Is the world over populated ? Should we have kids ?

It is an often ignored fact that everything has its limits. The maximum size of the human population for this planet is just one of these, but, what the population does has a far more immediate impact on ecology than the number of people doing it.

As I see it, almost none of the population has any real idea of the environmental impact caused by simply living their daily lives. People seldom look at their footprints and nearly always disregard what they have trodden on. So, if some enlightened government made that disregarded impact far less damaging, then people could go on living very much the way they are and the ecology of the planet could recover.

The only global consensus that would be required is for a common understanding that there are problems with limits - and that taking someone else's resources is not acceptable. The need for trade itself will be greatly reduced by the massively reduced need for resources enabled by being Green. The ending of planned obsolescence, the introduction of a repair and rebuild culture and a general lowering of demand for new things being replaced by a demand for new or better experiences are just some of the innumerable methods that shall have to be used globally and locally, as appropriate to local conditions.

Global trade is important for the quality of life, far less important is the quantity of stuff in that life. Trade should bring novelty not 'coals to Newcastle'. The quantity of exports and GDP etc has nothing to do with real lives other than via money. We can cut out all of that and the associated trade sanctions by making the reasons for them irrelevant. For example, using renewable power would kill off the oil barons / countries / industries - not the people who work for them as by then there would be enough stuff properly distributed to go round.

It is not the job of all Green Party members to have all the answers. The odd person may have a partial answer, and when enabled by a Green government they may find the rest of an answer from someone else - no mater who that person votes for. A Green government should not claim to have all the answers either - but should empower people to find answers by asking the right questions - ensuring the search is going in the right direction.

Slowly, as people begin to feel safe, and as the level of education - for blue sky thinking or just personal interest and personal growth increases, the birth rate falls. This is an established interaction seen all over the world, there is no reason to think it will fail now. Thus, population first levels off - then falls.

There are problems with this picture - firstly that it all takes too long and resource wars break out before people learn how to sew or run their 3d printers. Solution - go in to space - mine stuff up there - have your wars up their if you really must. Climb to the Moon and Mars rather than invade some other part of the Earth.

Secondly, the powers that be want to keep being in power and so continue to stop a green surge pushing them out. The solution there is already happening. The powers that be are powers partly because they are lead by intelligent ( hidden ) thinkers who are totally aware of the planets limit. They have been working and planning for almost as long as Greens for what to do in the future. They have been waiting until the last moment to do it so as to get the maximum value from their infrastructures - but now they know that time has run out and they are changing. Possibly they judge that right time to go Green by public reaction, whatever the reason - it is happening. Cars are being built that run on renewable energy, Oil companies are greening their images, China is advancing solar cell technology, US residents are making algae grown in their back yards power their homes.  It's all happening folks !

None of the above is either utopian or outside our current technological ability. It's all a matter of the social will - and this week's massive membership rise further supports me in thinking that having my kids was a great idea - they are both Green Party members.

A Green Utopia ?

Yes, there is a real danger of over emphasising the brilliance of a Green future - but it really has a chance - if - simply put - we redesign the entire system.

Doing so will result in most people doing nothing particularly differently, but the effects on the environment would be utterly different.

Waste would be reduced to the point where demand for raw materials would fall and with it pollution and the demand for power. Money, which properly used would equate with resources, would be properly distributed and accessible for those who best need it.

Best of all from my point of view, is the arrival of the long promised 'leisure shock'. We shall all have to ask ourselves what we actually want from life - because we shall all have to time to attempt to achieve something rather than always working just to live.  The Basic Income would keep everyone alive and well, and the odd bit of actually paid would would do nicely for pin money.

OK, that could take some time to make work smoothly, but is it a Utopia ? No, it will have many problems, but nothing like as many as not doing anything, or worse, voting for business as usual - from any of the other parties.

The alternatives to attempting something other via the Green route are many, and all of them are bad. For a short example :-

We can expect continued and increased international friction between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' - the 'West' being the 'have-nots' and the 'East' being the 'haves' - from whom we continually take having now almost totally used up what we had.

The 'haves' in our own society, the 1% who have a disproportionate percentage of everything, will continue to take more and more from the 'have-not' 99% who actually attempt to make stuff - and I'm 99% certain they won't take it quietly.

Even if we can keep our own civilisation together socially, there is simply ( note the word ) not enough stuff left for any sort of 'business as usual' to be physically or mathematically  possible - and - what's more - industry knows this. Industrialists are not stupid - they can count perfectly well so they have known the natural limits for decades - probably tipped off because they heard what we were telling them. They invented the austerity crisis to maintain their income as stuff for the rest of us ran out, and it is working for them at least - but, it, like everything else that is unsustainable - can't last.

Note, as a Green, I have hardly mentioned the environment, but, I will now. 2014 has just been marked down as the hottest in recorded human history. Sea level rise, the tip-over point of carbon release from permafrost and deep sea ice to name but a few could do damage that our very civilisation may not be able to outlive. So, even the rich would not have a pleasant time of it no matter how many robots may do the jobs the 99% used to have.

Not a pretty sight now is it? Doing anything other than falling deeper in to these traps does indeed look like a Utopian dream - but only if you are already living in hell.

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.