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  • From: lbsaltzman@aol.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Financial Collapse / Katrina
  • Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:28:37 -0500

Actually FEMA pre-George Bush was extremely competent at handling natural
disasters.? All the experienced technical people were replaced by political
hacks.


-----Original Message-----
From: David Travis <djtravis@hotmail.com>
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 10:13 am
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Financial Collapse / Katrina





> From: Toby Hemenway
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Five Stages of Financial Collapse
> To: permaculture
>
> ... But centralized control structures are notoriously poor at dealing with
rapid change (e.g. FEMA and Katrina), and I think the USSR merely shows how
> difficult it is for an industrial state to collapse fully.

This is a rather ironic interpretation of Katrina, given that the initial
response to the disaster was to "allow" (if they could afford it...) families
to
purchase their own options for evacuation "on the market", and that
subsequent
disaster relief was both decentralized (with multiple state and federal
agencies
both claiming and disavowing responsibility for multiple relief
responsibilities) and lacked a fixed structure. So claiming that Katrina is
a
case where centralized planning and structure existed but failed doesn't seem
like a very accurate description of what happened, since the main criticism
seems not to be so much that these didn't work, but that they simply existed
as
haphazard afterthoughts if they existed at all. If anything, Katrina is a
case
where a lack of coordinated centralized planning, a blind faith in consumer
"freedom" and markets, paired with a lack of action on the part of state and
non-state agencies, lead to a rather devastating and embarrassing outcome.

I'd also like to note that this is a classic neo-conservative strategy coming
from the unlikely and well-intentioned pen of Toby Hemenway: using
(well-founded...) public animosity and distrust of the government as a way of
defending (in the case of conservatives) deregulation and corporatism. I know
this isn't what Toby has in mind, but we simply can't exchange the failures
of
one system as evidence for the success of an alternative, especially when
this
"alternative" has a history that's as wasteful and bloody as any government
could hope to be.

> A far better system to deal with rapid change than a centralized one is a
highly distributed network of independent agents, like our economy.

This is interesting, considering that "our economy" has virtually destroyed
our
planet, has exterminated and enslaved entire cultures, and has managed to
become
one of the most inefficient, self-destructive, and inhumane resource
allocation
and management systems ever devised. I would be genuinely interested to hear
why
anyone would consider it to be a good candidate for dealing with rapid change.

> Western economies are like ecosystems and thus more resilient to chaos than
centralized ones.

I'd be very, very cautious of leaping head-first into analogies like these.
An
ecosystem might "adapt" to stress with "positive" things, such as symbiosis,
but
it may also respond with increased incidents of epidemic disease, population
decline, and even species loss. These changes in an ecosystem might allow for
the net preservation of biodiversity over the long run, but it does so in a
way
that involves adaptations which, if translated into actions within a human
society, would be morally abhorrent. Allowing the old, young, and sick to be
culled by resource depletion, or looking upon epidemic disease as a positive
"adaptation", takes the intuition that "mother nature knows best" to a level
that is frightening and sociopathic. An economy or political structure might
adapt and survive, but this tells us absolutely nothing about the quality of
its
treatment of human beings or the Earth.

In fact, I think America went through a period where the government was
small,
our economy was "free", and a "naturalistic" philosophy of society and
economics
was all the rage. That philosophy was called social Darwinism, and that time
period saw massive class disparity, worker exploitation, institutionalized
racism, runaway pollution, widespread human rights abuses, and the final
massacres of the First Nations. This America might have been very "resilient"
and "adaptive", but it's no place I would want to live.


- David Travis
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