h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Everyone reading the article and reading this reply is doing so on a machine that is using energy and so adding to the problem.

I suggest that we return to gossip as the main means of sharing information.
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One of the problems we face is that nobody likes a dictator but maybe there needs to be one to insist on reduced consumption.

Maybe a benevolent dictator would share out the wealth so that the poor didn't have to have so many children to replace the ones that die in childhood, thus having sufficient survivors to look after the older generation safely.

The dictator could then ensure that we all had what we need rather than cater for our greed.

While at it he, or she, could insist that having 3 or 4 sets of clothes would be more than enough for anyone and that weapons expenditure should be reduced and turned towards sustainable ways of living.

If things got really bad he or she could pick a small group to build a boat that could accommodate a gene bank. Living specimens of everything would be best but maybe chosen at random to increase biodiversity.

It could be called something like: New Opportunties And Hope Service - Arbitrary Recycling Corporation.

Of course you're right about using computers - though it's probably less harmful sending an email than actually travelling to a meeting.

I have wondered if democracy is compatible with bringing in effective action against global warming and over consumption, as politicians worrying about elections tend to think short term. On the other hand democratic governments may be more ready to listen to pressure groups like Friends of the Earth.

Education and information must be key, I think.

??? INSANE, MUCH

I think Vestboy has put his finger on part of the problem - who decides what the solutions are?

It is relatively easy to say that something is taking too much out of the environment. But each interest group will, of course, defend its own turf.

It is, for instance, splendid that the citizens of Amsterdam have developed wonderful solutions to energy problems. (And wise in a country under sea level.)

If I lived there, I would be limited to walking or taking public transportation - which is fine - because I simply cannot ride a bicycle.

It is similar to the US debate about health care. Opponents of an extended health-care franchise are afraid that they will be left out of the bounty of life-extending and -enhancing opportunities. They hate to say it - they'll do anything to avoid saying it - but that means they really don't want to worry about the 'others', the ones who don't qualify for what they already have.

I would argue that computers could save energy, especially if we start making our electricity cheaper. Because they save enormously on paper.

And we'd save more on paper if we'd use hemp paper, not tree paper...I am tiresome on the subject.

What we need is not a fashion for conservation. What we need is a mentality of sharing - and a recognition of Blake's dictum that 'one law for the ox and the eagle is tyranny'.

Meaning: City people should conserve one way, country people another. It's no good telling farm communities to get rid of their machinery and cars. But they don't use the infrastructure of a city. So it evens out.

Why blame computers? Why not cell phones? The things are ubiquitous now, have a short life span, and are not recyclable. Why not insist they be made of Melmac? This could be done...

This planet really needs to look at space exploration. The problems are mounting because there is no frontier left.

If that last paragraph sounded nutty, that's part of the problem...

Noah's Ark, indeed.

I sometimes think that, if I were a dictator, I would ban advertising, because it encourages people to want things they don't actually need.

Then all the people who work in advertising are out of work, demand for the products that they advertise drops and the people who make those things are out of work too.

There are no easy solutions. So we need to work on the hard ones.
Space might be one - though do we deserve a second chance?

A question of Biblical proportions...

The matter of gossip is not a trivial one..

At the time that the English rural way of life that had worked pretty well for a thousand years was being swept away, people who had read the new works of political economy like those of Adam Smith were arguing that his Land and Labour were not made by God to be left idle-but should be being materially productive.

Looking at village life they saw the productive inefficiency as people found time to gossip and handle their affairs through dialogue, especially at those times of the year when the demands of looking their crops and animals fell. This "idleness" was often cited as one of the reasons why the villages should be swept away. It was axiomatic that these were ignorant country folk and the like. But along with its destruction came the destruction of the vibrant and creative England that launched the industrial revolution and ran itself through extra-parliamentary democracy.

In future there would be no such idleness and no Society capable of dealing with life at the human level. Of course those who swept it away in pursuit of economic power were then able to use that economic power in order to underpin a massive growth in State power-- and the next phase of the war against idleness- the search for God's lands and natural resources that were also not made to lay idle but to serve Humankind's quest for power.

By the 1840's Thomas Carlyle was arguing for a Cromwellian type of figure to come along and save Britain through what would have been tantamount to a dictatorship. But such thinking produced the logic of the even more massive development of the State with its use of violence, coercion, and compulsion.

The fundamental problem that we face is that the model that we are trying to market to the world is still this one in which approximately 40% of all that we produce is needed by the State directly while our efforts to supply the State with that wealth also involves the people with extra costs.

If we could return to extra-parliamentary democracy and taking time to sort things out at a human level we could probably get by on half of our current GDP.

I'm not sure I buy that argument .

You have omitted one crucial factor - population growth. The village, with its gossip, works fine if there is only a small number of people involved. As soon as the population grows, you get a town, where people don't all know each other and you need some kind of authority to resolve disputes and keep order. The authority necessary gets more and more complex as cities grow and nations need to talk to nations.

minorvogonpoet

In fact the English village had built in mechanisms for dealing with population growth and decline: and managed to cope very well with at least a quadrupling of the population.

But I am not talking about Gandhi's 1930's 1930's vision of going back to simple hand-technology and mere traditional self-sufficiency... This is not what was happening in England up to around 1780. But I am talking about a situation in which solutions were found that grew out of the existing circumstances and made a better use of existing resources; as opposed to ones that were imposed by "those who knew better".

Development economics around the World has tended to move towards such empowerment of the people , and we hear a great deal about Non Government Organisations which tap into the determination of people to get to grips with problems at the ground level.

The two most worrying boom economies at present, however, are those that have now abandonned the Socialist and Communist aspirations that they tried to base their States upon since 1947 and 1949 respectively. Like other intellectual rationalisations they did not work in practice: and both India and China have finally decided to go full tilt at their own Capitalist economic miracles on the model of the past economic expansion of Britain, the USA, Germany and Japan.

This is very understandable because of the legacy of European Imperialism - and specifically British Imperialism in the case of both of these countries.

The British legacy in India is very obvious, not least in the involvement of British-based businessmen with family roots there. The Chinese one is less obvious at first view; but a Chinese Canadian that I met a month or so ago on a first trip to Europe commented how much like "home"- her original home in Shanghai- she found London's embankments. Britain's Shanghai concession was very important as a window on the World for China in the twenties. And I believe that what we have seen over the last 15 years or so has been a process of the Hong-Kongisation of China.

The population densities achieved in Hong Kong, however, can not be separated from the very special and historical circumstances that kept such a large population so near and so far from their heartland.

But small English towns had their own methods of extra-parliamentary democracy. Modern representatative parliamentary democracy, however, is based upon the idea that "the people" are incompetent and unable to understand the real complexity of the issues. That is probably true, but as with global warming, neither do the supposed experts when there has been no "stitch in time that saves nine". This is a great excuse- as I discovered in a long teaching career in state education- for pupils to say "We do not need to know or understand that for what we are going to do"- and end up being exactly the kind of Citizens that the politicians need -to look after and persuade themselves that they are "making a difference".

Surely, in the Middle Ages much of the power resided with the local lord and the local priest? The local people did have rights, enshrined in law, but the quality of their lives must have depended on how benign or otherwise the lord was.

Following the reformation, you get a move towards what we might recognise as local government, which culminated in the powerful local authorities of the Victorian era. Local authorities were stripped of much of their power after the Second World War, reaching their nadir under Mrs Thatcher. There has been much talk of localism recently but there has always been a tension between letting local authorities decide what is best for their area and fear of unacceptably poor local services.

In my last job, I had a lot of dealings with parish councils, which are the lowest level of local authority in England. The best are effective but the worst are models of inertia and local feuding.

minorvorgonpoet

No. Real power rested with those who knew how to make the village work successfully-- Under the "feudal system" low ranking knights and priests were in a very vulnerable situation if their villages suddenly stopped producing the expected yields- and this was often- their villagers would tell the higher authorities- because those given the responsibility to take care of them had tried to mess around with "the custom of the village".

This was how real power stayed with the people who actually did the work - as long as they were clever enough to make themselves indispensable..

As for Parish Councils they changed radically in 1817 when voting in parish vestry meetings was changed in order to give more representation to wealth and property-- taking power away, as William Cobbett said when this proposal was first made c1809, from "the little man" who had always been able to protect himself from tyrants- as he put it.. I deal with this in my "Towards" piece.

Unfortunately Marxist analysis has muddied the waters. Wealth is produced by the people in order to exploit those that they need to do all the nasty business of government- or whatever need "we" have created Posh and Becks to fullfil. Or perhaps Michael Jackson is a more contemporary example of the way that we use wealth to sacrifice people to our needs.

someone said about advertisers being made redundant and this leading to unemployment.
I got one of my colleagues to stop in her tracks when I said, "If we all worked half the hours we could employ twice as many people."

If demand was lower (not of essentials like food and warmth) but of mobile phones, carpet shampoo, second and third cars, 47th pair of shoes, 12th watch, 93rd computer game etc. then maybe we could afford to earn half of what we earn with everyone working less and socialising more.

i work with ceramics, one of the few people who do as a profession now in this country
and I think one of the main problems with people buying more is over prodution
in order to give people the low price they want manufacturers lower the quality of items therefor they brake easier and people need to buy more and in the end spend more on replacements of inferior quality items and all these broken items add to waste etc
so perhaps if we went back to buying things from craft people from producers of items then people would stop taking items for granted thus waste less
local economys would improve so moral in these places would go up
leeding to less lawlessness etc
perhaps I'm being nieve but surely then there would also be less unemployment and we'd be too busy working to be worrying about the latest fashion in watch

We have some nice pieces of pottery, made by friends, in the house. They are lovely and take pride of place.
In Maslow's hierarchy of need once you get past providing for the basics you get to the higher levels and emotional and spiritual needs become what you turn your attention to.
I think for some people it is met (wrongly in my mind but it's only my opinion) by owning pretty stuff. If one sparkly thing makes me happy then two sparkly things will make me twice as happy.
Sadly a house full of sparkly things doesn't make you happy, but making someone else smile does.

A few years ago I read a book called "Short Circuit" by an economist called Richard Douthwaite. He had written a book previously entitled "The Growth Illusion" which basically said that things were going to end in tears as long as we were always aiming to supply more year on year with a limited set of natural resources.

Short Circuit was one of the best books I read at the time as it was a read a bit and leave it sort of book with every dip in revealing a new method of dealing with our world in a less harmful way.

I was delighted to find that he has now made it available to read free on the internet if you go here:

http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/contents.html

I hope you enjoy it,

Vestie

Thanks for the link.