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An
Open Letter to Barack Obama
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
September 16, 2009
Dear
President Obama,
Congratulations
of your historic victory at the polls last November! The presidency seems to be a rather thankless
job, but you have handled it so far with dignity. You have inspired great hope in billions of
people worldwide, a hope that you will succeed in changing our great nation and
the world in fair-minded, positive, progressive and peace-engendering ways. Good luck!!!
The purpose of this letter is to introduce the
online Earth Manifesto, and to make
you aware of its primary message that humanity must responsibly choose to leave
a fairer legacy to future generations. We
are already pursuing courses of action that will leave our children and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren a legacy of depleted resources and damaged ecosystems. To compound this inequity by leaving our
descendents a burden of enormous debt obligations is astonishingly
irresponsible.
I have specific proposals that would be revolutionarily
effective in solving the crucial ecological problems we face. These plans would simultaneously address the
looming national security threats that are posed by two other overarching
problems that confront us: the folly and
intergenerational unfairness of relying of rapid increases in our national
debt, and the current dangerous extremes of social inequities and healthcare
and environmental injustices in our societies.
These proposals are contained in an Earth Manifesto document that is
attached to this communiqué, Three Bills
of Right: A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good. Please read this! It can also be viewed in Part Four of the
Earth Manifesto at www.EarthManifesto.com.
Ecological insights similar to those of the Earth
Manifesto were revealed in the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and also
in the provocative film Home which
was produced by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the renowned French aerial photographer
and ecologist. The film has visually
stunning images and evocative music and a compelling narration by the great actress
Glenn Close.
The film Home
begins with these words:
“Listen
to me, please. You’re like me, a Homo sapiens, a wise human. Life, a miracle in the Universe, appeared
around 4 billion years ago and we humans only 200,000 years ago. Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the
balance that is so essential to life.
Listen carefully to this extraordinary story -- which is yours -- and
decide what you want to do with it.”
One segment in this film shows the view as a camera
sweeps in across the Pacific Ocean past the monumental stone statues on Easter
Island in the South Pacific. Easter Island,
or Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated inhabited lands in the world, and its
story is one with an urgent and
sobering message for our time. The enormous
iconic carved stone faces were sculpted from the island’s volcanic rock by the native
people. These giant and mysterious
sculptures loom large in our modern imaginations with a powerful message of
singular importance to us today.
To fully comprehend this cautionary
tale, one must know the human history of Rapa Nui. The original inhabitants of the island had arrived by
canoe from other Polynesian islands somewhere between 1,600 and 1,200 years
ago. Over the course of the next millennium
they created a complex civilization of cultivated crops and an artistic culture
and rule by chiefdoms. The Rapanui
people were so isolated from other islands that they chose to channel their
energies into monumental efforts to create giant platforms near the sea and to
carve and transport and erect gigantic stone statues on these platforms. Whereas other Polynesian islanders had
devoted their energies and resources to inter-island exploration and trading
and raiding and colonization and emigration, the isolation of the Easter
Islanders eliminated such competing outlets for their ambitions. The gigantic volcanic stone statues are the
apparent result.
The
island had been covered with a large variety of native trees when the first people
arrived, including a species of palm trees that exceeded in size any other ever
known in the world. The island also
teemed with many kinds of land birds and sea-going birds. The indigenous forests were used for many
purposes, including as fuel for cooking and warmth and in the construction of
houses and fishing canoes and funeral pyres to cremate the remains of the
dead. The enormous palm trees were
likely the best to be used to construct the tracks on which hundreds of
imposing stone statues, some weighing as much as 80 tons, were hauled from the
volcanic quarries of the Rano Raraku crater, where they were carved, to
positions as far as 10 miles away around the perimeter of the island.
By
the 1600’s, the human population had grown to more than 10,000 people, and the
pressure of all these people on the available resources finally caused the
total decimation of the native forests.
The civilization of the Rapanui was completely dependent on these trees,
so as people devastated them, their society began to fall apart. The harvesting of the forest severely damaged the island’s ecosystems, and
soil erosion led to crop failures and famine and intense conflicts and sickness
and death. By the mid-19th
century, the population had crashed from more than 10,000 people to less than
120.
The parallels of our human trajectory today, on a
global scale, are daunting. We should
adopt visionary precautionary principles, and stop going down a similar path to
the one that had such catastrophic consequences for the Rapanui. Professor Jared Diamond emphasizes this point in his insightful
book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed. He indicates that the inability to think sensibly and plan
ahead wisely, and to be flexibly adaptable, is a form of ecological insanity
that is likely to have calamitous consequences for us and the marvelous biotic
diversity of our home planet. Chapter 2
of Diamond’s book is an insightful perspective of the ecological calamity of
Easter Island.
You,
Mr. President, and every American should also be fully aware of the critically
important understandings of the 2005 Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment. The findings of this report were compiled by more
than 1,000 experts in 95 countries over a period of four years, from 2001 to
2005. This makes this ecological
Assessment one of the most extensively researched undertakings in the history
of the human race. This report, together
with many farsighted remedial recommendations, is available online.
The report essentially concluded that human beings
are unsustainably consuming natural resources, and that we are significantly
degrading the ecosystems upon which we depend. Such courses of action are
colossally foolish and unsustainably unwise, just like those activities of the Rapanui
which led to such severely calamitous consequences.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warns that we
need to restructure our economic activities, and to adopt common sense
strategies and powerful incentives that will help protect the vitality of the ecosystem
services upon which we rely. To ensure
that future generations have good prospects for a fair quality of life, we must
adopt these bold and straight-forward ways of achieving wholesome and
sustainable modes of living.
The findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
profoundly concern each and every person on Earth. A March 2005 headline
of a national newspaper stated, “Humans’ basic needs destroying planet
rapidly”. This news oddly barely made a
splash, appearing on page 16 instead of the front page. Not long after the findings were published
they curiously disappeared from the radar of public attention like a skipping
stone sinking in the riffles of a great river.
Scientific tomes have a way of being less than
scintillating, so perhaps it is not surprising that they receive less attention
than imaginative but insubstantial things like a Harry Potter adventure novel
or a Stieg Larsson thriller. Evocative
imagery, on the other hand, is capable of influencing us at a more profound
level than the written word, so film is a medium that is uniquely able of
communicating to our awareness in ways that are more visceral and effective
than scientific studies. This is why I
highly recommend that people watch the film Home. It
can be viewed on the Internet at YouTube.com/homeproject. Toggle to minute 53:40 for the specific
footage of Easter Island and the accompanying observations about it.
Just
after the Home segment about Easter
Island, narrator Glenn Close makes the following observation: “Since 1950, the world’s population has
almost tripled, and since 1950 we have more fundamentally altered our island,
the Earth, than in all of our 200,000 year history.” Crucial understandings like this are also
explored in Chapter #7 of the Earth Manifesto’s Comprehensive Global Perspective – An Illuminating Worldview. Recognition is given therein to the foolish
risks that humanity is taking by our indulgent involvement in a ‘rash and
uncontrolled experiment’.
This
rash experiment involves: (1) stimulated
consumerism, (2) the profligate use of resources, (3) uncontrolled population
growth, (4) rapid industrialization, (5) dramatic urbanization, (6) large-scale
monoculture agriculture, (7) economic globalization, (8) a far-reaching
modification of habitats and ecosystems, (9) the generation of pollutants,
toxins and wastes, (10) the alteration of the gaseous composition of the
atmosphere, (11) divisive and hyper-partisan and short-term oriented politics, (12)
inegalitarian social policies, (13) aggressive militarism, (14) irresponsible
deficit-spending and debt financing, (15) financial deregulation, and (16) inadequately
supervised asset speculation. Almost
every other species of life on earth is harmed by the aggregate impacts of
these courses of action.
The
stakes are enormous. No one knows
exactly what the outcome and consequences of these risky gambles will be, but
surely we risk not only the quality of life of every child, and of all future
generations, but ultimately the very survival of our species. We are contributing to irreversible climate
change, widespread habitat damage, unbalanced societal instability, escalating
conflicts and ominous species extinctions.
These are NOT good things. And
yet we collectively refuse to accept intuitions that tell us that new and courageous
ways of thinking and acting must be embraced to reduce these risks and mitigate
the damages done. We simply must change
the status quo in light of our best understandings. We cannot continue to ignore the signs of
resource depletion like the Rapanui did.
Albert
Einstein was surely correct when he observed, “We can't solve problems by using
the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” I call on you, Mr. President, to better
manage the economic and social and environmental challenges that we face. It is
extremely foolish for us to procrastinate, because the gathering crises will
get worse as we reach the condition known as Peak Oil, and as liabilities mount,
and as continuing population increases occur.
These crises will likely be characterized by national security threats such
as energy cost inflation, severe scarcities of resources, disruptions in
economic activities, unsupportable debt, exacerbated environmental injustices, and
possible ‘abrupt climate change’ or other forms of ecological collapse.
Economic recessions, financial crises and high
unemployment pose grave risks, but they also create exceptional opportunities
for politicians, entrepreneurs, investors and even the general public. Your Administration, President Obama, has
made epic efforts to deal with the deepest recession in decades. You have done this by bailing out Wall
Street, and by introducing hyper-stimulative government spending into the
economy. This stimulus has taken
Keynesian economic philosophy to an unprecedented extreme, leading to deep concerns
about the enormous size of federal deficit spending every year since Bill
Clinton was in office, and about the rapidly growing trillions of dollars of national
debt.
This debt represents a serious gamble that could result
in higher interest rates, inflation that skyrockets, a plunging value of the
dollar, and another financial meltdown that would make the current recession
and economic instability look like a picnic in the park. We must find a way to finance our societies
without borrowing so heavily from people in the future! The Earth Manifesto proposals in Three Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of
Responsible Actions for the Greater Good would dramatically help solve this
challenge.
As you are well aware, Mr. President, our democracy is
inflexible and not adequately adaptive because it is far too deeply influenced
by vested interests and wealthy people and shortsighted Federal Reserve-stoked ‘bubble
economics’ expediencies. As a result, protections
of the U.S. banking system like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act were repealed,
and anti-regulatory legislation like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act
of 2000 was passed. These gambits made
it easier for bankers and speculators to game the economic system. The resulting lack of government supervision
and inadequate regulation and widespread speculation led to dangerous levels of
risk-taking and debt leveraging and ‘irrational exuberance’ in the stock
market. When this game became too hot, a
severe correction in equities occurred in the bear market from 2000 to 2002. This volatility created fears of systemic
risk, so the Federal Reserve then cut interest rates to historic lows to pump
up a new economic bubble -- the real estate market -- to get growth going again. The Great American Bubble Machine inflated
once again.
Inevitably, this housing appreciation bubble became
overvalued and also burst, sending home prices and ‘securitized mortgage
instruments’ plummeting in value. Severe
damage to economies worldwide resulted, and extensive hardships were wreaked on
people around the globe. The tonics and
tactics of your Administration have been laudable from a short-term
perspective, but in the big picture we must not lose sight of the overarching
challenges facing civilization. The
unrestrained increase in federal debt will be the next risky bubble that could
collapse.
Some
say that the current economic emergency was intentionally engineered by bankers
and Wall Street insiders and politicians and the Federal Reserve through the
support of these narrow interests, using deregulation and inadequate
supervision and accountability of financial markets and Wall Street. Others say the circumstances that took place
were completely unforeseeable, and that GOSH, no one could have anticipated
that stoking the real estate bubble so that homes appreciated 20% a year for 5
years in a row would lead to the bursting of this bubble. People in the latter camp ignore the
implications of the trillions of dollars in ‘credit default swaps’ that were
created to insure against the probability that the bubble would in fact inevitably
burst. This is especially hard to
ignore, because the American taxpayer is paying hundreds of billions of dollars
to those involved in engineering the bubble and its collapse, in the form of
bailouts to the insurer AIG and to
banks and businesses that were hurt by the giant profiteering scheme.
Whether
intentionally engineered or inadvertently mismanaged, this episode is criminally
wrong-headed. All public policy
decision-making must begin to take into account the probable impacts that
actions will have on the proverbial ‘Seventh Generation’ to come, and not just
the short-term benefits that will be gained by narrowly-focused interests that
are obsessed with making profits over all other values. Our decision-making horizon must be broader even
than the four or eight years of a Presidential tenure.
This sounds naïve, due to the political realities of
our lobbyist-dominated politics and the powerful influence of narrow interests that
are vested in the status quo. Our system
of democratic capitalism is supposedly governed by free markets and free
elections, but it is extremely vulnerable to organized greed, which easily
triumphs over less organized democracy.
Allowing our system of legalized institutional bribery to continue
without courageous and effective efforts to honestly reform it is foolish and
shortsighted.
Our government is extremely weak-willed when it
comes to making hard decisions like paying as we go, or eschewing the
convenient expediency of borrowing to spend, or changing our tax structure to
assess higher marginal rates on rich people and highly profitable businesses. Politicians seem to be unable to avoid wars, or
to extricate our nation from military occupations like those in which we have
been involved for so long in Afghanistan and Iraq. And political leaders have done little to reject
abuses of power by corporations and federal officials.
Our leaders are as yet unable to regulate our profit-oriented
health insurance system or reform the unjust healthcare care system itself,
with its high annual increases in premiums, and its reliance on emergency rooms
for tens of millions of uninsured people, and its perverse focus on drugs and
surgery rather than good health and prevention.
How could so much angry
opposition arise to try to prevent reform of a system that is as unjust and
bureaucratic and costly as the care-obstructing American health insurance
system?
The
forces of inertia that resist change in human societies are amazingly strong,
so adaptive change tends to come in jolts rather than intelligent and confident
strides. Large corporations are dead set against progressive and smart common-good changes
to the status quo. Giant agribusiness
and fast-food companies have manufactured demand for obesity-causing foods and
sodas and nutrition-poor corn products, but they evade the costs and
liabilities that result. Big Oil and Big
Auto have promoted fuel-inefficient vehicles and opposed pollution mitigation
and supported wars-for-oil and fought initiatives that would establish any form
of carbon-dioxide emissions taxes. They
have helped to prevent increases in gasoline taxes that would help finance the
necessary transition to renewable alternatives, and to deal with the adverse
impacts of climate change. Big
Businesses have created generous subsidies and tax loopholes and profit-making
schemes for themselves, through institutionalized bribery, and they are staunchly
unwilling to accept any meaningful changes to the status quo, even when the
changes to the system would simply require them to include externalized costs
in the price of their products rather than forcing them upon the government and
taxpayers and future generations.
Capitalism
flirts with financial collapse and ecological devastation specifically because
our economic system is set up to privatize profits while allowing costs and
risks and liabilities to be socialized.
Economic fundamentalists clamor for free markets, but they really just
want a free lunch. They want the system
to remain structured so that CEO’s and top management and shareholders and
insiders retain the privilege to irresponsibly make profits by freely
speculating to gain enormous upsides, but to limit their downside risks, and to
foist the costly outcomes of these risks upon the government and taxpayers.
These are some of the reasons we need ‘Clean Money
for Clean Elections’ or other truly serious reforms of our electoral system and
Congressional ethics. You intelligently
called for vigorous debate, Mr. President, in your recent town hall meeting in
New Hampshire, and you decried the scare tactics and misrepresentations that
have been propagated by opponents of reform like Sarah Palin with her ridiculous
allegations of “death panels”.
I am a gal in my fifties, and I have recently signed
an Advance Health Care Directive and Power of Attorney for Health Care. I want my end-of-life wishes known, and I do
not want anyone else making decisions for me, and especially not some
Schiavo-mad politicians who want to impose their beliefs on me. The provisions in the pending health care
reform plan that would help people establish similar directives are a good
plan, and a smart one, not some form of insidious government conspiracy to kill
off old people. The anger and fears and
misinformation and deep biases that are being expressed in town hall meetings
are a pathetic reflection on the state of our public discourse. Shame on Sarah Palin!
You were ‘right on’, Mr. President, when
you told Americans at an August New Hampshire town hall meeting: "Where we disagree, let’s disagree over
things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that don't bear any
resemblance to anything that's actually being proposed." You were talking about distortions and scare
tactics of social conservatives, and of people who angrily oppose changes in
the current system that allows giant drug companies to make such obscenely
large profit margins and health insurance companies to make profits at the
expense of the public by raising premiums while freely denying coverage and
claims.
It
seems bizarrely foolish for people to rationalize and defend the status quo in
such starkly problematic arenas, and to scorn the progressive ideas of those
who want to reduce the severe inequities of the current system. It is like a person swimming in the ocean yelling
praise to circling sharks while heaping invective on rescuers who approach in
lifeboats. But far worse than this, from
my own long-term perspective, are right-wing ideologues and those who they have
misled, who defend the status quo and criticize farsighted precautionary
principles like those advocated by ecologists.
The
crux of the problem arguably resides within each and every one of us. We manifest a collective tendency to consume
and waste and deplete and pollute. This
is indisputably unfair to future generations.
So this propensity should be mitigated by the creation of a fund to
offset the far-reaching adverse unintended consequences of these actions. The fact that we are adding the brutal insult
to injury of following a diametrically contrary course of action by borrowing
heavily from people in the future is selfishly irresponsible.
The
national debt when Ronald Reagan took office was $845 billion. During his 8 year tenure, this debt increased
78% to $2.35 trillion. George H.W. Bush
managed to increase this debt by 56% in four years. Bill Clinton increased it another 54% in 8
years. George W. Bush increased the
national debt about 75% during his profligate 8 year tenure, to more than $10
trillion. The latest estimate by the
Congressional Budget Office is for this debt to increase to $19 trillion in the
next 10 years. This trend is obscenely
irresponsible. We simply must not let
this happen. We must pursue more
fiscally responsible courses of action!
My
proposed Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2010 would prevent such a risky course of action. See the Three
Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good. A
copy is attached to this letter being sent to the President, and it can also be
viewed online by all others in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto.
In
order to shift our societies to fairer and more responsible ones, we should enact
a clearly-articulated Bill of Rights for Future Generations, as outlined by the
Cousteau Society. And we should add a
provision to this new Bill of Rights that advocates greater fiscal
responsibility by national governments.
This provision would recommend against the shortsighted expediency of
borrowing money from future generations, because deficit spending is almost as
directly a form of depletion of resources as the clear-cutting of rainforests,
the use of dynamite in ‘fishing’ around coral reefs, or the profligate burning
of oil for fuel-inefficient vehicles.
Think again of the lessons learned by the Rapanui on
Easter Island. The anthropological
purpose of their monumental volcanic stone statues appears to have been to
honor the spirits of their intrepid ancestors who had come by canoe from
distant Polynesian islands between the fourth and ninth centuries A.D. An internet site provides this cogent explanation: “Archaeological and iconographic analysis
indicates that the statue cult was based on an ideology of male, lineage-based
authority that incorporated anthropomorphic symbolism. The statues were thus symbols of authority
and power, both religious and political.”
Humankind clearly must adaptively embrace a new
worldview in which we respect those yet to be born in future generations,
and NOT just honor those who came before us.
We must commit our civilizations to protecting and restoring Mother
Earth and the vital ecosystems upon which we completely depend. And we would be wise to elevate feminine
nurturing principles and women’s status to a fairer balance in our
far-too-authoritarian and discriminatory patriarchal societies. Women in politics today tend to be better
champions than men for environmental protections and social justice. They are stronger advocates for families, and
they are more committed to promoting nonviolent conflict resolution. These are critical perspectives for us to
cultivate.
The Easter Island statues, or moai, were erected on long platforms known as ahu. These platforms were
constructed all around the perimeter of the island. In addition to being the sturdy foundations
for the gigantic statues, they were used as repositories of cremated remains of
thousands of people over the centuries. Curiously,
the moai all face inward, away from
the ocean and toward the houses of the elite, which are on the best land closest
to the coast. Houses of the commoners were
further island, in less desirable locations.
The moai have tall torsos and
chiseled faces with sharp chins and prominent noses and deep eye sockets. The tops of their heads are flat, and the
most elaborate statues are topped with cylinders of red volcanic stone that are
a kind of ostentatious headdress, or hat, that weighs up to 12 tons.
These statues were great feats of erection! The inward-looking megalomania of the Rapanui
rulers that led to these giant artistic erection projects seems to have been
fueled by a testosterone-infused preoccupation with competition and ‘one-upmanship’. How ironic that this unmindful exploitation
and depletion of resources seems not to have been foreseen as a risk that would
cause an ecological calamity which would devastate their civilization!
The characteristic that most separates human beings from all
other animals on Earth is the size of our brains and our correlated ability to
remember the past and imagine the future.
Fore-thought is our most important human ability. It is the quality that allowed us to hunt and
gather successfully for untold millennia, and it is the quality that offers us
the greatest hope of salvation. Blind
obedience to fading dogmas and faithful belief itself will not save us. Au
contraire! Wisdom and nimble
versatility in the face of inevitable change offers us the best hope for a kind
of salvation. Wisdom is synonymous with
good judgment. It is based on learning
from experience and combining knowledge of the past with intuition and insight
to predict future outcomes. Attaining
wisdom should be the highest goal of our collective ambitions.
As change accelerates in human affairs and our civilizations
become more complex and populous, we seem to be becoming more aware, and yet we
are still hubristically heedless of ecological limits and of the ill-advised
impacts we are having on the life support systems that sustain us. Our best hope of adapting to the rapidly
changing conditions on our home planet is that we choose to take a quantum leap
in our understandings, and begin to embrace worldviews that respect and protect
and restore the ecosystems services upon which we rely. One part of this human equation is the
inextricable need to make a quantum leap to greater fiscal responsibility and
fairer commitments to equitable societies.
Stephen Jay Gould is the prominent American evolutionary
biologist and historian of science who first proposed the theory of ‘punctuated
equilibrium’. In doing so, he came up
with an idea that modified the earlier conception of evolution as taking place
over the eons through continuous and gradual biological change. Critics jokingly referred to his theory as
“evolution by jerks”. Gould responded in
kind by describing gradualism as “evolution by creeps.” Ha!
From my point of view, religious fanatics that deny biological
evolution altogether, in order to cling to their antediluvian myths about God
creating us in ‘his’ own image to have dominion over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, are the ones who embrace the
most preposterous doctrine. Even in Genesis 28, which commands mankind to
‘Be fruitful, and multiply’, and to subdue the earth, a caution is adduced that
we should replenish the earth. The idea
of responsible stewardship of the earth thus has early roots.
Stephen Jay Gould’s idea that evolution has taken quantum
leaps in the past, like the 50% increase in brain size of our ancestors from 3
million years ago to 2 million years ago, is compelling. It makes one think of a far more rapid kind
of change that has taken place in human societies: social and cultural and political
change. Kinds of change like this can
take place very quickly, for better or for worse. Ecological circumstances on Earth today are
changing rapidly, and they are aggravated by our growing human numbers and the
increasingly significant impact of our aggregate activities on vital
ecosystems.
This is why the understandings of the Earth
Manifesto and the film Home and the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are so important. All of them warn that humanity must be
smarter and more courageous in the conduct of our rash experiment on our home
planet. Unlike the Ecosystem Assessment,
the film Home has a poetic beauty and
evocative imagery and a haunting soundtrack, so it affects viewers more deeply. “It is too late to be pessimistic,” the
narrator Glenn Close intones.
The film Home
was made of footage taken by Yann Arthus-Bertrand in more than 50 countries
around the globe. Yann Arthus-Bertrand previously
created the beautiful large-format book Earth
from Above, which contains scores of beautiful images and incisive
ecological observations. The film richly portrays dramatic and colorful
scenes from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from mountain tops to the deep
seas, and from dry deserts to watery wetlands, and from wilderness areas to the
blighted hearts of urban metropolises like that of Lagos, Nigeria.
Images are an effective medium for the transmission
of information for two reasons. They
provocatively inform our rational and analytical left-brain selves, and at the
same time they make a deep impression on the more intuitive and holistic
hemisphere of our emotional right brain.
Our society is arguably in critical need of a better balance between
these two spheres of understanding, each with its own distinct ways of seeing
and feeling and making sense of the world.
I believe that widespread attention to this film will help galvanize us
into creating this needed balance between what is essentially the
masculine-oriented and word-dominated left brain and the feminine-oriented and
image-influenced right brain.
Everyone
on Earth is essentially going along with the gambits that allow overly generous
opportunities for people today to fleece all people in the future by foisting
the bondage of debt and the costs of energy modernization, infrastructure investment,
resource depletion, pollution, global warming, climate change, environmental
justice initiatives, and war recovery costs upon our children and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren.
This
is an incomprehensibly irresponsible state of affairs, which curiously mimics
the jealous God of the Bible, who gave ‘Ten Commandments’ in Exodus 20 that promised to “visit the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation”
for all who were not obedient to ‘His’ words.
Today, we are the ones
visiting iniquities upon our children, and we are doing it to all generations to come. Are we being hateful, God? Or just myopic and selfish and stubborn and
unethical and sheepishly stupid!
All
Americans, and all people worldwide, must SOON begin to contribute to making
our aggregate activities more sustainable.
The smartest way to ensure this is to re-structure our economies and
social institutions so that people have compelling incentives to do the right
things, and effective disincentives to dissuade people from doing the wrong
things. Our current system in effect gives
people incentives to waste resources and rapidly deplete them, and to pollute
the commons. We must create a new system
that includes all the costs related to the production and delivery of products in
the sales prices of all products, plus a surcharge to cover the cost of
investments needed to replace depleted resources.
Every
iota of oil that we burn, for instance, should include an allowance to cover both
the costs of pollution and the costs of needed subsidies for the development of
alternative energy sources. Gasoline
should be taxed so that funds are generated to cover the costs of respiratory
diseases and lost employment caused by air pollution, plus a contribution to
cover the costs incurred by our military to ensure access to oil in the Middle
East, plus a contribution of funds that are required for the relief of natural
disasters that are getting worse due to global warming, such as more severe wildfires,
hurricanes, flooding and crop failures. We
should devise a method of ensuring that such taxes are non-regressive, so that
higher costs for things like gasoline would be partially offset for low-income
people.
I
am well aware that borrowing money by means of deficit spending is far more
popular than paying as we go, and that it is much easier to cheat future
generations than to live within our means.
But we are already foisting heavy costs on our descendents, and it is
our obligation to begin to live more fairly and responsibly and sustainably.
I
believe in positive progressive change.
I know it can happen. Where there
is a will, there is a way, as they say.
Our collective will must be one of overarching civic concern, of
constructive cooperation, of fair-mindedness, of collaborative long-term
thinking, and of intelligent planning.
It must NOT be one of wrong-headed priorities, misguided goals, uncompromising
ideologies, shortsighted expediencies, obtuse obstructionism, divisive
politics, hateful anger, or destructive extremism.
Healthy
societies are ones that foster constructive outlets for the energies of their
people. They support the arts, and
cultural activities, and community involvements and participatory sports. Misguided societies exhaust themselves on
shortsighted goals like the Rapanui one-upmanship, or exhaustive wars, or
imprisoning their peoples, or making futile efforts like the one undertaken by
the first Emperor of China to memorialize himself by conscripted 700,000
laborers over a 20-year period to build an enormous mausoleum for him in Xian
that was to be protected by thousands of terra cotta warriors. (As destiny and poetic irony would have it,
this project was laid waste soon after the Emperor died in 210 B.C., when the
aroused Chinese citizenry raided and destroyed the enormous monument and its
contents.)
Consider, for a moment, the perspective of Ambrose
Bierce, who gave us this definition:
Conservative,
n.
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished
from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them
with others.”
Ha! There is some truth here. I feel strongly that we need to correct the
‘existing evils’, but also that we should replace them with new plans that are
consistent with the greater good, and NOT with other plans that are
wrong-headed and shortsighted and heavy with debt financing. We need to gather together all points of
view, and representatives of all competing interests, and to formulate the best
compromise between the varying ideas and interests. We need honest and civil discourse that
recognizes the crucial importance of collaborative long-term thinking. And we need to properly prioritize the issues
and their funding, and boldly implement the best solutions.
The
best plans are those which are formulated only after clear understandings are
achieved of the nature of problems and their causes. In order to make the best public policy
decisions, we must:
(a) Utilize the broadest range of relevant facts
and information;
(b) Listen to all voices, and assess the
integrity of their viewpoints, and make the fairest and smartest compromise
between all of these competing interests;
and,
(c)
Strive for the greatest good and the long-term best interests of human
societies, not forgetting a voice representing the interests of those in future
generations.
In conclusion, it is as if a specter haunts humanity
today. This is not some shadowy vision
that forebodes a cataclysmic class struggle or a terminal crisis of the
capitalist system like the spectre Karl Marx envisioned in his Communist Manifesto; nor is it a vision of fear at the spread of
socialist or communist ideologies; no,
it is more accurately seen as a specter of extreme social irresponsibility and
intergenerational inequity and ecological calamity.
This specter is being manifested in five principal
ways:
(1) The establishment and the ruthless defense of
economic systems that enable 50% of all income and wealth around the globe to
be usurped by 2% of the people;
(2) The profligate exploitation and depletion of
natural resources without regard to the well-being and needs of our
descendents;
(3) A ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ gambit that allows
giant corporations to externalize costs and risks and liabilities and
obligations upon everyone now AND
in the future, doing so in order to primarily benefit the small percentage of
people who wield the most power and influence, and give them the lion’s share
of the resulting artificially increased profits;
(4) The insidious expediency of borrowing enormous
amounts of money and indulging in deficit spending and drastically increasing
the national debt in order to create jobs and stimulate consumption and
facilitate the concentration of wealth for the few; and,
(5) The damage to Earth’s habitats and ecosystems
being caused to accomplish these wrong-headed goals through rampant global
deforestation, the overfishing of the seas, urban sprawl, unmitigated
pollution, unsustainable agriculture, uncontrolled population growth, the
devastation of biotic nurseries like wetlands and coastal mangrove forests and
coral reefs, and the uncontrolled emissions of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere.
Future generations are
being given short shrift by the shortsighted policies that permit and encourage
such activities. Good solutions exist,
ones that could be implemented THIS YEAR, as articulated in Three Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of
Responsible Actions for the Greater Good, and as explored thoroughly in A Second Open Letter to President Obama - Provocative Proposals for Real
‘Change We Can Believe In’.
I can easily imagine that many people
may regard these proposals as radical, but let’s be honest, what could be more
radical than sticking with the status quo and defending the forces that are hell-bent
on exploiting and depleting and wasting resources? What could be more radical than financing
this unwise course of action by irresponsibly borrowing bigger and bigger
amounts of money from our heirs? What
could be more radical than allowing a tiny establishment of wealthy people to
gain more and more privileges while undermining fairness and exacerbating
inequities in human societies around the globe?
Throughout
his career and writings, the aforementioned Stephen Jay Gould spoke out against
cultural oppression in all of its forms, and especially against what he saw as
pseudoscience and ideologies that are used to perpetuate racism and sexism and
injustices.
The website EarthManifesto.com
contains one of the most extensive collections of good ideas and in-depth understandings
ever assembled. I would love it if you would
review them and consider implementing the most important ideas they contain. The general public is also encouraged to check
out these ideas. In particular, see Part
Four of the Earth Manifesto, which contains the Three Bills of Right, plus One
Dozen Big Ideas to Positively Transform Our Societies and the Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity.
Thanks for your consideration!
Truly,
Dr.
Tiffany B. Twain
Contact email address: SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com
Attachment to President
Obama’s copy (Part Four of Earth Manifesto):
Three Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of
Responsible Actions for the Greater Good.
Copy to:
All Americans, via the Earth Manifesto at www.EarthManifesto.com
Future Generations Petition, The Cousteau Society
930 West 21st Street, Norfolk VA
23517
Katharine Weymouth, Publisher of the Washington Post
1150 15th St.
NW, Washington D.C. 20071
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher of
the New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue., New
York 10018
Rachel Maddow c/o NBC
News, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10112
Jack Whitaker, Publisher of the Hannibal Courier-Post
200 N. 3rd St. Hannibal, MO
63401
Earth Justice, Because the Earth needs a good lawyer, and I may too!
426 17th Street, 6th
Floor; Oakland, CA 94612
The
Nation, c/o Submissions, 33 Irving Place, 8th Floor New York City 10003
Graydon Carter, Editor-In-Chief, Vanity
Fair
4 Times Square, 7th
Floor NYC 10036
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