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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Financial Collapse / Katrina

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  • From: David Travis <djtravis@hotmail.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Financial Collapse / Katrina
  • Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 18:13:56 +0000



> 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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