state representative, who has no children in, nor has ever taught in Jeffco schools would be similarly disqualified). I accommodated the district’s insistence on behaving with actual political bias, in the name of avoiding the appearance of bias, by putting Holly in touch with another representative of the South Jeffco Community Organization, and by getting my Republican opponent in my house district race to agree (at least in private) to come on board in our efforts to implement a community volunteer tutoring and mentoring program.
Despite these accommodations, after months of being strung along, Holly sent the SJCO member who has been working with her the following suggested letter for us to send to potential volunteers interested in helping to improve Jeffco Schools:
Dear [NAME]
Thank you for expressing an interest in volunteering in a Jeffco school. While the school district is not involved in our South Jeffco Community Organization in any way, they are receptive to volunteers in the schools. Because you know your talents, interests, and schedule best we have been advised that it would work best for you to contact a school principal directly. We have attached contact information for the south area Jeffco schools.
If volunteering is still of interest to you at this time, we would encourage you to look at the attached list and give the appropriate school principal a call. They will inform you of their needs and discuss what possibilities for volunteering exist at their site. Together you can develop a mutual agreement regarding the process for volunteering at their school based on the schools’ requirements/needs and your availability. Please be advised that you may be asked to provide references and/or background information prior to being invited to volunteer. You will need to present proper identification and follow all security guidelines at the school site.
Sincerely….
Translated: “You’re free to do what you’ve always been free to do, and we don’t care enough to encourage you to do it.” Essentially, Jeffco Schools made it clear that it is not willingly going to form a partnership with the members of the community begging to help it improve the quality of education we deliver to OUR children.
Jeffco Schools has demonstrated once again that it is more committed to preserving a dysfunctional but comfortable status quo than to providing our kids with the best possible education.
It’s time to break free of the ritualized kabuki theater of modern American education. It’s time to do more than invest in school improvement plans and “best practices” research, the products of which are then shelved and forgotten, swept away by the combination of overwhelming inertia and petty local politics that seem to define American public education today. It’s time to start exploring robust and meaningful alternatives that could dramatically improve the breadth and depth of education that our children receive. A good place to start is by expanding the human resource base on which our students are able to draw, by utilizing the free and abundant community resources that are available.
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Colin Powell spoke out on immigration reform recently (http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_16119612). He said what every reasonable person knows: That we have to provide a road to legal status for the roughly 12 million who are here illegally, and that we have to recognize that fairly massive immigration is still part of the life-blood of this country.
As Powell recognizes, leaving intact an underground undocumented population that constitutes over three percent of the entire population is simply untenable. Identifying, detaining, and removing a significant portion of that population is prohibitively costly, inhumane, and destructive to our own economy. The only reasonable course of action, by any measure, is to provide a path to some kind of legal status, and to make it more attractive than remaining undocumented.
Also, as Powell realizes, those millions of undocumented immigrants are fully integrated into our economy, into our culture, and into our society. Simply removing them, even aside from the incredible inhumanity involved, would send shock waves through all three. It would undermine our economic vitality, disrupt our social systems and networks, and impoverish our culture.
Virtually everyone agrees that some kind of immigration reform is necessary. The argument is over what form it should take.
A few quick facts to keep in mind:
1) The United States has historically exploited the permeability of our southern border, and the relative poverty south of it, to create a membrane through which cheap disposable labor can pass (sometimes assertively imported) when it is convenient for us, and can be blocked and removed when it is inconvenient for us.
2) The true economic impact of illegal immigration is far more complex, and far less large, than the xenophobes contend. Most analyses conclude that there is either pretty much a net nation-wide economic wash, or a small net nation-wide economic gain due to illegal immigration, though the distribution of costs and benefits does lead to real strains on local social services. Illegal immigrants pay far more taxes, and are far more obstructed from collecting the benefits funded for by those taxes, than some people realize. Most importantly, they are paying into social security to support current retirees, but are not accruing social security benefits upon which they can draw.
3) Human beings have always migrated away from poverty and toward opportunity, and always will. Any responsible parent would place greater weight on their children’s future than on the prohibition to cross a line drawn in the sand by historical (and opportunistic) military conflicts. To villify people for doing so is simply reprehensible.
4) The more factors of production can flow freely, which includes how open borders are, the more global wealth is produced, and, in this case, the less inequitably it is distributed.
5) We rely on massive immigration demographically, with a burgeoning retired population and a shrinking working-age population supporting them. Immigrants come to work, redressing that imbalance.
Here’s my analysis:
From a global economic efficiency and distributional justice point-of-view, the ideal is the free flow of people and goods across borders. From a global leadership and fairness in distributing the burden point-of-view, the US should be in the lead on moving the world in the direction of that ideal.
I’m both a global humanist and a realist: I recognize the ideals we should be striving for, and the current realities that force us to compromise our efforts. One of the realities of the world is that people are locally and immediately biased: costs and benefits closer to home and closer to the present are weighted much more heavily than costs and benefits farther from home and farther in the future.
I’m less sympathetic to the reactions of people who resent (though are only marginally burdened by) the unstoppable flow of people from poverty and destitution toward opportunity than I am cognizant of its inevitability. For that reason, more than any other, we need federal laws that are enforceable, and that are a reasonable compromise between who and what we should be, and who and what we are.
The history of immigration law in America is a lot uglier than a lot of people realize, more often racist than not, and still somewhat brutal in the fierce protection of what’s ours, even against the most innocent and vulnerable victims of a cruel world. It’s hard to admire that, when the vast majority in America are walking around with i-phones, and pay cable subscriptions, and live comfortably and eat well. And here’s one of my objections to some in my own party: the branch of American labor that does not recognize any international responsibility beyond protecting our own wealth against foreign intrusion is as odious to me as any aspect of right-wing ideology.
Furthermore, we are capable of restructuring our priorities, and investing in our future, in ways which will provide native-born Americans with better opportunities to fill higher-paying, more information-intensive positions in our national (and the global) economy, leaving those eager souls from beyond our borders with the opportunity to fill the lower-paying, unskilled positions that Americans no longer want. This is, to a limited extent, the nature of illegal immigration today; in reality, the demand for low-paid foreign labor exists because Americans want, and can usually find, better opportunities (and the demand for highly paid, highly skilled foreign labor exists because we are failing to educate our own children to be able to satisfy it). But to the extent that there still is some competition for jobs between those born here or here legally, at the bottom of our economic ladder, and those who are newly arriving illegally, a greater commitment on our part to robust and effective public education, and provision of affordable, varied higher educational opportunities, will mitigate this problem, by moving those already here up the economic ladder, and leaving the rungs at the bottom to those newly arriving.
Even so, the use of immigrant labor to depress wages and to displace higher paid American labor still exists. Despite our relative wealth and comfort, the pressures and anxieties of an uncertain economy, of an uncertain future, of family responsibilities and assumptions about what we will be able to give to our children, all make our protectionist reflexes understandable, if neither ideal nor admirable. I’m not unsympathetic to the worker whose livelihood is made less secure by the competition of desparately poor people elsewhere, nor to the folks in border states and communities whose local resources are strained by undocumented waves of humanity pouring in.
But I’m a human being first, and an American second. The problems and stresses of Americans are nothing compared to the problems and stresses of those against whom we are protecting ourselves. And our mythologies and rationalizations with which we reassure ourselves that that is just and right do not in any way actually make it just and right. Furthermore, our own long-term interests are best served by including massive immigration in the equation, and creating a context in which those who enter fill positions that those who are here no longer need to settle for.
So that’s the nature of the challenge, as I see it. How do we negotiate all of those imperatives, all of those needs, all of those legitimate concerns? I don’t know. But the first step is to achieve a higher degree of honesty about the nature of the world in which we live, and the nature of the role we play, and could play, in it.
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Susan Greene’s column in today’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16114434) discusses the current CU Board of Regents, and the choices Coloradans have. Sue Sharkey, a Republican reactionary in the 4th Congressional District running for regent of our flagship university, states that “[c]ollege graduates are more likely to be liberalized than non-college graduates.” Her solution to this unacceptable result of receiving a higher education is to impose upon it her ideological agenda. Steve Bosley, a current regent, was one of four to vote no on “Preserving the Independence of the Board of Regents,” a vote on whether to appeal an appellate court decision that regents cannot ban concealed weaons on campus. At a Tea Party rally, Bosley said, “We’re the storm troopers. The storm troopers are going to take back America.”
One important measure of a civilization is how much it appreciates and cultivates the gift of human consciousness, and how sincerely it aspires to be a bastion of wisdom and compassion. The term “a liberal education” refers to our tradition of striving to ensure that as many of our young people as possible are guided through an exploration of human knowledge, learning about humanity, who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Our universities are indeed our temples of human knowledge and thought, where we go to learn and to create new knowledge, to investigate the complexities and subtleties of our world and universe, to improve our ability to act wisely.
Not only is America under attack by self-proclaimed “storm troopers” admittedly determined to undermine our commitment to providing a broad and comprehensive education to our young people, but they are currently the majority on the Board of Regents of Colorado’s flagship university. When a large and vocal minority, passionate, angry, militant, motivated by the desire to catalyze and assist the contraction of the human mind and the human heart, by the rejection of wisdom and compassion, by the advocacy of ignorance and belligerence, succeed in taking over our temples of wisdom, our institutions for cultivating human consciousness, it is not hyperbole to suggest that this is a threat to the very foundation of what it means to be a civilized nation.
Coloradan’s do have a choice this November. As Susan Greene wrote, “The at-large race is a statewide referendum on what we want the regency to be.” By extension, it’s about something more than that as well: It’s a statewide referendum on what kind of a people we want to be. Melissa Hart, the CU Law professor who is a Harvard Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, represents the choice to be a civilized people committed to wisdom and compassion. The alternative is to allow one more victory of a movement determined to force America to worship at the alter of ignorance and belligerence. Let’s not falter in the face of this truly consequential challenge.
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Many of the most pressing social problems we face are embedded in the loss of community, in dysfunctional families, in unaddressed behavioral and situational problems of children. Some consider these spheres of life to be beyond the purview of public policy, and too expensive to address even if government could or should be used to address them. I think this is mistaken on all counts, and more profoundly than immediately apparent.
First, the unaddressed (or under addressed) behavioral and mental health problems of children, and the unstable or unsafe family environments in which many find themselves, end up being extremely costly to society in the long run, both monetarily and socially. These under addressed problems are implicated in poor educational performance, delinquent and future criminal behavior, and a myriad of related problems that reduce individual productivity, increase economic and social burdens on society, and reproduce themselves generationally.
Second, our current programs tend to be piecemeal, reactive, and both fiscally inefficient and of more limited effectiveness than necessary. This is not a set of defects that we cannot substantially improve upon, and, in fact, there are many advances taking place right now which are doing just that. By placing ever-increasing emphasis on coordination among services and agencies that perform interrelated services for children and families in need, we reduce the costs of fractured and redundant services performed by seperate agencies with unconsolidated administrative costs. Those costs are far greater than providing oversight boards which help to coordinate and consolidate these overlapping services. By doing so, not only is the fiscal efficiency of providing services greatly increased, but also the outcome efficacy of these services, for when schools and juvenile justice agencies and mental health providers and child welfare counselors and others involved in addressing individual children’s needs are engaged in those efforts in better coordinated ways, all do their jobs more effectively, and contribute to a more effective regime of service provision.
Providing such proactive services more effectively, addressing the behavioral health challenges that so many of our youth face, helping to ensure that each child has a safe and nurturing permanent family environment in which to grow up in, and coordinating these efforts with both juvenile justice agencies and public schools, not only increases the present and future welfare of those children, but also reduces both the costs of reactive solutions to the problems thus avoided, and the costs to society of the problems themselves.
The costs of the relative failure of our educational system, for instance, are enormous, on many levels, costs that can be dramatically reduced through improvements in the effectiveness of our schools. And the enormnous costs of having the dubious distinction of being the nation, of all nations on Earth, with both the highest absolute number, and highest percentage of our population incarcerated, are perhaps directly tracable to our failure to address the childhood problems that lay the foundation for that unfortunate statistic.
Improving our proactive services to children and families is an up-front investment in our future, cultivating productive and well-adjusted members of society who contribute more to our collective welfare and less to our collective suffering. And even marginal gains on that dimension promise enormous future fiscal savings. It’s an investment we can’t afford not to make.
But the potential to improve the quality of our lives, and the prospects for our children, do not stop there. Increased community involvement provides one more pillar to the structure of improved support to children and families, increasing the vigilance with which problems are identified, the informal neighborly assistance and interventions with which they are avoided or mitigated, and the positive human capital with which child development is cultivated. Implementing robust community volunteer tutoring and mentoring programs is one easy step we can take to increase the strength of our communities, improve the quality of education our children receive, and provide our youth with a greater number of positive role models to emulate. In addition to such benefits are the benefits of increased informal mutual support in times of need, and just as an ordinary part of life, each of us helping one another out just a little bit more, because we have spent more time working together as members of a cohesive community.
There are no panaceas, and I do not mean to imply that the policy agenda I am outlining would solve all of our problems, would magically make all children well-behaved and studious, and all neighbors helpful. I am suggesting that, as always, we can do better or worse, we can improve on our current social institutional framework or not, and we can strive to increase the opportunities available to our children for their future success, and our improved shared quality of life.
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A marine bacteria that very robustly pumps carbon out of the atmosphere and into a permanent oceanic carbon sink. From The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/16990766.
To sumarize, when marine life dies, some of the carbon in the remains dissolves into the ocean, 95% of which can’t be metabolized (called “refractory”). Since it can’t be metabolized, it can’t be turned back into carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, making it an actually and potentially enormous carbon sink that has been largely overlooked by marine biologists until recently. The quantity of carbon stored in these refractory molecules is about equal to the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere.
It had previously been discovered that a certain kind of bacteria (abbreviated AAPB) produces these refractory molecules when it metabolizes certain common nutrients, but on a far more robust scale than previously realized. (The main source of food for these bacteria is phytoplankton, which plays a crucial role in the marine food chain and itself is affected in complex ways by global warming).
Until now, the only known way to stimulate carbon absorption into the sea was to seed the sea with iron in order to stimulate the growth of planktonic algae. However, the introduction of iron has some serious negative side effects. With the new discovery of this very robust carbon pump (the AAPB bacteria, which pumps carbon from the carbon cycle into an apparently premanent carbon-sink), new potential exists for organically pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and into the sea, which has a large capacity to absorb it with ecological damage. How this might be done, exactly, is not yet known.
This story is interesting in its own right, but what appeals to me most is that it highlights the complex systemic nature of the world in which we live, and the value of understanding it for working with those systems to find solutions that both serve our own particularly human interests, and simultaneously restore disrupted systems to a sustainable dynamic equilibrium.
Humanity faces a daunting challenge: Billions of people desperate to live even in what Americans would call an extremely modest level of comfort and security, and a global integrated system (comprised of biosphere, and the anthrosphere within it; the hydrosphere; the atmosphere; and the lithosphere) already strained by the relatively few who already do. For the wealthy and comfortable few to attempt to condemn the rest of global humanity to perpetual poverty in the name of environmental sensitivity is completely untenable for both humanitarian and pragmatic reasons (you want more violence and instabililty? Try that strategy).
Our paltry attempts to solve our environmental problems with what are truly systemically superficial strategies are not going to rise to this challenge. We are going to need to effectively redesign our economic and technological systems to become more integrated with the ecological and natural systems within which they are ensconsed, and upon which they depend.
Economically, it means “internalizing the externalities,” incorporating into the prices of our goods and services the environmental costs that are currently not incorporated. Technologically, it is going to mean integrating an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the systems which comprise our world into the technologies which interact with those systems. Together, economically and technologically, it will mean constructing closed systems, in which the waste produced is the in-put in another process, and in which imbalances are addressed by tweaking the human and natural systems through which we operate in ways which restore and maintain the balance that had been disrupted.
First, of course, we need to overcome that faction of humanity more to the indefinate continuation of immediate, on-going, destructive, unsustainable, self-indulgent greed and mutual indifference. Once again, though the challenges we face together are daunting enough, it is the armies of Organized Ignorance among us who ensure our inability to confront and surmount them.
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Another step forward for Colordo’s New Energy Economy? http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16086540
The Denver Post today printed an interesting op-ed today (“Green Homes Are Not So New”: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16036555), describing the history of sod houses on the prairie, with sunflowers growing on the roof, as well as past uses of passive solar technology in architecture, and implicitly comparing and contrasting that use of “green technologies” to today’s more sophisticated New Energy technologies.
Aside from presenting a fascinating little detail of Colorado history, the story also reminds me of the fact that much of what progress is involves rediscovering the essence of what we were and where we’re coming from, and applying it in more sophisticated ways to what we are becoming and where we’re going. Ultimately, we “emerged from” ecosystems (and remain, despite our delusions of exceptionalism, mere products of nature still ensconced within ecosystems), and are now striving to reintegrate ourselves in systemically sustainable ways back into those ecosystems, without sacrificing the prosperity that our rapacious exploitation of Nature’s bounty has enabled us to enjoy.
It is my belief that our social institutions and our technologies will increasingly come to resemble nature’s forms and functions ever more closely, eventually becoming fully reintegrated into the natural systems of which they are inevitably a part, preserving the benefits to us, while finding ways to eliminate the costs to the natural context which sustains us. In the process, we will better mimic the far-greater sophistication of natural systems, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our own human systems by doing so.
…the ‘them’ are those who believe in extremism.” This is a statement just made in closing by a participant in a discussion of American Muslims on “This Week,” discussing the anti-Islamic ferver in America today.
More generally (and currently even less attainably), I would argue, the “us” are those who are global humanists who strongly identify with no other in-group/group distinction, and the “them” are insular “tribalists” who live in a world most saliently defined by the intersection of their various in-groups (racial, national, ethnic, socio-economic, religious, sexual orientation, etc.), and all of the out-groups against whom they stand in opposition.
Of course, as with all such things, it is not really such a tidy dichotomy, but rather a set of interacting continua, with individuals falling at different points along different continua, some being quite nationalistic but not very racist, or quite classist but not very concerned with sexual orientation. However, those who tend to be “in-group/out-group” oriented in some spheres tend to be so oriented in others, because it is a way of viewing the world more than it is a set of positions on discrete issues.
Being committed to a non-tribalistic orientation does not mean being ignorant of current realities: We live in a world divided in many ways (politically, religiously, culturally, socio-economically, etc.), and those divisions have real consequences, and real implications for what kinds of public policies we can and should pursue. We can’t legislate globally, because we have no global government. We can’t magically create universal non-tribalism by embracing non-tribalism ourselves, as individuals. The question we should always address is, “What decisions, among those that I can make, best serve global humanity, given the current realities of the world?”
