Near the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Huck talks about leaving the Widow, to set out bravely on his own, "for the territory ahead." Of course, it's all new to non-natives, so there are no maps for it, only the sense and sensibilities we bring with us. As the profoundly astute French poet Paul Valery wrote more than a century ago, "we are backing into the future." Our only guide is what we left behind, our old perceptions and ways of being. But we soon find ourselves as troubled as ever, vulnerable to what unknowns lurk there, no matter how well-prepared we might be.

This is where we find ourselves today when we try to discern the best course or options for our mutual futures. Most often we turn first to our history, for we know we did this and that, we were successful at this, not that, and we can always fall back on our overly vaunted technology. Leaving aside the matter of "technology" being 'the study of technique', just as biology is the study of life, geology the study of planet Earth and so on, what is it that we can rely on?

Traditionally we extrapolate from the "facts" of our particular case, project those old findings on the new situation, and hope for the best. At present, still using the "infinitely expanding pie" of Dr Samuelson's Economics Bible, many believe bioengineering will transform farming so that Earth can support an indefinite number of people. The UN announced some months ago that the planet could sustain a population by 2050 of ten billion people.

Just why this is a goal worthy of pursuit is never mentioned; apparently one is to believe that quantity trumps quality. But this is scientism, a kind of religious faith in the "Green Revolution" starting in the late Fifties, when a Wonderworld of new chemicals combined with industrial modalities was to feed the "useless eaters" of Henry Kissinger's realpolitik world.

Scientists came up with "miracle" strains of super rice, forage crops, and an endless stream of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides, all based on petro-chemistry. And production did indeed rise-for a while. That has now ground to a halt: yields cannot be increased any further, while the damage to crops, fields, and humans has been immense.

The preceding was written on June 22nd, 2003. On the 23rd, Michael McCarthy, Environmental Editor at The Independent newspaper, UK, in an article titled "Herbicide-Resistant 'Superweeds' Signal GM Crop Setback" wrote that "in the past seven years, up to five weed species have been found with resistance to the weed killer glyphosphate... through natural evolution." Five species in only seven years? Pretty damned efficient, I'd say!

Ever relentless, Nature never ceases its slow but definitive work, while Wonderworld scientism brings us new Wondergerms and Wonderweeds, perfectly evolved to any challenge we impose on whatever environment we find ourselves in or create. Medical science finally admits our ability to create new antibiotics that triumph over "Superbugs" has halted: we erect ever-higher barriers, and ever-stronger germs leap over them. Darwin, damn it, was right after all! How then to meet the endless stream of crises, one after the other?

We can start by getting back to basics: education has been corrupted from Kindergarten to grad schools to administer conditioning, not critical reasoning, to create obedient consumers who will take their place in a treadmill ant-society. The artist-scholar and social critic Ivan Ilitch [http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html] wrote of this on-going crisis for forty years, but not enough has been done worldwide-which is what is required-to awaken us from our self-imposed, self-defeating courses. Students desperately need to learn what truly makes the planet work: it's Biology-or Oblivion: lessons from the ultimate science, as Dr Brian Hocking (University of Alberta) wrote in 1965 and 1972. We're so distanced from Nature we cannot make even the simplest decision without fatal consequences. Our freeways become monuments to the end of the Age of Peak Oil.

Source: webshots.com

Not that fatal consequences can be abolished: the fate of all born is to die, and I doubt that any-at least not very many-of us wish to abolish birth, a violent process if ever there was one! We under-stand little of either life or living, confuse the two, and end in a terrible muddle of quality and quantities, believing the two commingle equally. The current generation believes it can have its collective cakes and eat them as well. They only mirror their society's participation in an economy that counts air, water, and soil pollution as part of its Gross Domestic Product.

We quantify our perception of and subsequent interaction with world, so that we may say we understand it in a relevant way. But this is not enough: let us ask three questions of our intents and purposes. Our first question is that of initiative:

1. Can this be done? Generally, science and technique find it impossible to resist a challenge to their means. So then we must look at ends.
2. The second concerns consequence: Can we do it in ways that minimize negative impacts?
3. If not, we should not do it. As simple as this may sound, it is quite revolutionary.

Imagine if this logic had operated for the people who developed atomic bombs and weapons for massive death-dealing!

We can't get there from here, Huck soon finds out, and this realization makes Twain's sequel to Huck's earlier adventure disappointing for most readers. We're going to have to abandon part of the road falsely taken (i.e., techniques and industrialism) and return to such mundane basics as biology, chemistry, and physics. [3]

Our first realization is that we live in a very finite, circumscribed series of closed systems. Among these are the Water, Carbon, and Nitrogen Cycles. Overarching all these are The Three Laws of Thermodynamics (TLT), which should be a grade school awareness, not left for a select few in college, along with corollaries in biology and ecology, to culminate in an economics grounded in the latter. And this must be done because these are the realities we live and die under, like it or not, Dr Kissinger.

The strangest aspect of our troubling behaviour is that the answers we seek are at hand, but we fail to put them to work For the Greater Good, which is also the title of one of the seminal works in what will become our way of living, if we are to have much of a life. First published in 1989 by economist Dr Herman Daly and theologian Charles Cobb, it resolves our fragmented economic interpretations and offers ways out of our dilemma, ones that work because they are grounded in the realities of ecology and biology.

The second book, Humanomics: how we can make the economy serve us, not destroy us, by Dr Eugen Loebl, 1979, was published ten years ahead of Cobb and Daly's magnum opus. Dr Loebl's work shows governments how to get out of the way so that humankind's greatest resource, human intelligence, can operate to generate the only wealth we have: human ingenuity in analysis and application. These two works take our truly real world into consideration, not the absurd "infinitely expanding pie" of Dr Samuelson's opportunistic Economics. With deepest regret, I must counsel that for neither Dr Samuelson nor for Marie Antoinette can our Earthly pie infinitely expand. So sorry!

Greeted with immense enthusiasm when they first came into the world, both were quietly smothered under global corporatism's twelve-month bottom lines. "Ending is better than mending!" sing out TV jingles to a numb boobocracy, and "All's well that ends in oil wells," as Iraq is plundered to sustain one mistake by creating an even larger one. Pathetic as they are, these outcomes could not have been otherwise under the curse of materialism triumphant, not since Francis Bacon enunciated these as ideals in his Novum Organum, or New Order of the World, circa 1620.

Since then, most of us labour under the assumption that Nature is a kind of poor housekeeper, some times slovenly, and terribly inefficient all the time. She just can't get done what we want fast enough! Instead, Nature needs Our Help, because our infinite intellectual insights allow us to replace an old-fashioned God with our flawless Thoughts and Actions (T&A). This would be a fine premise to operate under if Nature (and all those pesky closed systems!) were not so fatally unforgiving of applied arrogance.

Most prominent lately is the moronically cheerful madness of "the new Hydrogen Economy". (Golly, I didn't know there was anything wrong with the old one!) Any first year physics student with a grasp of TLT immediately knows this is an oxymoron, because of the larger amount of effort expended to obtain a smaller amount of hydrogen-sourced energy. Yet billions of tax dollars are wasted in such schemes: the installed ignorance that now rules the USA declares it will "invest" one and a half billions in this Wonderfuel by extracting it from (surprise!) petroleum controlled by its oily friends. [1]

"Natural Gas is also the feedstock for hydrogen production. As NG prices are expected to remain high for the next several years, one cannot help but wonder what impact this will have upon the hydrogen economy fantasy." (Dr Alan Dale Pfeiffer, June 23rd 2003 essay, 'Natural Gas Crisis' at Mike Ruppert's website, copvcia.com.) [2]

Incredibly, this is accepted as a realistic, pragmatic solution! As Richard Daughty writes in his funny, yet serious essay, There's Something about the Millennium Depression at 321gold.com for January 31st, "…the idea of productivity as a saviour at the micro level cannot be presumed to exist at the macro level, which is known as 'the fallacy of composition.'"

1. First, we must use rigorous logic when we consider proposals, else solutions be as bad as or worse than the problems. The substance as well as the style of proposals must conform to TLT and the over-arching realities of biology and ecology.
   
   This is not rocket science; indeed, it requires both intuition and art to tease out what Nature loves to hide. We must re-learn sympathy with Nature, rather than see sinister threats at every turn. King James' scholars made a poor translation of a phrase in Genesis, in stating that God "gave" Earth to Adam, to run as a kind of branch plant economy. What the Hebrew really says is that Adam and Eve will not dominate Earth, but live in a "bondage relationship"! We must live in a mutual, subtle, and interactive relationship as stewards and caretakers, to be rewarded for our efforts. [4]



2. We can deliberately choose quality of life over quantity, every way we can. A billion more people on the planet will not contribute one erg to human welfare in any way. Just as there is no "infinitely expanding pie," neither can there be an infinitely expanding number of people to eat it. If we truly want holistic resolutions to present crises, then spiritual investments must precede our financial investments.



3. We must choose diversity over uniformity, encouraging multiple solutions from the people involved with and affected by outcomes. This is the only way that ensures these truly meet basic human needs, as opposed to the grandiose schemes of planners and technocrats who will never live in the public and private Hells they devise for others. Social and economic structures built from the bottom up, rather than imposed from the top down, are far more stable in every way, as well as more satisfying.



4. We can learn from the experiences of other people. Re-inventing the wheel over and again may be useful for some things (although what they might be escapes me just now), but it's not an efficient way to build a wagon. Unless minimum levels of educational, social, and medical needs are met, the result is always a vast social deficit. It is long past time to put an end to Social Darwinism.
   
   The fact is that our birth's circumstances are trumped by genetics, for good or bad, in every case. Privileged families do not have a monopoly on intelligence, as famously demonstrated by any number of disastrous politicians and rulers.
   
   A negatively engendered society eventually fills with anger and resentment; these become murderous rage, first by individuals and then entire societies, and end in foreign and civil wars. The present USA has morphed into social entropy, directing its misplaced pains of civil and social loss unto entire nations of innocents, the most recent being Afghanistan and Iraq.



5. Finally, there must be a sense of justice with equilibrium instilled into our young people, one that is borne out by their witnessing it throughout their society. When a company's CEO is paid one hundred thousand times more than its lowest paid worker, what is taught? What can possibly justify this? When tax laws allow the already wealthy to hide income overseas, what model is held up as an example?

It is said it is very difficult to be a Christian in our society, but it is equally difficult to be a Jew, Sikh, Muslim, Jain, or anyone else who seeks justice, wants to live with others, and respects another's beliefs. When we create and maintain economies that divide and set individuals against one another, that deteriorate our environment and allow one class of people to prosper at the expense of others, then we have acted in un-Natural ways, for Nature does not allow such in her economy.

Prince Peter Kropotkin was the first to state that animal societies benefit and develop through cooperation, not ruthless competition: his conclusions derived from a lifetime's careful observation of animal populations. But his work opposed the Darwinian-imaged capitalism of his era, so he was discounted, just as was Fr Gregor Mendel, Dr Herman Daly, and Dr Eugen Loebl. Although variants of mindless, anti-life capitalism still burden 21st century humankind, life doesn't have to be like this: we can--and must--do better, much better.

For us to succeed to the widest possible viable and sustainable extent, we must never forget that we always have before us the definitive choice: biology or oblivion. That all life on Earth and everywhere in the universe accurately reflects TLT in every aspect of its manifold, perhaps infinite, manifestations has been long known. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God declares, "this day I have offered you life or death. Choose life." When this sensibility informs our sense, we can make decisions that are truly for the common good, instead of the uncommonly rich.

"But at my back I always hear, / time's winged chariot drawing near," wrote Andrew Marvell, entreating his coy mistress more than three hundred years ago. Indeed, Nature is our only mistress, and we must pay full attention to her soon, for "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

1. For an excellent summary of our current state of denial, see "The Hype about Hydrogen" at http://www.culturechange.org/hydrogen.htm
2. Michael Ruppert's website copvcia.com has many articles covering all aspects of our crisis, and is working on developing positive resolutions for as many of these as possible.
3. One who made the immense journey from oil industry professional to one of the Oil age's foremost critics is Jan Lundberg. His site is http://culturechange.org/
4. Dr Richard Heinberg's website, http://www.museletter.com/, covers all of the topics discussed above and offers useful insights and alternatives to our crises.

Joseph E Fasciani
Email: jefasciani@highspeedplus.com

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