Intelligent Precautionary Principles Enunciated – Holy Cow!

                                                      An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                     October 24, 2011

CONTENTS:

I.            Introduction

II.         Ecological Precautionary Principles

III.      Fiscal Precautionary Principles

IV.         Social Precautionary Principles

V.            Financial Precautionary Principles

VI.         Military Precautionary Principles

VII.      Political Precautionary Principles

I.  Introduction

We human beings are evolutionarily adapted to be social animals.  This is our human nature.  The survival of thousands of generations of our hunter and gatherer ancestors depended on close cooperation between males and females, and between individuals and other members of their clan groups.  Our ancestors depended on cooperation and group cohesion much more significantly than on individual selfishness or ruthlessness of competition. 

Natural selection honed human beings to be disposed to share food and shelter as well as child-rearing duties with other members of the groups in which they lived.  Social misfits, freeloaders, pugnacious non-conformists, or those unwilling to abide by communal rules for rubbish disposal, cave hygiene, or the greater security of their group were likely ostracized or banished.  Such clan discord diminished the prospects of being successful for both misfits and their groups in passing their genes on to future generations.

With the advent of the Agricultural Revolution, the size of in-groups expanded and they became more focused on extended families and their agrarian communities.  In essence, as the influence of living in larger communities increased, our groups became more “domesticated” and civilized.  Golden Rule behaviors came to be more important and adaptive.

In modern times, sink-or-swim social Darwinism became fashionable amongst the Few who gained most of the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution.  But the main current of our social success as a species resides in reining in our greedy and violent impulses in order to ensure that the groups to which we belong survive and prosper. 

Today, another revolution is underway, and those who survive will likely be those who are smart enough and committed enough to the societies in which they live to embrace the greater good.  Our social groups have grown in size to encompass cities and nations and the entire human race, so our collective survival will depend on cooperative problem-solving and a greater commitment to a revolutionary transformation in our modes of living to make them indefinitely sustainable.

The realization is growing that we are all intricately interconnected and interdependent.  Greed, selfishness, and an anti-social unwillingness to contribute to the greater good will prove to be evolutionary dead ends.  The foresight which is essential to farsighted precautionary principles will be vital for the long-term survival of our species.  I encourage readers to consider the ideas found in Revelations of a Modern Prophet for a more expansive insight into such ideas.

We arguably must make greater collective commitments in the future to embracing civilizing processes that are marked by increases in self-control, better long-term planning, and a more honest sensitivity to the feelings and fates of others.  Win/lose ethics of ruthless competition, exploitation, and obedience to authority must arguably give way to win/win ethics of reciprocity, recognition of consequences, and better outcomes.  Since “we are all in this together”, win/win solutions also include equitable lose/lose potentials if cooperative efforts fail.  Win/win and lose/lose situations are more advantageous than win/lose ones because they provide a fairer motive to strive together rather than against each other.  Win/lose strategies tend to poison relations between people rather than improve them.  Life may be a “non-zero-sum game” in which cooperative initiatives like precautionary planning, divisions of labor, fair trade, or the sharing of technological advances are better for all.

Intelligence is the most adaptive of all human characteristics.  This includes social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and ecological intelligence.  Clear critical thinking and reason and broad scientific understandings are important to our flourishing.  This perspective is a form of rational humanism.  It recognizes an implicit social contract in which we agree to sensible limitations on our individual liberties in order to help ensure mutual security.  This is an aspect of community ethics that does not rely on religious authority or doctrinal revelation or God-defined morality or any other supposed certainties which are impervious to argument. 

Rational humanism is a philosophical perspective that allows us to be more open-minded to learning about the natural world and our true place within it.  It is philosophy that provides us with a natural basis for morality and for making effective efforts to improve the living conditions and prospects of our kind.

“Courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness, one of which is a lack, the

    other an excess of courage.”

                                       --- The Greek historian Plutarch, in the first century B.C.

The very future of hope lies in broad-mindedness, intelligent foresight, reasonable risk-taking, and wise planning.  We need honesty and clarity of understanding.  We must strive for mutual security, true justice, a modicum more social equality, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  Our societies must become more fiscally responsible, and our collective activities must become more sustainable.  We need the courage to embrace smarter social policies which are more empathetic to others, including our descendents.  Ecological sanity necessarily includes a commitment to caring about future generations.

This is not mere moralizing.  Socially and ecologically intelligent precautionary principles are crucial to our collective survival and prospering.  A Bill of Rights for Future Generations should be adopted because it provides overarching guidance toward aggregate actions that are most likely to be sustainable.  It is not just a value judgment to say that we should clearly understand and honor the underlying principles of sustainable existence. 

Our growing appreciation of the extent to which we are interconnected with other human beings, and with the wider web of life on Earth, is creating a more ecological sense of self.  This is a “greener” sense of self that must be embraced for its adaptive value.  This wider construct of self-identity and self-interest is one that is smart, not just noble or altruistic or virtuous. 

A wider and deeper notion of our “selves” naturally includes concerns for the greater good and common interests in protecting natural ecosystems.  The integration of such awareness into our worldviews actually serves to protect the selves of each and every one of us.

“The crisis that threatens our planet, whether seen from its military, ecological, or social aspect, derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self.  It derives from a mistake about our place in the order of things.  It is a delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries, that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume, and that it is so aloof that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings.”

                                                                                 --- Joanna Macy, The Greening of the Self

Concrete Examples of the Need for Precautionary Principles

A political cartoon in the Washington Post in March 2011 showed heavy smoke billowing from a nuclear power plant in Japan, and oil spilling from a BP oil rig, and the housing market symbolically melting down in flames, and the climate being polluted with particulate emissions spewing from industrial smokestacks.  A building representing the economy lies in ruins, and a billboard above Wall Street reads: “For bigger profits, take bigger risks.”  One guy on Wall Street is looking up at the sign and saying to another behind a desk, “MAYBE IT’S TIME WE TOOK THAT DOWN.”

The time has come today to more sensibly restrict the amount of risk-leveraging that bankers and speculators are allowed to take.  Risk takers must be required to bear the costs of risks gone wrong instead of having the government bail them out with taxpayer money or borrowings from future generations.   

Radical risk-taking is an epic and socially unacceptable form of shortsighted folly.  Professor Robert Reich wrote wise and germane commentary in a Sunday newspaper article titled, “Safety on the Cheap Invites Disaster”:

“No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that’s 100 percent safe under all circumstances.  The costs would be prohibitive.  It’s unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

Inevitably, there’s a trade-off.  Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem:  Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.  This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

And it’s why recent proposals in Congress to cut the budgets of agencies charged with protecting public safety are so wrong-headed.  One such proposal would reduce funding for the tsunami warning system.  Another would ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating air pollution, including cancer-causing contaminants.

It’s also why regulators have to be independent of the industries they regulate. …

Finally, the tendency of corporations to understate the probabilities of public harms requires that limits be placed on corporate political power.  The public cannot be adequately protected as long as big corporations -- GE, BP, Halliburton, Massey and all others -- are allowed to bribe legislators with campaign donations and boondoggles.”

Significant conflicts of interest exist between private activities and the greater public good, now and in the long run.  This makes it imperative that we collectively commit to reasonable precautionary principles.  Due to the unfair influence of Big Money in our political system, we have, as a nation, chosen to allow the “polluter pays principle” to be subverted and circumvented.  Those responsible for pollution and waste are consequently able to externalize costs onto governments, and thus onto taxpayers and society at large.  This is a violation of Principle 16 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development which concerns the real costs related to pollution.  We must restructure the rules in our country to reinstitute polluter pays principles!

II.  Ecological Precautionary Principles

    "In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.”

                                                                                           --- Aristotle

The need for embracing ecological precautionary principles is the most important idea in the Earth Manifesto.  Such principles are inextricably influenced by social, fiscal, financial and political activities, so precautionary principles in these arenas are also important.

An ecological precautionary principle was enunciated in Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.  This principle states:  “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities.  Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

This is a reasonable “no regrets” approach to environmental policy-making.  It sensibly takes into account the likely impacts of our resource-depleting and habitat-damaging activities on people in future generations.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!  This approach helps us to focus on actions that should be undertaken which are consistent with values of sensibly protecting ecosystems and reasonably-sharing prosperity and other greater good goals. 

“Humanity has never before had to grapple with a problem that measures itself in centuries,

 and threatens our very existence, and requires global cooperation to overcome.”

                                                                                                                --- David Roberts

Edward O. Wilson, writing about Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs’ valuable book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, notes:  “The world has changed radically in the past several decades;  it is going to change more, faster and faster.  In spite of all we have accomplished through science and technology - indeed because of it - we will soon run out of margin.  Now is the time to grasp exactly what is happening.  The evidence is compelling: we need to redesign our social and economic policies before we wreck the planet.” 

E.O. Wilson goes on to say that we have a narrow window of opportunity today to choose sustainable avenues into the future.  If we fail to grasp this, and continue to create intense conflicts, catastrophes, and crises, we will cause devastating damages to the cornucopia of resources that sustains us. 

Wilson compellingly continues:  “Almost all of the crises that afflict the world economy are ultimately environmental in origin:  climatic change, pollution, water shortage, defaunation, decline of arable soil, depletion of marine fisheries, tightening of petroleum sources, persistent pockets of severe poverty, the threat of pandemics, and a dangerous disparity of resource appropriation within and between nations.  Unfortunately, while each of these problems is understood to some degree by decision makers, they typically continue to be addressed as separate issues.  Yet the world has little chance to solve any one until we understand how all of them connect by cause and effect.  We will be wise to look upon ourselves as a species and devise more realistic and pragmatic approaches to all the problems we face as a whole. … We all operate by a worldview distorted by the residues of hereditary human nature.  We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and godlike technology.”  

“We ought to develop a new kind of self-understanding, self-reflection, and self-imaging.  Then we might be able to actually get somewhere together.” 

In other words, we need Big Picture understandings!  The ancient Rapanui people of remote Easter Island were known for their monumental iconic inward-looking stone statues.  One wonders if either the rulers or the common people of the island had any inkling of impending adversities that were to be incurred as crucially-important native forests were decimated while the island’s population continued, inexorably, to grow.

Were there no cautionary voices?  Were they incapable of foreseeing the implications of their unsustainable exploitive activities?  Was there an equivalent of political bickering, gamesmanship, ideological polarization and obtuse obstinacy by decision-makers in the face of the increasingly-obvious impending depletion of the resources that were so vital to their existence?

   “I am the Lorax.  I speak for the trees!  Let them grow!”

                                                                               --- Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss

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   “In wildness is the preservation of man.”

                                                       --- Henry David Thoreau

What if Thoreau was right?  Deep ecologists note that it is vital that we protect natural areas so that they will be able to serve as genetic storehouses for the future.  Once our virulent strain of extinction-causing assaults has run its course, all genetic diversity that has been preserved will provide surviving life forms the maximum opportunity to once again propagate themselves into habitats and ecosystems which have been disturbed and damaged by our heedless human actions. 

Think about the following observations from the Earth Manifesto’s Comprehensive Global Perspective: An Illuminating Worldview:

Windswept ridges and peaks that project above glaciers and ice fields are called ‘nunataks’.  During past ice ages, alpine trees like Lodgepole Pines and Whitebark Pines and other forms of plant life survived in nunataks, and were therefore able to re-colonize the lands that had been scraped barren by the ice, once global temperatures warmed and the ice had melted.  Nunataks served as storehouses of genetic materials that once again were able to colonize the land after the glaciers retreated.  Lichens built soil bit by bit once the glaciers had melted, using sunlight and water and the process of photosynthesis to dissolve the raw materials of rock, and they leave organic compost when they die that is beneficial to succeeding generations.

Today’s wild lands and wilderness areas are like modern nunataks:  they are biological islands in a sea of altered and developed lands.  As in the past, these modern nunataks provide irreplaceable genetic storehouses that are capable of replenishing disturbed lands.  Today’s National Parks and Wilderness Areas, and roadless areas in National Forests, and public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, are thus vital islands of hope for the future.  We simply must make much more serious commitments to protect them!

Arch-conservative Dick Cheney, a former oil services executive, stated in 2001:  “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”  He made this remark to support his recommendation that the United States renew construction of nuclear and hydroelectric and oil-fired and coal-fired power plants, and that our nation drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Aldo Leopold, the American ecologist, forester and environmentalist who is most famous for having written A Sand County Almanac, would have strongly disagreed.  As he once pointed out,

“Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality 

   as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.”

This quote brings up the vital issue of our collective need for sustainable energy sources to power our civilizations.  As these words were first being written, nuclear reactors were failing in the wake of the devastating 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and turmoil was embroiling a dozen Arab nations where rulers have oppressed their peoples by governing in completely undemocratic ways using ruthlessly repressive ‘security forces’ and religious discrimination.  Religious conflicts feature Sunni people oppressing or being oppressed by Shiite people, and Muslims and Christians who seem to be committed to an epic economic and cultural conflict over whose God is the one and only right true one. 

Meanwhile, the global population of human beings will reach an incomprehensibly needy SEVEN BILLION people by November 2011.  And people in every nation are trying to figure out how to break the shackles of money-monopolizing wealthy people in order to gain a fairer modicum of social justice.  All of these developments are intricately interconnected.

Greed and conspicuous consumption are motives that drive the people who own most of the wealth in the world.  As a result of having so much money, they wield great overweening power in every nation around the globe.  They persistently use this power to demand and get public policies that allow them the maximum privileges to exploit resources AND to have a minimum amount of limitations on their actions.  They are not fond of requirements that fairer considerations of the greater good must be made by all competing constituencies, particularly including themselves. 

The activities of the wealthy almost always include socially undesirable tactics like the shrewd privatization of profits while some of the costs of production are externalized onto the public.  This is simply wrong!

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

                                                                        --- Aldo Leopold

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska wants the United States to ramp up oil production in the fragile ecosystems of Alaska.  Murkowski opined on March 12, 2011 that we must deal with rising energy prices by reducing restrictions on oil drilling and taxes on gasoline.  She stated that we imported 11 million barrels of oil a day last year at a cost of $330 billion, and that Alaska has estimated reserves that could be tapped which would be equal to 65 years of oil imports from the Middle East.  She is correct in stating that we imported 11 million barrels of oil a day, or about 4.2 billion barrels of oil for the year.  Since about 14% of this oil came from the Persian Gulf region, Senator Murkowski is basically contending that Alaska has roughly 40 billion barrels of oil reserves.  This estimate includes an enormous allowance for oil deposits that have not yet been discovered, and which may not be recoverable without taking extreme environmental risks. 

Let us clearly understand the current situation.  Americans burn about 7 billion barrels of oil each year.  This is 25% of the total amount burned worldwide.  We use this much despite the fact that Americans comprise less than 5% of the world population.  This is profligate use!  Imports represent an extremely costly 60% of our demand for oil, and this supply is highly vulnerable to political disruptions.

While Republicans blame the government for restrictions and ‘shortsightedness’, and while they recommend that we boost domestic production by streamlining regulations and aggressively drilling for more oil in Alaska and offshore and elsewhere on public lands within the United States, it seems to me that the writing is clearly on the wall.  Total proven reserves of oil in the U.S. are about 21 billion barrels, so if we consumed only our own reserves, we would have just about 3 years supply left.  This is why we are using up oil resources from other countries at such a rapid and alarming rate. 

Like Dick Cheney, Senator Murkowski says that the U.S. lacks a coherent energy policy.  Most people would agree that this is true.  Conservatives, however, say that our policies are not coherent because the government restricts production, while liberals feel that the need for conservation and dramatically greater efficiency of use, and renewable energy alternatives, is critically important for the future.  Liberals further believe that we need to rethink the degree to which we waste oil in our cities and suburbs and agricultural practices.

It is certainly the case that our dependence on oil is a serious national security concern.  It is a risky problem from numerous standpoints, including:

(1) We import oil from politically volatile countries in the world, making our supplies vulnerable to disruptions and sudden price increases;

(2) The enormous cost of importing so much oil is a big financial drain on our economy;

(3) The costs of maintaining a vast military machine to protect our interests in the Middle East are contributing to record federal budget deficits, and this fiscal problem is a national security concern in its own right;

(4) We are becoming increasingly vulnerable to oil price and supply interruption shocks because people in other nations worldwide are also wastefully and rapidly depleting these critically important fossil fuel resources;  and,

(5) Epic health and environmental damages and threats are being caused by our collective activities.  Human beings are spewing tens of billions of tons of pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year as a result of our profligacy in burning gasoline and diesel fuel and heating oil and coal and natural gas.  This is contributing to growing problems associated with these activities.

We should give closer consideration to these challenges.  To formulate a truly far-sighted national energy policy, we surely should not be giving costly subsidies to powerful oil companies every year.  These corporations are, after all, making record profits.  Shouldn’t we try harder to find a way to wean ourselves from this dangerous addiction?  Shouldn’t we make a great national effort to conserve resources better, and to use fossil fuels radically more efficiently?  Shouldn’t we commit our nations to an Apollo-Program-like effort to develop alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels?

The wisdom of precautionary principles resoundingly responds:  “YES!”

The best course of action is to embrace precautionary principles and sensible worldviews, and to spend less time and energy rationalizing boom-and-bust laissez-faire corporatism.  We must begin to act in ways that are more honestly responsible to society and future generations.  Disaster Capitalism and Casino Capitalism are simply proving to be too risky and too destructive. Far-reaching reforms are called for.

In many of our aggregate actions, it is as if we are chopping off the limb of the tree upon which our civilizations are perched.  The distant echo of our agents hacking away at the massive biotic trunk of the tree of life is deeply unsettling.  We can, and must, figure out new ways of living!

It is becoming crystal clear that we must work together to decisively and fair-mindedly address the existential imperative of protecting the ecological foundations of our well-being, now and in the future.  We owe it to our children and all of our descendents to leave them a fairer legacy. 

Unfortunately, our current collective actions presage an inevitable legacy of resource depletion and environmental degradation and financial destitution unless we soon begin to make an overarching commitment to changes in our habits and reforms of our econopolitical systems.  It is simply outrageous for us to continue borrowing enormous sums of money from people in the future.  This expediency is irresponsible and undisciplined and self-centered and weak-willed. 

We should manage resources better to ensure sustainable harvests.  This is a far more sensible plan than squandering them in a manner that threatens our future well-being and drives untold numbers of species of plants and animals to extinction.  It is rash for us to collectively fail to protect vital ecosystems and to preserve the stability of climatic and ecological conditions on Earth.  Shortsighted actions can have far-reaching consequences.  These facts make precautionary principles exceedingly important.

We must implement highly effective incentives and disincentives to cut down on pollution and toxic wastes and unlimited emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  We must revolutionarily redesign our economic and political systems to prevent short-term-oriented special interests, which are powerfully vested in maintaining the entrenched status quo, from dominating our decision-making and despotically determining our national policies in ways that are contrary to the greater good. 

It came to me in the middle of the night, I thought, as I lay in a sunshine-flooded green meadow near the top of a hillside with an expansive view:  Every person in every country worldwide should be accorded the right to a maximum amount of individual freedoms.  This is true for all people in the United States, as well as those in China and in all of those Middle Eastern nations where economic and social and political turmoil are erupting into violence and revolution in 2011.  Within the context of these theoretically unalienable liberties, overarching responsibilities exist.  Golden Rule responsibilities.  Community responsibilities.  Resource conservation responsibilities.  Civic responsibilities.  Ecological responsibilities. 

Our nation must make a revolutionary commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, and nations worldwide must make similar commitments to human rights.  Religious and political freedom should be embraced as bedrock principles.  A greater modicum of fairness of opportunity should be established.  Ecological sanity must be defended by choosing to embrace ecological precautionary principles that help guarantee a greater respect for the foundations of our collective well-being.

We do, to an extent, ‘make our destinies by the gods we choose’.  It is high time we cease worshipping money above all other values.  It is important for us to stop giving special privileges to society’s elites that allow them to cause extensive harm to the majority of people.  We should begin to honor and respect our neighbors, and our communities, and our descendents.

A true respect for the well-being of humanity now and in the future would guide us in new directions.  Such greater respect would lead us to pursue wiser priorities.  It is all but insane not to embrace precautionary principles related to environmental protections and climate-disrupting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Fresh ideas must be given greater sway, ones that are more fortuitous to the general good.  The honorable late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota believed that politics should be about far more than power, money, and winning at any cost.  He once said, <Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.  It’s about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.>”

                                       --- Comprehensive Global Perspective – An Illuminating Worldview

A Digression on Climate Disruptions

An article in the October 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine investigates an episode of global warming which took place at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary about 56 million years ago.  A sudden dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere occurred way back then.  This development was possibly caused by an intense period of volcanic activity associated with the opening up of the North Atlantic Ocean as Greenland and the North American continent pulled apart from the continent of Europe.  This impulse of greenhouse warming gases caused a global warming trend which in turn thawed frozen methane molecules and released them into the atmosphere, radically accelerating the warming trend.

Methane has a greenhouse warming effect on the Earth that is 20 times more per molecule than carbon dioxide.  Large deposits of methane hydrate exist today under the Arctic tundra and the sea floor.  Such hydrates are stable only in a narrow range of cold temperatures and high pressures, so the warming trend being caused today by our rash burning of enormous volumes of oil and coal and natural gas could trigger a runaway release of methane from the frozen north and the deep sea.  This occurrence could parallel the events of the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, so it is instructive to investigate the impacts that this radical warming had on the ecosystems at the time.  Evidence indicates that there were far-reaching destabilizing impacts.

This is an excellent reason to embrace precautionary principles rather than to continue burning fossil fuels at the fastest possible rate in powering our agricultural, industrial and residential activities.

Global warming today is causing more intense El Nino and La Nina weather patterns.  This is disrupting the wind patterns of the jet stream and altering the global climate.  As a result, some areas are experiencing episodes of higher rainfall and flooding, while severe droughts are affecting other areas.  Monsoon seasons in Asia and other regions seem to be becoming more volatile.  More extreme heat waves and cold weather snaps are also being experienced.

As extreme weather events strike places worldwide, an overwhelmingly consensus of scientists warn us about the dangers related to climate-disrupting activities.  In response, economists analyze the range of damages that can be expected because of changes in the climate, and they calculate a range of costs that will be associated with coping with these changes.  They further compare these costs to the costs that will be incurred in trying to prevent or mitigate climate changes and sea-level rises and the impacts these outcomes will have on nations worldwide.  Such analyses are swayed by political interests and the assumptions made, but we should certainly think clearly and calculate honestly in the face of the biggest picture considerations.  Trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as untold unintended consequences.

These considerations involve gaping uncertainties.  But we are in a “Bet Situation” in which we are inextricably ‘in the game’, and we must make decisions about what courses of action to pursue.  It would be wisest to make smart decisions.  The best plan would be to develop the most reasonable scenarios of likely costs and impacts, based on the most probable assumptions, and to then find the best balance between the costs of the potential damages and the costs of up-front sustained spending on prevention or mitigation or adaptation to the changes.  We arguably must find the Goldilocks scenario, the ‘just right’ level of precautionary actions!

Conservatives in the United States are in the thrall of the laissez-faire propaganda of big corporations and the radical right, so they deny correlations of the myriad of climate-disrupting occurrences to our human activities.  They tend to pretend that spewing out tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year is having no effect.  They deny or ignore the fact that rapid deforestation in tropical regions is exacerbating this carbon dioxide build-up problem.  They deny that uncontrolled activities are causing, and will cause, significant costs to be incurred.  Denial, however, does not diminish the likelihood of adverse outcomes.  We really must be honest and make the most accurate assessments we can, using science, not fiction.  Then, we should proceed accordingly.

The Ten-Thousand Hour Rule

 “Rational, adj.  Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.”

                                                                                --- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Malcolm Gladwell opines that what we do as a community, and as a society, and for each other, ultimately matters far more than what we do for ourselves.  When will we realize the vital importance of this understanding?  When will we seek to honestly create better incentives for people to act in ways that are more responsible to society as a whole?  I suspect it will require a revolution of the mind, rather than an undesirable revolution in the streets.  More expansive worldviews are needed, not more rationalizations for corporatism, inequality, selfishness, and right-wing ideologies.

A paradigm shift has already been launched with Swami Beyondananda’s Spontaneous Evolution -- Our Positive Future (And a Way to Get There from Here).  And, as soon as the Earth Manifesto gains wider readership, hopes for more sensible future activities will likely gain much more solid footing.

Mr. Gladwell noted in his book Outliers, the Story of Success that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of working at a specific task for a total of more than 10,000 hours.  He mentions the Beatles performing together in live venues more than 1,200 times in the early Sixties, and the enormous dedication of people like Bill Gates and J. Robert Oppenheimer to their life tasks.

Whoa!  I have devoted more than 10,000 hours to the writings in the Earth Manifesto.  Prepare for launch!  This manuscript may reach critical mass and go viral, and thus succeed in changing the world for the better.  It’s about time!

III.  Fiscal Precautionary Principles

We should formulate prudent national policies that leave our country in a sound fiscal position so that we can afford the costs related to economic setbacks and natural disasters or other unforeseen adverse developments.  Japan, for instance, has the third largest economy in the world, but it has run its economy into a danger zone by allowing its national debt to reach almost 200% of its national annual economic output.  Next to the crumbling economy of Zimbabwe, this is the highest level of debt in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook.  The percentage of Japan’s debt to its GDP exceeds that of Greece and Iceland and Italy and Ireland and Portugal, which are all countries suffering significant economic crises and debt problems. 

As a consequence, after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit on 3/11/11, Japan is in a poor position to finance its recovery and reconstruction.  The Japanese have been foolhardy to have allowed their fiscal situation to deteriorate to such an extent.  The United States, inebriated on its own addiction to deficit spending, is also avoiding making difficult decisions between competing interests.  We do this by taking the expedient route:  we borrow money and continue fleecing future generations to preserve entitlements and to fight wars and to continue giving high-income people historically low tax rates.

The importance of a Rainy Day Fund concept cannot be overstated.  Instead of adopting such a precautionary fiscal approach, we are squandering money and flat-out hyper-stimulating the economy.  By spending profligately and borrowing heavily, we are causing our currency to depreciate.  This is a directly contrary approach to the creation of a rainy day fund.  It makes our economy less flexible and less resilient.  This course of action is incautious, careless, heedless, reckless, imprudent, improvident and injudicious.  We surely are tempting Providence!  It is, in essence, insane.

Nations worldwide are being forced to attempt to reduce their unsustainably high debt loads in the face of epic quantities of deficit spending and recessionary influences.  In the resulting competition to decide what programs to save or eliminate, we should not lose sight of the difference between productive uses of debt and non-productive ones.  Productive debt like investments in public education, infrastructure, worker productivity, and research and innovation can actually serve to improve future prospects, rather than to diminish them.  Competing interests argue about what are entitlements and earmarks, as contrasted to necessary investments, but we must make smart assessments and then boldly act upon them.

The only sensible economic system in the long term is one that is NOT reliant on Ponzi-like schemes which are predicated on an ever-growing human population and debt.  There is no hope of achieving sustainable activities and using limited resources wisely without recognizing the need to make a dramatic shift in our aggregate activities to renewable resources from nonrenewable resources.  People must be encouraged to live within their means through the use of smart incentives.  And governments must provide only enough services and benefits as citizens are collectively willing to pay for.

Let us establish budgets which are more balanced through a revised system of more steeply graduated income and capital gains taxes.  And let us enact laws that honor fiscal precautionary principles so that we will position ourselves better for the daunting challenges which we will encounter as the twenty-first century unfolds!

IV.  Social Precautionary Principles

In the lawless Wild West of yesteryear, “six-shooter aggression” and reactive vigilante justice ruled the day.  Mark Twain attested to it in Roughing It.  A stagecoach in which he was riding in Nevada was held up at gunpoint, and the bandits ordered, STAND AND DELIVER!  You’d better be sure that he complied, fearing for his life.  In those days, conglomerate trusts back East were just getting up to speed on their abuses of power, and the unethical wealthy were just beginning to stretch their peacock wings and get the Gilded Age partying really under way.  Responsibility, children!

Today, we should make sure our rules and laws are designed to create a safer and fairer system of opportunity and justice.  Unfortunately, laws are being routinely evaded and violated by narrow and self-interested individuals and entities in order to gain benefits and advantages.

In the Earth Manifesto dissertation Principal Reasons a Bill of Rights for Future Generations is Needed, an exhaustive examination is made of the reasons that Social Precautionary Principles are necessary for a fairer and more sustainable future.  The insights in that treatise are included herein, by this reference.

A peaceful revolution is needed here in the United States to alter our priorities so that people and the environment are better protected.  Costs associated with the octopus of the military-industrial complex must be reduced.  We should honestly and fairly begin to deal with the overarching challenges that we face by preventing wealthy people and giant corporations from having outsized power to pollute the commons, exploit workers, externalize costs onto society, export jobs abroad, contribute to the creation of irresponsibly high federal budget deficits, and gain advantages at the expense of the vast majority of the people. 

A revolution of the mind is what we really need.  Perhaps it will come in the form of a providential spontaneous evolution of our worldviews, and of our perceptual awareness.  Let us allow the feminine within every one of us to be a little more ascendant.  That may be the way to achieve radically more fair and successful societies.

Perhaps it is time to return to sensibilities that pertained when Mother Earth goddesses were revered and Nature was more highly respected.  Dr. Leonard Shlain would surely have posited that a better balance between our intuitive right brains and our more analytical left brains would be good for our well-being.  He wrote at provocative length about the desirability of a better balance between our feminine and masculine selves, and about the advantages of more respect for women’s rights in various civilizations.

In any case, the pendulum swings.  Since 1980 it has been swinging in the wrong direction, when considered from the standpoint of the whole of society.  The pendulum is swinging from a sensible modicum of fairness to more unfairness, and from political centrism to a more right-wing laissez-faire extremism.  This is not evolutionarily advantageous! 

Impoverished by the Concentration of Wealth

A boa constrictor kills its prey by squeezing it ever more tightly until the prey can no longer breathe.  The victim then dies of asphyxiation.  Left to their own devices, people of domineering classes tend to squeeze those they exploit ever more ruthlessly.  As a result, the benefits of productivity are being reaped by corporate management and investors rather being shared more fairly with workers.  As wealth becomes more concentrated in the hands of the Few, inequities are becoming more egregious.  The wealthy must eventually either share wealth a little more fairly or face insurrection by those they oppress.  The Occupy Wall Street events worldwide may portend the beginning of this change.

The total wealth in the U.S. in 2010 was about $56 trillion.  This wealth was distributed in a highly unequal manner;  25% of households owned 87% of this wealth, and the middle 50% of Americans held the remaining 13% of all U.S. wealth.  The bottom 25% had a net wealth of zero or less.  At the extremes, the richest 400 American families have more wealth than the bottom 50%; in other words, the richest 400 families have more money than the bottom 150,000,000 people. 

Radical social inequality like this contributes to more intense class warfare.  This will likely become more obviously dangerous to the privileged if the trend continues to get more extreme.  These gross inequalities must be mitigated and reduced!

V.  Financial Precautionary Principles

Investment advisors sensibly recommend that a diversified portfolio amongst various asset classes is the best plan in the long-term.  Putting all of one’s eggs in a single basket is an incautious approach.  Since our government seems to be committed to indulging in inflationary monetary and fiscal policies, the purchasing power of savings is slowly but continuously being undermined.  This is why a dollar today is worth only about 40 cents relative to the value of a dollar in 1980.  This causes savings accounts and certificates of deposit to effectively lose value.

Investors therefore seek higher returns by putting money in riskier investments.  Government incentives for home ownership (mortgage interest deductions, low interest rates, the $250,000 tax-free allowance of capital gains on home sales, etc.) made real estate a superior investment for many years.  But these national policies led to people using home equity increases to spend rashly and profligately by borrowing against real estate appreciation.  This was a strong stimulus to consumerism, and may have seemed to be a peachy condition while the bubble was inflating.  But it led to financial disaster when the bubble burst and we entered a prolonged and on-going period of depressed home prices and widespread foreclosures. 

In June 2011, homeowners had only 38 percent equity in their homes, down from 61% a decade ago.  This is near the lowest point since World War II.  Unintended consequences, not at all unforeseeable, were caused by rash and misguided public and Federal Reserve policies.

Inflationary policies by the Federal Reserve have made gold and other commodities seemingly good investments, but the boom-and-bust nature of economic policies makes prices volatile and therefore risky.  Government and corporate bonds are also volatile because they are strongly influenced by interest rate fluctuations.  Stocks have proven to have the highest average return on investment of the major asset classes over the long run.  This is primarily because stocks allow investors to gain a share of the profits made by corporations in the international economy, and God knows that nations worldwide stumble all over themselves to pander to giant corporations.  But equities are also highly volatile due to emerging trends, extensive uncertainties, competitive developments and manipulative forces, as well as to fears and irrational exuberance.

In general, when some asset classes are gaining, others are losing.  The precautionary idea behind a diversified portfolio is essentially to hedge one’s bets, and to own some things that will go up in value while others are going down.  The goal is to keep ahead of inflation while not risking steep plunges in asset values due to an overweight in any one speculative risk that goes bust.

Speculators are aware that there are more opportunities to make big profits during times when markets are volatile than when prices are steady.  But there are also much bigger chances of suffering disastrous losses.  Long-term investors prefer more stable markets for a variety of good reasons.  Let’s heed this lesson and demand that the Federal Reserve also heeds it!  The Fed must, in particular, be required to emphasize fiscal stability more than inflationary stimulus.

VI.  Military Precautionary Principles

Our leaders must recognize the overarching necessity to pursue more sound policies than our current bubble economic policies and “military Keynesianism” and hyper-borrowing.

Military Keynesianism is the term used to describe government economic policies that stimulate the economy by using deficit financing and high spending on weapons and military personnel and military operations abroad.  In a pathetic irony, this strategy has become a tactic that is itself creating increasingly grave threats to our national security.  To make our nation more secure, LESS spending on the military is called for, not increasingly high levels of spending.  It is stupid to make our nation more vulnerable to national financial insolvency by wanton and wasteful and poorly controlled military spending.

Defense spending has practically become a sacred cow on the American political scene.  It has been subjected to few cost controls and wholly inadequate oversight and accountability.  It has served as a cover for wasteful spending and bureaucracy and unethical profiteering and misallocations of resources.  Military Keynesianism facilitates aggressive interventions in the affairs of other countries.  This makes us less safe by goading blowback opposition and by creating increasing numbers of people who regard us as war-mongers and imperialists and aggressor enemies. 

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined’, as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

                                                                 --- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, February 2011

The United States today spends more money on its military than all of the other nations in the world combined.  This is bizarre, because we are getting extremely poor value for our money.  The “opportunity costs” of devoting so many resources to misguided goals are extensive, and this makes military Keynesian policies quite counterproductive.  The late Chalmers Johnson once made a poignant point:  “Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable.”  This is a dangerous state of affairs, indeed!

Chalmers Johnson also noted that, despite the fact that the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, “US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment.  Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration.  Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses.  Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.”

Wars require great material sacrifices as well as extensive stressful and emotional sacrifices by those actually who do the fighting.  Wars also require very high monetary and social costs by those who must pay for the expensive conflicts.  In this context, there is a cynical brilliance to the unethical strategy that facilitates the foisting of these costs and sacrifices upon those with little power, and those in the future who have no voice in these matters.

The peoples of Arab countries are making it radically clear that we cannot trust our political leaders to make fair-minded changes.  They are simply too vested in the status quo.  Likewise, we cannot trust lobbyists for amoral corporations to do the right thing for society, because they have very narrow goals.  The balance of power must shift to democratic fairness and actions which are more responsible to future generations.  Public decision-making must be guided by overarching principles.

For a more comprehensive perspective on issues of war and peace, see the Earth Manifesto dissertation in Part Three, Reflections on War.

We all figuratively live <<Home, home on the range, Where the deer and antelope play;  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, And the skies are not cloudy all day>>, as the unofficial anthem of the American West goes.  While this ‘State Song of Kansas’ epitomizes an indomitable American spirit and encapsulates a positive sunny attitude, there are strangers on adjacent properties, some of them our agents, who are clear-cutting the forests and drilling for oil and belching acrid-smelling coal smoke and polluting the streams and spewing toxic climate-altering emissions and squandering the common wealth, as if there will be no tomorrow. 

Yet there will be a tomorrow.  And it will be a tomorrow whose well-being is dependent upon decisions we are collectively making today.  We ignore this fact at our own peril, and at a terrible price to our children, and theirs.  Let the sun shine in!

In an even larger collective sense, a sense of purpose for us all together must of necessity involve responsibility for the rights and prerogatives of future generations.  Let us all commit ourselves to responsibly participating in helping to make a global team effort to make the world a better place.  And, in this case, remember the slyly witty definition:  a team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.  Ha!

Apropos of Something Else

“My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role,

 Is to try and express what we all feel.  

 Not to tell people how to feel.  

 Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

                                                                           --- John Lennon (1940 – 1980)

We would be wise to remember Martin Luther King’s words:  “Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus, but a molder of consensus.”

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.  We must begin a rapid shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.  The creature comforts of conspicuous consumption have a seductive allure, a kind of spiritually-subversive impulse toward shallow materialism and resource-wasting consumerism.  A better sense of balance is needed!

Machines and computers and profit motives and property rights must not be allowed to have more importance than people.  Racism, wasteful materialism, and aggressive militarism must be vanquished. 

What could go wrong if we continue to ignore growth constraints and continue to allow the mindless exploitation and depletion of resources?  What could go wrong if we continue to let our advertising-stimulated “needs” and selfish impulses wreak terrible damages upon the natural world through a ferocious and poorly-controlled assault against entire ecosystems and the best long-term interests of tens of millions of species of life, including our own?

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.  It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

                                                               --- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The quality of our lives is deeply enhanced by having protected public parks and open spaces and extensive national forests and wild areas.  It is sad that privatization proponents demand a proliferation of No Trespassing signs instead of protected public lands.  The rude selfishness of certain privileged people in our societies is undermining the ethic that honors one of America’s most important contributions to the world, the idea of protected National Parks. 

VII.  Political Precautionary Principles

Will and Ariel Durant write in The Lessons of History that the concentration of wealth in societies occasionally reaches a critical point where either sensible legislative redistributions of wealth are enacted (like progressive tax reforms), or increased violence and possibly even destructive revolutions take place which generally destroy wealth rather than redistributing it.

I believe it would be safer for all Americans if we were to create a fairer and more just society, rather than one that is increasingly unfair due to growing disparities in income and wealth between the top several percent of people and all others.

To make our nation safer, we must reform our political system sometime soon!

Real political reform is needed because of the extraordinary economic and demographic changes which have taken place in recent decades.  Consider the fact that the size of our early human clans was probably less than 30 people on average, while today our social groups consist of entire societies of millions of people.  Remarkable urbanization trends have occurred in the past century in the United States.  Only 40% of Americans lived in urban areas in the year 1900, and now more than 80% of Americans live in cities and metropolitan areas and suburbs. 

With such epic changes, the need for social cohesion and lower levels of aggression and violence between groups has increased significantly.  As a consequence, the immorality and social danger of allowing radical increases in the levels of inequality of income, wealth and political influence is becoming more pronounced. 

Less equality of opportunity and income and net worth makes everyone less secure.  Radical insecurity leads people to engage in atavistic behaviors, creating an increased disposition toward crime and violence.  Such actions are maladaptive for society as a whole.

The privileged already live in gated communities in a nation with strong police forces and military forces.  If we continue to let the privileged increase their advantages while all others become ever-more insecure, the privileged will soon jealously demand greater fortress-like protections and harsher laws and more authoritarian government.  Revolution is brewing if we are unable to cooperate together to mitigate inequality and reduce the insecurity of the masses. 

The simple fact of the matter is that “everyone does better when everyone does better”.  Public policies should be targeted to ensure that the maximum number of people do better, not just the same Few who already monopolize the preponderance of our national wealth.

I strongly believe that the most important political reform to start with would be to stop giving corporations the rights of personhood, and to seriously limit the influence of money in our politics.

Truly,

            Dr. Tiffany B. Twain   

               Contact:  savetruffulatrees@hotmail.com