We, the civilized masses, are lost, adrift, imprisoned. We do not know where we belong. We sense somehow that this life we are living is alien, wrong, not the way it should be. We are disconnected, confused, struggling. And we are addicted to consumption and debt and unable, even unwilling, to break these addictions. It is the only life we know. We cannot imagine living in a place that we know in our bones is home. We cannot imagine living a life where we have everything we need, take nothing more than what we need, and owe nothing to anyone. We are homeless and addicted, desperate to find a home that makes sense to us and to overcome our addictions and yet at the same time defiant, unwilling to accept the ‘home’ that others try to impose on us ‘for our own good’ or to break the addictions that give us such comfort, our only moments of joy and freedom.

(*A very old expression that means using heroin)

Civilization is our Pusher. It’s The Man who keeps us hooked on consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and gives us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander the streets of civilization’s artificial world in a daze, never really home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting fires on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already drug-addicted at birth.

So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don’t be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home?

How can we break the habit when all of us are addicts, even The Man? When we have all forgotten what it’s like to live without the monkey? When we have all become the hollow, empty, desperate shadows of men that the monkey leaves behind?

There’s no methadone for the stuff we’re hooked on. And no one left to administer it even if there were.

Image of homelessness from the Italian blog Moving & Learning

Why do we put up with this? I’ve just been watching a program on the Haida Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Heritage Site, on the Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in BC, which provides a remarkable cultural contrast to the problems that bedevil our culture. The park and the site are jointly protected by the Haida people and the Canadian government, and the number of visitors is strictly limited. An area of stunning beauty (depicted above and below) and astonishing wildness (some of the highest rains and winds on the planet), the site is of course seriously threatened by the oil cartel’s shoddily constructed and negligently managed oil tankers. And the Haida people, whose self-contained and rich culture is arguably one of the best models of how to live in human history, were ravaged by epidemics of the white man’s diseases, to which they had no immunity, brought by miners, loggers and whalers. The 9000 year-old matrilineal Haida culture had about 30,000 people living in total harmony in 800 communities scattered throughout its 4000 square mile, 200-island area. Between 1780 and 1915, disease, mainly smallpox, reduced their numbers to about 500, and children were forced into residential schools to indoctrinate them into the colonizers’ culture. Our culture clear-cut the Northern forests and drastically reduced the fish population on which the Haida culture had thrived.

The remaining Haida have been able to protect only the Southern third of the islands from logging and other development by our invasive and destructive culture. The area sports a staggering biological diversity, including, because of the islands’ remoteness, some species not found anywhere else on Earth.

These were a people who, for 9000 years, knew nothing of the learned helplessness that oppresses our culture. The word Haida means simply ‘People’. Their genesis legend is that Raven, the great spirit, coaxed the first humans out of a clamshell. Their relationship with the land, the sea, the forest and the air, and all their creatures, is a profoundly sacred one, one of complete interconnectedness.

Think of the problems that we are struggling with today: lack of adequate and affordable health care, housing, education, safe and healthy food, and security in old age. For 9000 years the Haida had none of these problems. They lived within their means. They had an egalitarian society where resources were shared. They learned what they needed to know (and what we would be wise to learn) from studying nature, from each other, and from the stories passed down from previous generations. They lived in a world of great abundance, and took only what they needed. They revered the community elders. Although they had the wherewithal to create an exploding population and imperial, urban society (they were the only ones skilled enough to cross the strait to the mainland, but did so rarely), they did not — their population was never more than 8 people per square mile, and women had an average of only 3-4 children, which kept population stable for millennia. In short, they managed their numbers and their consumption in a way that prevented any of the problems that plague us today from ever arising. They lived responsibly and sustainably. And very comfortably.

So my answer to Shoshana’s question is: Our culture is doomed, and we will not ‘confront the power of empire’ and overcome our learned helplessness. In our urban, horrifically overpopulated, rapacious and expansionist artificial world, we can no longer see that the ‘power of empire’ is an inevitable consequence of living beyond our means and of disconnection from the appreciation of nature as sacred. We cannot learn the lessons of the Haida because our culture’s constant noise and indoctrination, the ‘machine in our heads’, no longer lets us hear or understand these lessons intuitively, there is no natural context for us to see and hear and feel the truth that allowed previous cultures to thrive for millennia. We need people like Shoshana to stop wasting time trying to make a hopelessly damaged and self-destructive culture work, and instead help us design the next culture, after ours has destroyed itself. That next culture will be one that melds the best innovation and technology of our present dreadful culture, with the timeless and instinctive wisdom of all other cultures, successful and sustainable cultures, human and animal, that we have so tragically forgotten.

Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn’t be enough. As the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens and consumers, our continued theft of our children’s and grandchildren’s heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies, the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last month’s US elections all showed, we’re losing ground fast. We need to be doing much more.

So while I’m still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers’ stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my ‘to do’ list, to publicly commit to do more.

Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called ‘Plan B‘, a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new technological innovation simply aren’t going to be enough to save the world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:

• We need to end the ‘growth’ economy quickly, putting a stop to the increased destruction of our environment and increased consumption of scarce resources.  To reach a sustainable level and stave off collapse, we must achieve an 80-85% reduction  in resource consumption,  through a combination of conservation and population reduction. Today this consumption is doubling every forty years. The longer we wait, the greater the challenge to achieve sustainability.
• <>We need to drastically cut the disparity of wealth and power between rich and poor, so that the means of control of our future would return to all of us. Globally the Gini index (the difference between the percent of income or wealth of the richest and poorest 20% of the population) stands at an astronomical 80 (81% owned and earned by the richest 20%, <1% owned and earned by the poorest 20%, with a sizeable proportion of that 81% owned by the world’s richest 0.1%); it should be close to that of civilized nations like Denmark and Japan, which have Gini indices of 25 (35% of wealth owned by the richest 20%, 10% by the poorest 20%). Economic power and wealth often trumps (or buys) votes, making democratic political and economic change impossible.
• <>We need to increase our self-sufficiency, resiliency and readiness to make the rapid transition to a new and radically different human culture. Individuals and communities are currently helpless in the face of centrally controlled infrastructure and total dependence on  government and foreign markets. Communities and individuals are currently enslaved  and imprisoned by political, social and economic systems they simply can’t walk away from without dying.

I believe it is now time for Plan B. Like the rest of nature, humans only change their behaviour (adapt) when they must — there is a little minority serendipitous experimentation with changes occurring all the time as an inherent part of evolution, but for the most part that is merely fine-tuning and diversification to protect the gene pool. The vast majority of the world’s people support the Kyoto Accord and even more radical action to protect the environment, and appreciate that the world is overpopulated, but in the face of opposition by the rich and wealthy elite and of religious leaders, they’re not about to rise up and overthrow the intransigent governments, stop having children, disband the churches and revoke the charters of polluters. They would only do that when they know beyond reasonable doubt that they must do it — when there is no other choice. By the time we reach that point it will be too late. Persuasion has almost never brought about radical change in human culture. There must be a ‘burning platform’ — either you jump or you perish. Radical change occurs when there is no choice: Change or die.

Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let’s take fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies, and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness, the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant imperialist wars with oil-rich countries — anything to forestall the need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That’s human nature. That’s nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must.

For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market. That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few month’s supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative energy (corporations won’t pay for it). All of these options are anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature and won’t dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market will fix everything automatically.

So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can’t do this by changing  human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage), precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The third of these options is not available because those with wealth and power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern ‘maximize short-term profit at all costs’ corporate mantra, and hence would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and dismissal from their posts.

We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to quadruple prices (that’s what many OPEC members believe is a fair price for their product now, but they’re unwilling to risk an invasion by the West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren’t in their short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I’m sure awareness of this is what’s behind the recent crude price volatility). Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for $160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is military threats from the West.

If OPEC doesn’t have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and transportation systems, done in a way that doesn’t cause human or environmental injury — preventing the supply from getting to the market. We need a lot of individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes). At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil — arms flowing out to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor countries to rich.

This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious, enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it.

The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to the point where both consumers and producers say ‘uncle’ and start to change their behaviour because they have no other choice.

I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment the only way we know will work. If we’re going to save the planet, we all need to consume less, and we’re doing our part to make that happen.

So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.

1. Establish a loose network of individuals who are committed to researching, sharing knowledge, and then acting upon ways to selectively sabotage the most socially and environmentally destructive elements of the modern economy without causing physical harm or suffering to people or the environment, and in a coordinated way. A million cells of one caring individual each. No formal organization, no hierarchy, no command and control. No name.
2. Develop and share significant research on the vulnerabilities of the energy, mineral, forestry, water, food, and other natural resource production and distribution industries, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to disrupt supply, to dampen demand by undermining public trust in and reliability of their products, and to begin to force communities to look at ways of increasing their resource self-sufficiency.
3. Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability of the major media, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities to jam, hack and occupy broadcast facilities in order to educate the public about the threats to our planet and how they can help solve them, to communicate clearly our network’s purpose and carefully selected actions, and to recruit new individuals.
4. Develop and share significant research on the vulnerability of the world’s financial systems, and means of exploiting those vulnerabilities (such as short-selling currencies) to undermine confidence in the fiscal and monetary systems through which the rich and irresponsible wield power, and to disrupt the flow of money that supports socially and environmentally damaging activities.
5. Educate the public about how to reduce consumption and debt without causing hardship, since excessive consumption and debt are the fuel that enables massive disparity of wealth and power to accumulate, and the continued enslavement of the people to a corporatist economy and agenda.
6. Develop and share significant research on ways in which human fertility can be reduced and population growth rate reversed, including both voluntary (innovative new birth control, abortion and suicide technologies) and involuntary (airborne, waterborne or food supply-borne agents, provided they have no effect on other creatures, cause no human suffering, and take effect across the entire human population without discrimination and therefore cannot be used in any eugenic way).
7. Create one or more spaces where like-minded activists can share knowledge and ideas, coordinate activities, and collaborate, to find less disruptive, more positive ways to save the world.

Not your average set of New Year’s resolutions, I’ll admit.

It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm. Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet, so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live.

Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature’s ‘last resort’ method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don’t do the trick. Earlier I had calculated  a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country.

As I explained in last month’s post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:

1. First, I calculated the Resource Use Index by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country’s population), and dividing it by the number of habitable hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford’s ‘arable land area’ data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each country’s citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An index of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability, it needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
2. Then I multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated annual growth rate of the country’s aggregate Ecological Footprint. For this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth rate numbers when I could find them online (China’s EF is growing much faster than its population, for example).

The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed the soaring need.

Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries’ natural resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations’ unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index.

What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this article and you’ll get the idea. We’re talking about a world war for increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right side of that table then become invasion targets.

We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to finance the development of technologies that conserve or don’t require natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies, so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives for having no children, or maybe one.

Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep civilization’s engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won’t occur fast enough to stave off disaster.

Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth, global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of huge, collective intervention. That’s what we need now. The ‘market’ isn’t going to fix this mess.

Bill Moyers is one such hero. Week after week he’s out there on the front lines focusing his critical eye on unearthing what’s most wrong with our world, shouting it out for all the world to hear, showing it for all the world to see. Many of us have reached the point that, while we know he’s right, we cannot bear to watch, to listen any more. The endless feelings of anger and helplessness are just too hard to subject ourselves too. Moyers is relentless. He’s 70 years old, an ordained Baptist minister from Oklahoma and Texas, and he retires next week from Now, his TV journalism program on PBS. And he recently delivered, on receiving the Harvard Medical School Global Environmental Citizen award, what may be the most important speech of the 21st century so far. Here it is in its entirety, emphasis mine:

We, planet Earth, One, Connected, see it feelingly too. We know instinctively that what man has created is unsustainable, that our civilization is out of control and driving the planet to the next great extinction. We cannot explain this in rational or moral terms — and if we wait until there is enough evidence that we can, it will already be too late. It may already be too late. Daniel Quinn (Story of B, Beyond Civilization) has tried valiantly to explain this in rational terms. Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words) has tried valiantly to explain it in moral, emotional terms (“Stand still and listen to the land, and in time, you will know exactly what to do”). But ultimately we just know — when we look at factory farms and the atrocities in Rwanda and the melting of the arctic and the millions of children enslaved and abused in sweat shops, and the millions of other acts of inhumanity that go on every day everywhere relentlessly and incessantly in this prison called civilization, that we cannot allow this to go on, we cannot leave this legacy to our grandchildren, that we cannot allow human excesses to end the world.

In many ways, those drunk with the rapture that Moyers describes are our perfect foils. They, the religious fatalists, outnumber us — the scientists, the journalists, the informed, the sensitive, we who have “the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act” by a large enough margin that we will never be able to overcome their political and social dead weight and bring about the needed change through democratic action or social persuasion. As the crisis gets worse, and looks ever more hopeless, their numbers will swell faster than ours. They are worse than dead weight: As Moyers says, they welcome the apocalypse, and will actually go out of their way to accelerate it. At a time when every new baby, especially in the Western world, adds another unbearable burden to the already cracking foundations of our ecosystem, they are eagerly having babies in large numbers, creating new martyrs for the rapture. And as the last vestiges of nature and other cultures are eradicated from the face of the Earth, there will be fewer and fewer who are even able to get in touch with their instincts, feel the spell of the sensuous, to understand the knowledge of nature’s understanding and its better answer of how to live, to “see it feelingly”. We cannot expect those who have only ever known one, narrow, civilized, imprisoned way to live, to imagine another, wildly different way, when all the natural models of it have been extinguished.

The believers in the rapture are our enemy. The religious right, the corporatists, the technophiles who believe we can invent our way out of crisis, the war-mongers, the denyers of our civilization’s irresponsibility and destructiveness and unsustainability, are all our enemies. They have the power, the money, the faith. We don’t even have logic on our side — for how can it be logical to end the civilization that has allowed our species to stave off extinction, how can it be logical to reduce our numbers when our very biology drives us to reproduce, how can it be logical to go against all the rational and moral teachings we have learned since birth? All we have on our side is our instinctive knowledge that we are headed towards catastrophe, that the religious fatalists are part of the problem not the solution, and that all the other species of life on Earth are on our side, depending on us to help them fight the cancer of human overpopulation and rapacious overconsumption. And the instinctive knowledge that we have to “fight for the future we want”, at any cost.

There are those who argue that we are, in a way, not unlike the believers in rapture. Their beliefs are spiritual, based on faith. Ours are instinctive, based on our senses. Neither side has enough objective, rational, articulatable knowledge to support our position logically, to persuade skeptics. But the time is past for that. Those who are paralyzed by their brains, by the need to be convinced rationally of the inevitability of social, political and ecological collapse if we don’t radically change our culture now, are beyond our reach. We cannot wait for them to be convinced, and cannot waste our time trying to convince them of what only their instincts can tell them. I’m sorry, because a lot of them are my friends, my readers, and they want us to convince them rationally. Not possible, my friends. Turn off your computer and go out and experience the spell of the sensuous. Get out there on the front lines so you see for yourself what our civilization is really wreaking on this planet. And then join us. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

It is time for us, instinctive pacifists though we may be, to declare war on ruinous human civilization. It is time for Plan B.

Next week I will present my personal manifesto for change. And suggest we each develop our own personal manifesto. A war of a million cells of one.