Zeitgeist roughly translates from German into “spirit of the times.”  The movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, directed by Peter Joseph was released globally on January 25th, 2011 as a sequel to “Zeitgeist“(2007) and is available to everyone free for non-commercial use as a public commons.

I haven’t watched the 2007 movie at the time of writing, which I understand puts forth some radical theories on religion, the 9/11 event, and government and corporate propoganda. So I guess I got to view this one with a relatively unbiased mind.

The first half makes a cohesive analysis of the psychological, economic, social, political and environmental morass that we have created, and links all of these very effectively – this is where the strength of the movie lies.

Joseph connects the psychological imprints we get from our surroundings to various societal problems including drug addiction, aggression and consumerism. He strikes at the heart of the problem, namely the functionings of the market economy which rewards cost effectiveness and economic growth – a process that conflicts with human and planetary wellbeing.

Our current economic model is headed towards disaster on all fronts. It is also highly inequitable with poverty being the worst form of violence against humanity. Joseph also calls the monetary system a ponzi scheme, because the dollar is nothing but debt, and eventually a point will come when the Federal Government is unable to service the interest on the debt, leading to a systemic collapse.

The latter half of the movie, however, is less convincing. As an activist myself, I’m constantly looking for solutions to various issues, and these solutions need to be viable and practical – unless of course some kind of swift and dramatic revolution like the film proposes at the end happens.

Joseph doesn’t like the word ‘utopian’ but his vision of how we can overcome the problems is radical to say the least.  He asserts we can do away with currency and markets with a centralised resource allocation ‘machine’ which can scientifically calculate all of human needs and decide how much to produce and what resources to use and conserve.  Sound communist?  The movie spends a good few minutes to refute this.

Who’d control such a supercomputing machine that Joseph suggests? The political path to this isn’t clear, and though I don’t agree with the computing idea, we could benefit from some kind of ‘supragovernment’ or a federation of nations, which can make decisions to the best interests of the planet as a whole and all its citizens, especially those with less access to resources. There are many, who support such a holistic view as espoused at the Bolivian Climate Change Conference on the Rights of Mother Earth held at Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010.

I also prefer a more practical model like Contraction & Convergence that allocates emission targets to nations on an equitable basis, using the markets to penalise or reward those who are on either sides of this target.  We also have ways to incorporate environmental and social costs into the market based system – such as removing incentives for and taxing fossil fuel intensive as well as socially destructive activities. We can also redefine laws that can penalise persons who hide behind the ‘corporate persona’ by making environmental crimes or ecocide a crime against humanity.

However there are some very plausible ideas in the narrative such as green transport, vertical farming and cradle-to-cradle design which could well become mainstream in the coming decades. I would have really liked the movie to touch upon one avant-garde idea that Jacques Fresco, the founder of The Venus Project (the ideological basis for the movie) has researched about which could break our dependence on fossil fuels – namely Zero Point Energy from vacuum. This is touted as the ” Forbidden Energy Science” that ‘energy cartels would rather you not know.’

We do have as a society, all the techonological and policy solutions for a sustainable world without necessarily having to go to the extreme of giving up markets or currencies – how we create political will and change is the moot question.

It’s a long and slow movie – 2 hours and 41 minutes, but do watch it, it has lots to tickle your brains with.

Video link here

Further links that may be of interest:

1. The Venus Project is the ideological basis for “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward” It was founded by Jacques Fresco, considered by many as “Leonardo da Vinci’ whose ideas are often ahead of our times. The project strives to create ” a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture.”

2. The Venus Project Video with Jacques Fresco, the Founder of the Venus Project.

3. Free Energy – Zero-Point Energy Extraction from the Quantum Vacuum Video

4. EWTT: Why We Need A Law On Ecocide

5. EWTT: Bolivia Climate Change Conference and The Rights of Mother Earth

6. EWTT: Contraction & Convergence: An Urgent Global Imperative to Tackle Climate Change

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Dr Vandana Shiva - Source: Wikipedia

The end of December is a not only a good time to reflect upon the year that has passed, but also to take stock of why we are here on this planet as human beings. “Do we have a higher end?” is a question to which every individual, every society, every civilisation must find an answer, if we are to ensure a sustainable and peaceful future for ourselves and future generations. It is also an answer that will prove critical in preventing life, genes, knowledge and culture from being commoditised by a few greedy corporations –  worsening climate, water and biodiversity chaos.

Dr Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist and environmentalist, asks these profound questions when delivering her powerful Sydney Peace Prize lecture on 4th November 2010 in what must be one of the best human rights and earth rights speeches of the year.

Dr Shiva has been honoured with Sydney’s only International Peace prize for her tireless advocacy of human rights of small farming communities and women empowerment in developing countries as well as her scientific analysis of environmental sustainability and anti-biopiracy efforts. She runs the NGO called Navdanya which encourages seed preservation and organic farming.

Here is the ‘must watch’ video of the speech:

Vandana Shiva : Sydney Peace Prize Talk from WisdomKeepers Productions on Vimeo.

The following is an edited version of Dr Shiva’s Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, “Time to End War Against Earth”

When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.

A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth’s resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.

The continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and onwards are not only about “blood for oil”. As they unfold, we will see that they are about blood for food, blood for genes and biodiversity and blood for water.

The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names of Monsanto’s herbicides – ”Round-Up”, ”Machete”, ”Lasso”. American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto, gives its herbicides similarly aggressive names, including ”Pentagon” and ”Squadron”.This is the language of war. Sustainability is based on peace with the earth.

The war against the earth begins in the mind. Violent thoughts shape violent actions. Violent categories construct violent tools. And nowhere is this more vivid than in the metaphors and methods on which industrial, agricultural and food production is based. Factories that produced poisons and explosives to kill people during wars were transformed into factories producing agri-chemicals after the wars.

The year 1984 woke me up to the fact that something was terribly wrong with the way food was produced. With the violence in Punjab and the disaster in Bhopal, agriculture looked like war. That is when I wrote The Violence of the Green Revolution and why I started Navdanya as a movement for an agriculture free of poisons and toxics.

Pesticides, which started as war chemicals, have failed to control pests. Genetic engineering was supposed to provide an alternative to toxic chemicals. Instead, it has led to increased use of pesticides and herbicides and unleashed a war against farmers.

The high-cost feeds and high-cost chemicals are trapping farmers in debt – and the debt trap is pushing farmers to suicide. According to official data, more than 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.

Making peace with the earth was always an ethical and ecological imperative. It has now become a survival imperative for our species.

Violence to the soil, to biodiversity, to water, to atmosphere, to farms and farmers produces a warlike food system that is unable to feed people. One billion people are hungry. Two billion suffer food-related diseases – obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cancers.

There are three levels of violence involved in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.

When every aspect of life is commercialised, living becomes more costly, and people are poor, even if they earn more than a dollar a day. On the other hand, people can be affluent in material terms, even without the money economy, if they have access to land, their soils are fertile, their rivers flow clean, their cultures are rich and carry traditions of producing beautiful homes and clothing and delicious food, and there is social cohesion, solidarity and spirit of community.

The elevation of the domain of the market, and money as man-made capital, to the position of the highest organising principle for societies and the only measure of our well-being has led to the undermining of the processes that maintain and sustain life in nature and society.

The richer we get, the poorer we become ecologically and culturally. The growth of affluence, measured in money, is leading to a growth in poverty at the material, cultural, ecological and spiritual levels.

The real currency of life is life itself and this view raises questions: how do we look at ourselves in this world? What are humans for? And are we merely a money-making and resource-guzzling machine? Or do we have a higher purpose, a higher end?

I believe that ”earth democracy” enables us to envision and create living democracies based on the intrinsic worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures – a just and equal sharing of this earth’s vital resources, and sharing the decisions about the use of the earth’s resources.

Earth democracy protects the ecological processes that maintain life and the fundamental human rights that are the basis of the right to life, including the right to water, food, health, education, jobs and livelihoods.

We have to make a choice. Will we obey the market laws of corporate greed or Gaia’s laws for maintenance of the earth’s ecosystems and the diversity of its beings?

People’s need for food and water can be met only if nature’s capacity to provide food and water is protected. Dead soils and dead rivers cannot give food and water.

Defending the rights of Mother Earth is therefore the most important human rights and social justice struggle. It is the broadest peace movement of our times.

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Annie Leonard, creator of a series of informative animations, The Story of Stuff, The Story of Bottled Water, The Story of Cosmetics and The Story of Cap & Trade has just released the latest one taking the electronics industry to task:  The Story of Electronics. It shows the negative impact of the “designing for the dump” mentionality that exposes workers to toxic inputs, and people in developing countries like Nigeria and India to toxic e-waste.

Good Magazine came out with an interesting infographic recently.  E-waste is piling up at an incredible 40 million tons a year. You may click here for a larger picture.

According to the book written by Annie Leonard “The Story of Stuff” “e-waste is increasing three times faster than other municipal waste and is packed with hazardous metals and chemicals.  The Electronics Take Back Coalition says the 5 common sources and reasons for e-waste are cell phone upgrades, digital TV conversions, software upgrades, batteries and disposable printers.

Annie Leonard’s fervent plea in the Huffington Post is for the Electronics Industry to “Make ‘Em Safe, Make ‘Em Last, Take ‘Em Back. She says:

“In the U.S. we throw away about 400 million electronic gadgets each year — more than one per person. Only about 20 percent of e-waste in the U.S. is collected for recycling; the rest goes to landfills and incinerators where the toxics leach out to contaminate our air, water and communities.

Investigations have found that 50 to 80 percent of this stuff is shipped overseas to Asia and Africa where it is broken apart by workers to extract the small bits of valuable metals. In addition to those pieces of gold and copper, today’s electronics routinely contain toxic chemicals like lead, mercury, PVC, chlorine, and bromines that end up poisoning workers and their communities in the importing country.”

She makes a call for “a green ‘race to the top’ where designers compete to make long-lasting, toxic-free products that are fully and easily recyclable.”  Manufacturers should design for disassembly right at the outset, so they can put in quality materials, which will come back to them at the end-of-life of a product.

This is increasingly important with the impending materials crisis which has provoked countries like China to impose restrictions on exports of rare earths, used heavily in the electronics industry. The mining of some metals like Coltan is deeply intertwined with civil conflict in the Congo Basin.  With that kind of far reaching impact that mining of metals for electronic products has, the electronics industry should take greater responsibility towards recycling and conserving of scarce resources.

We don’t have to be silent consumers. There are a lot of suggestions on the “What You Can Do” section of the Story of Electronics website, but most of the agencies mentioned relate to the US.

If you’re buying electronics, support manufacturers who are rated higher in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics.

We can stick with our gadgets a little longer without rushing out for the latest designs.

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT:  Michael Braungart: Do Good, Not Less Bad (On Cradle-to-Cradle design)
EWTT:  Janet Unruh: Recycle Everything : Why We Must, How We Can
Urban Mining: China considering rare earths strategic reserves

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“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it”

                                    — Edmund Burke

Indeed!  Here is a collection of videos that show how and why some civilisations have soared and fallen. While theories abound in explaining these, we can see an underlying thread of resource overuse beyond sustainable realms, leading societies to an eventual state of demise. If modern civilisation were to survive as we know it today, we must be humble enough to understand and learn from the foibles of those who have trodden before us, however distant in the past.

VIDEO 1:  Alexandra Cousteau describes an alternative theory to the commonly held view of the decline of ANGKOR WAT, CAMBODIA ; that of invasion by enemies.

VIDEO 2:  The oft quoted example of EASTER ISLAND, POLYNESIA, PACIFIC OCEAN as the ultimate symbol of local resource exploitation

VIDEO 3: The NAZCA CIVILISATION, PERU is well known for the mysterious carvings in the desert of animals and birds of gigantic proportions which are clearly visible from air.  One well know theory behind their disappearance is that a big El-Nino storm hit them circa AD 500, but Discovery News reported that it might well be due to their cutting down of the forest of Huarango trees. Devoid of the forest to stabilise the soil and protect them from El-Nino, the area soon became a desert. A similar situation is now occuring in the south of Peru.

VIDEO 4:  The little known civilisation called MOCHE  Northern PERU existed around 2000 years ago. Remnants of the gigantic mud brick pyramids they built remain to this day, as do the elaborate aqueducts that help them survive the desert environment by transporting water. But having created a successful civilisation in the middle of a desert, what led to their downfall? Scientists try to unearth the mystery.  

Watch Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the program

VIDEO 5: JARED DIAMOND’s explanation of his five point framework for why societies collapse and what we can do to prevent it.

What about Modern Civilisation…well, that’s us!  Michael Pollard gives a brilliant visual protrayal of the ”Timeline for Civilisation’s Collapse” with three underlying crises, namely, the Economic and Political crisis, Energy Crisis and the Ecological Crisis in order.

If you have links to other similar stories from ancient history, do feel free to share.

Is all lost then? Are we in the brink of civilisation collapse from which there is no return?  In the next part, I’ll outline where the hope lies, and the models to restructure civilisation.

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According to the NEF website,

” Four years on from NEF’s Growth isn’t Working (report), this new report goes one step further and tests that thesis in detail in the context of climate change and energy. It argues that indefinite global economic growth is unsustainable. Just as the laws of thermodynamics constrain the maximum efficiency of a heat engine, economic growth is constrained by the finite nature of our planet’s natural resources (biocapacity).”

Download the report from the NEF “Growth isn’t working : We need a new economic direction” here.

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To make sense of the specific reasons for the loss of biodiversity, this is one programme (“The State of the Planet”, part of BBC’s “Earth” DVD series) that hit the nail on the head. It’s always a pleasure to watch Sir David Attenborough, and of course get inspired by his passion and energy. I’ve only seen this increase over the last few decades as a sense of urgency comes into play, while he personally sees the deterioration in the state of the planet over his lifetime.

78% of oceans are being fished to the limit. 170,000 square kilometeres of rainforest are destroyed every year, nearly 200,000 square kilometeres of land are made desert every year. There is no doubt we are in the midst of a crisis of epic proportions. Why is this happening? According to Sir David, there are 5 main human activities that can be attributed to this biodiversity crisis.

1. Overharvesting- Every growing population coupled with more efficient technology makes harvesting quicker than ecosystems can reproduce and regenerate. Trees are being felled 10 times faster than they are being replaced by new growth ones. 70% of fish species are being harvested above the rate they can reproduce. It should not take long to understand if we continue at this rate, entire fish species will vanish and forests will disappear. Where will we go then?

2. Introduction of alien species-  This can often decimate populations of native animal species. For all the illusion of greenery in the island of Hawaii, it is impoverished in terms of the native species which have all but vanished. One example is the beautiful and exotic snail species which have disappeared due to introduction of rats, pigs, and West African killer snails.

3. Destruction of habits- Sir David talks of Cape Town, which is a biological hotspot with about 5,500 types of plants. This area is endangered as 40% of the area is destroyed by agriculture and the spread of the town. There are thousands of hotspots the world over. Orangutans and other species in Indonesia are endangered because of the rapid clearance of rainforests due to oil palm plantations. A similar fate awaits the mountain gorillas of East Africa.  Most of the IUCN list of endangered animals are those which are mainly affected by habitat loss.

4. Islandisation of habitats- With the spread of agriculture, urbanisation and deforestation, what inevitably happens is that undisturbed pockets of nature become islands. Even nature reserves are islands. Unique species may be localised to these islands, and even if they are located across islands, they may not be able to move between islands. If anything were to happen to these islands, for example due to further infringement, or drought, these species are very vulnerable to extinction.

5. Pollution – Humans are so dependent on air and water, and yet we indiscrimately use these precious resources like an open and free sewer, dumpling all effluents, emissions from industries. One kind of pollution, that of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is causing severe changes in the earth’s temperature, leading to endangering of species from the polar bears to coral reefs.

Habitat destruction and climate change are key reasons for extinction of species, 20% all species is expected to disappear in just three decades. We may well lose over 2/3rds  of all life species in a century’s time.

Change is an intrinsic part of the natural cycle, but it is the unprecedented speed with which all these five factors are happening is leading to a historical rate of extinction, what is being called the 6th wave of extinction (which I’d talked about in the previous blog).

If we look at history, civilisations such as Easter Island, Indus valley, Great Zimbabwe and so on collapsed because they reached a point where the trees, water resources and other natural resources had all been over-exploited, leaving nothing for the humans to survive on. A similar fate awaits us, unless we learn to use our natural resources in a way that is sustainable.

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