Hello Glenn I much welcome this discussion here. The context of biofuels promotion and production is most important. If it's just to be a replacement of fossil fuels, business otherwise as usual, we'll gain little, and maybe lose a lot. It should be part of a strategy which avoids or counter-acts the negative impacts of energy use up to now - and thus of business-as-usual practices, as well as the concepts of "development".
Ten years ago I produced a book for Zed Books called "Beyond the Impasse: Development Theory in the 1990s", on Third World development, which took account of these issues. The industrialized countries seem to think they're immune, but they're not, far from it - more like the opposite: they could well be the disease itself. Somebody said: "Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced - profits are privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, to present low and middle income taxpayers." Centralization (top-down) seems to be a large part of the problem. Localization, community self-reliance, bioregionalism are, I'm sure, the way forward, for development, and for energy. That's already happening, and seems to have been happening for some time. This is interesting: http://www.tnews.com/text/mccloskey2.html Ecology and Community: The Bioregional Vision As is this: http://www.ilsr.org/ Institute for Local Self-Reliance There's a lot going on. >Todd, > >Thank you for your response. In the main, I agree with you. Perhaps what >history is teaching us is that our ideas of capitalism need to be modified, >less toward a national, and more toward a regional approach. That would >indeed be revolutionary, and perhaps require a revolution, since most of the >political and economic activities to date appear to have pushed us in the >nationalistic direction, and our culture has become highly nationalistic. >You and others appear to be advocating a change of thinking. If so, I >agree. > >But first, to say the least, we need a philosophy as the basis to reverse >the nationalism trend and redirect it toward regionalism,. The >Jewdaic-Christian heritage is generally credited with having been the basis >for the present high standard of living. Not the only one, and there have been other societies in the past with a high-standard of living, and even a very equitable system. I think you could find the principles you're looking for in any of the great religions, not just the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three monotheistic religions. It's a goodly part of the "perennial philosophy" that all cultures seem to share, in large measure. These principles will make sense to anyone outside a national legislature or a corporate boardroom. For instance: http://www.schumachersociety.org/lec-zaj.html Buddhist Technology: Bringing a New Consciousness to Our Technological Future >I suggest go to that for the >development of such a philosophy. You ennunciated one principle of this >philosophy, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Some other >elements from this same heritage, not much a part of the capitalistic >approach and our culture these days, are: "A man's life consists not in the >abundance of things which he possesses." And "love they neighbor as >thyself." On this all the commandments are based, "Love the Lord God with >all thy heart, and love they neighbor as thyself." Nor are most of these >principles altogetgher unique to the Jewdaic-Christian heritage. Others have >advocated and practiced these principles outside of our culture. And, can >the capitalistic system survive much longer without incorporating these >principles? Is it in fact still a capitalist system at all? It's a corporate system. There's always been a contradiction between capitalism and democracy - a company is not democratic, it's anti-democratic, completely autocratic. The contradiction tends to fall away on a local scale - after all, your customers' children go to school with your children, you go to the same church as your employees, edtc etc. The local level humanizes these relationships and makes exploitation much less probable. Where it does happen, there's a high social cost to pay, usually not worth it. The less local things are, the less this is so; at the remove of the boardroom of the global corporation there is no trace of it, as recent (and current, and future) events in Wall Street most amply demonstrate. There the bottom line is all. That will not do, it does not work. At the boardroom level, it's feasible and practical to add millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes to fertilizer bags to be used for growing food - could that happen at the local level? It's possible for Gerber to overturn laws in a Latin American country with threats of costly WTO action so they can go on advertising infant formula in a manner demonstrated to kill babies - could that happen at the local level? The sky is broken; with profligate energy over-use and the active suppression of alternatives the climate is turning into a monster such as none of us has dreamt of. It couldn't have happened at a local level of doing business. I do believe that every local community, in its daily doings, in the ordinary relations between ordinary people of goodwill trying to go about their daily business, knows very well how to handle all this, and always has known it. Maybe we don't need new principles so much as the re-establishment of very well-known old ones, which have been purloined and distorted in the modern era. >And, can not its failures and its weaknesses largely be >attributed to not having practiced such principles? Yes, or abandoned them. I think Fritz Schumacher addressed this very adequately in "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered". As with "Beyond the Impasse", it's been relegated to the Third World, but it's at least as applicable to the industrialized countries, more so even. Same goes for Appropriate Technology, developed as an adjunct to Schumacher's economics. There's been a lot of good work in both these fields since then. Finally, I think this below is relevant. Best wishes Keith >Glenn Ellis Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to "natural or legal persons". It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT "natural persons", and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition. It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are genetically programmed to maximize the flow of profits into their gut. To extract profit from their environment, corporations transform everything into commodities and then make profits by selling them or renting them out. Corporations can transform practically anything into a commodity, including corporations and profits themselves. Today, corporations are the dominant species on the planet. They have taken over most social institutions and other niches that humans have originally created for themselves. The physical reach of the biggest corporations span the entire globe. The term "globalization" can mean, without exaggeration, the global rule of corporations. The non-stop transformation of the natural world - the ecological base of human survival - into commodities for profit-making has, in fact, become a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of many other species. In the same way that we learned to domesticate plants and animals, corporations have learned to domesticate humans. Much of today's educational process is a process of corporate domestication, reinforced subsequently by corporate-controlled media. Corporations have perfected the art of training humans, using carrot-and-stick methods, to keep them tame and obedient. Of course, some humans have remained wild and undomesticated. But today, they are outside the mainstream. Corporations have trained domesticated humans to immobilize, maim, kill or otherwise "neutralize" those fellow-humans who have remained feral and uncontrolled by corporations. But there's a growing body of feral humans who are now trying to learn how to disable, maim or kill corporations. Prehistoric humans knew how to kill the largest beasts of their time; modern humans have not yet learned how to kill corporations. Individual humans have practically no hope of fighting off a determined corporate attack. Most confrontations between corporations and communities of humans end up in corporate victory, with humans ending up dead, maimed or subdued and domesticated, their human will broken. On those occasions when humans manage a victory, it almost never results in the death of the attacking corporation. When corporations lose a battle with feral humans, they can simply withdraw for a while, split into several persons, combine with another person, change their persona, or adopt other survival tricks which they have evolved over time. In fact, when entering new and presumably wild territory, a corporation would often clone itself and send its clone in. Even in the remote possibility that the clone dies from human attacks, the mother firm stays unharmed and as powerful as ever. In prehistoric ages, our ancestors learned how to repel, disable or kill an attacking mammoth; the challenge of our age is learning how to do the same with corporations. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> 4 DVDs Free +s&p Join Now http://us.click.yahoo.com/pt6YBB/NXiEAA/RN.GAA/9bTolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://www.webconx.dns2go.com/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
