What has happened to the world's sanity - and how did we let this happen?

Let me start with a redefinition of terms. When I grew up, I got bigger, I did not expect to grow to be 11 feet tall and as it turned out, I didn't. My parents did not expect that of me either. It was known that growth has its limits. That was a no-brainer as it wasn't called then. It was a an unthinkable concept, it was too silly even to imagine.

Today, growth is open ended. Things like the economy and GDP, land use and the supply of raw materials are expected to grow and are never expected to either stop or shorten and certainly never to end.

Unlimited growth does have a name, it is Cancer. In the body, this has to be stopped - our bodies are limited in size, the design does not allow for us to get too large - we won't fit the airplane seats for a start. We won't be able to walk up the step to get in to the thing in the first place. Size does matter, that is what the real world tells us if we bother to listen. So, why do we ignore the nature of reality when it comes to money, or GDP for that matter ?

Statistics and experience - that's the answer. Statistics, which can be made to prove anything, are most simply utilised to prove that what goes up keeps going up - a straight line graph - reaching for the stars if we extend it far enough. Experience - that of watching a child grow year on year from birth to 15ish - that's a long enough sample surely - from that you can clearly see people will grow for ever. Yes, that is too blindingly stupid to even consider - and yet - we have based our entire future, and that of the world, on the assumption that reality plays no part in economic growth.

Worse - to say there are limits to expansion makes you look like a naif idiot, certainly it won't get you a job in a Bank or any business I can think of. It definitely won't get you votes if you say ' hang on a minute, this can't go on for ever now can it ? Lets stop now and have a think about this." No, even considering slowing down is dangerous to the great god of growth. If I slow down, you will over take me. Standing still is going backwards - being behind is bad. The Jones's must be kept up with at all costs. Even slowing down the rate of increasing growth is a very bad thing as people loose confidence in the great dream once they notice people starting to wake up a bit and twitch in their sleep.

Any lack of confidence in money, or future growth, is considered to be damaging, it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy of doom. The entire system is in danger of collapse. Even when systems do collapse, they are called 'too big to fail' and have money pumped in via 'Quantitative Easing' - printing money - inventing the growth you don't have.

Oddly, the world has not come to an end. Why ? because people still believe in it so much and have so much invested in it, they don't want it to end. This pulling yourself up by your bootstraps thinking only works if no one is watching. You can claim you are getting higher and higher, and, if no one says otherwise, then the lie is accepted and low and behold - new clothes for the Emperor.

And yet - somehow - we keep going. How is this and how long have we got ? Well, in reality, the planet still has some stuff left in it. 'Growth' can be emulated by imports from a place of 'under-pollution' to centres of over population - until recently only available in the west. That plan has work fantastically well for centuries and has now got so popular , the "west" has grown to cover most of the planet. Oddly the "East" does not like this.

In the "East" they can see though the lack of clothes covering the old empires and hate what is revealed. They can see the naked greed that has become invisible from inside a fully working and sustained capitalist system. They can see what is keeping this cancerous monster growing past its limits - it grows as it feeds off them - stopping them growing, stopping them even staying still, forcing them to die slowly though a lack of everything except our trickled down cast offs - pollution. Is it any wonder they get annoyed ? Best ask them what to do about it all before it's too late.

Paris Jan 2015

If I don't like something - I don't watch it. I don't expect to have it rubbed in my face though. 
Muslims are now suffering the way Black people and Jews have done in the past as well as now. It is always easy to blame current events on identifiable 'others'. I have a sixty year old recording of my Great Grandmother saying ' the problem with this town now, is the Portuguese'. That flash has long left the pan, other issues linger longer but are just as unjustified.

Being part of the chosen hate group has only happened to me once - as an Englishman in Glasgow - and they were joking ! It was not fun. When someone gets angrily defensive about being picked on, it is because this was not the first time - after years of continual picking - the last straw may be endangering the camel's back. I could leave Glasgow, but then I'm a white, anglo-saxon, middle aged and a man. 

My point ? Free speech, yes - absolutely - but we in the west should let other societies be as free as we are. This is no excuse for violence - but could possibly be an aid in reducing youthful radicalisation.

Why - even with First Past the Post, a Green vote is never wasted.

A vote for any party other than a Green one is a vote for more of the same. By that I mean it is a vote for the almost total lack of attention to the infrastructure of waste and fossil fuel reliance at the core of our economy. I totally agree – and campaign in support of many of the policies the Labour party have published for 2015 and which - more importantly- many Labour supporters have for decades actually promoted, but, after a lot of thinking realise it is almost as wasted as the effort to rearrange the Titanic deckchairs.

Let me explain. The fighting between the ‘grey’ parties for votes, influence and power takes precedence over the hard to see central environmental concerns. The large scale environmental pressures imposed on the planet by our current version of a Capitalist economy result in the social evils which anyone who has a heart can see any and every day. This social hell is often laid totally at the feet of the Tories but, all save the Greens keep on doing more of the same thing so, the  “let’s get out of hell first, then we can work on building our utopia.” idea – always fails.

Greens are not aiming at utopia, ‘hell’ is very much on the way – environmentally – which is almost non-metaphorical. ‘Society’ is like the deckchairs – it needs something solid to be under it. We have been destroying the foundations of the very infrastructure that supports human existence itself – Malthus yes, but on a global scale. He was clearly historically wrong – but only in the ‘west’ and only while there were places left which our growth could pillage to fuel itself. These other counties and the protected areas of our own land have either run dry ( almost ) or it is too destructive to safely harvest them ( fracking, nuclear fission power ) – to say nothing of the social destruction ( resource wars, occupation ) that result.

I am delighted by science and technology and can see multiple ways out of our mess – including replacing war with space exploration as a way to gain resources and generally show off. Oh, I long for that ! The Star Trek model shows a simplistic way in which that could work, but I hope we don’t need total collapse to bring us all together first.

As I have written in my blogs, no one living their daily lives intends to wreak collateral damage on anyone or any thing. They (we) are almost totally unaware of the consequences of our actions, we have to grow up and open our eyes to these facts while we still can. By ‘we’ I can only mean the people who actually vote in the governments all over the planet.

Green Party policies intend to enable, empower, encourage and educate everyone who has any form of control over our planet’s populations’ daily lives, to further the aim of making human life itself become supportive and regenerative of the planet’s life support systems. There does not need to be any great change in what everyday people do everyday (us) – Government and industry must change the ground rules so that we are free to think about stuff – like social justice and everything social activists from all parties  stand for – and carry on being blissfully ignorant of the larger environment. As it is, with ‘more of the same’, humanity could very well die out – that’s not a party I wish to be part of.

Yes, this is social hell indeed – but, lets avoid the physical hell of environmental breakdown while we can – at the same time as dealing with all the social stuff. ‘More of the same’ deals with nothing fundamental to environmental sustainability. There is no option left – we have already tried everything else and things went brilliantly for centuries ! – for some of us in the West, but, to the determent of the countries we occupied and to the shared future that none of us can escape.

So Global thought – Green sustainability and regeneration, Local action – do what is locally appropriate and helpful.

We still have the time, resources and the freedom of a not yet broken climate in which to do this – but not for much longer. Co operation is the key. Greens will help any party ( that isn’t mad , illegal or bigoted – insert party names here ) as long as that is the shared goal. We can get there by any of multiple path, indeed just taking one path would lead to destruction as that would be the blind following of dogma, hatred, fear and – basically all the problems we have already. Greens don’t have all the answers – but we know who to ask ! It could be – and in part defiantly is you !

A Green vote does indeed take votes away from the others - that is very much the point. This forces the others to do what must be done. They won't do it as long as they think they can keep business as usual going for another term. Vote for what you want - not for what you fear less that what we have.

Happy new year.

Before we bomb again...

ISIS / ISAL whoever - have been portrayed as mindless thugs, more willing to die then talk or listen. A few of them may well be but this is true of a few members of any group. By singling out the atrocities of the actions taken in their name, we mask out any reasons they may have for letting their madmen act on their behalf. If we westernised, modernised politically capable societies simply bomb our adversaries, we destroy our moral right to stand in judgement. If we will not listen to what is said about us or look ourselves in the face then we condemn ourselves to live inside a bubble of blindness that obscures any realities which we could use to our advantage. We can't be better than them by acting worse.

The best form of defense is to understand why someone may wish to attack. I believe that the main reasons other societies may dislike the way the west is run are down to the tremendous waste of resources and despoliation of nature that has typified our economic growth for so long. I believe that we have now reached the point - standing on the shoulders of that waste and destruction - from which we can see a better way forward that will chime well with anyone who cares to look at it. Our new Green technologies should be enhanced, supported and given away free to anyone who asks. If we become the savior of the world then who would want to kill us ?

ISIS and the Greens

The modern world is currently facing the worst environmental problems ever seen in recorded history.  There is also an increasing divide between developed and ancient societies as seen in the rise of the so called Islamic State.
This first statement is to my mind a fact that is decreasingly avoidable. It bears closer inspection which may shed some light on the second issue.

Lets start at the very beginning. The environment of this planet has changed dramatically since it formed from a cloud of gas, dust and rocks at the start of the solar system. From a molten globe, the surface eventually cooled enough for water to collect and seas to form.  This water then froze from time to time encasing the entire planet in ice - grinding away the very rocks themselves. These forces are totally natural and predate the formation of Earth by 13 billion years or more. They have the greatest power ever to effect Humans - there is utterly no reason to think they have stopped now just because we have invented mobiles phones.

The term 'modern' used above to describe the world was deliberate, it was that part where technology developed to the point where human actions can add to and change the ageless underlying natural environmental mutations that gave rise to life in the first place. Other parts of the world did not do this. Other parts of the world lived and changed with the environment - adapting to rather than fighting against it. Not a great way to increase GDP, but it lets a human society stay stable for thousands of years.

'The wolf in the fold', 'The Grass is always greener' and 'Keeping up with the Jones's' can define the change from one way of living to the other. Taking these one at a time, in a stable society, it only takes one firm and continuous nudge to topple it unless it reacts against the force - one wolf in a sufficiently docile fold will grow fat and destroy the others (- then starve itself, that will be touched on again later). Secondly - presenting the lure of an easier way of life to a people living in a stable yet subsistence only society can create considerable disturbances in the otherwise quite sustainable culture. Finally, once the fold is all wolves ( living on external supplies ), not all wolves will be equal, some will have more than others and in this new go-getting paradigm, more has to be 'gone and got' to feed our growing need. Where does all this extra stuff come from ? Why, the part of the world not yet 'modern'.

After a while, even a peaceful society, when used as a source to fuel a growing external world, recognises the need to act to protect it's own way of life. They begin to lose any docility towards the outside world - if indeed there was any in the first place - and look for anti-wolf protection. But, in order not to destroy what they seek to preserve, they protect in their own way. Much as an invaded country's subdued population may resist the invaders. Think French Resistance, Dad's Army and Palestine.

That's finally killed off the metaphors. The point laboriously worked towards is as follows. Change is natural, we have to live with it. Our technology has now reached the stage where continued Jones's following does not have to be at the expense of any Smith or sheep - or anything - but, it is only one small part of that technology, the Green stuff, that does no harm as it increases GDP, all the rest of it causes stress and damage to anyone not supported by it.

How do we wolves in the 'modern' world protect ourselves from older society's freedom fighters and activists ? Leave them alone. Run our way of life without the need for external input - go green as soon as possible, or we may kill ourselves off before the wrath of newly empowered older societies do it for us. We have no right to continually despoil the parts of the world we don't either live in or want to visit on holiday - and now our technology allows us to live - as we do today - without destroying the ability of others to live their own lives. It makes people angry. Surely we have grown beyond that. Making ourselves be as 'green' as possible is our own best protection and the way to our only sustainable future.

Found in the archives from 2006 - and still true now.

I joined the Young Conservatives because the name Conservative appealed to my ideals of conservation. It did not take me long to realise the word in the party name had nothing to do with the word in the environmental sense - so I left - and grew up.
It took me many more years before I put together the pieces of the world I saw in to a coherent whole - and longer yet to find that I was not the first person to do it - the Greens had been there long before me.

And so it is today. People join or support a political party until they see the party go against the views which drew them to it. At that point they have a choice, either to think again or to give up and just follow the flow. It is our human duty to think again - it is democracy - but it is our human nature to follow the flow that gives us an easy ride - at least as long as we keep our eyes closed.

In 1993 I stood as a Green for the parliamentary constituency of Rushcliffe. Had I not stood there would have been no party for me to vote for. I gave voters their democratic right to vote for a party of their choice by giving them a choice. There was no doubt who would win, but I hope I made the other candidates start to think.

Today, Ken Clarke is happy to say that he believes human action is at least in part the cause of admitted global warming. In 1993 he didn't. Had there not been a Green Party - had there not been a reason for a Green Party he would not have been forced to change his mind. I expect Ken would say he always thought it was true, but even if he did, he never did anything publicly about it - or we would not be in the mess we are in and can't easily get out of today.

After the election I took part in an audience television debate on the BBC, I think the topic was - 'Have you been betrayed by the Conservatives'. At the end of a heated afternoon I put my question " How can the Green Party get its policies heard, how can we be treated as a real party when the BBC ignores us. How long will it take?" John Sergent, the then leading political journalist for the BBC answered. He said it took the young Labour Party 60 years. I did not have the chance to reply that we don't have 60 years left because he had taken up the rest of the program answering me. He had taken the question very seriously.

Today, other parties have decided to state in public that they support Green concerns. In private however they have always known we were right. It has taken them this long to say anything publicly because they have been able to continue with the status quo - which supports them very well - until this point. By hiding the facts from the public the grey parties, industry, big business, the status quo have kept on doing business as usual up to the point where the realities which we warned them about decades ago stopped business being usual - forcing them to change. Only now do they admit in public what they must have always known in private.

These people are not stupid, Greens don't have the only clear vision of reality. Green though put our joint vested interests in the world environment before vested interests in businesses as usual. That's the difference.

That was the pithy point at which to stop this blog, but I have to continue. It is important to make it clear that Greens do not think that 'doing Business' is the problem, nor are the people who do it. For example, I love technology and live by and with it. Business and every day life does not have to change very much to have a very great change on the way it impacts the natural and man made environment. We can, must and shall do what the Greens have always said - because there is no choice.

Had the world listened when the problem was first noticed, then there would have been time and space for a gentle alteration of our habits over the last 40 or so years. During that time Greens have worked out what to do. The other parties have either just started thinking about the problem or are about to unleash massive packages of change which will astonish everyone and probably do more harm than good. We though have a simple set of steps, but all must be taken together, now, by all of us together, for all of us together. There is no time left for blame or recriminations, nor very much point - as long as we really do act now.

How to raise a phoenix from the ashes of riotous London.

The main problem is - there is not enough 'Stuff' to go round - at least there isn't enough while we who have it waste so very much. There is plenty for all if we design and create an environmentally sustainable economy not based on growth and consumption.

The solution?

Jo Average is the problem - but, Jo Average didn't do it consciously. We need to keep almost everything the same as it is - on the surface - but change the way things work at a deeper level. We accidentally destroy our world's resources by shopping, eating and day to day living. A government's job is to enable industry and societies systems to change the 'back end' of the economy so that far fewer and far less of the world's resources are consumed and far more - to all of them - can be and will be re-used easily. That is what ' Sustainable' should mean.

Once we are living within our means it will be easy for everyone to have 'enough'. Advertisers should stop trying to make us want more though - another big requirement. We can still have change and improvements, sustainability is not stagnation.

This ideal may read as being a Utopian dream, but, it is as achievable as has been the terrible mess we are in already. The same - existing- system can be used to fix rather than worsen the situation. Already in Industry, or under development in universities and groups all around the planet, we have all the technologies needed to sort things out in the way I describe.

Society will follow the good in the same way it is now following the bad. By Society, I mean the youths who are not part of the massive existing majority sensible society - the one that is accidentally causing the problems.

Environmentalists are not golden age - back to nature cave lovers, and by the way - we don't have all the answers - but we know people who do - everyone else. A Green government's job is to point everyone in the right direction. How we get there the Government doesn't need to and can't understand. It's job is to direct and ensure no more damage is done on the way.

We must not criminalise the rioters, yes, the acts are criminal but that is not the point. We should see beyond that simple comfortable - them and us - hiding place. They are us, our children or our students, certainly or future whether we like it or not. To stamp down hard now would be like imposing punitive restrictions on Germany after the first world war. It would create another war in the future.

Most of the rioters are just bored and 'up for' some excitement and fun. Opportunistic is the right term here. This is not a revolution, but it does have a cause. The rioter have no thought of other people, they are mindless with nothing to think let alone say. We must teach them to think and be people together - and then listen and act when they speak. But, this violence tells us we have been doing things wrong and we have no option left but to change. In fact, this is not a choice at all any more.

The next Elephant issue to address after education is - Jobs. What are Jobs for? Until now it has been the only way you could keep yourself alive, a route to and a hope for the future improvement of your lot. Today though things have changed and the future can be different. Technology has advanced so much - thanks to the way we have been doing things - that now we have a chance to do things differently. On the back of a wasteful economy we can and now must build a new economy that does not despoil as it 'grows'.

'Growth' without boundaries kills - in the body of a human this is called Cancer. Sustainable economies do not need to grow to live, they may expand or contract but at their will rather than because of any Malthusian effects. Sadly it will soon be evident that most of the 'Jobs' we do today are very much part of the problem, yet we think that jobs are the solution. More jobs are not the answer. More of the same will add fuel to the ecological fire, we need some of something different.

Life not Jobs.

If resources were not lost during the course of daily life but instead, if they were recovered and renewed - which modern technology and age old common sense has long allowed - then it would be clear that most jobs need not and indeed should not be done.

What do we do then? No jobs and time on our hands? That is the very problem as we and more importantly the rioters see it now. What must we do? We must address both issues in a different way.

World governments will soon admit what they must have known deep inside for years - that there is no alternative but to provide a Basic Income for everyone - sufficient to give homes, health and comfort to all - simply based on the fact of a person's existence. Yes, it can be afforded, it can't not be afforded.

Secondly - the real issue can be asked, then possibly addressed. What do people do when they don't have work to fill their time?
Historically the answer has been - join the Armed Forces (and start a war to take people's minds off things), join the Clergy or - in modern times - stay in education for life. Education is essential, but for Life, not for employment. We need better answers today.

May be we can continue to be consumers after all - but this time - of the Arts. The world can be our oyster and it can turn this grit in to pearls.