Nice try, fred, but way too simplistic a criterion. Fine for countries like those in the EU with large populations in small areas, but those with small poulations in large areas where transportation is essential, agricultural productivity of the land is low requiring more land and more fuel to farm it...... etc. To say nothing of small population countries who understandably need to advance rapidly to reach the living standards that you smugly enjoy.

Just another Eurocentric view of "equality" I'm afraid.

The method outlined is as good as any to get to the obvious target of roughly equal emissions proportional to population size.

When you are talking about a 80 to 90 percent reduction in global emissions by 2100, and a 50 precent reduction by 2050, all we need worry about is a first order approximation of that redcution or increase, by those nations participating.

Second order approximations to those emission targets can be adjusted easily enough to compensate for Industrial Capacity, regional climate, and population density.

None of this is rocket science.

But then to many apes on this planet, walking and chewing gum is rocket science.

All you have to do is look at the Republican Failure currently occupying the White House to see that.

Vendicar Decarian

It sounds fair fred mate but there is nothing fair about it. if it was a level playing field then it would be.
Northen enviroments need more energy then say equitorial regions. some counties have a open access to polution info, other countries make it up as they go along. The offset scheme sounds very logical on paper.
The reality will be very diffrent. In the real world what will happen is realy simple to see.The companies will relocate, relocate, relocate when its not viable in a certain region the less developed counties will be inundated with industry until that part of the world is emmision expensive. and guess what happens next? Relocation.
will they be tidy about it ? or will there be a bit of an industrial scar. not to metion mass swings in the local and national ecconomics, low to high and back to low.also a massive transient global work force will be a nessesity. The quantity of instability and damage is unimaganable.It dosent matter what legislation there is in place, company lawyers will find the loop holes and totaly rubbish the scheeme. but on recycled paper it would be all in balance. just Like the reptile scheemes in Margret Thatchers day(float anew company say for £5 million, because of tax cuts and benifits the company is worth £6m sell it on )thats the sort of accounting carbon trading would create. even if it was done 100% the delay in the rebalancing will create a surplus, and diffrent areas will deal with that diffrently. Its great that so many diffrent ideas are getting genreated, but touting "Them as the best solution to climate change" is I think in error. This "solution" Is at best,futile and as mad as king TUT. Or bit like karl marx "I know whats good for the people"
How many people died so far for his solution to the poor man's conundrum poetic on paper pushes all the right buttons. but at best karl marxes worth is in ecconomics, not social solutions. Or somthing a bit closer to today, look at the mess that was created with the biofuels. we are still on the brink of global starvation sorry soaring global food prices.

This is how i see the present condition
The problem is like there is a person lying in the road servely injured because of a reckless driver. A medic arrives on the scene "shouts dont move or touch the person! " "im just gonna pop to the shops for a band aid",.. everybody stops! and awaits the medic comming back!!! But it wedensday and the shops are on half day and He only has 10 mins to get there , ( the guys meanwhile is dying and hemoreiging blood) meanwhile some folks realise hey this aint right, and start doing CPR and applying tourniquets and such, another chap/ess take the number of the car.
A little later the police arrive Ask where is the medic ? , HE/She then promtly go looking for him, The medic by now is going from shop to shop trying to by a band aid and if lucky might get offerd a bandage.
I know its easy for me to throw stones.
The solution is unfolding itself before us albeit too bloody slow. Its a multi pronged engagement, first aid, then surgery,
If triage is being heralded! as the best ( final)solution then civilisation is dying and will be dead on the battle feild. now whats the most humaine way,. ( oh thats a big can of worms im looking in now) bullet to the head or leave them to suffer. triage is a downward spiral. AND NOT A SOLUTION!

No plan will be acceptable to the large environmental groups unless it:

1.) Punishes the "wealthy".

2.) Gives more power to government.

3.) Damages capitalism.

4.) Moves mankind back toward living in caves.

Fred Fred Fred!!! I love how the world is all going to cooperate to save the planet! I wouldn't trust the UN or any over world body with my liberty or money.Need to watch Fox News investigation into the UN money & coruption! Carbon trading or control of oil production what great choices. Why base everything on population??? Instead of an arms race there would be reason to breed like rabbits! Don't you want to look at carbon production along with carbon sinks. Maybe factor in land area & other relevant items??? I'm still waiting to find out how I get paid for all the carbon my land (trees & grass) consume! Second thought just mind your countries business & stay out of mine!Ask Russia about borders cease fire lies, etc... Maybe the KGB & Putin are VD's idea of great leadership! Ronnie

Another thing in emmision trading
done fairly all greenhouse gasses will taken into account. in the eastern half of the world the agriculture is mostley rice production, china and the like with the methane (traps 25x more heat) and carbon emmisions will far exeede europeans foor print per capita. mind you we could ignore the methane problem i mention and say it is all just hot air

OK so America has less than 1/4 of 1% would drive horse & buggies while India would hold international NASCAR races? I s that right!

Surely we can all agree that making a start to lower our carbon footprints is important, and that a good start would be to use half the number of sheets of toilet tissue at each sitting, and perhaps limiting your sittings to once a day or once every other day. By this standard we can see that apes are far superior to humans in that they do not use energy intensive paper products.

There seem to be a lot of negative comments. If everyone was a little more constructive, we could make more progress. I also find the generalisations a little dispirating. For instanace brian said that Northern countries require more energy than equatorial countries. Is this true? Why? Is it heating bills? But what about airconitioning costs? Could using more insulation take care of this? Better design, etc. I realise that we're not going to get things done on this forum, but had to reply anyway. Every body must think, and think critically. Do not accept anything that anyone says on face value, especially if you are inclined to agree with it; this is just too important.

Hear, hear Fred.

FoE and the other major NGOs want a global treaty to depend on parity over historical rights to emit, and the logical conclusion of this is Ecoequity's Greenhouse Development Rights ("vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself and falls on the other").

In contrast Kyoto2 shifts the balance of wealth more to the North than C&C and starves the poor even more than now, because it means N-fertilizer, agri-diesel etc everywhere become much more expensive; the wealthy countries can afford this much better than now. I don't get Monbiot's support for it at all - or can someone correct me on the above?

...correction, my final parag. should read "the wealthy countries can afford this much better than the South"

Contraction and convergence implies Personal Carbon Allowances (or some appromixation).

Some of the many advantages of PCAs are described on http://www.mng.org.uk/gh/dtcrs.htm .

My apologies Damian for my generalisations such the energy needs of the north and equatorial regions. my point was really about a level playing field. My comment on a whole was a negative one again Sorry mate, I find it difficult to find anything positive about C+C. pca's emmm! we also need pma (personal methane allowance).I wont generalise on the ammount of methane produced, with cattle farming or rice growing . The problem seems just as important as carbon and deserves the same attention
I hope being a vegetarian and cyclist hopefully Ill get a PCA/PMA REBATE, AWARD OR CERT !
The gist of what I was saying:
A. its Dangerous territory the c+c route
B. There is a convergence and momentum of lots of different ideas and disciplines to alleviate this human crisis!
C.If c+c cutting emissions from one part of the globe only to have virgin area's start doing the same thing, There is little net gain, if any.
I really don't see how carbon offseting is gonna help the environment.
Some poorer people might get financially rewarded. but will mugabie and such like tyrants give "their" people the rewards?.
If the UN (United nutjobs) or that fraternity are the facilitators of this proposal its gonna go horribley wrong!.
They couldn't organise an orgy at a prostitutes wedding!(aid for oil; was koffe's son ever held to account ^^?) oh and not forgetting: do i or dont i have a historical carbon foot print that needs to be offset , is that still a political football, what does that mean to the c+c and pca for the common British person ?, cycles and rubbing lard all over to keep warm in the winter ?, The less common (affluent) will still have central heating and cars.

We still havent reached critical mass, knowledge wise, about this subject and wont until all factors are into account. we need to step back and determine what are all the contributing factors. the solution is multi faceted as is the issue, Me, im very hartend how this challenge is being taken up and in ernest by the world, finally!!!, it might be to little and to late it might have always have been out of our hands impossible to know yet, ergo the various belief systems battling for recognition and dominance.
It wasnt to long ago this was the domain of the hippies and squaters and crack pot scientists.
I think I am rightfully wary about quick fixes,flag waving or finger pointers that blame the general public for this catastrophic mess.

I think message " your all sinners and we are gonna find a fair way(honest!) to make you pay for your crimes" against the planet, should be changed to " lets pull together message to sort this out", would much more constructive and pay dividends,it would show abi curtsey and respect to the populance, The cannon fodder, The great unwashed, The general public they after all are gonna pay comparatively the most for this mess, The more affluent will always as always, be able to have their cake, will the rest of us have a crust left?

Right said Fred! (couldn't resist)

There's so much more that could be done. This Earth Policy Institute paer is a good well documented paper:

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/80by2020notes.pdf

It advocated getting to below 2006 emissions by 2020. Brilliant -- and even then I think we could do better. It makes the point that when the political will is there, as it was with the US in WW2, you can do amazing things. The US essentially converted all their car producing capacity into fighting the war. Luckily, we have no war, but the threat is at least as big.

I do believe that the first world must carry the developing world both as a matter of equity and practicality. We must make it easy for them to avoid repeating our errors.

Fran

It is pathetic that no one realizes the massive messes of organic wastes being mishandled across the globe. Those wastes contain trapped carbon in biochemicals that the mishandling especially composting allows the reemitting of GHGs due to natural biodegradation. Those wastes contain germs,toxics and drugs that pollute much of the world's water and cause the spreading of major health problems.
A program to pyrolyze organic wastes including separate solids from sewage plants and farm animal feces would convert much of the organic matter to inert charcoal stopping GHG reemitting. More important, all germs, toxics, and drugs would be destroyed initiating a reduction in water pollution and the spreading of diseases. In developed countries considerable reduction in costs for new dumps would accrue as no seepage of germs, toxics and drugs would be occurring.
Talk about pathetic useless verbosity, the recent G-8 meeting proposed action on world health problems with no mention whatsoever of the organic waste messes across the globe. I challenge any commentator here to find a bigger cause for our ever-expanding water pollution and health problems. I urge readers to start getting attention to the never-ending global organic waste messes and what we can do to curtail them with great benefit for all. Dr. J. Singmaster, Fremont, CA USA

LOL good luck with this...

Americans are the most selfish people in human history. They will NEVER agree to a per capita emissions standard.

America puts out 4x as much emissions as China on a per capita basis, and yet Americans are already screaming bloody murder about China being the world's biggest polluter when in reality, that's nonsense... the nation with the highest emissions PER PERSON is the biggest polluter, and that's the US of A.

You will NEVER get Americans to agree to do something which is fair, because in their mind fair means everything stacked in their favor, and unfair means a level playing field for all.

Is this the New Scientiest or the Few Scientists. The issue is not just emissions it is the entire cycle of the so called global warming gasses including methane, often simplified to carbon for the sake of the argument. It seems the west is so concerned with not loising any money out of it it will do anything include ruin the game for everyone if it does not "win". This debate is old , tired and not going anywhere, Anti global warming pundits use vitriolic language to cast disdain on "believers" who reotrt with hysterical shrieks of planet murderer. Nothing is going to change until we experience massive ecosystem collapse and the pain of that loss is felt in the Western world. ANd Climate change might not be what does it, there are plenty of other things to worry about. As for all the sanctimoniuos vegetarians out there, two things one I have canines in my mouth for ripping and tearing flesh which I thorughely enjoy and second Goid did not put me at the top of the food chain to eat bloody vegetables.

Look at the whole cycle oft he gasses, the fertilsier, the loss of forests to grow the vegies, the irrigation of vegetables in deserts, the transport, cold storage. It is no individsuals lifelstyle to blame it is societies fault based on individual greed. The fact we all have computers and time to write on a blog indicates we are not doing enough. On the green groups, I am incredibly dissapointed with these self appoiunted guardians of the earth sanctimonioulsy banging on about how good they are and if it was not for them we would have all gone to hell in a handbasket , well I have watched Greenpeace, WWF and all the others tell me how to run my life whilst things have just gotten worse, if you were doing sucha fine job then things would be better, either these groups are appalling at their job or nobody cares and so leave to their fate. Most of these organisations are a classic example of the organisation becoming more important than the movement.

America is not the higehst emitter per person that falls to Australia who are trying to do something about it but being railroaded by lobby groups who claim the emissiosn trading will wreck the economy. What a load of crap. People are inherently lazy and look at America an obesity crisis whilst they throw half of thier food awat. A merica and Europe pay farmers not to growe food, how about paying an african to grow some, no retroviral drugs for those that need them as it willl hurt the companies profits. And it is your superannuation that supports these guys. Mind you the Australian banks claim they are suffering from the loss of money in the sub prime crisis in America and raising fees in Australia and making record profits.

The lorax

Lorax: Check my comment just above your's about using organic wastes, on which we have to spend billions of dollars, Euros etc. to keep dumps from leaking hazards. The pyrolysis program mentioned in my comment would lead to new dumps not having the costs of keeping seepage of the hazards and would stop water pollution and attendant health problems. If someone would start pointing out that we can recover a lot of money wasted on organic wastes, we ought to be able to get some forward going action.
Dr. J. Singmaster

Can someone provide PROOF of the involvement of carbon dioxide in any "global warming"??

Give up and move on.
The current actions are only being developed to placate the concerned few and assure that capitalism can be spurned on into the 21st century in a new skin.
The basics are still with us and life rockets on.
There is no concern until we are directly affected and as long as that in not palpable (who cares if its across the seas) we'll continue in our lethal ways.

It's undoubtedly a complex problem and I'm looking for websites discussing it.One more positive forum for discussion to try to find the best solution that I've found is at www.ClimateChangeTriage.net. Anybody else found that one?

Lots of interesting points. Carbon trading is a bit tricky to say the least!! I personally think everyone should be given Carbon credit cards, so people can take responsibility for there own emissions. When everyone starts to realise just how many carbon credits they have been using within day to day life, as well as the increasing price of buying more credits, then this would act as an impetus to reduce the use! The creation of a fair playing field sounds like the start of the solution, however parameters at the global level are extremely intricate and delicate especially with world politics like it is today. What is required is a complete change within our economic system to take into account all natural resources and there ecosystem services. Prices need to be allocated to carbon sinks, to encourage reforestation and for more sustainable practices. With most of the UK industry abroad, advantage is being taken of natural resources in developing countries who need easy cash. We need to stop taking advantage of poorer nations, share technology, stop being so greedy. The carbon debate is a lot deeper and darker than just slapping on a contraction and convergence approach.
Check out the The naked Hippie podcasts for more things sustainable at www.nakedhippie.co.uk

Nature always has a way of balancing things out. The issue of climate change and emissions will always be discussed and no agreeable solution will be settled on as long as unequal economic environment exist in different countries. But it is good to be aware of the impending consequences.

Nakedhippie! A carbon card for the carbon we use/ wow! Can we have a fair playing field enforced by whom?? What about a food card & children card! Don't these things also factor into how much CO2 a person uses. So lets punish equally ok! Where do you nakedhippies believe peace & prosperity come from??? No need for soldiers because we can all just get along. It much be great to be as niave as you all. Living in a fairy tale that will never be but you can always protest until someone with a gun comes along. Oops thats right we're going to get rid of all the evil guns as well. Love/peace! Ronnie

Is the global economy a primary precipitant of worldwide ecological degradation because the distinctly human-driven construction's gigantic size and rampant growth could soon become patently unsustainable in a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planetary home such as Earth provides to the family of humanity?

That is to say, could at least one of the causes of life and the Earth, as we know them, “going to hell in a handbasket” be that the global political economy is a human construction that takes its shape as a perpetual motion machine and is operated as a colossal pyramid scheme? Unfortunately, both the 'machine' and the scheme are unsustainable.


Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

Unfortunately we are going to suffer the consequences of resource depletion (not oil but rare earth metals and farming chemicals) and direct ecological destruction before anyone would ever feel the consequences of a "maybe" theory, AGW.

The world of environmental activists is concentrating far too much on AGW and too little on ecological destruction and resource depletion.

0.6 degrees; the world has been much warmer in even the past 2 million years and there have been steeper rises.

I think allot of the anthropogenic global warming alarmists hope that the theory is true because their egos wouldn't take being wrong.

Some one liners:

Climate change and the link to CO2 is beyond doubt by the vast majority of those who study it.

Put back what you take, and never take more than you need.

Educate the next generations, limit population growth and control greed.

Better to err on the side of caution instead of gamble with the habitability of the only planet we can exist on.

Carbon trading proves the world is run by those least qualified to manage it - Accountants. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so this is their solution.

Let's pretend the oil has already run out, leave it in the ground and accelerate clean alternatives as if.

Americans cutting carbon emissions would be like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving Day. Only an immediate catastrophe would make it happen.

Perhaps the only thing that would save the planet is another world war, dictator or disease that decimates the population.

We have outgrown our little blue petri dish, and there isn't another one for many hundreds of light-years.

What was so bad about living in trees and caves, anyway? There are so few of them left now, competition would be fierce!

"Unfortunately we are going to suffer the consequences of resource depletion (not oil but rare earth metals and farming chemicals)[...]"

These things are not consumed. For instance, nearly all the copper ever mined is still in circulation because it's easier to recycle it than it is to go fetch more in nature. This will become increasingly true for other materials as well as technology improves and they become more scarce in natural deposits(relative to artificial "deposits" like land fills).

A lot of this peak-everything nonsense is based on known resources and as such is complete nonsense. If you're running a company and you've got 40 years of known reserves at some given price, you're hardly going to go exploring for more.

Political Will, Political Won’t

————————————————–
The accepted wisdom of today’s environmental reform movement is founded on two core assumptions. The first is that most of the technical solutions we need to address the world’s various crises are available, or at least could be swiftly developed by sufficiently intelligent, hard-working people. The second assumption is that all that’s lacking for a successful outcome is the political will to put these technical solutions into effect.

Whether the discussion turns to replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines and using electric cars instead of gas-driven SUVs, converting industrial agricultural practices to organic permaculture, or reversing the decline of ocean life though international regulations, it is an article of faith in the reform movement that we know what we need to do and all that’s lacking is a sufficiently visionary leader to put more planet-friendly solutions in place.

Both those assumptions ignore significant aspects of the situation – aspects that must be addressed for the envisioned reforms to be successful. This article examines those two assumptions with an eye to uncovering the confounding issues.

The array of problems
As the following laundry list of negative trends clearly illustrates, the scale and diversity of the problems we face are significant.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching 400 parts per million.
We are emitting carbon dioxide 10 times faster than one of the world’s largest known volcanic eruptions (the Deccan Traps) that was implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago.
Ice caps and glaciers are disintegrating.
World oil production is on a 4 year plateau despite prices that have quadrupled during that time.
In our oceans the coral reefs are dying, dead zones are expanding, and predatory fish species (the ones we eat) have declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
The biomass of prey fish in the Great Lakes has fallen by 92% since 2000.
The estimated extinction rate for plants and animals is at least 75 species per day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is full of plastic.
Over 75,000 square miles of arable land is lost each year to urbanization and desertification.
A billion people in over 110 countries are seriously affected by desertification.
Nearly a third of the world’s cropland has been abandoned since WW II because of damage by intensive agriculture and erosion.
On the American Great Plains, half the topsoil has been lost in the last hundred years.
The Ogallala aquifer in the western United States is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.
Indian farmers have drilled over 21 million water wells using oil-well technology. They take 200 billion cubic tonnes of water out of the earth each year for irrigation.
We have eaten more grain than we have grown in 7 of the last 8 years.
World carry-over grain stocks were 130 days of consumption in 1986 – today, it’s only 53 days.
The global per capita grain supply has fallen from 340 kg in 1984 to 300 kg today.
The world price of fertilizer is rising exponentially.
The IPCC predicts that climate change will cut African food production in half by 2020.
The cost of food is skyrocketing world-wide. Some countries have responded by banning exports of wheat or rice.
We are in the beginning stages of a global financial crisis that could result in either a deflationary or hyper-inflationary depression lasting for a decade or more.
These sorts of problems are known as wicked problems. That means they are messy, circular, aggressive and interlinked, so that trying to solve one may worsen others. Each problem shows a trend, and all the trends appear to be worsening inexorably. In some cases the trends have been visible for centuries (for example the loss of arable land and desertification), sometimes for decades (as with the loss of aquatic biomass), and some like Peak Oil for a scant few years. In all cases the global trends show no signs of reversing, however much effort has been expended to alter their local or regional trajectories . As their effects become more pronounced, it becomes easier to see their potential to hit our globalized industrial civilization like a planet-sized version of Hurricane Katrina.

As daunting as the individual problems are, the key to understanding the importance of this list is recognizing the degree of the linkages between them. In many cases, trying to solve one problem can inadvertently make others worse. One prominent example is the attempt to address global warming through the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. While there may have been some merit to that primary intention, the secondary effects – increasing dead zones in the oceans due to fertilizer runoff, and rising food prices due to the use of food crops as fuel – eliminated the overall benefit of the effort, and even created a net negative outcome.

Similar knock-on effects have occurred in in other areas. The attempt to raise food production through irrigation and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers has depleted water tables and reinforced a style of agriculture based on a finite resource. The attempt to increase global living standards (and thereby reduce population growth) by exporting production facilities to regions with lower wage and environmental standards has backfired by increasing levels of water, air and soil pollution – increases that have been felt well beyond the boundaries of those regions. One dark quip that addresses this sort of backfire is, “Around every silver lining there is a cloud.”

When viewed from this perspective it becomes obvious that dealing with the panoply of problems besetting our world involves considerably more than just knocking them down one at a time. If we don’t apply holistic, system-level thinking to the converging crisis, our well-meaning efforts stand an excellent chance of making the overall situation worse.

I have concluded that it is a mistake to think of “solving” these problems in any global or final sense. Some of them may be improved regionally, especially if they are not in local conflict with other competing problems. The logical corollary is that there will be other regions where those same problems cannot be solved, due different local circumstances.

The big question, however, concerns those problems that are not contained, that do not respect national or regional boundaries. Global warming and the death of ocean biomes affect us all, and failures to address these problems in any region can make the situation worse for everyone. In these cases, it’s obvious that a collective global response is called for – a response that brings together the political, economic, industrial and opinion-making institutions of our world. If these institutions acted together they might have a chance of implementing the deep and wide-ranging changes the situation calls for.

Unfortunately, until now we have seen precious little evidence of such a collective response. For example, we have repeatedly seen climate change conferences break down or issue watered-down statements that fail to address the scale of the accelerating crisis. While individuals, citizens’ groups and even some governments are obviously aware of the urgency, collective action repeatedly fails to gain the required global traction.

This state of affairs is no accident. This is not because of some dark and sinister cabal or conspiracy to hold back change in the name of personal profit, though there probably are some instances of that. The real reasons are at once more banal and more worrisome than the Bilderberg watchers assume. In the next section I will examine the structural reasons for this sorry situation.

Politics, the high art of civilization

In order to understand the role that politics plays in our collective failure to address the predicament described above, we need to examine the nature of modern civilization.

Now, when I use the term “modern civilization” I’m not just talking about the growth of industrialism over the last two hundred years. I’m not even talking about the growth of Western culture over the last two thousand years. What we usually think of as “modern civilization” is the development, refinement and culmination of cultural changes that began ten thousand years ago.

In turn, in order to understand modern civilization, we need to look even farther back, at how humans lived before we became “modern and civilized” and what happened to push our species across that threshold.

Human beings have been around in one form or another for two and a half million years, first as homo habilis, then as homo erectus, and finally as homo sapiens. For virtually all of those 2.5 million years, we lived in harmony with our environment. While it may not always have been a comfortable life (how could it have been, without color cable television or cars?), we were nonetheless perfectly adapted to our habitat. This statement is supported by two facts: over most of that period our presence caused little or no damage to the planetary biosphere; and during that time the human population was essentially stable, growing to only 5 million or so in two and a half million years, for a net addition of a scant two people per year.

Recently there have been some remarkable discoveries about the quality of life in the times before modern civilization. We have always known that society back then consisted of hunter-gatherers, organized as tribes. The classical impression was that the lives of these savages were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Recent investigations have shown that in fact hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a remarkable quality of life characterized by low levels of effort, plenty of leisure time, good nutrition, low levels of disease, egalitarianism, very low levels of suicide, homicide and warfare, a high degree of personal autonomy and close-knit communities. In the words of Marshall Sahlins, hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society.” In one of our more damaging semantic restatements we have defined “subsistence” living as bad and “sustainable” living as good – even though in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they mean exactly the same thing.

So here we have a species that was exquisitely adapted to its environment, living an affluent yet sustainable life, treading lightly on the earth, never outgrowing or overrunning its habitat, at least in terms of the species as a whole. We lived in this harmony with our world for two and a half million years, or 99.6% of the time we have been on the planet. Then suddenly, in the last ten thousand years – a mere 0.4% eye blink of time – our population increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth’s stocks of non-renewable resources, we cut down over 90% of the planet’s forests, we fished her oceans to the edge of extinction, and we live in a near-constant state of conflict with each other. In this grievously short time we have brought about all the wicked problems listed above. Pardon my French, but what the hell happened?

In a word, it was agriculture.

About 10,000 years ago humanity developed organized, settled agriculture. Over the next couple of thousand years our predominant social model changed from hunter-gatherers to cultivators. We settled down (as one has to, to raise crops), and started to form larger social structures – villages, towns and cities. Nobody is precisely sure why we developed agriculture, when our previous ways of life had been perfectly satisfactory for millions of years. It may have been precipitated by climate changes, or growing populations in some areas, or it may have been just one of those things. There is no doubt that the threshold of radical human change is clearly demarcated by fields of grain.

Hierarchy
The shift to settled cultivation entrained a host of other changes. Our diet was dramatically impoverished. Levels of chronic disease and malnutrition increased. Levels of social violence escalated. However, the most significant change was the introduction of hierarchies that had not previously existed in our social systems.

Why the development of agriculture resulted in the simultaneous appearance of social hierarchies is still a matter of debate. My opinion is that it happened because the risk to farming communities from crop failures was very high. If the crops failed, these communities contained too many people to survive on local foraging or hunting – both because population densities were so high and because the habitat destruction caused by farming had reduced the amount of local wild food. There was also no way to bring in food from some other unaffected region. Therefore the risk of crop failures had to be mitigated. This mitigation involved many activities. For example, local hunting kept larger crop-eating pests at bay, irrigation helped in times of drought, and shamanic intercession took care of storms and blights.

Each of these activities of hunter, irrigation engineer and shaman was highly specialized in comparison to the more generic farming skills required for planting and harvesting. Such specialization conferred power on the holders of those skills. This was especially true in the case of shamans, whose power could not be entirely learned, but was said to emanate come from a mysterious connection with the supernatural. Their attempt to exercise control over nature gave the shamans the real ability to exercise control over other people however (”Obey me or the gods will frown on us, and the crop failure will be your fault!”), and the first systematic hierarchies were born.

Surplus
The other significant change introduced by organized agriculture was the psychological effect of reliable surpluses of food. While the previous two and a half million years of our existence had been shaped by sustainable subsistence, agriculture introduced the possibility of producing more food than we needed, letting us distribute the required amount to the members of the community and store the excess.

Centralizing the production of food and managing its distribution reinforced the development of hierarchies. Since some of the food was needed by people who had no direct hand in producing it (such as weavers, shamans and granary guards), some means had to be found of giving them equitable access to it. This meant coming up with a way of defining relative values for different kinds of work, and establishing a medium of exchange. In one stroke the concepts of money and wages appeared, resulting in a further transfer of power to those who established the value of work and controlled the money supply (and indirectly the access to food).

As important as that development was, there was yet another fundamental cultural change brought about by the simple existence of a food surplus. For the previous two and a half million years, human wants had been satisfied by the concept of “enough”. People worked until they had enough, then they stopped. Now there was almost always “more than enough”. The perception that there was more than enough food caused a radical change in how we looked at the world.

Food surpluses and the development of a medium of exchange made trade for non-food goods possible. The continued trade of ongoing food surpluses enabled a continuous growth in the material comfort of peoples’ lives. It did not take long for people to become accustomed to this new state of affairs. As memories of the past faded over just a few generations, the new conditions of growing abundance were rapidly accepted as the “natural” order of things.

Modern Civilization
We now have the two critical preconditions for “modern civilization”. The first is the belief that a continuous growth in material prosperity is the natural order of the human universe. The second is the belief that a power hierarchy is essential for the smooth functioning of the system.

As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. In order to ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly defending the two fundamental preconditions: the idea that both material growth and the need for hierarchy are natural, essential and unquestionable. Indeed, the status quo is best served if the rest of the community sees this situation as simply part of the matrix of the universe, the only possible way life could work, and that any suggestions to the contrary are the result of either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.

Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.

Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn’t make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.

Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it at the same time as training them to see this as the only possible way the world could work.
Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both though overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that one should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural – just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to the legalized violence that defends those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.
At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible.

So where does that put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of these problems is the result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer we have been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture.

Why politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent “solution” to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction, no matter how small.

Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power. It doesn’t matter whether the power managers are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same beneficiaries.

In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions – the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications organizations. Together these institutions create, maintain and guard a noetic milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to limit, halt or reverse that growth.

Conclusion
The influences of our guardian institutions are firmly embedded in our global culture. They have such power and such general support at all levels of society that it is ultimately fruitless to try and remove them from power by either direct or indirect confrontation. The penalties for trying this are severe and ruthlessly applied.

In light of this, is there any hope for a return to a sustainable, egalitarian, interconnected, considerate and just civilization? I strongly believe that there is, but getting there will be neither sure nor easy.

The institutions that stand between us and such a future are trapped by their dependence on the very paradigm they are sworn to protect. They defend the belief that permanent material growth is natural, possible and inevitable. While they defend that belief with laws, guns and television, ultimately their power comes from people who accept that premise. If people stop believing that such growth is possible the institutions’ power declines, no matter how many defense mechanisms they engage. If growth falters, the people lose faith and the institutions crack and crumble.

Look back at the list of problems that led off the article. Every single one of them is the result of our growth encountering limits. While we may be able to figure out ways to temporarily circumvent some of these limits, the pattern is now clear. The growth of modern civilization is slowing down, and is even showing evidence of coming to a halt. For a guardian institution that depends on growth for its very survival, this is like a diagnosis of terminal cancer.

What that means is that these institutions will inevitably start losing their monolithic top-down power. This dis-integration will leave “cracks in the sidewalk of civilization”. And just as grass grows through cracks in real concrete, small communities and individuals will start to appear through the metaphorical concrete of our industrial civilization.

No one can predict when, where or how the dis-integration will appear. It will take different forms in different places. The response of the guardians will probably be violently draconian in most cases. But there are places where communities have already formed in anticipation of such an opportunity. Like “Gaia’s antibodies” they will work to heal the wounds, widen the cracks, and let the sunshine and fresh air revitalize the hidden earth. As the seed stock of the next phase of civilization they will spread their values on the wind.

The next cycle of human experience on this planet will be very different from any that has gone before. We will have fewer resources, but more knowledge. We will have to deal with toxic landscapes, a warming climate, shifting rainfall patterns and the emergence of new diseases. To balance that we will have better communications and longer memories than any civilization that has gone before us. We will not fall back into the stone age, but neither will we motor off happily into the sunset in our electric cars. There will be hardship and misery, but there will also be joy – the joy that comes from looking forward, from participating in our communities, from the love of those around us. Above all, there will be the future.

—————————————————
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to the writing of Daniel Quinn and John Zerzan, as well as to Riane Eisler for her book “The Chalice and the Blade”. I’d also like to acknowledge the philosophy of Anarcho-Primitivism for its critique of civilization (though perhaps not for its suggested solutions).

September 3, 2008

© Copyright 2008, Paul Chefurka

This article may be reproduced in whole or in part for the purpose of research, education or other fair use, provided the nature and character of the work is maintained and credit is given to the author by the inclusion in the reproduction of his name and/or an electronic link to the article on the author’s web site. The right of commercial reproduction is reserved.

Welcome to our game world, my friend asks me to buy some wakfu kamas . I do not know how to use the wakfu gold ; my friend tells me how to use. I will thank for my friends bringing me in this world. I am not regret to buy wakfu kamas . We all love game, if you want to play it, please buy wakfu money and join us. Please do not hesitate to have wakfu kama . It is funny.

I am so happy to get some Perfect World Gold and the Perfect World Silver is given by my close friend who tells me that the Perfect World money is the basis to enter into the game.
Therefore, I should Buy Perfect World Gold with the spare money.
I gain some pw Gold from other players.
Then I share the cheap Perfect World Gold with my friends.