Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.
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Food is something we can no longer take for granted. The recent forth IPPC report on climate change, as well as pressure on land use from Bio-fuels, increased meat consumption and a growing freshwater crisis all point towards ongoing problems with food supply to the poor. Add to this the rising cost of oil, and the pressure on the price of oil-based inputs to agriculture, like most pesticides and fertilizers, and you can see that we need to think carefully about how to stabilize food supply, as well as protect farmers from price shocks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…
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For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

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Mark Lynas writes passionately and accurately at the current corruption of leadership on climate change.

New Statesman - Our leaders are steering us into the abyss

My response is that this is to do with us aiming our messages at the wrong people. The question that bears most strongly on all of this is who is facing the abyss the most. That is where the strongest political pressure-base can come from:

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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return

The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.

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I wrote something in response to a UK Green Poltician talking about Pirate Bay in Sweden:

New Statesman - Sian’s been very naughty

This is what I wrote:

There is a very Green issue underlying this. Sweden has held out legally partly because of a different tradition in relation to commons and public goods in Swede.Sweden has a very specific Scandinavian idea of land ownership. “Everybody’s right” means that land that others own can be used by you for certain purposes, including walking over it, camping out and picking berries etc…This is partly because Sweden is a huge land area with a tiny population, and partly because they are a deeply socialist bunch.

Anyway, hopefully Pirate Bay brings a sense of the commons to the zone of culture, and we can loosen the stranglehold of ownership a little.

What emerges from this for me is that if you want to start a global commons movement, it is a good idea to begin with the politics of copyright, and then extend the debates to ownership in general.

This is an issue that young peple understand (the MP3 generation) and it illustrates perfectly the limitations of private ownership.

Indeed in Sweden there is allready an anti-copyright party. Could this become a movement for Global reform of ownership, and the democritisation of the Global Commons?

This is an area where MP3 politics and Green politics intersect, so it is something that will draw people from many directions.

If we take the viewpoint of the earth as the common inheritance of all of humanity, how good a use are we making of it? And what can we do to improve on this?

New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index

The Happy Planet Index from NEF seems to show we are not really using the earth very well.

They make the point that if we measure from the ultimate resources at our disposal (the natural environment) to the ultimate goals of humanity (defined in terms of long and happy lives) we are squandering the earth with the wrong kinds of political-economic models: Development is mostly going in the wrong direction.

Central American societies come out as the most efficient societies, in terms of happiness for natural resources, with the somewhat morose G8 resource guzzlers being nowhere near as effective.

So if we have some sort of idea, from this index, of what a desirable social model for the long-term wellbeing of humanity might be, what can we do to bring that about?

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New Statesman - The economics of conquest

New Year’s Resolutions for the world:1) Elected Global Representatives: So that the UN has a direct mandate from “we the people”2) Global Public Service Broadcasting, so that “we the people” have a meaningful forum for democratic debate at a global level3) Taxation on the global commons (most pressingly the atmosphere, but the seas, space, the internet, and knowledge / patents, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum come to mind, as does biodiversity exploitation) to fund this global shebang.

4) The ICC given powers to prosecute people who break international law, even if they are leaders of G8 countries.

5) Oh yes and stop televising state sponsored murders, it’s too depressing.

One of the key issues of defining democracy at a global level is trying to understand what we mean by ‘public’ on what is effectively a new and emerging scale for debate. For democracy to operate we need to have ways for the ‘public’ to define themselves as a body at this level, and for ‘public’ opinion to be expressed and debated. There is no polity without a population or community that is to be defined in relation it. This leads us to ask not only what sort of polity are we hoping to constitute, and around which kinds of principles and institutions, but also how are the relationships with populations to be built up within this?

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Constitutions and revolutions are born out of discussion. A blog seems like a good salon for discussing a global constitution. But where should we start?

There has been quite some debate on such issues recently, much of it can be seen on the website Open Democracy. For instance, George Monbiot

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/George_Monbiot.jsp

and David Held
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/David_Held.jsp

have both put forward their ideas there.

What do we mean by ‘humanity’?
However both of their approaches seem to me to need a stronger initial focus, or philosophical starting point. They both seem to hinge around an emerging ‘human’ identity, born of a globalising moment, some sense of cosmopolitanism.

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