While I focus primarily on climate change, the problem is so interwoven with the machinery of the global economy that I end up absorbing a lot of economic information as a byproduct. Lately this financial chatter has been particularly hair-raising, and as much as it pains me to be the constant alarmist, I’d be remiss if I saw danger on the horizon and didn’t warn people.

So here goes:

There’s a high likelihood we will experience a large market correction (read: crash) this year, to the tune of 50% or more. This forecast is based on a few rather grim articles that have come out recently from respected industry insiders. The first, “Stocks likely to crater from here,” is from Chris Martenson, a biochemist and author whose work on exponential growth curves I already follow and respect for its tie-ins to climate change and the Limits to Growth. Chris’s warning is similar to the one he gave in the months preceding the crash of 2008, which turned out to be right and made him look pretty smart in the process. His article, for which this blog post is named, predicts a sizable crash in the May – September range of 2013.

I admit I’m not savvy enough to understand everything in that article…I definitely still consider myself a layperson where economic issues are concerned. But the gist of the article is that stocks are overbought/overvalued and that coupled with the world’s crushing debt, rising energy costs, and willingness to print unlimited amounts of money to paper over our systemic problems, we’re living a lie that will soon blow up in our faces.

Supporting this prediction are articles from two other luminaries of the investment world, Jim Rogers and Jeremy Grantham. Both have histories of adeptly predicting bubbles and crashes, and both have likewise set their sites on 2013 as a year of financial collapse. Quotes/articles from this pair:

“I  don’t trust the data from any government, including the U.S. We know that governments lie to us. Everybody’s printing money, but it cannot go on. This is all artificial.” — Jim Rogers

The Fed’s negative real [interest] rates regime…[is] designed to badger us into riskier investments in order to push up equity prices and grab a short-term wealth effect (that must be given back one day when least comfortable and least expected). This strategy will be…followed eventually, at long and hard-to- predict intervals, by exciting crashes. — Jeremy Grantham 

The IMF has identified 145 banking crashes, 204 monetary collapses, 72 sovereign debt crises and 48 massive meltdowns in the period 1637-1929.

Not a question of IF, but WHEN

These grim outlooks don’t seem so crazy when you consider that bubbles and crashes are baked in to capitalism. That’s not alarmism, and that’s not speculation…that’s economic fact, and one that’s been uttered by prominent economists for decades. What’s more, over time crashes are coming faster and faster, which is exactly what you’d expect when dealing with a system of exponential growth that’s approaching its limits. If you’ve absorbed any of the other material on this site, you know by now that exponential growth cannot persist indefinitely on a finite planet…which means our economy will stop growing before long. The real question you should be asking is: what does an economic system built on infinite growth do when growth stops?

If you believe neither precedent nor the predictions of smart people who do this for a living, you need only look out at the world around you for evidence of what’s coming. Many countries around the world right now are embroiled in sovereign debt crises, bailouts, and austerity (including the U.S., because that’s essentially what the sequester is). The weakest and most exposed countries are the southern European nations, all of which need serious help from their rich northern neighbors just to keep their economies afloat. We all know about Greece by now, but did you know that Italy, Portugal, Spain, and even France aren’t far behind? Just last week, the the island nation of Cyprus experienced a run on its banks: citizens got scared when they learned that their accounts were being raided to pay off debts from the banking system. The deal was later rejected and is now being restructured, but further bank runs are feared.

Bank runs, you heard that right. Shadows of the Great Depression. Lest you think that this could never happen in the United States, I’d remind you that these are all first-world nations we’re talking about, ones operating our very same economic and banking model (and the U.S is holding just as much debt as some of them). Yet even if somehow the United States manages to hold it together in the near term, Europe is still going down…and when it goes, it’s going to have a major effect on the U.S. economy. Future crises now appear inevitable, and if the bungled bailouts and ham-fisted attempts at solving the Euro crises are any indication, I would not put a lot of faith in our elected leaders to find us an elegant solution.

Time to diversify

The long and the short of it is: I wouldn’t trust markets for a while. If you’ve got investments tied up in stocks/bonds/mutual funds etc., it might be a good idea to move them to safer spots for the time being. Personally, I lost about 50% of my retirement when the market went sour in 2008, and many of you did too, I’d wager. Let’s learn the lessons of 2008 and get out ahead of this one…once bitten, twice shy.

For the record, I’d like to state that the impending crash is nobody’s fault. Neither the sleazy bankers, the corrupt politicians nor the greedy home-buyers bear the blame for what is ultimately a systemic problem. They and everyone else are just pursuing their rational interests inside a system that is fatally flawed. If someone sells us a car with no brakes and a faulty steering wheel, we’re going to crash before too long. It’s hard to predict where and when of course, but when it happens it’s natural to blame things like driver error or outdated maps. Of course we’ll try changing those elements, slapping on a new tire and soldiering on…yet crashes will keep happening because we haven’t identified the root problem. The economy, like this car, is a broken system…it was always doomed to fail.

What we need now is the humility to realize that we’re going down, and that finger pointing is useless. Once we wake up to that “hey, maybe something else is going on here” feeling, we can get busy redesigning our economic system to operate in a more sustainable way. Change on this scale is of course very scary, especially since the system we have now is all we’ve ever known…people don’t just give that up without a fight. Yet in times of great crisis we also become more willing to listen to new ideas. So here’s hoping we do, and that in the near future we can have an honest discussion about the shortcomings of capitalism and the growth economy.

Reposted from Science Pope.

– Eric Krasnauskas, Transition Voice

Photo: Alan Cleaver/Flickr.

Ah, it’s good to have a sense of humor. In fact, a sense of humor is an essential part of what I’ve been calling “the New Masculine.”

As an example, almost as soon as my article, “Creating the New Story: The Masculine and the Feminine,” got published on various internet sites earlier this year, the cruelest cosmic joke of all time – for humanity, that is – came into my awareness.

What is the nature of this cosmic joke? Rather than going into it in full detail here, I’ll provide you a link to Daniel Drumright’s essay, “The Irreconcilable Acceptance of Near-Term Extinction.” Once you’ve read it, you can come back to this article with a deeper understanding of where I’m coming from. Of course, if you’re reading this at one of the usual places my writing appears on the internet, I’ll assume you’ve already read Daniel’s article.

In brief, the cosmic joke is that just as humanity begins to wake up, it suddenly appears as if it may well be too late. From my book, Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior:

No longer faced with mere territorial struggles, the consequences humankind faces today are global, and we are faced with the very real possibility of our own demise as a species. To be sure, these are issues of patriarchal power and the light and dark forces on the planet facing off against one another. It is the oldest story on the planet. It’s time for the patriarchy to be disassembled and for its sons to grow up.

There is already a great deal of debate around the veracity of Daniel’s essay. That’s part of the nature of our species: to remain safely in denial until it’s too late and we can no longer deny what’s in front of us. We’ve lost the ability to pay attention to the survival skill of fear. Some will arrive at that place sooner than others and I consider myself to be in the second wave of acceptance. As someone who has basically accepted the premise of the coming 6th Great Extinction – I still pray I’m wrong – I can’t fault later arrivals except to say that trying to stop that which appears to have already passed the tipping point feels a lot like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, I honor and respect your Warrior spirit of not quitting. There may not be any inappropriate responses. After all, when have we ever faced what we’re now facing?

However, assuming you share the conclusions I’ve come to, the rest of this article will look at what might be some other appropriate responses to what has already begun, the path we set upon when we walked out of the forests as hunter-gatherers and began the horticulture age, agrarian culture, and finally sealing our fate by ramping up with the industrial revolution. We can no longer argue whether our predicament was inevitable or not, for here we are.

Because of my work with the masculine, I’m going to specifically look at the role of the new masculine at this Great Turning. How does/can this New Masculine respond to this new information that changes everything and yet changes nothing? To do this, we first need to look at what is it that determines whether a man – or a woman who carries strong masculine energy – embodies this new way of being?

The long explanation – about 170 pages worth – is contained within my book, but we won’t go there in this article. Instead, let’s look at the primary characteristics which delineate the new masculine from the old masculine, and let’s start with the old masculine.

The old masculine is the patriarchal energy of domination and greed that has pretty much been with us from our humble beginnings but were, again, ramped up as we evolved from our hunter-gatherer status to settling into city-states, or what is called “civilization.” Long story short, the masculine was emphasized, including the introduction of only masculine “Gods,” and the feminine was relegated to inferior status, and in spite of advances in the last 100 years or so, that reality still exists. This is the consciousness that has brought us to where were find ourselves today: The conqueror, the ego-centric belief that we were put here to dominate nature, as opposed to the “partnering with nature” of the indigenous heart, and the idea that somehow the same runaway technology of what brought us here is what will now save us. How’s that working for you?

The old masculine denies everything feminine: the caring heart, community, love of relationship, including our relationship to the planet. There’s a reason the names we’ve had for the planet are feminine: Mother Earth, Gaia, Terra, Hermione,, Avani, Kun, Onatah, and many more. The sky gods have mostly been masculine and the earth has mostly been the domain of the Goddess.

One of the defining characteristics of the New Masculine is the ability to integrate both sides of the essences we all carry: The feminine and the masculine. During the transition time of both – still in full swing since the 1960′s – postmodern men have denied their masculine while integrating their softer feminine qualities, and women have been busy integrating their masculine, while largely denying their feminine. This is an extremely simplified version, but the big picture is accurate.

What brings the feminized masculine into the realm of the New Masculine, is the reintegration of healthy masculine qualities like being on purpose, drive, directional, discipline, stability, focus, confidence, and more, only without having to dominate or rule the feminine. In fact, the other part of being in tune and vibrant with qualities of the New Masculine, is also having fully integrated the healthy qualities of the feminine: Reception, surrender, emotion, radiance, flow, nurturing, sharing, gentleness, empathy, patience…It is, in fact, the total integration of both the masculine and the feminine that determines this new way of being in the world. Obviously, there’s more, but that can’t be dealt with within the context of this article.

Two caveats: One, I intentionally left out the trait of authenticity. Generally described as a masculine trait, it is a distinction I don’t agree with, as I believe both the feminine and the masculine are equally capable of displaying this quality. Two, you’ve probably realized that when I speak of the masculine and the feminine, that I’m not necessarily talking about men and women, but rather, the qualities contained within each. Masculine and feminine qualities are not about gender.

Now that we’ve set our definitions, let’s look at some ways this New Masculine can serve at what this article calls “the end of time.”

Another quality of the masculine is to protect the feminine, and in the case of a man, to protect both the feminine contained within himself and within women. A natural extension of that is that the masculine also protects those who are powerless and cannot protect themselves.

Protecting others – and ourselves – may require some very hard choices in whatever time we may have left: choices that involve considering what constitutes the least amount of suffering for others and yourself. These likely scenarios will require that we maintain the ultimate compassion for ourselves and those we serve: Our communities, our partners, our loved ones, and even our animals.

It’s easy to talk about how the masculine protects others, but requires a little more nuance when we talk about protecting the feminine within. It means not hardening our hearts regardless of what’s going on around us. It means keeping a balance between the head (thinking) and the heart (feeling). It means remaining compassionate and empathetic even with those you have conflict with. It means healing the mind/body/spirit split that has brought us to where we are today, and it means healing that chasm within us in time to help heal it within others.

If we – the masculine within each of as individuals and as a collective – can do that one thing before the chaos sets in, before we choose whatever exit strategy we will ultimately be forced to take, then the end of the human era on this beautiful planet, from a universe-centric perspective, will also have served some higher purpose.

Gary Stamper, Ph.D., is the founder of CollapsingintoConsciousness.com, and the author of Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior.

– Gary Stamper, Transition Voice

Photo: Grit.com

The annual Transition Challenge is in motion! This month, thousands of people across the country are taking action to build community resilience, enhance local food systems, and reduce energy and water consumption. Over 3,000 actions have already been registered, bringing us one step closer to our goal of 5,000 actions.

For those of you that have yet to take the plunge and sign up your action(s), what are you waiting for? If you missed the recent Transition Challenge Tools and Tips teleseminar, you can listen to it online and find out what Challenge action organizers are doing in their communities. Below are some highlights from the call, which was led by Trathen Heckman, the Executive Director of Daily Acts, backyard farmer, and board president of Transition US. Trathen helped launch the original 350 Challenge (which was the inspiration for the National Transition Challenge) in 2010 in Sonoma County, CA.

1) Some examples of Challenge Actions that have already been registered with Transition US:

• A new home owner in High Point N. Caroline signed up 10 actions to do at their new home, with lots of fun ideas including converting lawn to grow food, setting up composting system and rainwater harvesting system, hanging a clothes line, mailing vegetable seeds to his/her 7 nieces and nephews, stopping using electricity for 24 hours once a month on a full moon night, etc.
• Transition Town Charlotte in Vermont: last year they planted a potato garden on the Library lawn, had a public harvest, followed by a “Spud Fest”. The excess potatoes were given to the local food shelf. This year they are expanding the project to include pole beans and tomatoes as well as potatoes. They will again have a Spud Fest again, inviting all townspeople to share favorite recipes, and celebrating the harvest. Also they are removing some invasive ornamentals and replacing them with blueberries, other to-be-decided edibles, and some plants that attract wildlife.
• Bellingham, WA: is accepting proposals for 3 grants up to $350 to support neighborhood Transition projects. Previous projects they’ve supported include: a community orchard on Lummi Island; a neighborhood garden and orchard specifically to support people in a supported living situation; food bank gardens. They have a work day in May to gather together to implement the projects selected.

2) Trathen’s tips for organizing Challenge actions:

• Start where you are: find out what you’re excited about and have an action related to that.
• Be ambitious: set a goal for the number of actions that you want to meet, and aim high.
• Find common ground: connect with people already doing actions in the community and invite them to register their actions; “stand up and be counted”
• Collaborate! Cities are good potential partners – you may find that they have funding to support your action projects. Some ideas for other partners: compost companies, landscapers, nurseries
• Engage media and social media

3) Tips from Tina King Neuhausel of Sustainable Contra Costa:

• Paper pledge forms work well for registering people’s actions at community events
• Reach out to local businesses to provide incentives to people who sign up action (like free compost gift certificates)
• Make sure people know about easy actions they can take if they’re not quite ready to take on a big action just yet (for example, turning off the ignition while waiting to pick up your child from school)

4) Tips from Victory V. Lee of The Victory Garden Foundation:

• Use social media to highlight actions that people have registered to encourage more people to register their own actions
• Partner with organizations that are already doing work with community gardens
• Partner with Transition groups in your region

Now it’s YOUR turn! Click here to register one or more actions that you or your group will do as part of the Challenge this month. By joining the Challenge, you’ll not only see the benefits to your own home and community, but you’ll be counted as part of a bigger movement toward community resilience in the face of climate change and peak oil.

– Maggie Fleming, Transition US via Transition Voice

Transition Voice Publisher Erik Curren.

Today is Transition Voice publisher Erik Curren’s birthday. I thought that was reason enough to make one of our occasional plugs for donations to help support the work at Transition Voice.

Talk about one of the hardest working guys in the news business. In spite of the fact that Erik has already entered the new economy, holding down five different jobs simultaneously — he’s a web designer, English teacher at a local college, on his town’s City Council, a PR consultant, and a writer for a Buddhist organization — he still manages to oversee the all-volunteer Transition Voice, serves on several boards, and still gets out to mow with a scythe in the local community garden.

Where does he find the time?

Putting others first

Well, as his wife I can say that Erik is a constant living example of “be the change you wish to see in the world.” He’s the first person to step up to the plate if he can, whether to help make a better, kinder world, or just to lift horse manure for a local vegetable garden planting. But it’s not just his helpfulness, kindness, and readiness that make him such a wonderful person to love and work with.

His mind is also ever at the ready, taking on weighty subjects that effect us all in deep and important ways. All that, and yet he’s got a great sense of humor, too, as you can see in the Global Warming Truth Index below.

Here’s just a small sampling of some of Erik’s “greatest hits” from his writing over nearly three years at Transition Voice (and here’s his full archive). I think you’ll agree that you can’t get this kind of writing everywhere, and that it deserves support to help make it easiest for him to create the time for this kind of work.

• Emancipating Slaves Then and Now
• Cut Off From Society Sports Become Junk
• Empathy: Our Strongest Weapon Against Climate Change?
• It’s Official: Peak Oil Came in 2006
• Solar Power, The Teddy Bear of Energy Sources
• Noah’s Ark: No Kind of Escape Plan
• You Can Love City Hall
• How we can, and why we must, overthrow Big Oil
• Peak Oil Angst and the Lure of Technotopia
• Fighting Corporate Power Since 1776
• And of course, The Global Warming Truth Index

There are many more pieces he’s written for Transition Voice, so please check his archive.

I hope you’ll agree that Transition Voice is putting out some of the most original, thought-provoking and even entertaining writing on the topics of energy, global warming, and global economic crisis out there and that supporting our publication with your donation is a good thing to do. So please donate today and/or drop Erik a line wishing him a very happy — and maybe even relaxing (take a day off, fella!) birthday!

–Lindsay Curren, Transition Voice

Image: mariopiperni/Flickr.

The Republicans are a party in crisis. Having lost the election, they’re now wracked with internal strife and prospects for a turnaround in the near term appear dim. The primary reasons for this decline are demographic: their values, platform, and policies are now dangerously out of sync with the mainstream, and diverging further every year. Exploring this divergence could fill an article of its own, but it’s best summed up by the Republican party’s recent “autopsy” of their 2012 election failures which concluded the party is simply “too old, too white.”

Faced with these demographic challenges, Republicans understandably fear they’ll be marginalized and irrelevant within a generation. They’re in need of a renaissance, a new narrative that draws attention away from their current controversies over “legitimate rape”, and funding cuts for social programs. Building this narrative requires a bridge issue, one that appeals to broad new audiences without compromising the party’s core values.

That issue is climate change.

Whoa! How could climate change possibly be a Republican issue? After all, isn’t it counter to the interests of Big Business, and don’t dozens of Republican congressmen openly deny the science behind it? How can climate change possibly become the issue that saves the party?

Let’s begin with a truism about politics: perception is reality. Perception matters more than policy, and political packaging is one of the Republican party’s core strengths. Consider their success establishing narratives like “lower taxes grow the economy” and “immigrants are stealing American jobs.” While each of these is empirically false, a combination of intuitive packaging and endless repetition have forged them in to cultural truisms. Republican’s current branding of climate change includes phrases like “job-killing” and “left-wing conspiracy,” which has, over the years, turned their base squarely against the issue. But if they change that branding, perceptions from the base and the public at large will change with it. So let’s begin!

Climate change threatens our freedom!

What? That’s stupid. But wait: if you’re a rancher or a farmer in the American West, your freedom is enormously constrained by the horrific drought of the last two years. You don’t get to choose what you’re going to plant, or what cows you’re going to slaughter. And at the other end, shoppers are losing freedom of choice at the supermarket, as climate change destroys certain crops and makes meat unaffordable.

God commands we fight it!

Right out of the gate in Genesis, the Bible states “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it,” a responsibility we violate as we continue to pollute our air and water. Furthermore, addressing climate change fulfills the Christian’s commitment to aid the poor (whom climate change hits disproportionately). Across the country, religious leaders are beginning to understand climate change in its moral context and seeing it as an opportunity to apply their creed in the real world.

Our national security depends on it!

It’s telling that despite several ongoing military conflicts and nuclear threats from North Korea, America’s generals and intelligence agencies continue to identify climate change as our top threat. It’s no coincidence that the countries American forces are engaged in are some of those hit hardest by climate change! Climate change makes basic resources like food and water scarce, which in turn breeds unrest and radicalism…things that never turn out well for America. Admittedly, addressing this new kind of national security threat takes a major shift in thinking. Once we accept that we can’t kill our way out of resource shortages, we’ll realize our national security dollars are better spent on efforts like developing renewable energy and educating women in the third world.

Carbon — the original sequester

And what are the rewards for pursuing this strategic rebranding? First, Republicans would win their most prized demographics: non-whites, the young, and the poor. Second, flanked from the left, Democrats would be made to look out-of-touch and the party of the establishment. Finally, as climate change sheds its partisan taint, bills to address it will begin sailing through Congress, government will begin working again in the eyes of the people, and Republicans will get all the credit. Refocusing the party on climate change is akin to hitting the reset button: in one logically consistent move, Republicans would halt their decline and be revitalized, while preserving their core values.

Now before we get too enthusiastic about the idea of a Republican embrace of climate change, let’s be honest with ourselves: it will never happen. While resistance to massive change is to be expected, the biggest reason the GOP will not pursue this strategy is it relies on campaign contributions from Big Oil to get its candidates elected.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Yet if there were anyone who could transcend this paradigm, it’s Chris Christie. Who better to pursue this issue than a governor of a state that was wrecked by Hurricane Sandy? While he might be persona non grata with party leaders at the moment, he is still highly respected by the rank and file as the rarest of birds: someone who puts his constituents ahead of politics.

Climate change is the issue of our time. Today’s arguments about its science and legislation will be replaced with tomorrow’s responses to food riots and accommodating climate refugees. Yet the grimness of climate change is matched by its political opportunity — the opportunity to command an issue that will dominate human culture for generations. For their continued relevance in American politics, for the health of a democracy that needs diverse opinions to thrive, and for the sake of humanity’s future, let us hope the Republicans are the ones to embrace this opportunity.

– Eric Krasnauskas, Transition Voice

Local yogurt: Good for you, good for the economy. Photo: Sterling College/Flickr.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of food. Yet, sometimes it appears just as hard for food writers to avoid hype.

It’s all too easy for people who love food enough to write about food to lose themselves in breathless raptures over the deliciousness of forest foraged mushrooms or the power of artisanal pork to cure diabetes, resurrect rural economies and provide meaningful careers to former baristas from Philadelphia to Portland.

It makes even a sympathetic reader wonder: is all this fuss about food, particularly its local-organic variety, just a way to overcompensate for the sad fact that most Americans don’t care that much about the subject?

A harvest of hype and hope

The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food, Rodale, 234pp, $15.99.

Ben Hewitt wrestles with the hype while he embraces it at the same time in The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food. Hardwick, Vermont, population 3,200, never fully recovered after its granite quarry shut down in the 1930s, taking the local economy down with it. So you would think that residents of the hardscrabble town would be grateful for the new food industry that somehow sprouted up locally in the last couple decades.

But the truth is pretty much the opposite. Aside from a few upscale Manhattan transplants, Hardwick residents couldn’t care less about food.

Food may not have saved the town, but it does bring in good money. Scores of jobs are provided by nearly a dozen significant businesses located in and around the town that export food and related products outside the area, from a marketer of organic seeds to an artisanal cheese maker to a producer of tofu and soy milk. There’s even a non-profit to wrap it all up in a shiny ribbon of theory, the Center for an Agricultural Economy.

Yet, the town’s largely working-class population shrugs off all the attention given to the hippie entrepreneurs in their midst. Just like small town folk everywhere, the real Hardwick resident continues to wash down his Lay’s potato chips with an ice-cold Coke. And until the majority of non-yuppies can be convinced to eat like the foodies, then Hewitt rightly concludes that local food’s work isn’t done in Hardwick or anywhere else.

Grow your own

Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable and Secure Food Systems, A Community Resilience Guide, Chelsea Green, 308pp, $19.95.

For its snob-appeal, I used to dismiss food-talk as a self-indulgence too precious for an era of permanent economic distress and the end of jobs, not to mention climate change and peak oil.

But then I realized the connection between food and resilience. As the economy continues to decline in the future, communities that rely as little as possible on the outside world for the necessities of life, especially food, will be better off. Seeing the urgency of providing food close to home in an uncertain world, I had no choice but to become a food activist.

Last spring, I ran for the city council of Staunton, Virginia (pop. 24,000). With the help of lots of people who care about food, I got elected. After taking office, I convened a Food Policy Task Force. The group, composed of a dozen local leaders from education, retail, churches and of course, the food business, is charged with developing a package of good ideas by the fall to help the city promote good food for all citizens, regardless of income.

If you find yourself in the same boat and if you want to help your city put in policies that encourage people to grow food nearby, then you’ll want your own copy of Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable and Secure Food Systems.

This wonkish book may not be as easy a read as The Town That Food Saved, but if you’re looking for ammunition for that next city council meeting on why local food matters to the local economy and civic life, then you’ll find it here.

After a nuanced discussion to clarify what qualifies as “local” food — sometimes imported food really is better than the local stuff — author Philip Ackerman-Leist goes through the main reasons to promote a strong local food system, from peak oil and climate change to food justice and creating jobs.

After making the case for food that is locally produced or at least locally managed, Ackerman-Leist then offers dozens of policy ideas to bring local food, and the local farmers necessary to grow it, to a neighborhood near you. These range from the eminently practical (e.g., establishing a food policy council that reports directly to the mayor) to the satisfyingly visionary (e.g., subsidizing urban agriculture as a public service like transportation).

Raw milk and small government

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle Over Who Decides What We Eat, Chelsea Green, 257 pp, $19.95.

Yes, City Hall can be an ally in promoting a vibrant local food scene. But sometimes government can stand in the way of citizens getting the food they want. Nobody knows this better than David Gumpert, who blogs about the health benefits of natural food and the battles that people must fight with food safety regulators to obtain food outside of the industrial food system at his website The Complete Patient.

Gumpert already wrote a whole book about the political battles around raw milk. Now, in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Food Rights: The Escalating Battle Over Who Decides What We Eat, Gumpert expands his focus to the growing movement of people who want to drink raw milk and eat raw cheese so much that they don’t care if they have to fight the law to do so.

As well heeled urban consumers form buying clubs and join cowshares to get food directly from farms, regulators from federal and state health and agriculture agencies respond with enhanced enforcement of food safety regulations. But investigations, intimidation, civil and criminal charges and even jail time are targeted not at those consumers, but at the farmers and entrepreneurs trying to meet the growing demand for unprocessed “private” food.

Maddening stories follow. A long-time Amish farmer supplying a Washington, DC buying club was forced to abandon his farm and take up carpentry. The manager of a raw food club near L.A. spent nearly a year in jail. Countless other farmers and distributors racked up tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.

Food safety regulators are the jack-booted thugs of the book, driven by a paranoia based in an outdated fear of all microbes in food (hasn’t the FDA heard of “probiotics?”). Not surprisingly, regulators know that mounting drug war-style raids on Amish farms whose food has made nobody sick just because those farms lack permits and inspections, won’t play well with the voting public. So, the most draconian enforcement happens in secret.

Breaking that secrecy is the goal of Gumpert’s book as it is of the “food freedom” movement he chronicles. That movement has long been seeking its own “Rosa Parks moment,” when food choice activists can engage the public in sympathy with the plight of a farmer persecuted for trying to give people the food they want.

Gumpert thinks that the acquittal in September 2012 of a Minnesota egg farmer charged with violating food safety regulations may have provided that Civil Rights-esque moment. But for all his grit, Alvin Schlangen is still no Rosa Parks. And until the food freedom movement can generate at least a small part of the public sympathy and media attention that 1960s Freedom Riders did, then it’s clear that people who want to get food outside of the official system will be sitting at the back of the bus for a long time to come.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Image: Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In a first in human history, “it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400-ppm level without losing a beat.”

The world is likely days away from a “sobering milestone” in our planetary history.

Concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide will likely reach 400 parts per million (ppm) for first time in human history, say scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and unless drastic action is taken, we’re on track to hit 450 ppm in the near future.

“I wish it weren’t true, but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400-ppm level without losing a beat,” said Scripps geochemist Ralph Keeling, whose father Charles David (Dave) Keeling began the “Keeling Curve” to track daily CO2 levels recorded at Mauna Loa Observatory.

The last time the greenhouse gases were at 400 ppm was likely the Pliocene epoch, between 3.2 million and 5 million years ago.

The current reading is at 399.72 ppm — far past the 350 ppm level many, including noted climate scientist James Hansen, have warned is the upper safe limit before the planet hits a tipping point.

“At this pace we’ll hit 450 ppm within a few decades,” warned Keeling. Indeed, the rate of rise of CO2 over the past century is “unprecedented.”

The figure should serve as a call to act on the deadly emissions caused by our fossil fuel addiction, the scientists say.

“The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it’s too late for our children and grandchildren,” said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and carbon cycle researcher and part of the Scripps CO2 Group.

To keep a watch on the daily levels, you can visit The Keeling Curve website or follow the daily updates via Twitter.

This article was re-posted from Common Dreams.

- Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams via Transition Voice

Photo: bortescristian/Flickr.

These days I tend to beat myself up for screwing around; my biggest time sinks are video games (I never did quite kick my Civilization 5 habit) and television (my beloved Boston Celtics are kind of out in the wilderness). The reason, I think, is that I’ve internalized the threat of climate change. I feel it in my guts, hanging over me, demanding a response…so naturally any leisure time I afford myself ends up feels like a betrayal.

LeBron is a useful distraction from climate change.

It’s not healthy of course. We all need time to decompress and set our minds right, and often enough the best ideas and breakthroughs come when we’re doing something else entirely. Yet it’s still hard to rationalize taking the time to pilot Napoleon through the Industrial Age or scream obscenities at LeBron James when you see a hard stop to human civilization looming. Time now feels precious.

By “internalizing the threat” of climate change, I’m basically talking about acceptance. Acceptance is one of the five stages of grief, and unsurprisingly dealing with climate change tends to mirror the grief process.

• Denial — Koch Brothers, Heartland Institute…too easy.
• Anger — Reform our energy system? You can’t be serious, you expect us to pay how much to avoid human extinction??!!
• Bargaining — Well maybe if buy a Prius I can just ride out the storm without making any other serious changes.
• Depression — How did we fuck this up so badly?
• Acceptance — The world you grew up with is gone, and it’s not coming back. There is pain and hardship on the horizon, but with it comes opportunity for a better world.

In 2009 the island nation of Maldives, knowing they will be erased by sea level increases due to climate change, held an underwater Cabinet meeting to urge world leaders to reduce C02 emissions. The chief export of Maldives is subtlety.

Acceptance is the hardest step of all, which is why I think most of the world is still stuck in bargaining. World nations certainly understand the threat of climate change, yet continue to make only the most limp-wristed attempts to address it. With notable exceptions like Tuvalu or the Maldives which face complete annihilation in the near term, every single one is still wearing rose-tinted glasses. Leaders persistently ignore worst-case scenarios and instead assume the best case scenarios…even as best case scenarios gets downgraded with each passing year. None are reacting to real data and real timelines; we’re all stuck in a fairy tale that stubbornly refuses to match what’s happening all around us. Collectively we think of climate change as a political agenda, instead of a fact of the physical world.

But nature doesn’t play politics, and it doesn’t care about human timelines. We can bargain with it no more than we can bargain our way out of a sunrise or sunset.

Difficult though it may be, acceptance is actually an amazing place to be. I admit, it’s not fun thinking about the suffering the world is now certain to endure. But once you accept that it’s all going to be different, you become motivated to dictate that different. You become eager to shape the world to come, to minimize suffering, and to build a sustainable economic model to underpin it all. Acceptance gives you the perspective of one standing on a mountaintop: even as you tremble for fear of falling, the breath is snatched from you by the beauty of the landscape ahead.

Yet from this mountaintop we must now retreat. It will not be easy, certainly…but the treacherous path before us remains far better than the alternative, and we have many wonderful activists and thinkers like Bill McKibben, Paul Gilding, and Charles Eisenstein to help guide and brace us in our descent. They too bear the scars of grief, but from that mountaintop they see what we see: a way forward.

– Eric Krasnauskas, Transition Voice

Goldman Prize recipient Nohra Padilla at a recycling facility. Photo: the Goldman Prize.

Two recipients of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize are working to abolish the practice of sending trash to landfills and incinerators. And the idea is catching on.

There is a growing global movement to significantly reduce the amount of trash we produce as communities, cities, countries and even regions. It’s called the zero-waste movement, and it received a major boost this week as two of its leaders were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Nohra Padilla and Rossano Ercolini are two of the winners of this year’s Goldman Prize, which awards $150,000 to each of six grassroots environmentalists who have achieved great impact, often against great odds. On the surface, Padilla and Ercolini seem to have little in common. Padilla is a grassroots recycler—also known as a waste picker—from the embattled city of Bogotá, Colombia. Ercolini is an elementary school teacher from the rustic farmlands of Capannori, Italy.

Though their experiences are different, they share a common cause: organizing to reduce the amount of trash—everything from cans and bottles to cell phones and apple cores—that ends up buried in landfills or burned in incinerators.

What is zero waste?

Here in the United States zero waste is often thought of as a lifestyle choice, if it’s thought of at all. Blogs like Zero Waste Home and The Clean Bin Project attract a readership of thousands through tips on how to buy less, reuse more, and recycle and compost in the home. The popularity of these projects, along with the success of Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, show a growing interest in reducing what we throw into dumpsters.

Padilla and Ercolini’s stories show that zero waste is not only a personal choice, but also an organized system that works at multiple levels including the community, municipality, nation, and region. Zero waste systems include:

• composting, recycling, reuse, and education on how to separate materials into these categories;
• door-to-door collection of recyclable and compostable stuff; swap meets, flea markets or freecycle websites to exchange reuseable goods and encourage people to buy less;
• policy change, including bans on incineration and single-use plastic bags, and subsidies and incentives for recycling;
• regulation of corporations to require them to buy back and recycle their products once they are used by consumers (glass soda bottles and tires are examples of products subject to this regulation in some countries).

Zero waste systems are designed with the goal of eliminating the practice of sending trash to landfills and incinerators. Not only is this possible, it’s already beginning to happen. Ercolini’s hometown of Capannori, Italy, has already achieved 82 percent recycling and reuse and is on track to bring that figure to 100 percent by 2020.

Taking on Europe’s incineration industry

Rossano Ercolini is an elementary school teacher. He began organizing against incinerators in the 1970s, when he learned of a plan to build one in Capannori. Concerned for the health of his students, Ercolini began a campaign to educate his community on the dangers of incineration, including how the burning of garbage releases particulates linked to asthma and other respiratory problems.

Rossano Ercolini. Photo: Goldman Prize.

Over the course of the next 30 years, Ercolini led a David-versus-Goliath struggle, with education as his slingshot. In the 1990s, waste incineration was embraced by the Italian government as well as by big environmental organizations, all of whom bought into the premise that it was a safe and effective technology. Big business and the mafia also supported incineration because of the 20- to 30-year lucrative contracts and large government investments it involved.

The conjunction of economic and political interests behind incineration left citizens alone, not only to fight against incineration but also to develop sustainable alternatives. Ercolini worked for several years as a grassroots educator, inviting scientists and waste experts to give workshops to residents on the health effects of incineration and potential alternatives.

As a result, when the residents of Capannori succeeded in defeating the incinerator proposal, they also had gained the knowledge necessary to develop a better way of handling garbage. Ercolini himself was tapped to lead a local, publicly owned waste management company and began implementing a door-to-door waste collection system that maximized the quantity and quality of the recyclable materials recovered.

Soon after, Capannori became the first Italian municipality to declare a zero waste goal for 2020. Since then, Ercolini has helped to defeat 50 proposed incinerators and has also helped the zero waste movement to spread across Italy. Thanks to the Italian network Legge Rifiuti Zero, or the Zero Waste Alliance, and with the support of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, there are now 117 zero waste municipalities in Italy, with a population of about 3 million people.

“Incineration is no longer wanted or needed in these areas,” Ercolini says. “Instead, they have established comprehensive recycling and composting systems guided by zero waste goals. This has helped improve community health and has sparked strong collaborations between communities and local governments.”

Grassroots recyclers unite

Nohra Padilla is a third generation recycler. For decades her family has survived by salvaging plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper scraps, and the like from dumps, curbside trash cans, and collection centers. They made a living by reselling these materials to junk shops and also to businesses, which used them as raw material to create new products ranging from blue jeans to paper.

In the 1980s, Padilla began organizing her fellow recycling workers, creating the first grassroots recycler cooperative in Bogotá. Since then she has helped to form the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, or Bogotá Recyclers Association, where she now serves as executive director. The association includes 24 cooperatives representing 3,000 people. She also played an important role in forming and leading Colombia’s National Recyclers Association.

“Grassroots recycling is a key component of a zero waste system,” Padilla says. Through their network of cooperatives, grassroots recyclers in Bogotá recover 20 to 25 percent of all material thrown away by city residents. This amounts to about 100 times more recyclable material than is collected by the city’s large private recycling companies.

In March the association won a milestone victory: Grassroots recyclers are now city employees. They will be paid $48 per ton of material they deliver to collection centers, and will be eligible for government pensions and health coverage.

“After years of battling for recognition from the Bogotá government, we will finally be treated as dignified workers and paid just like any large company would be,” Padilla says. “I believe this is a victory that can be replicated across Latin America.”

Padilla has achieved this success in the face of powerful political opponents, a violent environment for worker organizing, and climate subsidies that cut recyclers out of the picture. In 2009, for example, the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism awarded carbon credits to the Doña Juana landfill gas project. This project threatened the livelihoods of Bogotá’s 21,000 informal recyclers by making it more profitable to landfill waste than to recycle it, and by limiting access to recyclable materials.

Padilla and the Grassroots Recyclers Association worked to mitigate the impact of the project, but faced many challenges in making sure that their community benefits agreement was implemented. In contrast to large landfills like Doña Juana, Padilla and the association have created infrastructure to recycle waste instead of bury it. They raised nearly two million dollars, about 75 percent from outside funds and 25 percent co-financed by the association, to build the biggest grassroots-run recycling center in Latin America.

A future without landfills

The stories of these two organizers show how zero waste movements from around the world share common problems and goals, as well as a need to confront powerful opponents with a vested interest in the business of trash.

Both stories also demonstrate the potential of zero waste organizing to bring people together across issues and sectors. For example, Ercolini has organized at the intersection of food sovereignty and trash reduction, advocating for a “Zero Miles, Zero Waste” approach to promoting local food. Meanwhile, Padilla has shown how zero waste approaches, and recycling in particular, can incorporate previously excluded workers into unionized labor, with a clear agenda to reduce trash and carbon emissions.

Padilla and Ercolini’s work has created a model for building viable zero waste alternatives to landfills and incinerators. The struggles of the Colombian recyclers’ movement, and the Bogotá Recyclers Association in particular, serve as an inspiration to recyclers throughout Latin America and beyond.

Meanwhile, the example of the Zero Waste network in Italy is being copied in many other places in Europe, decreasing the popularity of and need for incineration and sparking the creation of a continent-wide organization that advocates for zero waste.

Interested?

• 10 Tips for a Zero-Waste Household
  A year’s worth of solid waste from Bea Johnson’s home fits in a quart-sized jar. Here’s how you can reduce yours.
• Four Steps to Less Wasteful Communities
  The individual actions we take to reduce waste are important. But to stem the avalanche of stuff, we also need system-wide solutions.
• Waste Not: Seattle’s Road to Zero Trash
  There’s simply no room for waste in a carbon neutral city. Seattle has a plan to cut its contribution to landfills—and it’s working.

Re-posted from original article at YES! Magazine.

– Jen Soriano, YES! Magazine via Transition Voice

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s a needed chance for Americans to talk about slavery that has helped us reexamine our history.

For example, recent documentaries and museum exhibits on America’s Founding Fathers regularly show that slavery played a big role in the lives of several heroes of the American Revolution. So, now we know that while Thomas Jefferson proposed legislation against slavery, he may also have fathered children by his slave Sally Hemmings. We also know that George Washington was the only founding father to free all his slaves, if only in his will.

But too much of today’s talk about slavery is just telling stories from history, which can lead to finger-pointing at past generations and self-congratulation about how much better things are today.

Yet, to get an accurate picture of how the past relates to the present and to try make the emancipation project of Lincoln’s proclamation complete, we also need to talk about the shame that is slavery today. And to understand modern slavery we need to see its connection to the globalized economy and technology which, instead of merely replacing humans with machines, has also created a bigger market for the cheapest human labor.

Slavery by another name

We already know that Lincoln freed some slaves in 1863 but it took Congress to free the rest by passing the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. We also know that slavery’s effects lingered through the following century, when former slaves continued to suffer under the sharecropping peonage that was the lot of many rural blacks well into the twentieth century.

But when the Civil Rights movement helped end formal segregation in the rural South, it didn’t end bondage labor of blacks in the United States.

That unfree labor simply went behind closed doors and out of public sight into the criminal justice system with its hundreds of prison-factories across the United States. While prisoners of all races are put to work, due to racially biased criminal convictions and sentencing, a disproportionate number of prison workers are black. Today, 37.1% of inmates in America’s prisons are black, even though African Americans make up only 13.1% of the U.S. population.

And these days, those prisoners are doing a lot more than just making license plates.

Producing 100% of a variety of military supplies — helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags and canteens — along with more than 90% of paints and more than a third of home appliances, America’s prisons have become a profitable manufacturing powerhouse built on the cheapest and most compliant labor. Prisons are one place that manufacturers will never have to worry about unions.

Ironically, after decades of American manufacturing moving overseas, prisons remain one of the last bright spots for products Made in the USA.

Outsourced slavery

Outside the U.S., other major slave holding nations such as Brazil freed their slaves later in the nineteenth century. It took until the twentieth century for some African and Middle Eastern nations to follow suit. Oman abolished slavery in 1970 and Mauritania took until 2007 to outlaw slave ownership.

Today, slavery is illegal in every country on Earth. Yet, labor in bondage continues. Women caught up in human trafficking from Bangkok to Bucharest to the Super Bowl are living proof, as are debt slaves in South Asia or factory slaves in China.

This is not your average exploited Third World labor, with 12- or 18-hour days at pennies an hour. What separates slaveshops from sweatshops is that enslaved workers aren’t paid at all and they can’t leave.

Surprisingly, there are more slaves today then ever before — 27 million worldwide.

Why in this age when advanced, computerized, machine-slaves do so much of our daily work, has the market for old fashioned human slaves actually increased?

Call it the Cotton Gin Paradox.

In the late eighteenth century, Eli Whitney’s invention of a machine that made it dramatically faster and easier to separate cotton fiber from seed, suddenly made cotton hugely profitable. By hand, it took one slave all day to produce a single pound of cotton. With the cotton gin, two slaves could prepare a full 50 pounds of cotton each day. So, all of a sudden, the demand for slaves skyrocketed. From 1800 to 1850, the number of slaves in the U.S. jumped fivefold.

So, ironically, in the nineteenth century, the cotton gin became a labor-saving technology that created a huge new demand for more human labor in the form of slaves. Likewise, today, technology has also created a huge demand for slaves.

Advances in both manufacturing and transportation have allowed factories in poor countries to produce goods more efficiently than in the past and to ship them more cheaply to price-conscious consumers in Europe and North America. To stay competitive using an unskilled workforce, those manufacturers have focused less on trying to achieve high quality than on offering rock bottom prices, in a viscous cycle that relentlessly demands ever-cheaper labor.

Now, slaves make thousands of products, from soccer balls in India and Christmas decorations in China to footwear in Brazil, according to the Anti-Slavery Society.

White man’s burden

The nineteenth century global abolition movement tried to get the white citizenry of Britain, the U.S. and other powerful nations to hate slavery. One way was to appeal to the pity and shame of whites by sharing heart-rending stories of the suffering of slaves. But another way was to get whites to realize that slavery harmed them as well — in short, to appeal to whites’ self-interest.

In the Old South, even slaveholders recognized that the institution harmed the master as well as the slave.

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785.

As a slave owner, Robert E. Lee knew the corrupting influence of slavery on whites first hand.

Seven decades later and just before the Civil War, Robert E. Lee wrote that slavery “is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former.”

Could this appeal to self-interest work today? The biggest challenge is the difference between legal domestic nineteenth century slavery and modern globalized illegal bondage.

Since slavery in the Old South was a home-based business mostly operated in the open-air for anyone to see, planters couldn’t ignore how their slaves suffered and toiled. It also became plain to whites of all classes how the cruelty required to own and drive slaves corrupted the planters and their families.

By contrast, modern slavery is hidden from those who benefit, primarily the distant investors who profit from über-cheap labor and the distant consumers who demand Always Low Prices.

Human trafficking and sex slavery involves a brief personal encounter between slave and customer. But otherwise much of today’s slavery is impersonal, conducted across the ocean through the global economy’s countless product supply chains, with dozens of intermediaries between slave worker and final consumer.

As with so many problems today, from drone wars to climate change, First World voters and consumers who can make a difference on an issue are shielded by geographical and economic distance from the many evils that are required to maintain our comfortable lifestyles.

Living in blissful ignorance in our plastic bubbles, it’s all too easy for us to believe that we live virtuous lives, honestly earning our bread by the sweat of our brows (or our fingers on a keyboard).

In a subtle way, we experience what Buddhists call the suffering of ignorance. When it comes to the slavery that makes our everyday consumption more affordable, our lives become a see-no-evil-speak-no-evil kind of lie.

And of course, relying on slave labor, even if we never have to apply the lash to a slave’s back ourselves or even see it being done by someone else, is exactly what Hannah Arendt termed the Banality of Evil. That’s the situation where the Nazi office worker whose job was to keep the concentration camp trains running on time can claim innocence because he never killed one actual Jew himself.

That kind of excuse doesn’t hold up in court.

Wealth from the bondsman’s toil

Even once you realize the extent of modern slavery, you have to address how much rich-country consumers would have to sacrifice to emancipate all the slaves.

Jefferson, Lee and other slaveholders may have recognized that the evils of slavery extended beyond the bondsman to afflict the master, but like other Southern planters, both the president and the general were loath to give up the riches and the comfortable lifestyle that slavery afforded them.

Today, we can shake our fingers at Southern slave owners all we like, but it’s easy to see why the leading antebellum statesmen both South and North couldn’t live with slavery, but couldn’t live without it either.

In 1860, the South’s four million slaves were worth more than all of America’s factories and railroads put together.

Trade in slave goods connected the cotton ports of Charleston and Savannah in a lucrative Transatlantic commerce with the bankers of London and the mill owners of Manchester. By the 1850s, Southern planters provided 80% of Britain’s cotton.

That was a lot of trade and real wealth to surrender merely on an abstract principle espoused at the time by a few abolitionists. Cotton profits surely helped assuage the guilt of many a slave holder.

Likewise, billions of dollars in value is created in today’s economy by slave labor. It’s unlikely that today’s slave-masters, big corporations, will emancipate their slaves any more cheerfully than did planters in the Old South. That’s why the most likely force against slavery today will be the average First World voter and consumer.

The battle cry of freedom

If you’re already aware of modern slavery and if you want to help eradicate it near you and across the globe, you can join one of the active campaigns against slavery.

If you’re not ready to become an activist, you can set an example with your own consumption. Those with an appetite for research can try to limit imports to Fair Trade or products certified free of slave labor. Campaigns like Free2Work in the apparel industry list the brands that use slave labor and those that try to avoid it.

But in that case, you have to take somebody’s word, no matter how credible, that any particular product’s 6,000-mile long supply chain is virtuous. It’s safer to simply assume that all imports are suspect and decide to start buying as much as we can closer to home.

By reducing our demand for cheap products and cheap labor from abroad, American consumers can start to do our part to free modern slaves.

If we don’t free what are essentially our slaves, though they’re at a distance and held through many intermediaries, fate may free them whether we like it or not, and perhaps at a very inconvenient time for us.

Lincoln wondered if all the wealth built up by slaves would have to be destroyed by war to pay America’s moral debt.

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural. “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Will it take the equivalent of the Civil War and its destruction of slave-wealth, but this time on a worldwide scale, to get modern society off of cheap-labor globalization?

Whether you fear divine judgment or not, surely you will join me in hoping and praying that industrial society can find a peaceful way to free modern slaves and, by so doing, emancipate ourselves from dependence on cheap imports and the cheap lives they make possible.

 – Erik Curren, Transition Voice