SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
· There must be a great and noble object.
· Its achievement must be vital.
· The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.
B. “Intellectual
· They must be convinced that the object can be attained;
· That it is not out of reach.
· They must see, too, that the organization to which they belong, and which is striving to attain the object, is an efficient one.
· They must have confidence in their leaders... [confidence in their leaders—permit me to emphasize].
C. “Material
· They must feel that they will get a fair deal...
· They must, as far as humanly possible, be given the best … equipment for the task.
· Their living and working conditions must be made as good as possible.”
“It was one thing thus neatly to marshal my principles, but quite another to develop them, apply them, and get them recognized...” Field Marshall Sir William Slim, Defeat into Victory, Four Square Book, p. 180.
He was meditating how to turn a routed army into a triumphant one. His meditations apply perfectly to Learner transformation.
War-ending and disaster relief will provide unlimited opportunities to rework the hardscape of battered cities and the software of their governance.
The Shock Doctrine of disaster capitalism prescribes that these disasters be used to neutralize every progressive initiative and replace them with Victorian Era, “laissez-faire” economic piracy. That has been standard policy for a hundred years. Look where that has got us. This text advocates that they be used to shift humanity in the direction of progress (when they occur naturally; they should never be set up deliberately, the way the shock doctrinaires seek to do).
A planetary reconstruction program would relocate poorly housed populations to idyllic settings for 100,000’s, or to arcology mega-structures capable of housing tens of millions in seemingly miraculous comfort, security and affluence. All the squalor, insecurity and criminality of today’s urban ghettos would be replaced by beauty, order and jealously guarded popular support. These new townships will reduce urban footprints and discourage private motor vehicles.
Like most peace requirements, utopian city designs have been minutely thought out. You can find well-thumbed editions of them on any good urban planner’s bookshelf. SimCity software games have taught this topic of passion to thousands: how to construct and run a healthy township. Many more will learn as much and better.
The concrete for small-scale models has already been poured at Arcosanti in Arizona, at Gaviotas in Columbia and doubtless elsewhere. Nader Khalili has already set sunbaked straw and clay bricks for prototypes of his Dome of Rumi in Arizona (www.calearth.org). These abstract models have merely to be built on a serious scale wherever they can do the most good. As peace economies emerge, idealized city construction will take off. Italian Renaissance cities will serve as ergonomic prototypes, once properly wired and equipped with public utilities.
Nowadays, we shrug our shoulders, convinced that we can barely afford more slums and prisons, much less the urban paradises I foretell. The same goes for other peace technologies: our systems of public transport, education, justice and health care, all of them suffer from inadmissible neglect and decay. How often have we heard that there just isn’t enough money to pay for adequate public services? Yet in wartime, there’s always enough money. Hang the cost!
Warfare economies demand lavish financial support for nonproductive personnel and equipment. A reduced tax base must sustain enormous public expenses for indefinite periods. Wartime spending is so prodigious; a few months of this outflow during peacetime would make the average economist solemnly declare national ruin. Yet such wars have been protracted for decades; they have reduced the economies of entire countries to Stone Age primitivism. That is, until military defeat flattened the loser’s last money press and bank vault. Of course, those are the first things the invaders will refurbish.
Actually, we cannot afford any further degradation of the quality of life. ‘Money-saving’ reductions in peace management merely generate more frustration, mayhem and secondary expense. In the past, these merciless ‘savings’ were diverted to finance weapon technology. Such anti-profit ‘austerity programs’ are suicidal in the long run: precious savings handed over to fulfill the no-yield ends of ruined and ruinous banks. The financial collapse around 2008, and the serial disasters soon to follow (economic, social and environmental) confirm this premise.
We could dramatically improve our cities with a few straightforward cosmetics:
· Fountains and Parks. Along with restoring aquifers and purifying waterways, we should initiate an entirely new art form of urban park and garden courtyard design.
· Free pedestrian amenities: (benches, trash baskets, fountains and toilets) should spring up everywhere, unlike current practice.
· Litter disposal. Any poor person should be able to earn a minimum wage by collecting urban litter and bringing it to nearby collection stations and “selling” it to municipal employees. Littering should become a very costly misdemeanor and a public disgrace. It might be possible to train urban rodents and birds to do this work. It would be ironic to think that trained rats might become more useful to urban communities than litterers (self-confessed sociopaths).
· Magnificent artwork by skilled architects and craftspeople will replace the cheap steel and concrete boxes and urban glass piles we have grown accustomed to. At first, these will imitate the works of Louis Henry Sullivan, Gaudi and Luigi Colanni; then will evolve into beautiful designs of their own.
· Cities, great and small, will come to resemble Paolo Soleri’s arcology; rural villages will be built on the model of Nader Khalili's Domes of Rumi.
· We should conform to Frank Lloyd Wright’s advice to bad architects: wrap most concrete structures in extensive tree stands and vine plantings. Concrete and steel are splendid fortification materials, but lousy for habitat, given current cladding technology. It turns out that plantings are excellent heat and noise regulators, the things we need most, yet can’t seem to adapt to our needs.
· The twenty-foot rule: according to the best practice in Canadian cities, the twenty feet at the foot of every building should offer an optimal environment for pedestrians. On a very human scale, shops, open courtyards and other amenities should line the sidewalk. Above those twenty feet, architects and their clients may do as they please to meet urban zoning and cost-cutting requirements.
Baron Haussmann demolished thousands of tenements to
build the Grands Boulevards of
Paris. Besides unclogging Parisian
streets and thus the cerebral arteries of the French body politic, his work
leveled many squalid, labyrinthine and rebellious slums. Haussmann fulfilled his weapons obligation by
creating wide boulevards down which cavalry could charge the mob and government
artillery, pulverize insurgent barricades.
In 1871, thousands of French progressives were executed for trying to
defend Paris against victorious Prussian militarists and their re-armed French
prisoners of war, led by revenge-crazed
French reactionaries.
Battles and natural disasters have always caused massive urban destruction; they will no doubt continue to do so. Following on their heels, however, Learners will rebuild urban hardscapes for optimal efficiency, and discard wasteful zoning practices.
For example, the foolish habit of segregating residential, light industrial and commercial neighborhoods may cease. Most Americans shall live, shop and work in the same neighborhood. This zoning change would rule out ridiculous automotive commutes, reduce rental and utility overheads, bring somnolent neighborhoods back to life and make pollution, slum housing and other urban pathologies more conspicuous and less profitable.
Many more pedestrian amenities will spring up. Public gardens, fountains, arcades and millions of new urban trees will replace the triple monstrosities of urban vehicular traffic, commercial signage and ‘public’ art as currently conceived.
New laws will mandate that an urban tree be planted for every advertising sign and for every few parking spaces. Anyone felling a tree in a built-up area will pay a fine for the deed, the proceeds going to replant additional trees nearby. One way or another, half of urban surface areas should be surrendered to trees—future Learners will consider this percentage laughably inadequate.
During Europe’s Darkest Age, the Dar-al-Islam reached its pinnacle of glory. This happened largely because able Muslims promoted the ablest non-Muslims. This was Islam’s first Golden Age, also for the Sephardic Jew. Together, wise Muslims, Jews, Christians and others preserved what little remained of civilization; together, they added glorious new increments of wisdom and beauty. Learners should imitate and improve on that Convivencia, teach each other how to live in harmony.
Despite these concerted efforts, the need to pay growing armies crippled this broad-minded approach. A resurgence of militant fundamentalism wasted what little good will had been retained from the devastating Mongol invasion. Neighboring cities retained armies just as large and costly. Those troops wound up turning against their own people and government, to sustain themselves in the short term, which induced more devastation all around. They provoked such a crisis in the Islamic world that alien imperialists overcame Muslim self-rule for centuries.
Islam is due for a second Golden Age, the result of its absolute rejection of terrorism in favor of the Jihad for Peace. The same will happen for every world religion. Very soon, the world’s major creeds will sponsor a peaceful refflorescence of civilization—once they’ve recovered their sensibilities like hats lost in a windstorm.
This was also the Golden Age of the Muslim garden, complete with canals, tanks, fountains, pools and lakes; inner-facing courtyards and outward-looking parks; flowers, shrubs and trees for shade, scent and fruit; habitats for birds and beasts, wild and tame. Arabs and Persians reserved these places of domestic tranquility for private meditation. In their normal, crowded circumstances, privacy and quiet contemplation were impossible elsewhere.
Our word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian term for a garden. The Koran (Qran) describes heaven as tree-shaded parkland under which a cool rivers flows. The Bible’s ideal human habitat is the Garden of Eden.
Every mature civilization has treasured its parks and gardens; every Golden Age has displayed them to show off its elegance, wisdom and grace. We who busy ourselves poisoning the world, should learn from Arabs who escaped from the desert into their gardens. They, at least, had no choice. Since we’ve opted to mass-produce desert by dismantling the natural world, all our public and private spaces should be turned into scale models of paradise.
Nowadays, even landscape architects betray this trust. They cover the ground with plastic banners, painted cement, horrific public art and other industrial trash that doesn’t require “expensive additional inputs” – clean water and fresh air – to endure our hellish urban environment.
We should stop harassing indigents and install luxurious pedestrian amenities instead. Without exception, legitimate churches will respond to the needs of the poor as their first priority. God favors the dignified provision of the poor. In the Qran, this was the only legitimate reason to tax the faithful.
Pedestrian areas should be made more inviting and enjoyable, not less so. American elites disgrace themselves by tolerating litter everywhere; by neglecting public fountains, toilets, park benches and other pedestrian amenities; and by showing inexplicable incompetence at public signage. American cities are sprinkled with misplaced and torn-down street signs, misleading directional signs and buildings missing street numbers. What signage does exist is so poorly designed and sited that it can only serve as a memory aid for people who’ve already found their way by trial and error. This – despite the fact or because of it – that signage design has become a graduate degree program in American colleges. Like most modern administrations, they have ‘innovated, standardized and optimized’ themselves beyond any practical usefulness.
Anything we permit to be less than magnificent just accustoms us to the spirit-death of our inner cities and inner life; it promotes a prison-block siege mentality ripe for weapons exploitation. Urban habitability slashed to chase the poor off our streets—this bad habit worsens the lot of every passerby.
Motor roads will gird square miles of motor-free urban greenery. American college campuses operate quite well this way. The best college campuses imitate the ergonomics of a Renaissance city. Equipped with comprehensive mass transit, modern plumbing, optical cable and power, these new campuses will offer ideal layouts for future Learner achievement.
Only pedestrians, animals, bicycles and rare service vehicles would be permitted within these no-auto zones. Greenbelts will extend the length and breadth of future cities, providing excellent rights-of-way for bicycles and pedestrians. They’ll serve as runways for public transit vehicles, whether underground, on the surface or LTA.
Bicycles are an energy-efficient transportation technology; they should be adopted wherever autos are forbidden. They should not be mixed. Otherwise, the most common steel, purchased and driven by idiots, breaks the most valuable bone. In built-up areas, cantilevered bicycle/pedestrian arterials will bridge auto-road networks. At other intersections, pedestrians and bicycles will gain the right of way over cars, the same way sailboats claim priority over motor vessels on the high seas.
Once sailing technologies improve, we can expect to adopt wind power at sea. A distant uncle of mine pioneered technological breakthroughs in this area: Jacques Cousteau.
Fountains, pedestrian amenities and priority paths; community police kiosks and foot patrols; work, housing, shopping, medical care and Learning centers: all of them will cluster within easy walking distance. Every community will be brought back to human scale.
Modern combatants need to drive and maintain military vehicles. Therefore, all-consuming industrial cartels spawn the huge vehicle fleets that mechanized armies require. Civilians must maintain private vehicles, both to keep themselves in practice and to subsidize giant automotive piecework, assembly and maintenance complexes. Once warfare breaks out, it would take too long to train novice mechanics, build new factories from scratch, and grow the sickly corporate hierarchies needed to run them.
There are obvious peace advantages in the replacement of private vehicles with omnipresent public transit. By public transit, I don’t mean a fleet of ugly, stinking, roaring poisonous, decrepit, crowded, clumsy, untimely, uncomfortable and crime-ridden busses that force commuters to share each other’s social and hygiene failures. Bus fleets pick them up and drop them off in mini-garbage dumps; fleets that paint them with carcinogenic, immunity-suppressing and spirit-crushing diesel stink every hour of every day. No new car could be sold if it deafened its occupants the way busses do; if it stank as bad, inside and out; and if it was half as uncomfortable.
Picture instead a continuous capillary flow of private but subsidized jitneys and microbuses running on quiet, non-polluting engines. They would feed mixed arterial transit systems of articulated busses, monorails, light rail, walk-on ferries and lighter-than-air commuter transports.
A dollar spent on mass transit generates more jobs than the same dollar spent on private automobiles, more so than the same amount spent on military highways and many more than if spent on weapons … So what are we waiting for?
Where is the vaunted Labor Movement during this debate, one of the few where its self-serving input might prove worthwhile? Labor leaders are still fixated on World War II era assembly-line jobs. Workers of the world, all rise!
Learning Networks, luxurious public transit facilities, subsidized truck gardens and small acreage farming will make a comeback; they’ll combine to reduce urban footprints—as long as effective population controls occur in parallel. Many advantages will accrue to smaller, denser, more foot-reliant communities.
We will discover an important change in consumer outlook. Learners will favor equipment quality and repair over replacement. In the future, greater quality, simplicity and sturdiness will be the end goal of design. Highlighted will be longevity, dependability and ease of maintenance. Those not handcrafted locally will be dropped to the surface from orbital factories (with almost free delivery charges). Lengthy technical apprenticeships will reappear; so will master craftsmanship.
Incompetent administrators will vanish as political terms shrink and wary amateurs assume their responsibilities. Unrelenting public overwatch will become a major spectator sport. Behind-the-scenes political activities will come under intense public scrutiny. Political secrets will attract aggressive investigation—the same way today’s paparazzi pursue reclusive media stars.
Smaller family stores, shops and coops will flourish once again. Pollution problems will shrink, as automobiles are relegated to bulk transport and emergency services, and as new conservation technologies reduce energy demands. General health will improve with more exercise. Automotive pollution will disappear and environmental quality will recover synergistically.
Nowadays, we buy a whole range of labor-saving household equipment, and then expensive exercise machines. These are profitable for the few but a great waste of time and money for us common folk. Instead, people will get back on their feet and walk. Perhaps people – and especially their tireless children – will visit exercise stations where their aerobic efforts will improve health, generate a little electricity and earn them pocket change—the way today’s indigents might earn a few bucks for their blood.
Street crime will dry up as communities shrink back to human scale and as citizens, suddenly removed from their insulating cars, reconnect with their real habitats. Violence is a public health problem, much more so than one of judicial punishment. Under normal circumstances, criminal violence repels healthy adults; it induces overwhelming grief, guilt, panic and nausea. This natural state of revulsion should outweigh any trite disposition for glory. Weapon managers and their slavish media try to deprogram these healthy feelings. If violence (actual or portrayed) sickened us dependably once more, it would become much less concealable, justifiable and profitable.
In due course, cars will be restricted to interurban highways, suburban park-and-ride facilities, skyscrapers and underground garages—then to the recycle plant. Horses and mules will stage comebacks in the countryside, as will camels in arid climes and dromedaries, llama and alpaca in mountain regions. A whole new-wheeled carriage and agricultural machinery industry will emerge. Good use will be made of new draught animals (with machines in their train collecting and burning dung as fuel, for example); solar electric power; high-strength, low weight polymers; and almost perfectly frictionless, space-manufactured moving parts.
The protagonists of Secrets of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins & Row, 1989, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, (who co-authored The Secret Life of Plants), provide interesting examples of future cottage industries that specialize in organic soil restoration. Animal and vegetable manures, bacterial, insect, fungus and plant symbiotic mixtures will substitute for synthetic fertilizers and toxic ‘pest control’ agents that jeopardize the biosphere. Net increases in soil depth will outstrip global soil depletion.
A way may be found to practice industrial terra preta (biochar, agrichar), to cause two vital outcomes:
· hundreds of thousands of tons of charcoal, to serve as high-carbon fertilizer for depleted soils; and
· the systematic reduction of humanity’s CO2 production and its global warming. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm
Factories will be built at the mouth of great rivers to harvest chemical fertilizers and other toxins before they enter the ocean. Future farmers shall make good use of sea-floor soil mining, of composting, crop rotation, reforestation and the accelerated aging of artificial ponds and lakes. Devic advice will regulate genetic architecture.
Learners will dismantle disgraceful industrial cartels that:
· factory-farm neomutant, cannibalistic pseudo-food beasts;
· peddle mountains of pesticides that sterilize the soil, and surplus inorganic manures that eutrophy waterways; and
· commit agricultural rapine in general.
Organic pest controls and fertility enhancers will substitute for these hydra-headed nemeses. Food animals will be tailored for strength and health, no longer be enfeebled to increase their dependence on corporate pharmaceuticals. Their digestive tracts will be adapted to digest re-architected versions of prolific native weeds. In this manner, may we eliminate oft-contaminated feed supplements.
Learners will ban engineered cannibalism altogether. In many instances, reprocessed flesh has been fed to livestock, poultry and fish (relying on the physiological differences between eater and eaten species to avoid cross-infection). This is still the likeliest route for vicious cross-infections and prion pandemics. Attempts to raise domestic animals as factory herds in static lots will be curtailed, along with other factory farming abuses.
Learners will develop high-protein, high vitamin foods based on microorganisms like Chlorella, Wolffia and Spirulina. Cardboard-flavored soy burgers will evolve into nutritious gourmet items boasting the mouthwatering texture and flavor of medium rare, top grade hamburgers and crispy fries, exceeding their nutritional content and eliminating toxic ingredients. Of course, other flavors and mouth textures will be perfected.
Advanced micro-organic, aquaculture and insect cultivation will substitute for domesticated livestock and marine fisheries: archaic industries whose luxury products will be consigned to rare, ritual consumption. Instead of destroying half the harvest every year, cultivated pests may provide half of our foodstuffs and reduce our dependence on farm acreage.
Every town would have at least one tall building in which enough insects, bacteria and algae would be raised to provide the city’s inhabitants with their basic daily requirements of protein, fat, vitamin and roughage. This harvest may become huge in urban settings and elsewhere, if provided with sufficient quantities of clean water and sunlight. Those urban factories might shrink the farm fields required to support city populations, perhaps by several times. They might also serve as heat pumps and water purification plants.
Splendid foods can be grown in the desert: cholla buds, chia seeds, tepary beans, pads of prickly pear cactus and flour made from mesquite pods. They are among the healthiest foods on Earth. The Tohona O’dham tribe, of Tucson, Arizona, specializes in growing these foods.
The Mongongo nut tree (Ricinodendron Rautanenii or Euphorbiaceae Schinziophyton) is a draught-resistant plant that provides abundant food to subsistence hunter-gatherers in Africa. A given weight of its nuts offers twice as much protein as steak and five times as many calories as rice.
The Moringa (Moringa Oleifera) is a tree with many medicinal and nutritious uses. Its seeds bear 30% cooking oil and its remaining seed cake can be used as a flocculent to purify water. Its seedpods are called drumsticks and prepared like pea pods, its seeds and flowers are edible, its leaves are said to contain more Vitamin A than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges and more potassium than bananas. It is drought resistant and grows on almost every continent; it does not tolerate freeze or frost. In addition, it restores the fertility of poor soils.
Other desert desserts may replace the over-processed flour, toxin-laced fat, diabetes-inducing sugar and even more toxic sugar substitutes that we dose ourselves with today.
In 2008, Carl Hodges was growing a crop of Salicornia (sea asparagus) and other halophytes (salt-loving plants) using seawater irrigation on desert ground near the Sea of Cortez. Salicornia can be eaten steamed or fresh, squeezed for cooking oil or ground into high protein meal. An Israeli researcher has determined that regular crops can be successfully drip-irrigated with salt water, provided that their root beds are never allowed to dry out. Tremendous stretches of desert could be covered with salt-tolerant ground cover, edible or otherwise, in this manner.
As for hemp, there are 101 uses for it as a food item, medicine, article of toiletry and industrial component. http://www.recipenet.org/health/articles/101_uses_hemp_chart.htm Its criminalization, just because it happens to be the finest psychotropic drug in the history of mankind, is a much more serious crime. As if we had such inexhaustible resources that a miraculous one like that could be thrown out from simple reasons of tyranny and reactionary greed. Can’t you hear the still, small voice of peace whisper softly: “Murder your car and grow hemp”?
Genetic architecture and economies of scale promise to accelerate the development of algal food technologies. By genetic architecture, I do not mean trial and error manipulations of genetic material to satisfy corporate specifications for absurd offspring: cubic tomatoes, insect-resistant weeds produced in error, etc. Rather, as part of a mystical transformation of human awareness, the Devas (spirit architects of biological organisms) could teach the most useful details of biomimicry to dedicated teams of genetic architects, biologists, ethnobotanists and shamans. Working together, they’ll show us how best to serve Gaia and Learner populations.
Buffalo, wildebeest, deer and antelope will graze vast regions returned to wildlife ecology, along with their natural predators. Spirit-reverent nomad hunter-gatherers may get to reclaim their ancestral homelands.
In the past, pastoral nomads threatened sedentary farmers; all three face annihilation at the hands of industrial weapon technicians. On the other hand, peace technicians will welcome these cultural offshoots as self-sufficient recreational communities. After all, hunter-gather, nomad herding and freehold farming have been natural human lifestyles for a long, long time. Habitations along these lines could become temporary ‘tourist attractions’ for any urbanite so interested.
Have you turned into an obese and lazy city rat (like me)? Go out and live the hard life of a deep-forest hunter-gatherer for six months. Come back in a lot better shape, with your sour attitude refreshed and your skewed priorities redefined—or don’t come back at all: it will be hard to survive out there.
As a first priority, coastlines, riverfronts, latitude and altitude growth boundaries will be re-edenized. As a new form of worship and a sinkhole for enormous surplus wealth, Learners will cultivate climax ecology biohabitats for their aesthetic, ecological, climatic and spiritual benefits, more so than for mere profit—even though much more profit should accrue from them.
Commercial fishing enthusiasts promised unlimited tonnages of seafood into the distant future, but the sea is becoming a problematic food source—more so each day. Advice against unlimited commercial fishing has come from such diverse authorities as J.E. Lovelock, the author of The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, Bantam Books, New York, 1990; Elisabet Sahtouris, the author of Gaia, Pocket Books, New York, 1989; and Lynn Margulis. They have argued that land-bound ecocide may destroy humanity, but not all life. Earth’s primal life force won’t go into serious spasms until algae-moderated oceanic heat, salinity and carbon dioxide regimes suffer a serious imbalance.
Human encroachment is threatening to do just that. Marine ecologies endure sewage-and-fertilizer-induced oxygen depletion (eutrophication), toxin dumping, frenetic over-fishing, greenhouse ice-melt cooling and oil spills: especially countless minor spills and ballast releases. Compared to them, dramatic supertanker disasters are surprisingly less significant. Red and black tides are additional symptoms of this accelerating decay, whose impact corporate media fall over themselves to trivialize. Major drilling oil spills are becoming epidemic.
Factory-ships rake the ocean floor with four-meter (eleven-foot wide) beam trawls. These great armored dredge nets annihilate biota and habitats indiscriminately; they leave a muddy desert in their wake, heedless of ocean depth and ecological stability. These fragile ecologies take decades to recover. This is how to begin a new age of piracy on the Somali coast, by ruining local fisheries.
Other industrial fishermen cast enough mile-long, forty-foot deep drift nets to encircle the Earth a couple times a year. These imperishable nylon nets are often lost at sea: ghost nets. The death-throes of their first victims attract many more and kill them fruitlessly for years on end.
It is scary to contemplate capitalist enterprise rolling up its sleeves, spitting in its hands and wading out into the ocean to reap raw profit. We should withdraw from the oceans for a few decades, if only to let them recover. Failing that, we must reduce our impact on the sea in other significant ways. This interdiction would not be too difficult, since long-distance fisheries require government subsidy to pay their fuel bills.
Learners can establish thousands of Maritime Parks including the most fertile and damaged stretches of the sea. Often, regrettably, they are the same. Protective legislation would accelerate natural recovery by means of draconian fisheries management, toxic cleanup, runoff regulation and biological reinforcement. Surplus submarines will monitor commercial fishing and pollution dumping. Vessels abusing such activities should be monitored and overtaken by obsolete nuclear submarines, then confiscated, stripped and publicly sunk to form artificial reefs.
We may achieve better understanding of oceanic currents, and mine the sea bottom – not for magnesium nodules and suchlike litter, but for buried marine nutrients. Future technologies as-yet-unknown may allow us to raise cold, abyssal waters full of nutrients to the ocean surface. They’d create artificial reef effects as bountiful as natural cold-water currents.
I foresee underwater power plants whose waste heat would raise these cold currents to coastal surfaces, uplift untold amounts of submarine nutrients and thus explode current fish populations while accelerating and fine-tuning these submarine currents’ climate-stabilizing attributes. We would have to find new sites for these development projects that did not interfere with natural fisheries described below or with climate-stabilizing oceanic currents.
Some currents rise into 0.1 percent of the oceans’ surface just off the coasts of Peru, California and Africa (Mauritania, Namibia and Somalia). Another significant fishery is the Kildinbaken fishing ground in the Barents Sea. These restricted fisheries produce half the world’s current fish, per Brian Fagan’s Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations, Basic Books, New York, 1999, p. 31. All of them should become Marine Sanctuaries. Eventually, they we will be restocked with fully mature species, enormous and very plentiful.
Even more importantly, we should engage in the equivalent a new planetary Manhattan Project to develop photosynthetic capabilities in human skin and liberate us from our need to kill in order to feed ourselves. The details of this technology exhaust my imagination, as do its long-term consequences. Nancy Kress’ science fiction novel, Beggars and Choosers has scooped me on this topic. The longer the publication of Learners is held up, the more often its most daring speculations are reduced to commonplace realities.
A few clever real estate magnates have discovered that sound ecological investment generates enormous profits. In Alexandria, Virginia, my father spent his last few years protecting the suburban landscape from cost-cutting developers. In such lucky communities, real-estate revenues have skyrocketed through loving attention to environmental detail. A few less stupid industrialists have spun off superior production and quality control methods by going green, as well as superb advertising opportunities. But most of them have paid mere lip service to their stewardship responsibilities. Like the econologicians they must have studied when they got their college MBAs, they have abandoned sustainability in practice—to their infinite disgrace.
The impulsive rage that the business community expresses against each new environmental and labor challenge resembles a child’s temper tantrum. The merchant community can’t afford to maintain this spoiled-brat attitude any longer. Meticulous attention to ecology and human rights is just another business expense, less negotiable than outlays on plant, payroll and marketing. In the long run, such expenditures would be far more profitable than warfare taxes.
New legislation will prevent potential polluters and their patrons from doing business unless they move themselves and their families to their sites of potential disaster. Local administrations should share power with their constituencies. Slumlords, bank and insurance executives, supervisors of police, judiciary and municipal services; all these folks will need to revise routine practices to retain their jobs. These officials will relocate into the worst handled neighborhood in their care, along with their families. The children of the rich may not attend the school of their choice until per capita funding is equalized for every schoolchild in that bioregion.
In The Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore suggests that the world’s bookkeepers enter environmental impacts and resource exhaustion in their Depreciation columns. First World banks could credit Third World countries for the set-aside of parklands and renounced high-pollution technologies. They would drop power plants that burned sulfurous coal, for example, and massive slash-and-burn land grabs. Said credits could finance state-of-the-art, low-pollution technologies of native design.
I got some free advice quite a while ago. If just one penny a day had been invested in my name since the day I was born, this account would have allowed me to live comfortably off its interest. Well, since its infancy, humanity has bled off at least a third of its income – every day of every year – into weapons activities and their peripheral wastage. No wonder we can’t afford any peace improvements!
In truth, we can easily afford everything we need for
PeaceWorld. We cannot afford to do
otherwise or less, since poverty is by far the most expensive social policy.
Get used to that, at least.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld