Richard Sears forwarded this review originally posted at The New Yorker.

Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

A Book Review by Malcom Gladwell

A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable–a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years–and then they vanished.

The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond´s ìCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (Viking; $29.95). Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-seller ìGuns, Germs, and Steel,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. In ìGuns, Germs, and Steel,” Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In ìCollapse,” he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history´s losers–like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn´t particularly interested in any of those things–or, at least, he´s interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society´s relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. ìCollapse” is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth´s ecosystem–soil, trees, and water–because societies fail, in Diamond´s view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model of the time–devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.

The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.

But Greenland´s ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of strong winds. ìThe sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than is grass,” he writes. ìWith the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland´s climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire valley.” Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock–particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit–they called them skraelings, ìwretches”–and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen´s robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

Diamond´s argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society´s collapse. Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal civilization of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of smallpox. European Jewry was destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the disappearance of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little Ice Age, which descended on Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds, ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One archeologist refers to this as the ìIt got too cold, and they died” argument.) What all these explanations have in common is the idea that civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God.

But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it´s a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island´s forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. ìI have often asked myself, ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?´” Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of ìCollapse.” Those trees were felled by rational actors–who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of ìCollapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren´t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

This doesn´t mean that acts of God don´t play a role. It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn´t get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn´t adapt to the country´s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman´s dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. ìEvery archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. ìCould the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn´t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.

Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It would have diversified their diet.

Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren´t thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. ìThe Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland´s difficulties,” Diamond writes. ìThe values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.” He goes on:

To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.

Diamond´s distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.

Diamond points out that the Easter Islanders did not practice, so far as we know, a uniquely pathological version of South Pacific culture. Other societies, on other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, chopped down trees and farmed and raised livestock just as the Easter Islanders did. What doomed the Easter Islanders was the interaction between what they did and where they were. Diamond and a colleague, Barry Rollet, identified nine physical factors that contributed to the likelihood of deforestation–including latitude, average rainfall, aerial-ash fallout, proximity to Central Asia´s dust plume, size, and so on–and Easter Island ranked at the high-risk end of nearly every variable. ìThe reason for Easter´s unusually severe degree of deforestation isn´t that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident,” he concludes. ìInstead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people.” The problem wasn´t the Easter Islanders. It was Easter Island.

In the second half of ìCollapse,” Diamond turns his attention to modern examples, and one of his case studies is the recent genocide in Rwanda. What happened in Rwanda is commonly described as an ethnic struggle between the majority Hutu and the historically dominant, wealthier Tutsi, and it is understood in those terms because that is how we have come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb and Croat, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural antagonism. It´s an explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond. The Hutu didn´t just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at the land: steep hills farmed right up to the crests, without any protective terracing; rivers thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading to irregular rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population densities; the exhaustion of the topsoil; falling per-capita food production. This was a society on the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study of such societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal chaos. In ìCollapse,” Diamond quite convincingly defends himself against the charge of environmental determinism. His discussions are always nuanced, and he gives political and ideological factors their due. The real issue is how, in coming to terms with the uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest of us have turned ourselves into cultural determinists.

For the past thirty years, Oregon has had one of the strictest sets of land-use regulations in the nation, requiring new development to be clustered in and around existing urban development. The laws meant that Oregon has done perhaps the best job in the nation in limiting suburban sprawl, and protecting coastal lands and estuaries. But this November Oregon´s voters passed a ballot referendum, known as Measure 37, that rolled back many of those protections. Specifically, Measure 37 said that anyone who could show that the value of his land was affected by regulations implemented since its purchase was entitled to compensation from the state. If the state declined to pay, the property owner would be exempted from the regulations.

To call Measure 37–and similar referendums that have been passed recently in other states–intellectually incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the reason your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions to a developer is that it´s on a pristine hillside: if everyone on that hillside could subdivide, and sell out to Target and Wal-Mart, then nobody´s plot would be worth millions anymore. Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38, allowing them to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values caused by Measure 37?

It is hard to read ìCollapse,” though, and not have an additional reaction to Measure 37. Supporters of the law spoke entirely in the language of political ideology. To them, the measure was a defense of property rights, preventing the state from unconstitutional ìtakings.” If you replaced the term ìproperty rights” with ìFirst Amendment rights,” this would have been indistinguishable from an argument over, say, whether charitable groups ought to be able to canvass in malls, or whether cities can control the advertising they sell on the sides of public buses. As a society, we do a very good job with these kinds of debates: we give everyone a hearing, and pass laws, and make compromises, and square our conclusions with our constitutional heritage–and in the Oregon debate the quality of the theoretical argument was impressively high.

The thing that got lost in the debate, however, was the land. In a rapidly growing state like Oregon, what, precisely, are the state´s ecological strengths and vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use priorities have on water and soil and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond writing about the Measure 37 debate, and he wouldn´t be very impressed by how seriously Oregonians wrestled with the problem of squaring their land-use rules with their values, because to him a society´s environmental birthright is not best discussed in those terms. Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs–with making sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of witnesses following the announcement of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays–that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone.

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland–crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers–which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

This morning the Editor of Metaphysics Anonymous examines two tactics of adversity.

The War on Torture

Eldon New

I have noticed a symmetry between terrorism and torture.

They are both tactics to influence military campaigns or political movements.

They both tend to backfire, that is they can have the opposite effect than the one intended.

The tactic of terror is used by political movements with no ability or authority to negotiate, and who do not feel included in the political process.

The tactic of torture is used by political groups in power with legal authority and is used to maintain that power.

The Encyclopedia Americana has a section on torture:

The article mentions groups who practice these methods:

Newer issues of this encyclopedia will have to be updated to include the detail that some factions in the US government have decided that torture will now be allowed and utilized.

I have been in contact with Capt. Nemo through his friend Col. Kurtz, and he is planning to begin a part of the “War on Torture” by using sarcasm against the “evildoers” who perpetrate this abomination.

The US government has decided to pull out of the international court and not abide by the Geneva Convention, which they describe as “quaint.”

Einstein has weighed in on the issue of international law:

Some people are worried by the bogus rationale for a recent war:

Reagan assumed the United States would continue to honor international law and human rights:

If this bothers you, we can get reassurance from President G.W. Bush’s recent statement:

I was going to print Captain Nemo’s response to that remark, but in light of the FCC’c recent rulings, it is unprintable. [6]

What types of property ownership are best for the world? This article explores how petroleum and water are being owned and mis-owned worldwide. Reposted from The Progress Report.

Who Owns the World’s Oil?

George Caffentzis

The struggles over the ownership of the two most important political liquids of this era, petroleum and water, have had different fates. Though water has been claimed to be either private, state or common property throughout history, the novel feature of this period has been the move by corporations to totally privatize it. The powerful struggles against this corporate privatization of water from Cochabamba in Bolivia to Soweto in South Africa have focused world attention on the question: Who owns water? The consequent efforts to keep water as a common property on a local and global level are now some of the most important initiatives of the anti-globalization movement.

Petroleum, on the other hand, has in the last hundred and fifty years been considered exclusively as either private or state property. The pages of the history books on the petroleum industry have been filled with “magnates” like John D. Rockefeller or government “leaders”like Saddam Hussein and Winston Churchill. Thus the “struggle over oil”has been largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century.

But over the last fifteen years there has been a major shift in the physiognomy of the protagonists in the oil struggle. No longer do national governments and huge energy conglomerates dominate the scene so exclusively. The new protagonists include: “peoples” like the Ijaws, the Ogoni, the Chiapanacos, the U’wa, the Cofan, the Secoyas, the Huaorani, the Sumatrans; border-transcending social movements under the star of Islam and subscribing to “Islamic economics”; elements of the UN system like the World Bank, claiming to represent “global governance” of the “global commons.” These peoples, movements and global entities have entered into the struggle for the control of oil production, legitimizing themselves with a new (and yet, at the same time, quite archaic) conception of property–common property.

Why is the notion of a petroleum commons emerging now, and what are its consequences for the oil industry?

There are three levels of claims to petroleum as common property, correlating with three kinds of allied communities that are now taking shape, for there is no common property without a community that regulates its use:

• First, some local communities most directly affected by the extraction of petroleum claim to own and regulate the petroleum under its territory as a commons
• Second, Islamic economists claim for the Islamic community of believers, from Morocco to Indonesia, and its representative, the 21st century Caliphate in formation, ownership of and the right to regulate the huge petroleum fields beneath their vast territory.
• Third, UN officials claim for the “coming global community”the right to regulate the so-called global commons–air, water, land, minerals (including petroleum) and “nous” (knowledge and information). This imagined global community is to be represented by a dizzying array of “angels” that make up the UN system, from NGO activists to UN environmentalist bureaucrats to World Bank “green” advisors.

These claims and their legitimizing discourse are displacing, with different results, the monopoly hold of governments and corporations over the ownership and regulation of the planet’s petroleum. There is much in common in these conceptions of the petroleum commons, but they are also often in conflict. These conflicts will determine how the struggle over the ownership of petroleum and the regulation of its extraction and use will be transformed by the entrance of the “commoners” into a field dominated for over a century by nation states and global corporations.

The Local Petroleum Commons: Nigeria, Chiapas, the Amazon

One of the most important areas where the petroleum commons is emerging as a political reality is the Niger Delta. This area is located in a crossroads of the world market. Three centuries ago the region from Escarvos to Calabar was the main storage and transshipment point of African slaves bound for the plantations of the Americas. This trade poisoned the Delta people’s social relations then. Today the Delta people are caught in the middle of the global oil industry that is poisoning them physically and economically as well as socially. They have been struggling against this fate with great courage and originality, taking a political road that began with a demand for reparations for past damages caused by the oil companies, and has evolved to the declaration of a petroleum commons in the Delta.

This story begins in the early 1990s, when the Ogoni people decided that the time was ripe to transform what had been a long-fought but largely unknown and parochial struggle against both the Nigerian government and the global oil companies into an internationally-recognized one. The Ogonis are a relatively small ethnic group in Nigeria (with a population of less than a million), but they have been in the middle of oil production in Nigeria from its beginning and have suffered greatly for it. Some Ogonis realized that if they had to fight a global oil company–in their case, Royal Dutch Shell–to get reparations, they had to become global themselves. But how was a relatively small, impoverished ethnic group in the midst of an “obscure” part of Africa to “globalize itself”?

Parochial ethnic politics had to be transcended to make clear that the Ogoni struggle was part of the worldwide ecological struggle against the major oil companies. On the heels of the “No Blood for Oil”struggle against the first US-Iraq war, the Ogonis pointed out that they too had suffered to fuel the profits of Shell and the industrial machines of Europe and the US. And with the help of one of their leaders, playwright Kenule Saro-Wiwa, who had built up an international audience with his writings, the message made a connection with environmental groups around the planet.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) helped stimulate a “recomposition” of the anti-capitalist movement, since it made it clear that the Ogonis’ demands for reparations for Shell’s destruction of their environment were an integral part of the wider demand that the total costs of capitalist development be recognized and paid for by corporations everywhere. [The Progress Report observes -- we don't see anything "anti-capitalist" about honest accounting.]

In 1995, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and hanged on false charges of murder by the Nigerian military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha — actions Shell was complicit with. In response, Greenpeace and other environmental groups organized an effective worldwide boycott of Shell, protesting the blood being painfully exchanged for oil in Nigeria as in the Middle East. Ken Saro-Wiwa paid with his life for connecting the Ogoni with a world environmentalist movement, but his organizational model has been used again and again by other small ethnic groups throughout the world.

The high cost the Ogoni paid for their struggle was noted by other militant groups in the Niger Delta, which have de-emphasized the internationalization of their struggle and focused directly on negotiations with oil companies and the Nigerian government based upon their capacity to hinder or halt production or shipment of oil. These groups, however, have pushed the demands of the struggle to a new level–instead of demanding reparations as MOSOP did, they are claiming ownership of the petroleum underneath their territory as common property.

Thus the most prominent movement in the Delta after the MOSOP effort was the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN). The Ijaws form one of the largest ethnic groups in the Delta (with a population of approximately eight million), and their struggle has largely rejected non-violence and resurrected the militant symbols and memories of their collective past. The cult of Egbesu, their traditional war god, has been the recruiting ground for young militants who have liberated their leaders from government prisons, taken over oil installations, and kidnapped oil workers.

MOSOP was formally a non-violent organization. Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni leaders believed that it was folly to think that a small ethnic group could directly confront the might of the Nigerian army–which was then controlled by a military government. The Ijaw armed resistance has rejected this path, even though it has faced devastating attacks by the Nigerian military–including the horrendous Christmas massacre at Odi in 1999 that left 2,000 dead. This shift in tactics put into question much of the international support that the Ogoni struggle and Saro-Wiwa’s martyrdom had engendered for struggles in the Delta.

There were other important changes in the struggle beside the turn to armed confrontation with the government and oil companies. These included the Kaiama Declaration, that formally claimed the petroleum within Ijaw territory as the common property of the Ijaw community. This notion of the petroleum commons has become the ruling discourse in much of the armed resistance in the Delta. A good example of this is the reply a former president of the Ijaw Youth Council and current militia commander, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, gave to a Financial Times reporter when asked about much his men take from pipelines each day, “As much as we can. It’s free.” Another is the graffiti left behind after the Odi massacre by invading soldiers: “Na you get oil? Foolish people.” (“Does the oil belong to you? Foolish people.”)

Another dramatic political development was the entrance of women’s organizations into the struggle for a petroleum commons. Local women from the Ijaw and Istkeri ethnicities remembered the old tactic of shaming soldiers by appearing before them collectively naked–which was used to effect in the Aba Women’s War of 1929 against the British. After being brutally beaten by oil company guards in November 2002, one group of women protesters in the Delta threatened that “within 10 days from today, if our hospital and rehabilitation bills are not paid, we will all come out en masse fully naked, and we shall occupy not only their gates but their flow stations throughout the Niger Delta…”

What was more threatening to the oil companies and the Nigerian government than the presence of thousands of naked women occupying their oil installations, however, was the fact that women from different, often conflicting ethnic groups had come together at all. For the most powerful weapon the government and the oil companies have in escaping paying reparations and recognizing the Niger Delta communities’ communal ownership of the petroleum under their territory is the division between the groups themselves. However powerful ethnic ties are in strengthening the will to resist, they are also extremely divisive, resulting in thousands of deaths in the last decade. The fact that women from the oft-warring Itsekiri, Ijaw, Ilaje and Urhobos groups could join in a united front indicates that at least they have understood the secret of power. Whether their unity will set the pace for the petroleum commons movement in the Delta is still an open question.

Just as the early 1990s was a crucial turning point for the first step to a petroleum commons on the Niger Delta, that time also saw the organization of indigenous peoples around similar demands in Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. We know that at that time the Zapatistas were organizing an armed rebellion in Chiapas, launched on New Years Day 1994–the precise moment NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas’ Subcommandante Marcos frequently pointed out that when the indigenous cut firewood for their homes they are arrested and fined. But when the oil developers cut huge swathes through the forest for their roads and blow down trees with their dynamite, they are congratulated for their productivity!

But as fate would have it, post-rebellion Zapatista communities are often located near or directly over oil deposits. Consequently, the San Andres Accords — the main document arising from the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government — included the recognition of the indigenous communities’ “collective right to evaluate federal and state plans to exploit strategic resources in their region in order to determine those plans’ effects on indigenous territories.” This provision which, in effect, gave the indigenous communities a veto over oil exploration and exploitation, was certainly one of the main sticking points that prevented the approval of the Accords.

Similar developments took place in Ecuador in the early 1990s. Although oil exploration and extraction began in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1960s, it took some time for the indigenous peoples most affected by the industry’s pollution of their environment and the disintegration of their social life to organize: first to demand a clean-up and compensation, and then to claim the oil as a common resource whose disposition depended upon their will and not the state’s or the oil companies’–up to and including “The Right To Say, ‘No.’”

The Right To Say “No” became extremized in the struggle of the U’wa people in Colombia against Occidental Petroleum’s attempt to explore for oil in their territory, beginning in 1993. The U’wa threatened to commit collective suicide if Occidental Petroleum, which was granted exploration rights in U’wa territory by the Colombian government, actually drilled in their territory. The oil company had estimated over a billion barrels of oil there, and was anxious to verify the estimate. But a combination of law suits in Colombian and international courts, shareholder resolutions, demonstrations in front of its California offices and the home of its CEO carried on by the U’wa and their allies–as well as the threat of mass suicide by the entire U’wa community–somehow almost magically managed to “hide” the oil from the exploratory drills’ reach. Occidental Petroleum then pulled out of U’wa territory without making the second try which is usually standard procedure. Not surprisingly, these failed efforts by Occidental to penetrate the U’wa resistance have been followed by the exploration activities of Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company–which will face similar resistance and similar defeats.

The U’wa are one of many local peoples throughout the planet that are going beyond the position of supplicants demanding compensation from the oil industry for the harm oil extraction has caused. The growth of these non-corporate, non-state actors who claim communal ownership of petroleum is remarkable, and is having a decisive impact on the development of the oil industry. This is especially true of the expansion of oil exploration into the “margins”–areas that had previously been too distant from the main centers of the oil industry. It is exactly there that the oil industry is continually confronting people who still have a sense of the commons, since they often have common property resources such as land, and methods to regulate them. Consequently, the state and market paradigms of oil ownership are clashing with dozens of new, often “small,” local movements and communities that, when integrated across the planet, are beginning to have an impact on the legal status of oil ownership.

The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia

Another notion of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the world-wide Islamic community and neither state nor private property. This conception is challenging the relations that have been worked out between global oil companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.

A key event in the development of the global oil industry was the destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is pledged to defend the world-wide Islamic community, and the Ottoman Turks had been performing this role of the “defenders of the faith” since the fifteenth century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Saudi Arabia–i.e., the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In order for the petroleum industry to operate on a completely capitalist basis, the large international oil companies and major imperialist powers at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under their control.

This antithesis between a Caliphate and the regular for-profit operation of the oil industry is simple. An Islamic Caliphate had to recognize certain redistributive economic principles (including the notion of a petroleum common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that are problematic to the kind of total corporate control envisioned by the founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and 1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers (governmental or corporate). Finally, a genuine Caliphate would have had worldwide reach, and be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic community resided. These areas were often essential parts of the empires of Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).

What is called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This is what gives these social movements their “global reach,” for they claim to unite and to “protect” the Islamic community–which presently stretches from Morocco to Indonesia and, via immigration, into the heart of Europe and North America.

Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and whatever its class composition, this drive to a Caliphate is an important reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that nearly two-thirds of the world’s petroleum is “Islamic.” Such a drive, of course, is toward an “imagined community”–but then again, what community except the most intimate is not imagined?

Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the development of an “Islamic economics” that has a number of tenets relevant to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, it is seen from an Islamic perspective as a gift from Allah and hence a community good. Although Islamic economics respects private property–after all, Islam is a religion founded by a merchant–it also recognizes the role of communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard division of private, state and common property, and oil is definitely included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: “The people are partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum].” The recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the realization of an Islamic economics.

It is true, of course, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold, silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property of all Muslims. The Caliphate might mine them itself or sub-contract their collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the Bait al-Mal–the same treasury that the zakat or redistributive tithe, is destined for.

The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one. Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat, but there are many other redistributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition of usury) that make doctrinaire neoliberalism literally anathema in Islamic discourse. For a Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and jihad from the funds in the Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil production, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite’s extravagant ways are literally denying bread to the mouths of poor Muslim babes that Allah destined it for.

The third principle of Islamic economics is one based on the prohibition of waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Indeed, if the conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military hardware of the present elites are stopped, there would be an imperative to leave more oil in the ground. Such an economic policy would have an enormous impact on the pricing of oil, since it would not be considered a state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder; it would be a common good whose conservation is of value in itself.

Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in typical academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is taken by a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Savyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi writer Muhammad Baquir al-Sadr (1931-80) — the intellectual progenitors of Islamic economics — are often taken to task for trying to impose unrealistic constraints on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world, instead of heeding the free market wisdom of Frederick Hayek! But while critics cite the zakat and prohibition of interest, in fact their doctrine of the petroleum commons would certainly have a much greater impact on world economics, if it were actually put into place throughout the Islamic world.

This oil doctrine is the theoretical basis of economic planning for an Islamic world of more than a billion people. If a number of Islamic nations actually transformed their petroleum resources into a commons, then three important, perhaps even revolutionary, changes would follow. First, it would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness to exercise the
“Right to say ‘No’,” resulting in a much higher oil price. Second, the surplus of the commons would immediately flow into redistributive projects in the Islamic world and not into the financial systems of Europe and the US. Finally, of course, the whole basis of the neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush’s plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be definitely challenged.

The Global Petroleum Commons of the Future and the UN System

If we put together the local petroleum commons claims with those of Islamic economic theorists, then more than 70% of the oil on the planet is notionally claimed to be a part of a commons. Yet, there is still a third notion of petroleum as a global commons that incorporates all oil deposits, whether discovered or not. The proponents of this notion argue that the consequences of the exploration, extraction, distribution and consumption of petroleum are so problematic for
“humanity” that they cannot be left to the devices of private companies or nation states. There is, in this view, a global petroleum commons that needs an appropriate regulative community. But what is this community in its present incarnation? The most prominent contemporary answer is: the United Nations system.

Indeed, the concept of a global commons has stimulated the revival of the UN system’s legitimacy in the 1990s–since the system had an identity crisis after the end of the Cold War. For the UN system is increasingly claiming to be the surrogate for a truly global community of humanity that clearly does not yet exist. On the basis of this official representation of the future global community, the UN system has negotiated a number of accords with mining and energy companies that promised these companies ideological legitimacy. These include the Global Compact and the Global Mining Initiative as well as, of course, the Kyoto Accords. This makes the UN system–which includes the World Bank and IMF–the global “partner” to and regulator of the oil, gas and coal companies of the planet. [The Progress Report observes -- one can imagine such a UN 'system' in theory, but the World Bank and the IMF are separate and not controlled by the UN at all.]

It is crucial to understand why in the last fifteen years the UN system dares to claim the right to regulate petroleum as a global commons. During this time the extractive industries, with special emphasis on mining and oil, have been in crisis. This was not due to their reaching the absolute limits on supply of minerals or oil. It was due to the refusal of billions of people around the planet to accept the social and environmental impacts of their destructive activities. What appears to be the “natural” limit of extraction (as explained by either the Club of Rome’s “asymptotic depletion curves” or by M. King Hubbert’s “peak oil” graphs) is simply the resistance of an ever-wider circle of people to suffering the consequences of private or state mineral or oil extraction with no compensation or redress. Global warming, environmental pollution and illness, hazardous working conditions have increasingly been the source of anxiety about, protest against and disruption of operations in the extractive industries. Inevitably these responses and the problems they address–not the difficulty of finding new fields of coal, copper or petroleum–have led to these industries’ long-term loss of trust. The extractive industries needed some “legitimate partner” to negotiate with that would not pose the immediate threatening demands that organizations of workers and local communities increasingly present.

Just as the extractive industries were undergoing their crisis, the UN system was facing it own. After all, it was set up to negotiate the conflicts of Capitalism vs. Communism and Colonialism vs. Anti-Colonialism. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of apartheid in South Africa, what was the UN system to do with itself? Here is where the call of the extractive industries, especially the oil industry, became one of its lifelines. Its identity crisis could be resolved by becoming the “partner” of the extractive industries and regulating them as a representative of the coming global community.

The difficulties of such a surrogate global community have been brought to every one’s attention after more than a decade of the anti-globalization movement’s critique of the UN system’s most powerful elements besides the Security Council–the World Bank and IMF. Instead of the inherent problems of the nation state being transcended by the rise to a global level, the experience of the neo-liberal turn of the World Bank and IMF demonstrates that the UN system often just magnifies the problems of nation-state capitalism. This UN-based “coming global community” once again poses the classic solution to all distributive problems: “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.” Thus this
“virtual community” (actually composed of the UN-system and its satellite NGOs) feels free to demand, for example, that indigenous people in the South respect “ecological zones” or “conservation regions” it designates even though the actual indigenous community has no real power to control the behavior of this imaginary global community actually substituted for by the UN system. Indeed, the global petroleum commons as defined by the UN system can be seen as merely a preemptive strike against the local and Islamic commons.

The Petroleum Commons as Conflict and Opportunity

The entrance of “commoners” (indigenous peoples, Islamists, or UN officials) into the world of oil ownership and production on the three levels discussed here is undoubtedly creating major changes in the oil industry worldwide. The logic of both market and state rationality is increasingly losing its compelling power to determine the future of oil extraction and, with it, the whole system of capitalist production it energizes.

Critics of capitalism, however, cannot be complacent about the rise of the petroleum commoners. This social reality also poses political problems that can easily divide the anti-capitalist movement as well as make neoliberalism stumble. Every local commons requires a regulatory community with insiders and outsiders, and the outsiders might rightly demand to become insiders, with all the attendant possibility of conflict. Similarly, the regulation of the Islamic petroleum commons can conflict with the rules of local communities and their claimed commons. Finally, the demands of the global commons have already conflicted with the needs of local communities and with the Islamic ummah. But whatever the results of these conflicts, actual or potential, the assumption that petroleum is a different political liquid from water has been put in doubt by the demands and struggles of the petroleum commoners.

Also see: Common Assets Headquarters, Henry George’s discussion of common property, private property, and public property, Canada Conflict — Water Shortage versus Land Owners versus Petroleum Profits

What’s wrong with Merry Christmas?

Timothy Wilken MD

Recently it has become politically incorrect to wish your fellow humans a Merry Christmas. We are supposed to use the generic term Happy Holidays to avoid religious discrimination and hurting the feelings of others.

The term Christmas comes from a contraction of two words Christ and Mass. It is believed that the first Christmas was celebrated in the 4th century AD. The term Christ refers to the coming of a messiah to save the Jewish people as foretold in the Old Testament of the Bible. The term Mass referred to a special religious ceremony of the newly created Catholic Church based on the belief that the man known as Jesus of Nazareth was this foretold Christ. The Mass ceremony centers around the sharing of bread and wine of Communion (the Eucharist) which represents the body and blood of Jesus (transubstantiation), and Christ is sacrificed (offered up) again at each mass.

Like all new religions, the early Catholic Church began accommodating the pagan practices of that time. The merrymaking and exchanging of gifts came from the festival of Saturnalia (a festival to the god, Saturn) and the date, December 25, was an adaptation of the birthday of Mithra (the sun god). The actual birth date for Jesus of Nazareth is unknown. Christmas trees, mistletoe, candles, carols and gift giving rituals – all of these Christmas traditions are of pagan or non Christian origin.

So who are we offending by wishing someone a Merry Christmas?

There are those Christian religions that are purists. They believe in Christ and Jesus of Nazareth, but are offended by the pagan contamination surrounding Christmas. This includes the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And while the Jews believe in the Old Testament chapters of the Bible, and even in the coming of Christ, they do not accept that Jesus of Nazareth was that foretold messiah so Christmas is out for them. And then there are the many religions who do not accept the Bible so the Old Testament’s foretold Christ has no meaning to them. This includes the Hindu’s, Buddhists, and Muslims. And, don’t forget the Agnostics (the existence of God is unknowable) and Atheists (God does not exist) who naturally don’t believe in Christ, and so therefore might be offended when wished a Merry Christmas. And, I am sure the reader can think of many others who may be offended that I have left out.

I find all of this rather sad.

Probably for two reasons, first I remember growing up when Christmas was a positive event–A time to celebrate family, friendship and community–A time for Peace on Earth and Good Will to All. From that perspective, I can’t see how wishing anyone a Merry Christmas can be insulting.

But secondly, and more importantly, I very much want to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. I don’t care whether he was the Christ foretold in the Old Testament or not. I don’t care if there is a mixing of pagan and christian tradition in celebrating his birth. I don’t care whether December 25th is his real birth-date or not. I just want to celebrate Jesus of Nazareth, the human being.

Jesus of Nazareth was a good and decent man. He was a synergist. He taught that we should love one another, and that we should help each other. So (Merry Christmas) and …

Happy Jesus of Nazareth Day!

Read The Golden Rule.

Reposted from The New Farm.

Thinking Small

Laura Sayre

Working just one acre, Spencer and Mara used specialty crops and a genius for marketing to make Half Pint profitable after only two years.

Mara and Spencer Welton know how to focus. This farming couple grows a wide variety of lettuces and other greens, baby vegetables, herbs and cut flowers on less than an acre of Intervale land, selling at three Burlington farmers’ markets and to local restaurants. They have no employees and use almost no heavy equipment. From the beginning, Mara explains, their farm business strategy has been “to stay small and work it ourselves.”

Even so, after two years at the Intervale, Half Pint Farm has expanded dramatically in terms of turnover and profitability, Mara and Spencer report. With a few small shelters in the field in addition to Intervale farm program greenhouse space, the couple stretch their growing season from the last week of March to the last week of October. In the off season, Mara takes on temp work and Spencer teaches part-time at the local community college. Overall, they’re making a living doing work they love.

Spencer and Mara Welton of Half Pint Farm

High-school sweethearts from Denver, Mara and Spencer attended the University of Colorado in Boulder together, worked on an organic farm in Colorado and then joined the Peace Corps, serving two years in the Solomon Islands. “That was a very powerful experience, being part of a community like that,” says Spencer of their time in the Peace Corps. It convinced them that they wanted to grow food and to be connected to a place and a community in their future careers.

Back in the States, they relocated to western Pennsylvania, where Spencer completed a master’s degree in agroecology at Slippery Rock University. Spencer first came to Burlington for a wastewater treatment workshop, and was so impressed with the area and with the opportunity presented by the Intervale Farms Program that they decided to move here to start their farm business.

Half Pint Farm is a true partnership, with Spencer and Mara working side by side in the greenhouse, in the field and at the farmers’ markets. Mara handles most of the restaurant sales, making calls twice a week to take orders and schedule deliveries.

She says they’ve had good experiences selling to restaurants, and she credits the Vermont Fresh Network with helping to strengthen those relationships. “Chefs [in the network] make a pledge” to use local products, she explains. “That is pivotal. It makes it not like a cold call” even when you’re approaching a restaurant for the first time.

Ultra-microgreens mix of fennel, red-leaf amaranth and other leafy greens “Chefs love it,” says Mara. “It looks stunning as a garnish, but it also packs a lot of flavor.”

Mara and Spencer say that farming at the Intervale has also given them a leg up on accessing new markets. “People know the Intervale because of the [Intervale] Foundation and because of the CSA,” says Spencer. (The non-profit Intervale Community Farm, with 400 CSA members, has been in operation since 1989.) “You get a certain amount of respect from potential buyers because of that association.” That familiarity helped Half Pint establish contacts with chefs in the spring of 2003, before they even had any veggies to sell.

Today, one of Half Pint’s signature crops, an ultra-microgreens mix of fennel, red-leaf amaranth and other leafy greens, is grown with those chefs in mind. “Chefs love it,” says Mara. “It looks stunning as a garnish, but it also packs a lot of flavor.” The delicate, colorful crop takes just two weeks from seeding to harvest and sells for $24 a pound. This year, it was also the earliest marketable product to come out of an Intervale farm.

As the farm’s name implies, most of the rest of Half Pint’s crops also emphasize concentrated value–big flavors in small packages. They sell new potatoes, baby eggplant, tender zucchini, diminutive brassicas, cherry tomatoes, and more. The baby vegetable theme really works well at farmers’ markets, Mara and Spencer say: people are initially attracted by the novelty factor, but keep coming back because the veggies are so young and fresh many of them can be eaten raw. In addition, the Weltons put a lot of thought and effort into making their farmers’ market display distinctive and engaging, which is essential in competitive markets like Burlington’s. “We must have had 30 people per market take pictures of our stand this year,” says Spencer. And when people are done snapping photos, they buy.