permaculture

[lbsaltzman@aol.com]

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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